“I wouldn't be surprised or disappointed if there were many differences. Marx and Engels lived in a time when ‘the mass proletarian movement awoke to its own powers’, whereas Lenin lived in the time of highly organised industrial working classes in Europe and mass socialist parties.”
There is, however, a factual problem with this framing. Lenin did not build his party in highly organised, democratic, mass-party Europe. He built it in Tsarist Russia — an autocratic state marked by political illegality, repression, absence of parliamentary democracy, weak civil society, and a small, unevenly developed proletariat. The conditions under which Lenin theorised and organised were therefore Russian, not Western European. Marx and Engels, by contrast, expected that in advanced capitalist societies the working class would develop: mass workers’ parties, growing democratic participation, increasing political self-activity. For them, the starting point was always the principle that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. Organisationally, this meant that the party was the political expression of a real mass movement, not a substitute for it. Communists were the most conscious part of that movement, not a separate elite, and socialist consciousness was expected to develop through struggle itself, within unions, political organisation, and democratic debate. They explicitly rejected conspiratorial models and never argued that workers could not rise beyond trade-union consciousness. Lenin’s theory of a party of professional revolutionaries, especially in What Is to Be Done?, represents a qualitative shift: socialist consciousness is introduced from outside the spontaneous movement, and a tightly organised, centralised vanguard is required to lead the class. This model was not timeless; it was shaped by Tsarist repression, illegality, and the absence of legal mass workers’ parties. In this sense, Lenin’s model was most applicable where mass workers’ parties did not exist (Russia) and least applicable where they already did (Western Europe). Rosa Luxemburg warned that applying a Russian model of centralised vanguardism to societies with mass workers’ organisations would weaken, not strengthen, workers’ self-emancipation. So while Lenin’s model may have been historically intelligible in Russia, it cannot be treated as a universal Marxist norm. In societies with legal political activity, mass unions, and some democratic space, Marx’s emphasis on mass, democratic workers’ self-organisation becomes more relevant, not less. To recognise this is not to reject Lenin historically, but to refuse turning Russian exceptionalism into Marxist orthodoxy. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40273): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40273 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117257520/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
