Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] What Is To Be Done? - V.I. Lenin

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 20, 2019 What is to be Done? is a classic work on the role and organisation of the revolutionary party in the communist movement. Lenin criticises economism, revisionism and spontaneity, and argues persuasively for a centralised and professional vanguard of the proletariat. On this episode of Red Menace Alyson and Breht explain and reflect on the text, and then extract the core lessons for revolutionaries today.  What Is To Be Done? by V.I. Lenin Full text here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Hey there. My name is Allison, and I'm here with my co-host, Brett, and you are tuning into Red Menace podcast. This is our third episode. So if you're not familiar, a basic rundown of what we do. We take a classic work of leftist theory, and we try to break it down. and contextualize it to how it will apply today. So our show's broken up into three different segments in order to make that a little bit easier. And the first, we just sort of summarize the text and make sort of an outline of the argument that the author makes. In the second, we do a bit of discussion back and forth on it with questions that we've prepared for each other. And then in the third, we take some time to try to show how that text can be applied now to the kind of organizing that we're doing today. Absolutely. And if you want to follow us on social media, you can follow us at red underscore menace underscore pod on Twitter. You can also support the show at patreon.com forward slash the red menace.

And since we have three episodes now after this one, we really want the Patreon to be a place where people who still have questions of any of the texts that we cover, where they can go and ask those questions and we'll reply to it. And moreover, next month, we're looking to expand that Patreon Q&A to include live calls. Not only does this allow us to talk and reach out to the people that support the show, It also sort of builds up community a little tighter because you hear people's voices. You might have repeat call-ins. And that way, I think we can sort of build up a really interesting educational community.

So if you're at all interested in helping this show expand or at all interested in the possibility of live calling Q&A sessions, go ahead and support us on Patreon. It means a lot to us. I know Dave and Allison and I put in a lot of work for each of these episodes and anybody willing to support that, you know, it really means the world to us. So we really appreciate whoever does and we encourage people if you like what we do here to continue to do so. Allison, what are we reading today?

So today we are reading a slightly longer text than what we've worked with before, which is what is to be done by Lenin. So before we get into this text for our first section, I just want to kind of get into some of the historical context and explain how we're going to approach this text. What is to be done is lengthier than what we've worked with so far, and also is really historically specific in a way that can be a little tricky. A lot of the text is Lenin rehashing,

the minutia of arguments between different Russian revolutionary newspapers, and it can be very difficult to try to figure out how to draw out some of the theoretical takeaways. So what we're going to do today is focus less on the historical minutia that the text is contextualized in, and instead try to show you what the main arguments Lenin is making are, and why those arguments are still relevant. So we're not going to get into, you know, all of the various factions that were occurring and fighting with each other. There are way too many referenced in the text to keep track but we'll focus on the main tensions and disagreements. So a little bit of historical context for the text. The text was written very early within the revolutionary period in Russia. It was written in

2001 and put out in 1902. So this text for those who know the history of the Russian revolutionary period was before not only the February and October revolutions, which would install the USSR, but was actually before the 1905 revolutions as well, which was a set of revolutions that really radicalized a lot of people and caused the Tsarist government to actually have to make concessions and construct a Duma or sort of a parliament for the people. So this is written early on within the revolutionary period in Russia. And the text was written in the context of sort of internal disagreements that were occurring within the social democratic movement at the time. So Lenin at this time is a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and is arguing

with other factions within that and also some external international social Democrats. And so this text really gets at a lot of the arguments that would eventually split the Russian social democratic group into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. And this is where we sort of start to see the beginning of some of those disagreements and differences that will later fracture that party. Important linguistic note to take into account here is that social democracy today refers to a generally reformist approach to reforming capitalism and reducing some of its violence. and this is not quite the context that Lenin uses it in. Lenin refers to his approach to social democracy at this time as revolutionary social democracy, and he's very much still interested in a revolutionary approach, and that term doesn't really have all the connotations that it has today at the time that Lenin is writing this.

Some people have argued that because Lenin called himself a social democrat, that it's now contemporary social democrat reformists within, say, the DSA, for example, who carry on Lenin's legacy. But this is just a failure to understand how language has changed over time. and Lenin eventually stops using the term to refer to as politics anyway. So the text itself is largely dealing with a trend within social democracy at the time called Economism. And the movement built around communism was basically focused on prioritizing what Lenin calls

the economic struggle above all else. So the economists were mostly focused on wage increases, on the sort of union struggle that was happening in Russia and had a very large focus on labor strikes and things like that that were occurring at the time. The problem is that the followers of Economism did not only focus on that primarily, but they argued that that basically was the whole scope of the proletarian movement that needed to exist. Lenin summarizes Economism quite nicely in one of his other texts actually in 1901 called A Talk with Defenders of Economism, where he explains that, quote, the economists limited the tasks of the working

class to an economic struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, asserting that the political struggle was the business of the liberal bourgeois. They denied the leading role of the party of the working class, considering that the party should merely observe the spontaneous processes of the movement and register events. In their deference to spontaneity in the working class movement, the economists belittled the significance of revolutionary theory and class consciousness. They asserted that socialist ideology could emerge from the spontaneous movement, denied the need for a Marxist party to instill socialist consciousness into, the working class and thereby cleared the way for bourgeois ideology. So that's sort of the idea that Lenin is pushing back against and he's trying to come up with these ideas of the vanguard and the idea of the professional revolutionary in this text in a sort of pushback against this movement that had grown quite popular within Russia and abroad. So that's some context that will help you sort of understand what this text is doing and where these disagreements are emerging from. Yeah, exactly. And before I jump in to begin the text, you know, it's important to realize

that some of these terms are sort of weird. Not only are they written 100 years ago in different context, they're then translated from Russian to English. And so, you know, some of the stuff and some of like the subtle connotations of the way words are used are sort of loss in translation. I know it in my part, I'm sure in Allison's, anytime we come across one of those terms, we'll try to step aside and explain it to make sure that people are on the same wavelength with regards to how these words are being used.

And the other thing is with this text, it was challenging in many. ways, partially because it's so steeped in the historical minutia of the time that Allison and I were kind of challenged to pull out the overall theory from the general sort of polemic style that Lenin writes in in this text. And so we hope we did a good job with that. We'll find out from the feedback. But having said all of that, let's go ahead and jump into section one of our episode on what is to be done by Lenin. So, Lenin starts this work with an examination of the concept of freedom of criticism, arguing that it is, quote, undoubtedly the most fashionable slogan at the present time and the one most frequently employed in the controversies between the socialist

and the liberals of all countries, end quote. This controversy has led to there being two separate tendencies within the international socialist movement, or what Lenin calls throughout the text social democracy. Again, here we must be very clear. Social democracy in this context basically means socialism. And throughout the text, Lenin is arguing in defense of scientific socialism and Marxism, but he calls it revolutionary social democracy. So whenever you hear that term, just know that it does not mean what it means today, and that Lenin is protecting it from what basically amounts to a sort of left liberalism masquerading as Marxism, also known as opportunism. In any case, Lenin is combating this opportunism and showing how the international socialist movement in Europe

at this time has these two strains operating within it. This opportunism is presenting itself as a quote, new tendency, which adopts a critical attitude to what they pejoratively refer to as doctrinaire Marxism. But none of this is particularly new. Rosa Luxembourg and Reformal Revolution was combating this opportunism in Germany, and Lenin and many other of his text is combating this opportunism in Russia and beyond. And today we are still fighting this opportunism, which again is liberalism dressed in the radical garb of socialism. In Lenin's time, this opportunism represented by Bernstein, who, incidentally, was the main target of Rosa's reformer revolution, has systematically rejected the core components of socialism under the guise

of freedom of criticism. Lenin writes, quote, the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of proving that it is necessary from the point of view of the materialist conception of history was denied. The fact of increasing poverty, proliferation, authoritarianization and the growing acuteness of capitalist contradictions were also denied. The very conception of ultimate aim was declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was absolutely rejected. It was denied that there is any difference in principle between liberalism and socialism. The theory of the class struggle was rejected on the grounds that it could not be applied to strictly democratic society, governed according to the will

of the majority, etc. Thus, Lenin continues, the demand for a decided change from revolutionary social democracy to bourgeois reformism was accompanied by a no less decided turn towards bourgeois criticism of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. As this criticism of Marxism has been going on for a long time now from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets, and in a number of scientific works, as the younger generation of the educational classes

have been systematically trained for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the quote-unquote new critical tendency in social democracy should spring up like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. This new tendency did not have to grow and develop. It was transferred bodily from bourgeois literature to socialist literature, end quote. Liberalism is here wrapped up in the garb of radicalism, as Lenin is saying, and as such, Lenin calls it a new species of opportunism. In this context, freedom of criticism within ostensibly socialist organizations and indeed within the socialist movement across Europe becomes nothing more than a Trojan horse through which liberalism

infiltrates, obscures, weakens, and poisons the workers' movement. Lenin then showcases how the term freedom is used in liberalism and how it's always a mere facade and doesn't actually mean what it's taken to mean. Lenin says, quote, freedom is a grand word, but under the banner of free trade, the most predatory wars are conducted. Under the banner of free labor, the toilers are robbed. The term freedom of criticism contains the same inherent falsehood. Those who are really convinced that they have advanced science would demand not freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the old views by the new views. End quote. So what Lenin is arguing here is not that freedom of criticism in and of itself is a bad thing.

After all, nobody is a more surgeon-like critic of all that exist in Lenin. Rather, he is arguing against this new explosion of opportunists, stumbling over one another to present bourgeois critiques of Marxism as if they were proletarian critiques. This is not only naive or disingenuous, but it strips the socialist movement of its theoretical coherency,

its core values, its methodological approach to understanding the world, and then replaces it all with the same old liberal nonsense presented as new and exciting theory. Lenin highlights this by putting forth a wonderful and rather funny analogy. He says,

quote, picture this. We are marching in a compact group along a precipice and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined voluntarily specifically for the purpose of fighting the enemy and not of retreating into the nearby marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now, several in our crowd begin to cry out. Let us go into the marsh.

And when we begin to shame them, they retort, how conservative you are. Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road? Oh, yes, gentlemen. You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there.

only let go of our hands. Don't clutch at us, and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are free to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh. End quote. This is Lenin in full bloom, using literary devices expertly to explain precisely what is happening

and once again defending Marxism against those who wish to vulgarize, denigrate it, and defang it. In fact, Lenin goes on to point out that the ruling class in Tsarist Russia heavily censors any revolutionary material, but curiously, they let three editions of Bernstein's book, along with some of the work of other opportunists, be translated and published into Russian.

Lenin points to this fact as further proof that the revolutionary edge of Marxism was being softened into a passive liberalism, and the Russian autocrats chose to let these ideas spread. In a way not unsimilar to how, in our own time, the CIA helped translate and spread post-Marxist French theory as a way to help these anti-Marxist ideas flourish on the left. Lenin then leads into a defense of revolutionary theory,

pointing to the fact that in addition to the economic and political spheres, communists need to be active in the theoretical sphere as well. It is here that he puts forward his famous line, quote, without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement, end quote. Now, if you've listened to our show before, you will remember from our first episode on Engels' text that eclecticism in theory is utopian and works against a unified working class movement.

Here we see that same exact sort of utopian and bourgeois idealist eclecticism sprout up under the umbrella of Marxism, and it's Lenin who carries forward angles fight against it. Because what eclecticism does is deteriorate, distort, and destroy revolutionary theory, which in turn damages the revolutionary movement as a whole. This is why Angles and Lenin have to fight against it, and it's why we have to fight against it today. A disordered, eclectic array of different cherry-picked revolutionary ideals based on one's preferences can only ever lead to disunity, confusion, disorganization, and directionlessness.

Lenin ends this section of the work by showing how scientifically sound angles was, and then asserting that since Russian Tsarist autocracy is at the time of Lenin writing this the most powerful bulwark of European and Asian reaction, that it falls upon the Russian proletariat to be the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat at this time, asserting that it is precisely theoretical integrity and scientific socialism that will be decisive in this current era of class struggle in Russia and beyond. And the last thing I'll say is that Lenin makes it very clear

that this turn towards criticism was accompanied by the turn toward what Lenin calls communism. Allison will explain that in depth next, but the important thing here is that the important thing here is that the quote-unquote freedom of criticism that Lenin is critiquing is a criticism of opportunism in the labor movement and is tied in practice to the development of economism. So he is setting up and explaining how economism rose in the workers' movement and how it was undergirded by anti-Marxist opportunism.

So it's all connected. And Lenin is tracing this development meticulously to prove that it's all connected. Allison? Awesome. So the next thing that Lenin goes on to do is to really, focus on what economism is and not just sort of what it claims or what its theoretical stakes are, but what is undergirding it? What sort of theoretical mistake is it making? And how does that relate it to other movements that are making similar mistakes? So in the next few sections,

Lenin does some interesting work. He ties capitalism to terrorism, which on the surface level seems sort of strange. And he gets to all this through a discussion of spontaneity in the way that Economism is tied to spontaneity. So Lenin argues that the followers of Economism saw economic struggle as the crucial struggle. So again, it was the union struggle, the trade unionism, the increase of wages, and strikes that matter. That is where the working class should be working, the political struggle, the theoretical struggle, they're all irrelevant. So Economism necessarily had to exclude scientific socialism in order to make theoretical struggle something that the party didn't have to engage in, and that was irrelevant to

the workers. And so they argued that, that revolutionary social Democrats ought to basically provide insights and document what's happening in the labor movement that already exists, rather than trying to put themselves into a leadership position within it, or to steer or guide it in any way. Lenin talks about the way that the followers of Economism really talk about, like, this mass movement that already exists and that we don't have a right to interfere with. And this is still language that you hear today in many instances. And so for the followers of Economism, what needed to be done was to keep track of that movement and assist it without ever taking it over or guiding it. And so Lenin argues that this position is

more or less a form of what we within revolutionary socialism call tailism. It holds that revolutionaries are not meant to lead or even stand next to the masses as they engage in their struggle, but rather ought to tail them and follow them and just kind of let the masses lead and always be one step behind them. And this is just not a useful perspective. Most revolutionary socialists have come to highly criticize this. Mao, of course, spends a lot of time condemning both tailism and commandism. But what Lenin is focusing on here is tailism as a phenomenon. And Lenin argues that the framing that the followers of communism use theoretically pits the socialist leadership versus the masses. The masses are seen as the organic

and the true force that is going to bring about revolution. And the leaders are seen as elitists or opportunists who simply want to co-opt it. And so the very theoretical framework that is operating in, is designed to make it look like it's impossible for socialist intellectuals and leaders to have a positive relationship with the masses in the first place, other than simply following them and documenting what they're doing. So Lenin ends up saying that the mistake of communism is that it ends up fetishizing, and he says, bowing down to spontaneity. The economists believe that the masses will just spontaneously achieve revolutionary consciousness through the struggles that they're already engaged in. And Lenin argues that this is just simply,

And unfortunately, not true, because spontaneous action can never develop revolutionary theory in a society where capitalist ideology is dominant. Even if the working class is engaging in union struggle, is engaging in economic struggle, without an explicit theory provided to them to understand capitalism holistically, the only ideologies they have to fall back on are the ideologies which dominate in society, which are, of course, bourgeois capitalist ideologies. So Linen says that it's silly to believe that absent explicit theoretical struggle and the attempt to establish scientific socialism that somehow the working class could magically end up with revolutionary consciousness. That consciousness has to be developed.

It has to be created and it has to be brought and worked into the working class and their movements that exist. Followers of economism therefore ended up attacking socialist ideology as unimportant for the development of the movement. But Lennon clearly argues that this just clears the way for capital. idealist ideology to become the guiding factor in the movement. He says, quote, since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves and the process of their movement, the only choice is either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course for mankind has not created a third ideology. And moreover, in a society torn by class antagonism, there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology. Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way to turn aside

from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There's much talk of spontaneity, but the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. To its development along the lines of the credo program, for the spontaneous working class movement is trade unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers to the bourgeoisie. So Lenin argues that bowing to spontaneity can lead to strikes that can lead to smaller actions to all the things that fall under trade unionism, but it can never lead to actual revolution itself. And I think it's important to recognize that Lenin is not saying there's no place for trade

union activity or that the workers should not be engaged in unionization. In fact, Lenin will go on to argue that the Vanguard ought to have people involved in these union organizations and ought to be, you know, very attuned to them. They are important, but they don't challenge capitalism. And trade unionism itself can never escape bourgeois ideology without. something else. You can have a bunch of people fighting for a bunch of basic labor rights in different unions, but absent specific organization with socialist principles, you're never going to get them to spontaneously overthrow a despotic government and to get rid of capitalism.

So Lennon notes that the economist social Democrats also find themselves often defending and agreeing with advocates of terrorism. So this is sort of a very weird thing. You would not on the surface level expect these more reformist social Democrats to simultaneously support terrorist action against the Tsarist state in Russia. And even though this seems odd, Lenin argues that the terrorist factions operating Russia at the time shared a similar deference to spontaneity and also believed that terrorism would help with the spontaneous development of the mass movement of the workers. So the spontaneous action of terror would then accentuate the spontaneous movement

of the workers in trade unionism, and somehow it was believed that that would push them to a revolutionary consciousness. well obviously this is not the case terror movements very rarely lead to that kind of mass consciousness among the workers often because they hurt them as well as the class they attack and lenin is keenly aware of the dangers of terrorism his brother's own involvement with terrorist groups within russia led to his arrest and his execution and lenin is very tuned into the fact that while terror tactics might look flashy they're a good way to just throw away the lives of revolutionaries while not actually achieving a broader rupture And Lenin says we should be unsurprised that the followers of Economism end up siding with terror action. Both of them ultimately are opposed to ideological struggle and political struggle, and instead believe that just tailing the workers and occasionally throwing in something extra, whether or not it's some reporting on what they're doing,

or whether or not it's a terrorist bombing, will be enough. But both of them can never actually achieve revolutionary consciousness. Therefore, we can't simply expect the working class to magically transform into revolutionaries on their own, according to Lenin. A vanguard within the party is necessary to create the theory the working class needs. They need to propagandize and agitate within the working class in order to build connections and to go, according to Lenin, to all the classes in a society and synthesize their experiences and a criticism of capitalism.

Lenin writes, quote, class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of the relationships of all classes and all strata to the state and government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot merely be answered with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards economism, mostly content themselves, namely to go among the workers, to bring political knowledge to

to the workers, the social Democrats must go among all classes of the population. They must dispatch units of their army in all directions, end quote. And so what London is arguing here is that focusing only on the economic struggle and trade unionism isn't enough. We have to understand how the state functions in capitalism. We have to understand how the church functions in capitalism. We have to understand how even the non-urban classes, such as the peasantry function. And we need to be working in all of those fears in order to have a totalizing and holistic criticism

of capitalism, that can understand it in its entirety and then can bring that understanding to the workers themselves to move them beyond merely the economic struggle. And so in this vision that Lenin puts forth, we have the economic, the political, and the theoretical struggle all unified through the party. The vanguard must look to all aspects of society, the ideological, the political, and even the clerical, and it must paint a picture of society, on the whole, derived from materials to analysis of all of society and all classes within it. The Vanguard cannot only concern itself with the economic struggle.

It must be made up of professional revolutionaries who are, quote, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects, who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation, who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set before all his socialist convictions, and his democratic demands in order to clarify for all and everyone the world historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. So that's the task for the vanguard. It's a task that moves beyond the limits of spontaneity and economism and allows for actual holistic critique and attack on capitalism. And that's what Lennon calls for. Yep, exactly right. And then he shifts and he starts talking about, you know, the details of what this organization, what this vanguard party would look like. So Lennon starts this next section by showing how the economist approach, which Allison just explained in great detail,

not only narrows the political activity of the proletariat, but by extension, it also narrows the organizational work of the proletariat. Political activity again becomes something confined to and dependent upon the limited struggle by workers for concessions from their employers or the government, and by extension, the organizational work shrinks dramatically alongside it, confining the socialist movement to mere trade unionism. Now here I want to make something very clear echo what Allison already clarified earlier, which is that Lenin is not saying that trade unions are bad or that labor struggle within unions as useless. To the contrary, he is arguing that they are essential, but importantly, they aren't enough in and of themselves. And if you are skeptical of

his claim, just look at the labor unions in this country. In lieu of communist leadership and a broader revolutionary party machine, they default to bourgeois ideology and are reduced to just another interest group voting for Democrats, utterly stripped of any revolutionary content. And since bourgeois ideology is much older and more entrenched, any lack of socialist ideology and these movements will, without any external pressure needed, simply default to liberalism. We may come back to this idea later, but in any case, it's an important caveat to make up front to prevent confusion. So shifting back to the text, Lenin argues that with the realms of the economic, the political, and the theoretical narrowed, ignored, or discarded in favor of

spontaneity comes, by definition, what Lenin refers to as primitive methods of organization. For Lenin, the primitive methods which spring out of economism and the urge to bow before spontaneity give rise to the spontaneous growth, as opposed to the conscious growth, of traditional organizational work, and are defined by a lack of training, a lack of preparedness at each level of the class struggle, an inability to coordinate across space and time, a generalized directionlessness and an inability to maintain tactical secrecy. And as such, it ultimately leaves itself open to infiltration, attacks by the police, and quick defeat once the state, which is far more organized and reflective and tactical as an

organization than spot-in-80 can ever be, decides to clamp down on the organization, which in turn makes workers hesitant to engage with the organization and ultimately leads to a dead end. Lennon compares these primitive methods of organizing to peasants coming off their plows, picking up the nearest blunt object, and going to war with their enemies. It's admirable in its own way, but is hopelessly limited and rather dangerous, and as such can never result in any sort of long-term, sustainable victory for the working class. I think we can look at Occupy or the yellow vests or even the Arab Spring as being modern examples of this spontaneity approach.

These things happen organically in class societies, but in lieu of focus, disciplined, and organized leadership in the form of a party, these things can only ever flare up for a relatively short period of time before they fizzle out, are co-opted by liberal or reactionary institutional forces, or are crushed outright by the state. What the opportunist and economists of Lenin's time were effectively wanting to do is to wait for this sort of spontaneous uprising to occur and then join them, or more precisely, become absorbed into them.

What Lenin wants to do in this scenario is already have an order organized militant revolutionary party up and running so that when these spontaneous uprisings do occur, they can then be led, guided, and focused in a way that takes the struggle to the next higher level. If we want an example of this, we need look no further than the Russian revolution itself, which Lenin helped lead by putting these very ideas he formulated in this book into practice. So when the insurrection occurred, it didn't take the path of so many other insurrections which fizzle out or crushed, rather it was given leadership and guidance by the party and was therefore allowed to blossom into an actual revolution,

toppling the autocratic Russian state and allowing the struggle to reach a higher stage. Moreover, it was able to defend itself in the form of the Red Army when the Civil War descended upon them. So not only did they get to a new stage in the proletarian struggle never before seen on earth, but they were also able to defend it against a mighty coalition of Russian whites, along with bourgeois and reactionary governments,

including the U.S., which immediately descended upon it, in an effort to destroy the movement. Instead, they were defeated by the workers and the Bolshevik project was able to continue. In short, Lenin got the rare chance to actually test his theories out on the world historical stage, and he was proven correct. Again, it's not that Lenin is attacking spontaneous uprisings

and of themselves. He's simply arguing that without a centralized militant, well-disciplined, and prepared organization that can effectively take the class struggle further, spontaneity will fail. And we've seen it fail, over and over, and over again since Lenin wrote this book. But hey, that's the cost of disavowing scientific socialism in favor of eclecticism, utopianism, economism, and idealism. You get crushed. But my God, do I digress.

Let's get this train back on the tracks. So, in as concise a way as possible, Lenin's argument here is that those dedicated to economism, terrorism, and the spontaneity that they both imply, see mass movements as something that, quote, relieves us of the necessity of care on revolutionary activity and not as something that should embolden us and stimulate our revolutionary activity end quote mass movements are not to be tailed in hopes they erupt spontaneously into a revolution rather mass movements represent incredibly important proletarian energy that then must be directed and focused in order to advance the class struggle it can't advance of its own accord as lenin says quote the fact that the masses are spontaneously entering the movement

does not make the organization of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary, end quote. The working class, if left to its own devices, cannot organically develop into socialism. It can only develop into trade unionism. It takes something more to allow it to develop to a revolutionary consciousness, and that's something more as a communist party, a party with agents, agitating, and organizing and educating,

within those trade unions to be sure, but a party nonetheless. In this way, the spontaneity of the world, working class can be given what Lenin calls consciousness. It can cease to be spontaneous and can become organized. But who will make up this party? Who will the initial members of this party be? Well, Lenin says that the members will be a class of quote unquote professional revolutionaries. Now again, this term is muddied by time in translation and I am very aware of how it hits the ears of those less living in the West in 2019. It seems counterintuitive and straight up weird to even conceive of a professional revolutionary.

But don't get stuck on that term. It's just a convenient shorthand for a party worker, if you will, a dedicated full-time group of revolutionary organizers. Lennon was one of these, Mao was one of these, Che was one of these, Rosa was one of these. And importantly,

this is not a choice between actual workers and a small group of people who pretend to represent them, as our critics love to argue. Rather, this is a genuinely proletarian movement that, as it advances, brings in more and more people from the masses. The party is not a proxy for the working class.

It's not some substitute or stand in for it. It is the working class, organized, disciplined, and focused enough to take class struggle beyond spontaneous uprisings and crafted into a conscious, militant, and focused organization. These advanced revolutionaries, highly trained and experienced as veteran organizers and thoroughly educated by the party on theory, arise organically, and then are sharpened by the party, and as such need not be democratically elected. Lenin points to early Russian revolutionaries from a few decades before to make this point,

saying, quote, these revolutionaries never regarded themselves as leaders, and no one ever elected or appointed them as such, although, as a matter of fact, they were leaders, because in both the propaganda period, as well as in the period of the fight against the government, they took the brunt of the work upon themselves, they went into the most dangerous places, and their activities were the most fruitful. Priority came to them not because they wished it, but because the comrades surrounding them had confidence in their wisdom, their energy, and their loyalty, end quote.

That is the Leninist conception of revolutionary leaders, not authoritarian tyrants seeking power, not elected representatives of this or that constituency, not an invisible committee of conspirators, but doggedly committed revolutionaries holding themselves and their comrades to high standards and working as hard as they, they can on every imaginable front to educate and organize and prepare for class struggle.

For me, I think of someone like Fred Hampton as a great example of this sort of leader. His leadership did not depend on power or money or shrewd positioning. His leadership arose organically out of the fact that he put in the work. He had mass support in his community. He had personal and party discipline and he put aside his own ego and his own personal life to pursue and help lead the proletarian struggle for his people. ultimately, like Che or Sankara, he gave his life for the cause. This is the sort of professional revolutionary that Lenin is talking about.

And when Lenin was met with the argument that working class people who work all day couldn't put in that sort of dedication and time and energy, Lenin agreed and argued that it's precisely a funded and organized party that could pay those sort of organizers to leave their jobs and focus on building the movement full time. In lieu of that ability to fund the best and most dedicated organizers, many great leaders will be trapped in wage slavery, unable to put their talents toward the struggle. In tendencies obsessed with horizontalism and spontaneity,

Lenin argues that great revolutionaries are degraded to the level of an amateur among amateurs, which is why, in Occupy, for example, one could walk into a meeting, and a freshman at the local college who's never organized a day in his life, would have just as much say on how the movement should proceed as a 40-year-old veteran organizer with decades of experience. This is not a strength. This is a weakness. In opposition to this, Lenin argues that our focus should be to exalt the amateur to the level of revolutionary.

To train, educate, and give experience to people, to raise them up. And for that sort of systematic cultivation and training of revolutionary leaders, one needs a party. Let's turn to Lenin in his words on the subject. Quote, look at the Germans. Their forces, and he's referring to the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Socialist in Germany, their forces are a hundredfold greater than ours, but they understand perfectly well that really capable agitators, etc., are not often promoted from the ranks of the quote-unquote average. For this reason, they immediately try to place every capable working man in conditions that will

enable him to develop and apply his abilities to the fullest. He has made a professional agitator. He is encouraged to widen the field of his activity to spread it from one factory to the whole of the industry, from a single locality to the whole country. He acquires experience and dexterity in his profession. He broadens his outlook and increases his knowledge. He observes at close quarters the prominent political leaders from other localities and of other parties. He strives to rise to their level and combine in himself the knowledge of the working class environment and the freshness of socialist convictions with professional skill,

without which the proletariat cannot wage a stubborn struggle against its excellently trained enemies. He continues, A worker agitator who is at all gifted and promising, must not be left to work 11 hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the party, that he may go underground in good time and he changed the place of his activity if he is to enlarge his experience, widen his outlook, and be able to hold out for at least a few years in the struggle against the gendarmes or the political police, the oppressors, the censors, if you will.

As the spontaneous rise of their movement becomes broader and deeper, the working class masses promote from their ranks, not only an increasing number of talented agitators and organizers, but also propagandist and practical workers in the best sense of the term, of whom there are so few among our intellectuals who, for the most part, in the Russian manner, are somewhat careless and sluggish in their habits. When we have forces of specially trained worker revolutionaries who have gone through extensive preparation

no political police in the world will then be able to contend with them for these forces boundlessly devoted to the revolution will enjoy the boundless confidence of the widest masses of the workers. We are directly to blame for doing too little to stimulate the workers to take this path, common to them

and to the intellectuals of professional revolutionary training and for all too often dragging them back by our silly speeches about what is accessible to the masses of the people, the workers or to the average worker, et cetera. He ends it by saying, subservience to spontaneity seems to inspire a fear of taking even

one step away from what is accessible to the masses, a fear of rising too high above mere attendance on the immediate and direct requirements of the masses. Have no fear, gentlemen. Remember that we stand so low on the plane of organization that the very idea that we could rise too high is absurd. end quote finally I'll bring this section to a close by adding one more important point

regarding the superiority of the party form over that of spontaneity Lenin argued that economism is too narrow it relegates itself to the trade union struggle and by so doing disassociates itself from the fight against depression and exploitation in every other realm of society the fight against capitalism

and thus imperialism and fascism cannot be reduced to a merely economic struggle over wages and a seat in bourgeois governments. The fight against capitalism exists in every sphere of our lives, and that demands from us that we organize in every sphere of our lives. We aren't just fighting an economic battle. We are fighting against an entire society, a rotten bourgeois culture, and in fact a global system of domination and oppression. This reality was not only grasped in the work by Lenin, but towards the end of his life, he began talking about the need for a cultural revolution.

Mao took this idea and ran with it, but it originates explicitly in Lenin. And throughout this entire text, Lenin is insisting that what has come to be called a vanguard party is the most effective, systematic, and long-term vehicle through which we can carry on the class struggle in every corner and on every front. And once again, we see Lenin and his positions validated by over a century of hindsight, while the positions of his opponents have been proven time and again to be nothing more than capitulation to capital and to lead the working class absolutely nowhere at all. Allison? Wow. So I think that is a very good summary, honestly.

This text is extensive. And what I'm hoping at the end of this is that you have an understanding of the many arguments that Lenin is trying to make. There is a lot in this text. I really highly recommend that you read it after or before watching this episode and try to contextualize it. My hope is just at the end that we've summarized it a lot. I think Brett has been incredibly thorough with this section, getting to what Lennon is getting at, and our summary section is a little bit longer this time than last time. So we're going to go ahead and move into the next part of our episode, which is part two, where we will analyze, criticize, and have discussion questions about this.

Do you want to go ahead and start that off, Brett? Sure, yeah, I'll ask the first question. So given everything that we've covered so far, who are the professional revolutionaries or potential professional revolutionaries of today, given the lack of a proper party? Do they exist? Who are they? What do they do? And how does someone become one? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so this is a really tough one. I'm going to contextualize to the U.S. since that's where we're operating and largely what I have the most knowledge of. And I think in the U.S. today, you cannot quite say that professional revolutionaries exist yet. There's several reasons for that. I think part of it

is, again, we don't have a unified party infrastructure. The U.S. has a lot of organizations, some of which call themselves parties, some of which don't. And while those organizations may have their own internal cadre schools and their own ways of training organizers, there just isn't a unified infrastructure so that a professional revolutionary can be tying everything back to one single struggle or one single organization in the way that I think Lenin imagines it. So that's one reason that I think there's not really the possibility for that. I think the beginning of that infrastructure is in place and a lot of organizations that exist today

that have cadre training and that are concerned with that. But it's hard to say that that is quite possible to have the same sort of professional revolutionary now. So while I think that that is true, I do think that there are professional organizers in the United States who are doing organizational work that isn't quite revolutionary in the sense that Lenin means. So obviously all the many organizations that exist here have people who almost full-time work for those organizations and are doing, you know, explicit propaganda and agitation for them. And even within the economic struggle within the United States, you have those as well. Unions tend to do this. One union that I had the opportunity to go through their organizer training with, which is one

of the more left and militant-leaning unions in the U.S., had an incredible training program with full-time union workers whose job it was to make sure that their organizers were professionally trained and could do organizing as, you know, a professional duty in their life. But again, that organizing isn't unified by a single-party apparatus in the same way that a vanguard or a group of professional revolutionaries would be. So I think that that makes it kind of difficult. Now, at the same time, on the more optimistic side, the left has a lot of networks, has a lot of connections, and has a lot of ability to mobilize around individual struggles. You know, you've seen sizable movements within the U.S. before. It's just that they've been more or less

bound by the spontaneity. The thing is that the fact that those movements exist means that it is possible to begin to try to develop something akin to a single party or a single organization that professional revolutionaries could operate around. I think that we are not quite there yet, but we are very close to it, and a lot of the infrastructure does exist. What needs to be done is to take that infrastructure and unify it in a single struggle in an explicitly revolutionary manner, and then the people involved in that can rise to the level of professional revolutionaries and the sense that I think Lenin means it. So my basic answer is I'm not totally sure that it's possible now, but I think that we are close to a situation where we could make it possible

for those professional revolutionaries to exist here. Yeah. Incredibly well said. I agree with that wholeheartedly. And I would also add, you know, given all of that, given all those realities, it's still, I think, incumbent upon us as organizers as socialist intellectuals to sort of aspire to be like that, right? We don't have to have the entire party already in place to be those things or aspire to be those things. And part of the reason, like on Rev. Left Radio, why we cover people like Fred Hampton, is precisely to inspire people to sort of cultivate within themselves

the sort of talents and skill sets that will be necessary, hopefully, given the creation of a party. And in any case, even if that never comes about for whatever reason, you're always holding yourself to a higher standard. You're always trying to do more, do better, educate other people, educate yourself, and grow as an organizer and as a communist. and I think, you know, in our limited sort of context, we're forced to operate in now,

that can still be a really positive thing, and it's still something I think that we should try our hardest to cultivate in ourselves. Absolutely. So, while we didn't really get into it in this episode, a good chunk of this text in the original format is devoted to the need for a national newspaper, and Lenin's very interested in this debate around national newspaper. So then was focused on the way that the sort of work that a national newspaper could accomplished would create contexts when new people spread propaganda and function as a scaffolding

that an organization could be built within. So obviously, where we live in today, newspapers are kind of a dying medium, and they are also quite cliche on the left. We tend to make fun of people for them. But we are still seeing new media projects that disseminate leftist theory, propaganda, and maybe to less extent do reporting on things. Do these projects play a similar role to what Lennon envisioned with the All-Russian newspaper, or is their function less central for the organizing we need to be doing today. Okay, so I absolutely think that our multimedia or new media projects, like the one people are listening to right now, are the sort of modern incarnation of newspapers, but with some important differences. So I do think that podcast and videos are the new

modern version of the paper and are even superior to a paper in many ways. First, they are much cheaper to make, right? Papers, especially national ones, require oftentimes brick and mortar locations, consistent funding, printing materials, and then tons of time and energy and labor, putting them together and distributing them. Podcasting videos like this bypass all of that. Secondly, using this medium allows us to get our content out immediately across time and space, and especially with regards to podcasting, allows people to consume that content and learn from it at work or during chores or while exercising in a way that the classic newspaper just didn't. And lastly, I think this medium allows us to expand on ideas and have

conversations, back and forth conversations in real time, in a way that newspapers, with their limitations don't allow for. However, given the absolute size and scope of the Internet, it's much harder for comrades to organize around a central paper and, obviously, in lieu of a party, like Lennon imagined. The cacophonous nature of the Internet allows for a sort of infinite amount of blogs and podcasts, videos, and overall content from a never-ending array of different people. This makes it much harder to sort of push out all the noise

and focus our collective attention on one publication, especially in lieu again of a proper Marxist party of the sort Lenin is advocating for. But perhaps this problem could be reduced if we did build that movement, right, which had a media project attached to it. That media wouldn't take the form of a paper. It would likely take the form of new media, but within the context of a dominant communist party with the mass base of support. That could help solve the problem of oversaturation and endless choice between outlets that we have now and allow a party to focus its content in the appropriate way. But in any case, suffice it to say that if Allison and I went about making red menace solely in the form of a newspaper, we wouldn't have even a fraction of a fraction of the audience we have now, and we would almost certainly be mistaken for trots.

The newspaper is obsolete, but with new forms of media outreach come new sets of problems to overcome. Ultimately, though, we are doing our show through this medium precisely because we think it's the most accessible to the most people and as such is superior to other modes of communication. and education. What are your thoughts, Alison? Yeah, so I definitely agree that sort of the podcast and media projects that we're seeing now are sort of a recontextualization of that function. One thing that I think that would be cool to see, and obviously not for myself because this is sufficient effort put into this podcast, but would be for people to use this format or the YouTube format, not just for sort of theoretical ends, but also for that real task of reporting on the movements and

struggles already in the U.S. and synthesizing them as a whole into a criticism of capitalism with sort of a news orientation towards it. You know, a lot of people who've written about the function of a party paper talk about this. It's recording it and then it's synthesizing it with what's happening among all the classes. And I think that seeing some sort of reporting oriented sort of approach to new media and podcasts on the left would be really interesting and could also fulfill some of the gaps that we're missing by moving from that sort of newspaper function towards what podcasts and sort of YouTube videos are doing instead. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And there are some

signs of it, you know, even like among the anarchists, it's going down, I think really focuses on trying to, to stay up and report on different movements as they come and go. And I think with like the empire files, you might get some good anti-imperialist reporting consistently. But yeah, nothing really firmly communist that ties it all together and gives it that, you know, that theoretical thrust and direction. So, so yeah, I do agree. We have work to do here, but there are some really promising developments so far. But I'm just going to go into the next question. So what are the best examples of the sort of party that Lenin argues for in the U.S. history. What happened to them and what necessary steps do we have to take presently to build the foundations for such a party

in the hopefully near future? Okay. So this is a very tough question, especially that last part, which is sort of what I feel like. Yeah, well, we're all grappling with. So there's two examples that I want to look at that I think get at the party function and the way that Lenin imagines it. And so the first, surprisingly, is the Communist Party USA prior to its revisionist turn. I think in the early history with the CPUSA, you see some really cool work that gets beyond just the economic struggle and truly captures what Lennon means about going out into all the classes and working. During the 20s and 30s in particular, there was a movement within the CPUSA to actually begin organizing with black sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the south.

And so that's obviously outside of the scope. traditional urban proletary economic struggle. But there were factions within the CPUSA who really theorized the experiences of black Southerners as part of the critique of capitalism and as a necessary part of critiquing the way that capitalism functions in the U.S. And so I think a party that is doing that and moving beyond the union struggle and thinking about all of the masses in that way is getting at that sort of unifying focus that Lenin is talking about. Within the CPUSA, you also had factions that were explicitly focused on black nationalism and black self-determination in the U.S. in line with Marxist and Leninist theories of how nationalism functions. And I think,

again, that is a party that is doing the work of moving beyond the economic struggle and doing the theoretical and the political struggle in a way that unites all the classes who have an interest in the overthrow of capitalism into the movement of proletarian revolution. So I think at a certain point, the CP USA was doing that quite well. Obviously within the United States, the CPUSA had a slow, well, maybe not even that slow, but had a degeneration into revisionism and liberalism, where the CPUSA that exists today supports a united front with the Democratic Party, which gives you a pretty good idea of how far they've fallen. But there was a time when I think that they really were embodying

the kind of vision of the party that London was interested in. The second group that I think we really need to look at in order to see this in the United States is the Black Panther Party. I think the Black Panthers are interesting because, again, they moved beyond the economic struggle, even though that was obviously part of what they were doing, but they looked at the way that racism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness were shaped by capitalism on the whole in the U.S. and how that was experienced holistically for black Americans, right? They didn't just focus on poverty and the more specific economic issues. They also focused very clearly on police violence. They synthesized the way that the killing of black Americans by police officers, that the economic enslavement of people in the New Jim Crow and the general just racism that was happening was part of the struggle of capitalism and actually showed how those things related to each other. And that again, to me, seems like a prime example of what London is talking about, going among all the classes and synthesizing all of those perspectives into one coherent critique of capitalism. So I think that Black Panthers were doing that very, very well,

actually, and were achieving that sort of professional revolutionary who looks at everything that happens under capitalism and pulls it together into one theoretical explanation. So the last part is how is it that we get to the point of having that kind of party again today? And that is the question that I think every revolutionary in the U.S. wishes they knew the answer to. My thought is that there are a few things. I mean, we need to learn from Lenin. We can't just tail the spontaneous movements of the working class that will never get us to the point of having a party. We have to have some level of theoretical development and consciousness raising. And that can't be just all theory work, like a lot of the left ends up believing that has to be tied to mass

work and interacting with the masses and being part of those movements, but it can't be tailing either. And we need to find a balance there, but I think it's very, very difficult to actually find. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, just to kind of go back to what you're saying about the CPUSA and its deterioration into what did it deteriorate into? Opportunism, revisionism, the same sort of strands that Lenin is fighting, you know, all throughout this text. You can look at the CPUSA, look at the amazing work they did, you know, during the early civil rights period, and look how far they've devolved. And that's the exact sort of thing that Lenin was trying to prevent in the party at that time. It eventually led to the split between the Bolsheviks and the

Mensheviks and then the civil war, et cetera. But it's really, really important to realize that's what happens when that strain wins out over the Lenin is strain. You get a weird communist party telling you to vote for Hillary Clinton. It's absurd. And then the other thing I would say is both the CPUSA and the Black Panther Party were Marxist-Leninist organizations who took Lenin's arguments about organization very seriously an advanced class struggle more than any other single movement or party in so far as there were other parties on you know like big mass parties did in the United States history so you know when we look over our own like you know national history you can see that the most advanced segments of the proletarian struggle took Lenin seriously and

took up this organizational method and that's what made them so wonderful and it's funny you know in sort of an ironic way that many people who hate leninists who can't stand mls they still love to prop up the black panther party for example while totally disconnecting the black panther party and their effectiveness from the theory that stems from Marxism and Leninism in the first place and I think that's either you know naivete or super disingenuous and sort of cynical but either way we should be in the lookout for that sort of stuff and call it out. But yeah, if you want to move on to the next question, I'm ready. Totally, yeah. So the next question I had is how important is the ideological struggle today and the theoretical struggle? Lenin wrote this text in a context

where a party already existed, even though it was internally divided. In this context, the need for ideological and theoretical struggle obviously makes a whole lot of sense. In the U.S. today, we don't have a unified party. We have a lot of organizations and a lot of sects, but nothing similar to sort of the scope of the RSDLP that was operating in Russia. So should we prioritize this form of struggle in our organization today? Or is an emphasis on economic struggle and really being involved in that mass movement, which stopped short of economism proper, more fitting for the conditions that we're operating in right now? Well, you know, this is a very tough question. And I'm going to give my best answer and then and see, you know, what your thoughts are. But my answer to

this, sort of the intuitive answer that I came up with is like both and, right? Ideological struggle is essential and necessary, and that will always be the case, whether we are in the abysmal condition as communists like we are today in the U.S. or whether we have built a successful party and are having to defend it from our critics. But if that ideological struggle, in my opinion, takes place solely on social media where so much of these, quote-unquote, ideological struggles do take place and is therefore utterly disconnected from actual organizing work, then politics is often tragically reduced to like an online hobby, right? A form of bourgeois self-expression and little more. The point, after all, of ideological struggle

is to clarify our positions for the masses, defend our approaches and tactics from our critics, and make clear our vision for how to achieve our goals. On social media, however, we are, by the nature of that very platform, sort of sequestered into our little echo chambers, far away from the masses of regular working people. And so in that context, ideological struggle sort of loses its bearings and becomes nothing more than sectarian, sectarian bickering for its own sake, or at least it often can, right? It doesn't really lead anywhere. So ultimately, we should engage in ideological struggle, even if we have to do it online. We should point out the errors, fallacious reasoning and theoretical dead ends of others as well as in ourselves. That's our

responsibility as proletarian educators. But that ideological struggle must always be focused and must always be connected to actual mass work. And that's what makes it, important. That's what gives its edge, and that's what makes it necessary in the first place. So what are your thoughts on that, Allison? Yeah, I agree with that. I think it really is a matter of doing both. And I think that oftentimes the left falls into one side or the other. And that's a huge problem regardless of which side it falls into. You know, as much as I love the people in the left who are theorizing base building, I worry that sometimes we ignore the ideological struggle a little bit too much and the need for having it because we've seen the way that some people just hyper

focus on it and that leads to wrecking or dogmatism that's not really in line with where the movement is currently at. But one thing I like about this text is I think Lenin says like even a movement that's in its infancy still needs ideology. It still needs theory. That's still necessary for it to function. And so it might feel premature at times, but we need to begin doing that work so that even if the movement continues to grow and get bigger, it'll be possible to lead it in the necessary direction. So yeah, I think you have to have both simultaneously, and it's a mistake to abandon either of them. Yeah, I think we totally agree on that. So if you're ready, I'm ready to move on to part three, the application of theory. I think in our last section,

we got a little bit into what it is that this text has to offer to us, but now we're going to sort focus on that as the real focus of this section. So I'll go ahead and start it off. I think that spontaneity is obviously still an issue that we wrestle with on the left today. And we don't just see it within contemporary social democratic movements, like the sort of right wing of the DSA, but we really see it across a lot of portions of the left. And I think Lennon was very insightful to recognize that it can crop up in different manifestations, whether that be terrorism or reformism and opportunism. It can, you know, appear in a lot of different ways. So I just want to focus on some examples on the left where we've seen that sort of spontaneity and focus on how

we can learn from that. So I think one prime example, which we've already mentioned, is the Occupy movement within the United States, which really did happen kind of spontaneously. I believe it began with the Ad Busters campaign for Occupy Wall Street, and once there was a camp in Wall Street, you know, other cities started to have their own camps that cropped up, and it really was this spontaneous movement. But as Brett already said, that spontaneity and that lack of guidance is in many ways what ultimately doomed the Occupy movement. While it mobilized a lot of people and got them into the street, it did not have a way to synthesize a clear list of demands that it could make, and people consistently can

that they simply did not know what it was that Occupy wanted. And that was a fair criticism. When it was so spontaneous, when it wasn't guided, and when it didn't have an explicit ideology, it just sort of floundered. There were countless meetings held within the camps that used the consensus model, where everyone gets an equal voice and you have to have universal agreement in order to get things done. And with that lack of leadership, you had Occupy struggling to even make a basic points of unity and a basic list of demands. And so I think that's a good example of where spontaneity gets trapped in. Now, at the same time, Occupy obviously radicalized a lot of people and created a lot of discussion about better strategy, and there are things we've learned from it,

but it shows that spontaneity itself cannot create a revolutionary movement. So while Occupy's one historical example, you see a lot of anarchists and sort of more left communist-leaning people today who maintain a focus on spontaneity and a desire for organically developed revolutionary movements. They generally criticize Lenin for a sort of supposed elitism and paternalism. And at the same time, I think we really need to ask, has anyone offered an alternative to vanguardism that has been effective? Has there been an example of a movement that developed wholly organically and then overcame a capitalist state?

And I don't think there is. There's a lot of writing right now coming from more of the ultra-left factions of the left about the Yellow Best movement in France as an example of this, a movement that, again, seemed to sort of organically develop out of protests around gas prices and that quickly spun up to something bigger, even after the gas prices were changed in alignment with the demands of the movement, it still has continued to this day. And so many people have pointed to the Yellow Vest as a really radical and violent revolt that has been occurring in France that shows that spontaneity works. But I think we're left asking a really important

question, which is, do the Yellow Vest threaten the French state? And even if they do threaten the French state, do they have a plan or ability to institute socialism? And there's not really any evidence that they do. While there are rioting, individual riots without a real plan to move them into a generalized insurrection are never going to overthrow the state. The French police just come out and fight them over and over again, and that situation can continue to occur, disrupting capitalism to some extent, but never completely getting rid of it. And so on that level, I think that, again, the yellow vests really show that spontaneity is limited in what it can achieve. And also because of the spontaneous and more leaderless or organic approach to

the movement, it's been infiltrated by right-wing factions and fascists. And that has caused Yellow Vest protests and riots to turn to internal fighting where you could see protesters attacking and beating each other. And without a clear socialist leadership to guide that movement in the direction of Marxist socialist revolution, it will continue to tear itself apart in that way. So I think that it does seem to be clear that one of the main examples we're seeing right now, that is supposed to show that vanguardism is irrelevant and unnecessary shows quite the opposite, that without vanguardism and when we choose to embrace spontaneity, we're not able to move beyond individualized revolts and move to the general opposition to capitalism.

Now, I think there's another example and tradition within the U.S. which is worth looking at, which is sort of the more insurrectionary tradition within U.S. anarchism, and also the more terrorist and illegalist-leaning tradition within the U.S. anarchist left. Now, this has been seen largely in eco-extremist groups, which have utilized more spontaneous and decentralized structures in order to attack the state and private companies. You saw throughout the 90s especially attacks carried out under the name of the Earth Liberation Front and the animal liberation front that attacked logging facilities, attacked animal testing facilities, and often freed animals from abusive conditions and situations. And these terrorist attacks were sort of motivated by the same sort of spontaneity. These were not real organizations. These were titles that individual cells could use to unify under in these actions.

But there was no real socialist or ideological leadership that was occurring within this movement. And the eco-extremists, sure, may have freed some animals. They may have stopped a few trees from being cut down. But at the end of the day, decades later, many of them sit in prison, and the constant destruction of the planet and the mistreatment of animal life still continues. Ultimately, I think that tradition speaks very profoundly to why the terrorist version of sort of spontaneity cannot give us anything useful for sustained revolution. The destruction of the planet and the continued factory farming of animals and their mistreatment for scientific purposes is a problem that that terrorism simply did not address, because it could not move beyond individual spontaneous attacks into some sort of revolutionary movement that could address capitalism on the whole, the economic system, which is actually producing that violence in the first. place. And so my concern is that some on the left are looking to these illegalist and terrorist

traditions as an inspiration and as a way of avoiding Leninist vanguardism. But I think that a sober and honest assessment of how spontaneity is played out in the U.S. will show us that this is a dead end and that Lenin's criticism is relevant to our movement's own failures here and our ability to understand them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very well said. And, you know, I think most people who know Allison and I or have listened for a long time to our various works and projects know that we're coming from a place of like genuine comradly analysis and not from a bad place but just to make it extra extra clear like we are not shitting you know on these movements or on these people alison and i were you know involved in occupy uh yellow vest you know

the the non-fascist elements of it you know they have legitimate grievances and they're doing their fucking best even some of the terrorists you know you can um you can totally understand that they have really good intentions they care about life and they're so disgusted by the depravity of this capitalist system that they need to act and they need to act now. So these are often very well-intentioned, you know, human beings fighting as best as they can for a better world. But what we want to do is not shit on them, but simply show their limitations. And the whole point of showing their limitations is not to prove, hey, our tendency is right and your tendency is wrong. It's always to foster a deeper understanding between as many

comrades as possible of these things have already been tried. You know, these are the limitations. These are the dangers because at the end of the day, what we all want, whether you are an ML or not, assuming you're well-attentioned on the left, is you want the overthrow of capitalism. And so what we're doing here is not attacking people or movements. We're just showing that if your goal is to overthrow global capitalism and save this fucking planet, these strategies have been proven time and again to be false. And there's some stuff on this Lennon's side that have proven not to be false. And that's what we're saying in the hopes of pushing the left in a more effective direction because that's what we all want. And so I hope people really take that to heart

and realize that the stuff is coming from a comradly and respectful place and not just attacking people that disagree with us. Absolutely. Yeah. If I can interject real quick, I think that this is something Lenin gets at in this text too, right? Where there's a point where he says, like, he doesn't doubt the sincerity of the economists or even the sincerity of the people who are doing the terrorist attacks or the fact that they really, truly do want to see a lot of the world as they look at it change. And yeah, we are very much in agreement with that. While criticizing these movements, I absolutely understand what motivated them and do believe that they really are horrified by looking at the world's day. And it's that shared horror for how bad capitalism

has gotten. That is the reason that these criticisms are so important in the first place. And the reason that we want to take the time to study movements that we're not a part of and that we disagree with, not so that we can say they're trash, but so we can understand them and then have a conversation about how all of us can do better in order to overcome this terrible system that is destroying life on this planet. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we're totally open to good faith, comradly criticism of us as well, you know, and we really hope that the Patreon is a place people can do that. But even if you can't afford that, you know, if you tweet at us at Twitter and you're obviously acting in good faith

and you have a disagreement or you want a point in clarification on something that we've said, we're always there to meet you and to talk to you, you know, so I want to make that very clear as well. but I'm going to move on to my point and then we're going to go into Allison's and then we're going to wrap this up. So I have two relatively shorter points that I'll combine into just one answer here just for brevity's sake.

First off, one thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately in which this text really drives home for me is the concept of participation in the struggle, right? It's undeniably true that not everyone, even among leftists, can or wants to dedicate all their time and energy to politics and revolution. The vast majority of people, including those convinced of the correctness of our general political views,

just want to live in peace and prosperity, taking care of their families, hanging out with friends, and focusing on their own lives and hobbies. They certainly want the benefits that socialism can bring them, but mostly so that they can have less stress, less alienation, less precarity, and as such can live a fuller, more free existence. Most people are not intensely political animals like you or I. And guess what? That's okay. But when I engage with anarchism or other forms of left communism, which demand almost by definition that everyone be constantly working on a horizontalist revolutionary project and voting on every little decision lest we fall into the so-called authoritarianism of leadership based on experience in a vertical organization, I feel like they ignore this basic fact about most human beings. The party structure is superior to that, in my opinion, because it allows people to plug in at whatever,

level they want to or are comfortable with, and it doesn't demand of them constant organizing in meetings and endless engagement with participatory democracy. Marxist theory as a whole has this strength, but the Vanguard Party in particular definitely has it. Moreover, by training organizers and allowing people to specialize in areas, this responsibility is taken up by the people who want it and not imposed by default on those who don't. For example, I know for a goddamn fact that my mom would benefit from socialism in truly monumental ways. And to some extent, she increasingly knows this herself and supports it. But she would absolutely hate having to step away from her life and her grandchildren and her family

to engage in the tedious minutia of political organizing, decision-making, etc., to say nothing at all of all the shit you'd have to learn just to be able to engage meaningfully in those things. And most people are like that, I think. Some people want to be on the front lines in an insurrection, others like to do face-to-face organizing on the ground others have a pension for education and want to focus on that some just want to make sure we have healthy food at our meetings and others still just want to exist in a better world so they can live their own lives we do ourselves a huge favor by remembering that and not projecting our intensity onto others and assuming they want to do what we do and the party form i think it has that advantage over other forms of participatory and horizontalist politics

And the second point, which is totally separate from that, is a broad point about scientific socialism. So even with all the work that Allison and I have tried to do on this subject, both on Red Menace and elsewhere, confusion still naturally abounds regarding this very difficult topic, specifically with regards to the party form. People sometimes think that we are saying that this has been proven to be the end all, be all of political organizing, and therefore we are dogmatic about it and insist upon it regardless of context or conditions. This, of course, is a confusion. But given how some folks talk about it, even on the Marxist's side, I don't blame people for that confusion. But for clarity's sake, I want to argue that scientific socialism doesn't necessarily mean that we've discovered that the party is the only way forward until the end of time in all conditions.

It means only that we've been able to disprove through experimentation and study of history the efficacy of other competing forms of organizing. science operates by systematically testing theories to weed out those that don't work and over time to come to a smaller and smaller set of theories that are still standing it never declares the search to be over it only continuously tests those theories that have survived hitherto sharpening them over time but never settling the matter once and for all sciences after all open-ended for example this week human beings took the first ever photo of a black hole. Until this week, we only had artist renderings and science fiction movies to represent them to us. As such, there were still plenty of questions regarding them, including whether Einstein's theory

of relativity would hold up in the face of this picture. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say that the photo of the black hole was exactly as the theory of relativity suggested it would be, and as such, this discovery counted as yet another piece of evidence in favor of relativity because it made a prediction and it was proven correct. by empirical results. If the black hole had looked significantly different, it wouldn't have disproven relativity. It would just mean that the theory needed to be adjusted to account for the new data. And given that the evidence aligned with the theory of relativity, it doesn't mean that Einstein's theory is now true for all time in every way. It just means that more evidence has been

collected that aligns with the theory, bolstering its veracity, but always leading to new and more research, right? In the same way, the party form has much more evidence in its favor than other competing theories of revolution while theories like terrorism and spontaneous insurrection which rejects the party have all been shown again and again to be dead ends in the evolution of class struggle so we say that based on almost two centuries of evidence the leninist conception of the party has been the vehicle that has taken class struggle the absolute furthest while the competing revolutionary strategies on offer have failed to do so and not only that but have failed in in many different contexts at many different points in time.

So the data set is large enough to make some educated deductions about efficacy. Moreover, since the Yellow Vest movement is still going strong, we can actually formulate a prediction based on all the data we have accrued thus far about what does and doesn't work. And that prediction is that the yellow vests, unless they somehow embrace the party form, which is highly unlikely, will share the exact same fate as Occupy or even May 68. namely, it'll fizzle out or be crushed and never result in the overthrow of the French state

and the construction of any form of socialist society. It may get some policy changes, it may get a reduction in taxes, it may make a few sympathetic bourgeois politicians carry forward some of its arguments or ideas, but it can never actually challenge or topple the ruling class in France or beyond. Again, this is a prediction. I can very easily be proven false here. If the yellow vests swell their ranks, went over large chunks of the working class, storm the institutions of France, kick out or repress the ruling class, and build proletarian

power, like so many Marxist Leninists around the world have done over and over again, I will be proven incorrect. And the theory of the party, though it wouldn't be defeated completely, would then have at least some empirical evidence against it being the most effective form of organizing against capitalism. If, however, they end up as I predicted above, then that means to some degree that Marxism does indeed have a predictive power. And we will have gained yet another piece of empirical evidence suggesting that spontaneous insurrection is in and of itself and in lieu a formal party organizing which can take it to the next level, objectively limited in what it can possibly achieve. And lastly, the party form, it's important to remember, has objective evidence

supporting its efficacy to a certain point, and certainly with regards to getting beyond the lower stage of spontaneity, but runs into its own problems at certain levels of struggle. And this requires us to keep moving forward and experimenting. But it also shows us that we can't devolve back into the lower forms of organizing, which have already been proven incorrect. There are many radicals who, by virtue of rejecting Leninism and asserting there is nothing to learn from it at all, endlessly reinvent the wheel, endlessly go back to former eclectic ideas and played out strategies, endlessly trying the electoral route or the economist route, or the spontaneity route, and always being met with the same exact fate

as those who tried the same exact thing before them. So I hope people who are still confused in this concept of Marxism as a science can at least take some of that and help develop those ideas a little further. Allison? Yeah, so I really love your first point. And I think it's something that I often don't even think about,

which is, yeah, not everyone has the same amount of time or energy or desire even to put in the same amount of time or energy into a leadership position. And having some level of verticality and organization does accommodate to people's different amount of energy they want to put in. When everyone has to be involved in every decision, an organization makes really huge demands on your time that for many working people are not reasonable expectations. And that's actually something I've never really thought about in the context of the party and why that's a benefit to the party. So I think that point's really insightful. And on your second point, I also think, like, especially this claim about how we just keep seeing people try to revive the same old things.

I keep thinking about, like, these last two articles published in Jacobin saying, let's go back to Kautsky and let's go back to his ideas about the state in opposition to Lennon. And at some point, you just have to laugh at it. Like, how many times do we have to try that route that has continually and continually failed and abandoned a route that time and time again has successfully led to revolution? Exactly, yeah. I don't read Jacobin anymore, so I didn't know about that, but my God. Yeah, they're on that kick right now.

Their next one is going to be, in defense of Bernstein. Right. But yeah, if you wanted to go ahead and finish this section three out with your last application of theory. Definitely. So the last thing I want to talk about is in my first application section, I talked about why spontaneity is still a problem today. But I actually think economism, in a sense, is still a problem today. And the same error focusing on the economic struggle above and against all other struggles

actually is still playing itself out in the U.S. left. and needs to be combated. So many on the left have been rightfully invigorated and excited by a long string of union activity lately. We've seen teacher strikes in Los Angeles and now teacher strikes spreading across the country. On the higher education level, there are movements to build graduate unions at schools that have long been incredibly hostile to them. And there's been an overall trend towards engaging in the economic struggle and a sort of revitalization of the labor movement in the United States in many ways. And a lot of people, the left are very excited about this. And there's a lot to be excited about. After intense repression

of the labor movement within this country, it's refreshing to see it coming back in a big way. But at the same time, we can't stop with just the labor movement. There are many within both the democratic socialist tradition and the libertarian left who've argued that these developments indicate, you know, that a revolutionary movement is growing and it's being established without the guidance of any sort of party or without the guidance of professional revolutionaries or socialist intellectuals. And in this way, we can see this idea that the economic struggle expressed organically without any leadership can somehow become a revolutionary movement. Now, only time will tell if this revitalization of labor struggle will do that, but there's

reasons to think that it won't. Furthermore, I think that this framing that many people have used to talk about this emerging labor movement makes the same mistake of communism. It pits the masses involved in this movement against socialist leadership. And it argues, that the theoretical and ideological struggle cannot be pushed on to this movement without some sort of condescension or some sort of inorganic imposition on the workers by a socialist elite that has no right to bring it there. And so in this way, you really do see a lot of the people who are excited about this spontaneous development, repeating a lot of the mistakes that the economist made and really reinvesting in that same ideology. You know, this is essentially

the same mistake that Lenin is criticized and it carries the same problems. These movements, as we've seen them, have not, and I would argue, cannot move beyond reformism. Even if union-oriented reforms, you know, that they went, are important. None of them actually have embraced a holistic anti-capitalist approach. While these teachers may be militant on the picket line, and there has been presence of socialists there, they are not within a leadership position, and they are not tying this struggle into a broader struggle against capitalism. And again, none of this is to say that this labor movement and this union organizing doesn't

matter. It's incredibly important, and it's very awesome that it is coming back. But without Marxism as a guiding theory and ideology, we're going to see that these movements are going to be forced back to the hegemonic bourgeois ideologies, which understand labor struggle as its own isolated phenomena, which can be resolved through adequate reforms. There's a whole wing of the Democratic Party that is involved in union organizing and labor struggle, and they are fine to allow some level of a labor movement to exist, so long as it stays on its own, so long as it doesn't tie itself towards other movements against capitalism, towards decolonial struggles or anti-racist struggles within the United States. As long as those things are allowed to be separate,

the state and the capitalists are largely fine ignoring them. And in this sense, spontaneity may not be enough to move us to a revolutionary movement once again, and we may be getting trapped in the same form of opportunism because of a fetishization of spontaneity. What Lenin's theory allows us to recognize is that the task in the United States is not merely to develop a mass labor movement, and it's certainly not only to allow that movement to develop organically along Bouchoil lines. The task remains to develop a theoretical, political, and economic struggle which encompasses the whole of capitalist relations. There are many classes in the U.S. who are systemically excluded from the proletarian workforce on the basis of internal colonization, anti-blackness, and settler colonial violence. Within the U.S., there is a labor aristocracy, and there is a set of laborers who are highly marginalized, and even many people who are excluded from the economy on the whole, because the U.S.

divides the working class through these systems of racism and white supremacy and gentrification that shut off access to even being able to participate in the capitalist economy. And so, in the context of the U.S., London is right. We need a party and we need a movement that can move beyond the labor struggle and look to all the classes, all of those dispossessed among the masses of the United States who are not participating in the capitalist economy, but still have a vested interest in overcoming capitalism and seeing it come to an end. So we have to look to the experience of these people, and we have to theorize them in relation to economic struggle of the labor movement, and we have to demonstrate how all these

experiences speak to the totality of capitalism, and can only be resolved through a united struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist social relations. And this is a difficult task, and I would argue that this still requires a party and a vanguard that can train revolutionaries and organizers to be able to propagandize and agitate around all of these different struggles. We do not, as of yet, have such a party in the United States, and we will not get there through building more micro-parties and simply declaring them to be the party. That strategy has not worked and we need something new. The question is how we'll develop it. But that said, a party should still remain our goal, no matter what form of organizing. we are doing. And it provides an infrastructure which allows us to do the kind of work that the

Vanguard must do, this synthesis and this experiences of all the classes being put and synthesized towards painting a single picture of capitalism. This task remains unfortunately horrifyingly large in scale, and it can't be accomplished through decentralized cells operating without cohesion. If we want to engage in the political, economic, and ideological struggle, we absolutely must create a party to facilitate these multifaceted aspects that struggle like this entails. And so there still is a sort of economism that functions in the American left that still needs to be combated against. And that can only be done through the kind of

unifying work that a Vanguard party offers. And so in that sense, regardless of how we get there, I think that as our end goal for socialist organizing in the U.S., that party still has to be what we set our sights on. And Lenin's text thus remains incredibly and profoundly relevant to the struggles that we're engaging in here today. Beautifully said. And that is where we're going to end this discussion on Lenin's what is to be done. Again, this was a very challenging text.

We had to sort through all the historical minutia and pull out the theory. We urge people who have either already read it or are going to read it to give us their feedback, what they thought, whether they thought we hit the right notes or not. Really interested to hear your feedback, but remember, and this is essential. And I hope that we're driving this point home throughout all of these episodes, and we'll continue to going forward, which is that we do not do this show simply to hear ourselves talk or simply as an intellectual exercise. We do this show with the sole intention of urging people to pick up this theory, pick up this knowledge, and organize with it, to run with it,

to make, to put it into practice. Theory without practice is pointless and the vice versa is true as well. So, you know, when we say this stuff and we break this stuff down, we really hope people take, you know, our call to organize and put the stuff into practice seriously. And with that said, I know last time we promised you that from now on, what we're going to do is tell you the text we're going to tackle next month so that listeners can get a head start on that. And, you know, Allison and I behind the seeds are sort of building a curriculum, if you will. And so we're taking it step by step. We're going to go back to a crucial first, you know, Marxist texts from Marx, eventually. But we're trying to build up a little course of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory so that we can go back

and read Marx originally with all of this in mind. So for next month, what we are going to read is The Foundations of Leninism by Joseph Stalin.