Creating the Impossible: Lenin’s Legacy

ABSTRACT

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin provides an occasion for rethinking his legacy. Rethinking and employing it is critically to understand and change modern capitalism. The author shows that all his theoretical elaborations and practice make up an integral system of scientific achievements and political acts. Lenin’s elaboration of the development and limits of capitalism, including the contradictions of monopoly capital, allowed him to distinguish the system’s motive forces and pathways of change, and to outline the main steps of constructing a new society. His analysis of imperialism and approach to capitalism as an integrated world system is the basis for his conclusion that the initial impulse leading to a breakthrough from this system to socialism would occur at the “weakest link.” His use of the dialectical method solved Russia’s crisis in 1917 through a revolutionary course with insufficient material preconditions, but whose victory might lead to the simultaneous resolving of both bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks. His theory of social creativity helps identify the forces capable of carrying through the revolution and of retaining power. His decisiveness and responsibility in accomplishing theoretically validated actions allowed him to find the only true solutions in critical situations, and to triumph.

KEYWORDS:

• Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin
• capitalism
• imperialism
• socialism
• revolution
• social creativity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Alexander Buzgalin, Doctor of Economic Sciences, is a professor at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, editor-in-chief of the journals Voprosy Politicheskoy Ekonomii (Questions of Political Economy) and Alternatives, and coordinator of the Ex-USSR Political Economy Association. His research areas include political economy, Russian economy, methodology of economic theory and inequality. He has published a number of articles in journals like Cambridge Journal of Economics, International Critical Thought and Science & Society.

Notes

1 In this case I have in mind Western Marxism. In Asia (especially in China and Vietnam), in Latin America and in Africa the tradition has endured of studying and passing on Leninist ideas. But in Europe, the USA and Canada the situation is the reverse: most intellectuals have turned away from Lenin. The only exceptions are a few works: books by Michael Brie (2017), Tamás Krausz (2015), and Slavoj Žižek (2003, 2017); the collective monograph Lenin Reloaded (Budgen, Kouvelakis, and Žižek 2007). In Russia too, unfortunately, few serious scholarly works on the heritage of Lenin have appeared. Among the exceptions is the book Lenin Online (Buzgalin, Bulavka, and Linke 2020).

2 Lenin (1969, 322) said, “[T]he development of capitalism has reached the point where, although commodity production as in the past ‘rules,’ and is considered the basis of the whole economy, it has in fact already been undermined.”

3 Lenin (1973, 23) said,

Marxism differs from all other socialist theories in its remarkable combination of, on the one hand, complete scientific sobriety in analysing the objective state of affairs and the objective course of evolution with, on the other, a decisive recognition of the significance of revolutionary energy, of revolutionary creativity, of the revolutionary initiative of the masses—and also, of course, of the significance of individual people, of groups, of organisations, of parties.

And Lenin (1974d, 104) also said, “Our revolution has differed from all previous revolutions in that it has raised in the masses a thirst for construction and creative activity.” For a more detailed discussion of the phenomenon of social creativity, refer to Bulavka-Buzgalina (2018a, 2018b) and Novikov (2011).

4 In polemicizing against Sukhanov, Lenin (1970, 378–379) wrote that in Russia there had been

a revolution associated with the first world imperialist war. In such a revolution new features, or features modified in response to the war, had inevitably to make their effects felt, since never before in the world had there been such a war, in such circumstances. So far, we have seen that the bourgeoisies of the wealthiest countries have been unable to establish “normal” bourgeois relations since this war, while our reformists, our petty bourgeois, posing as revolutionists, continue to regard normal bourgeois relations as a limit not to be crossed. Further, they understand this “norm” in an extremely narrow and stereotyped fashion.

Addressing his question to critics of the Bolsheviks’ actions, he continued: “Well, why would it be impossible for us first to create such preconditions for civilisation here as driving out the landowners and expelling the Russian capitalists, and then to begin to move toward socialism?” (Lenin 1970, 378–379).

5 Here, I shall cite just a few of Lenin’s well-known theses that stress the role of the socially creative energies of the masses:

It is necessary to believe in our own forces, it is necessary that everything that has awoken in the people and that is capable of creative activity should be poured into the organisations that exist now and that will be constructed in future by the toiling masses. (Lenin 1974a, 113)

The strength, the vitality, the invincibility of the October Revolution of 1917 lies in the fact that it awakens these qualities, breaks down all the old barriers, tears up the old timeworn paths, and leads the workers onto the road of the independent creation of a new life. (Lenin 1974b, 199)

The victory … of the Soviet power … is being achieved because from the very first it has begun implementing the original precepts of socialism, relying consistently and decisively on the masses, while viewing its task as being to awaken the most oppressed, downtrodden layers of society to a new life, to elevate them to socialist creativity. (Lenin 1974c, 269)

These positions expressed by Lenin are noted in the earlier-mentioned text by B. V. Novikov (2011).