International Socialism 144 Autumn 2014 The Case of the Disappearing Lenin

Summary

What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all but dead and traditional reformist parties offering little beyond doing austerity in a fairer manner, revolution from below would seem to be an idea whose time has at long last returned. Yet the working class seems “slow” to fulfil the role allotted it by classical Marxism. It has, perhaps, even “accepted” neoliberalism. Many activists do not believe that class or political parties define anti-systemic movements. The idea of working class revolution led by a revolutionary party to smash the state seems the quaint property of irrelevant groups unable to break out of the far-left ghetto. This mood has affected the revolutionary left. For some the problem is the kind of party they used to believe in. Perhaps it is wrong to insist on a rigid distinction between “revolutionary” and “reformist”. Perhaps “mixing” the two can reconstruct a radical left able to fill the gap between a declining parliamentary reformism and a “Leninist” left that cannot grow. This seems to be what lies behind moves to create broad left parties that have the kind of appeal that, for example, Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France enjoy. A rapprochement with and re-evaluation of what the revolutionary left termed “left reformism” is therefore required.