Report on week 3 of Solidarity’s reading group, Problems of Socialist Organization
Ivan DZ
In this week’s report, I’ve decided to again write a response to the readings and discussion rather than a straight forward report on the discussion. That’s partly because Paul LeBlanc has made his presentation available here, so I felt relieved of the responsibility to sum it up! Please do read it if you haven’t had the chance, along with the three preparatory documents he put together: Map of political currents in the Russian revolution (Unpublished chart, 2025), Reform policies of early soviet gov’t (Unpublished document, 2025), and Tentative Conclusions about Russia’s 1917 revolution (Unpublished document, 2025). His presentation was recorded, you can watch it here, and listen to it here.
About three dozen people called in to this class. We had lively discussions in small groups and then all together at the end. It was a refreshingly open discussion. The class, overall, was impressed with the “from below” energy and organization of the revolution in 1917, and it was also critical of the restrictions on factions, the mixed history of revolutionary processes in the republics and peripheries of the Russian empire, and thoughtful about the decisions that Bolshevik leaders made after the Soviets took power.
This discussion will continue with our next class, on Thursday December 18th, with Suzi Weissman, about the “Consequences of the rise of a Soviet bureaucracy in Russia and Spain.” Find the readings and the registration link here: https://solidarity-us.org/socialist_organization_class_2025/
What is real
In his “Letter on Tactics,” written in April 1917 in response to criticisms of his “April Theses,” Lenin said what distinguished the Bolsheviks from other parties of the left was that they recognized the power struggles between the provisional government and the Soviets; between the opposing sides in a “dual power” equilibrium as it really existed. They were therefore able to forecast what change might come. “A Marxist,” he wrote, “must proceed not from what is possible, but from what is real.” (Emphasis in original)
With this call to found analysis and strategy on reality, Lenin was arguing against two socialist trends that opposed his call for a dirty break with the bourgeoisie, to end the dual power situation that had the Soviets supporting and subordinated to the provisional government, and fight for “all power to the Soviets.” He opposed the theory of Plekahnov and the Mensheviks who preached from Marxist scripture to say that Russia was not ready for a worker’s government because it had not yet completed its bourgeois revolution, and therefore that socialists must support the ongoing bourgeois revolution. In a wonderful turn in his polemic, Lenin responds by quoting from Goethe’s Faust, saying, “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.” To understand the conflicts that emerge through the complex lives of real peoples and classes, and act along with the living, theory alone is not enough.
And he opposed the pragmatic conservatism of his own comrades, who argued that it was not yet possible to take power, or that other forms of power, like a peasant-led revolution, were possible. I noticed this line of argument in his article because our discussion about the first months of the 1917 revolution kept coming back to this idea of “possibility.” Someone paraphrased Trotsky, saying that the job of revolutionaries is “not just taking the temperature of the movement, it’s raising the temperature,” and that this meant pushing past the limits of what is, to what is possible. Robin, who was in my breakout group in our discussion, asked if this was the bottomline of Lenin’s leadership: to know what can be done and how to to it?
I think it’s useful to understand Lenin’s sensitivity to what could be done and how to do it as fundamentally due to his dedicated focus on what was real: what real motions constituted the contradictions of bourgeois hegemony in 1917. Through the prism of what was real, Lenin argued that the dual power situation could not last, and that if the Soviets did not act to seize power and make a workers and peasants’ state, then the bourgeois state would destroy them. The Kadet’s attempted coup in the “July Days,” which failed, routed by the armed people and attentive and organized workers, proved Lenin correct.
Already-existing currents of power
Revolutionary possibility, then, is based on the already existing power relations within class society in a given historical moment and place. The bourgeoisie had power, organized and formalized through the capitalist state, and the working class also had a current of power, in the Soviets. In the “April Theses,” Lenin says “the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry has already become a reality… in the form of the Soviets…” (emphasis added)
The question for communists is how to elaborate the power that the working class and other oppressed groups have in the moment, reflecting back to them through a coherent political programme the truth of their power, which is distorted and obfuscated by the humiliating and disorganizing class relations they are accustomed to. Throughout his 1917 writings, Lenin says the gap between the objectively already-existing power of the workers in the social and productive contradictions of capitalist society and the putting-into-action of that power against bourgeois rule is a subjective problem. His revolutionary subject is the working class, and the problem is that the class is disorganized, uneducated, discouraged, and lacking self confidence.
Reading the histories of 1917, it’s hard to understand that Lenin could characterize this working class as disorganized or unconfident. In History of The Russian Revolution, Trotsky tells a story about workers, in the summer of 1917, who occupied the house and grounds of a Tsarist official who had put down the 1905 revolution. He says that the government called on the executive of the Soviet to condemn the occupation, and the executive complied, giving an order “to evict the group of anarchists from the place in twenty-four hours. Learning about the military activities in preparation, the workers sounded the alarm. The anarchists on their side threatened armed resistance. Twenty-eight factories proclaimed a protest strike.” The strikers were denounced by the Executive of the Soviet Congress, which was still propping up Kerensky’s provisional government, but then when police attacked they found it occupied by educational committees and police “were forced to withdraw in shame.” This is not the activity of an unselfconfident or discouraged class!
Trotsky’s history of the Soviet Congress in June 1917 also shows just how organized was the working class. It’s incredible to read that only Soviets with 25,000 members had the right to vote, and they required 10,000 members to have the right to speak. Trotsky estimates that the Congress represented 20 million workers. This is not an unorganized working class! Not, at least, by the measure of our situation today.
Bolshevik “blank space”
These differences between the level of consciousness and organization in the working class in 1917 Russia and in the working class in the US and Canada today are important to remember when we try to draw strategic lessons from the Bolshevik experience. It’s axiomatic that the Bolsheviks teach us the importance of building a communist party. But what was that party? It did have an internal life, but what members and leaders represented was fractions of that organized working class. Lenin characterized that highly organized and self-conscious working class as inadequately organized and inadequately self-conscious when it came to the task of making socialism. That inadequacy was the gap between the poverty of workers’ lives subjectively within capitalist production (or, as variable capital) and the power of their class position objectively against capitalist domination (or maybe better put, autonomous from capital).
Lenin’s assessment of that historical inadequacy was the whole reason that he argued for declassed professional revolutionaries to step into history and mend, temporarily, the breach between the working class’s objective power and subjective weakness. This was also the problem that gave him and others in the Bolshevik leadership great pause. The history of 1917 shows that it is easier to assess the contradictions and crises of capitalism than it is to assess the average composition of working class consciousness and capacity.
I think the story of the “blank space” in the centre of a July 1917 issue of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda encapsulates this problem. Paul Murphy tells this story in his article “From Compromise to Power“: in the midst of the July Days, when the Kadets were coup plotting and the bourgeois press was denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks as German spies, there was a pitched debate in the Bolshevik leadership about whether or not to call off a demonstration. The night before the planned demonstration, Kamenev and Zinoveiv convinced a slight majority of Bolshevik leaders to cancel because a fraction of workers too impatient for insurrection would cause it to “spiral out of control.” But before the newspaper cancelling the demonstration could go to press, it became clear that workers would rally no matter what, and editors pulled the cancellation notice. Murphy writes, “The July 4th Pravda was published with a blank space where the cancellation appeal was originally inserted.” In that blank space you can feel the antennae of the Bolshevik leaders madly twitching, divining the mood of the working class masses –– not to take the temperature of what is popular, which implies a kind of calculated populism, but to assess the level of self consciousness that workers had, at that moment. Had the average consciousness of workers awoken to the reality of the power that they objectively held?
Lenin’s two phantoms
Lenin’s visionary leadership floated on the draughts of these two phantoms: the organized working class, and the Bolshevik Party’s sensitive leadership of that class in struggle. I say phantoms because, while both the working class and the Bolshevik Party were real, objective bodies, the subjective capacity of each was always uncertain, inchoate, and impossible to be totally confident of. Lenin’s was skeptical of the class character of the Party. Was the Party representative of the vanguard of the working class, an inchoate proletarian party, or a declassed intelligencia, a bureaucracy in waiting? His writing in 1917, and after, reveals a constant anxiety about the class composition of the Party leadership, and about the political distance between the Party and the working class masses: whether the Party was going too far too fast out of impatience, or retreating too hastily.
And while the “working class” exists as a whole, international, objective entity, it does not act that way — it acts upon specific historical conditions, from a distinct historical situation. That’s why Lenin constantly referred to the Soviets as the body of the organized working class. In the Soviets, workers debated politics, passed resolutions, and decided to take collective action. For Lenin, the activity of the Soviets was the bellwether of working class consciousness and autonomous capacity. There were also vast passive, disorganized layers of the working class, but Lenin was not as interested in them as in that critically important, self-conscious, organized layer which sensed not only its exploitation, but also the real, subterranean existence of its own power.
The interactive relationship between these two forces is obvious. Without the organized working class, the Party would have no social body to be accountable to, and would therefore drift into self interested corruption or irrelevance. And without the Party, the working class would have no communist horizon –– no counter weight to the trade union, social democratic, and liberal nationalist political leaderships that had long infiltrated and led their movements.
What is to be done, now?
What can we learn from this today? I think the lesson of the central importance of a dynamic energy between class and party counts still today. But I think the more important lesson is negative: that without an organized working class, the party cannot be called into being by force of will. Not without substituting declassed activist energies for the historical juggernaut of the class itself. And not with success.
I think Paul LeBlanc’s comments closing the discussion also make sense to close this reflection. After we discussed the character of the early Soviet state, the creation of the Cheka, and the violence of civil war, Paul said that all these threads of discussion were flying around because it’s impossible to wrap up the lessons of 1917 in a 30 minute discussion. “1917 was glorious. And then there’s what happened after. It was a mass movement,” he said. “And in a mass movement there are complicated dynamics.”
Paul said, “We have to be serious. There is a qualitative difference between what Lenin and his comrades faced in 1917 and what we are facing today in the US. It is not a matter of figuring out how to replicate what they did in Russia to make revolution here. But there are many lessons and methods to pick up and carry forward in our time. We have a long way to go.”