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Lessons From Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder’

 

A Short Appraisal in the present Indian context

In today’s India both camps of the Stalinists are making the same mistakes from their common petty bourgeois perspective. The ones whose main goal is to form governments in the bourgeois parliament, like CPI(M), SUCI(C), CPI(ML)-Liberation think that they need to wait for the spontaneous development of the mass consciousness which would make the revolution possible. Till then they need to stay popular among the masses by giving into the backwardness and not propagate the scientific knowledge, making them repeat the same age old mistakes over and over again like building Popular Fronts with the so called “progressive” bourgeoisie or believing that even in this present economic crisis of capitalism the bourgeois state would grant the workers and peasants with democratic rights anew. For them Lenin has said “You must not sink to the level of the masses, to the level of the backward strata of the class. That is incontestable. You must tell them the bitter truth. You are in duty bound to call their bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices what they are — prejudices. But at the same time you must soberly follow the actual state of the class-consciousness and preparedness of the entire class (not only of its communist vanguard), and of all the working people (not only of their advanced elements).” Again, the minority, the small radical groups or cults who are realising the futility of the Parliament through the study of history or experience, are trying to alienate or seperate themselves from the masses to keep themselves “pure leftists”. For them again Lenin has said “The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly “left” slogans.” In this case as well the small fractions of the Maoists, the “Trotskyist” cults and others like some so-called “Independent” fractions are waiting for the masses to spontaneously gain the revolutionary consciousness and to come to their side! Lenin has said,

“…since revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone. “To lead the way without compromises, without turning” — this slogan is obviously wrong if it comes from a patently impotent minority of the workers who know (or at all events should know) that given a Henderson and Snowden [Oppurtunist working class leadership] victory over Lloyd George and Churchill, the majority will soon become disappointed in their leaders and will begin to support communism (or at all events will adopt an attitude of neutrality, and, in the main, of sympathetic neutrality, towards the Communists).” 

There’s the third camp, the Anarchists who make the same kind of mistakes while the Liberals complain that the Communists do not listen to the masses and that they only keep on stating their own lofty ideals. Here we need to keep this in mind that by “Communist” they mean the mainstream self proclaimed “Communists” who mostly consist of the Menshevist-Stalinist or Social Democratic trends. Now these parties ofcourse are run bureaucratically, totally opposed to the Democratic Centralist principles of Bolshevik-Leninism. Their cadres work along the party line without questioning it, they think that they’re being revolutionary just by organising certain rallies or postering on the university walls. Here we would take a look at what Lenin said in The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, October 2, 1920, Speech Delivered At The Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League, 

“The old schools provided purely book knowledge; they compelled their pupils to assimilate a mass of useless, superfluous and barren knowledge, which cluttered up the brain and turned the younger generation into bureaucrats regimented according to a single pattern. But it would mean falling into a grave error for you to try to draw the conclusion that one can become a Communist without assimilating the wealth of knowledge amassed by mankind. It would be mistaken to think it sufficient to learn communist slogans and the conclusions of communist science, without acquiring that sum of knowledge of which communism itself is a result. Marxism is an example which shows how communism arose out of the sum of human knowledge.”

When I quote Lenin, this is to be noted that the correctness of his views comes from the deep interwoven contact his party had with the larger working masses who have got the revolutionary instinct because of their socio-economic status, multiplied with the philosophical perspective of Dialectical Materialism which Lenin and the other leaders had mastered leading them to get democratically elected by the masses to lead them with the concrete analyses of the concrete situations. Lenin is no omnipotent superpower as is portrayed by the Stalinists who dilute his revolutionary views only to use him for their oppurtunist purposes.


Photo credit: National Herald.

Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership in Sri Lanka and the whole of South Asia

Let us take an example from our recent observations. An unprecedented mass mobilisation in Sri Lanka emerged within days and the protesters, breaking all the barricades of the oppressive all-powerful state captured the palace of the President. The present economic crisis in Sri Lanka has been an inevitable result of the fall of global capitalism. But even in this objective reality of a revolutionary situation, the working class failed to take the position of the leadership and the masses failed to recognize their main enemy. This is because they still have their faith in the bourgeois democratic parliament, but once the counter revolutionary forces united and the state military purged the camp sites of the protesters, a more dictatorial and authoritarian rule of capital in crisis got hold of the situation. The banks, the big industries, the telecommunication centres remain in the hands of the big capitalists who get active support from the American Imperialists. This proves how the spontaneous development of revolutionary mass consciousness can not resolve the crisis of the Proletarian leadership. 

Coming back to our Liberal friends, “people” or “masses” are umbrella terms and even in this class divided society, within a particular class there are different levels of consciousness present and if the vanguard section do not go through the task of organising the masses, which is the task of the Communist Party, society as a whole would not be able to progress.

This is what we mean when we say “Quantity will do it” or that the seeds of the destruction of Capitalism are sown within itself. Let us conclude with the words of Marxist Revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg from her pamphlet Reform or Revolution, 1900,

 

“It is, therefore, in the interest of the proletarian mass of the Party to become acquainted, actively and in detail, with the present theoretic knowledge remains the privilege of a handful of “academicians” in the Party, the latter will face the danger of going astray. Only when the great mass of workers take the keen and dependable weapons of scientific socialism in their own hands, will all the petty-bourgeois inclinations, all the opportunistic currents, come to naught. The movement will then find itself on sure and firm ground.”

 
Featured image is for representational purposes only. Photo credit: Picryl.
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