Among the greatest threats to the people of the world today and our ability for future prosperity is the threat of human-caused climate change, including global warming. In the capitalist world, many in the media, political and business establishment call the concept a hoax because they economically benefit from the industries that are making the planet unlivable for human beings. 

Yet in every socialist country, the ruling parties believe in the science of climate change and are taking steps to prevent it. In fact, the socialist countries are doing more to prevent it than many capitalist countries with far greater resources. Their systems of public ownership and planning are what give them the power to do it. 

First, what is climate change? What causes it? And why is capitalism so bad at preventing it? What is referred to as “climate change” is the alternation of the planet’s climate caused by human activity. The main mechanism that causes this is the burning of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and warms the planet. 

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, the water power of rivers was used to supply energy to the new factories spinning cloth in England. But before long, steam engines that burned coal replaced the rivers as the primary source of energy. Eventually, electricity was discovered, but the primary source of energy to make electricity was still coal, a very dirty and polluting form of energy, and it remains one of the largest sources of energy, today augmented by oil and natural gas. 

Due to hundreds of years of infrastructure and development, coal and other fossil fuels are at the center of so much of the industrialized world and represent some of the cheapest forms of energy, despite their continued use spelling doom for human civilization. Because capitalism is only concerned with profit, using the cheapest method will always be chosen over anything else, and the future of the planet or welfare of the workers is of no concern for the owners of capital. 

The economies of socialist societies, however, are based on planning and public ownership rather than private control by a small wealthy class. These societies can make strategic investments that prioritize other goals rather than the immediate maximization of profit, and preserving the environment and preventing climate change is one of these goals.

China turns to renewable energy

Despite having the largest share of total carbon emissions as a country, the People’s Republic of China has a per capita emissions rate that is half that of the United States, while having a greater gross domestic product when adjusted for local purchasing power. During the first decade of the 2000s, the Communist Party of China made fighting pollution a national policy goal. To this end, China poured vast sums of money and national resources into several critical areas of clean energy.

The solar panel and wind turbine markets used to be relatively small and products were expensive, but China invested billions of dollars into massive facilities for the production of solar panels and wind turbines. Within a few years, the costs of these products fell tremendously, with solar panel costs falling as much as 80 percent. These investments were made for the strategic reason of fighting climate change, and they go beyond the capitalist logic of maximizing profits. The state purposefully ramped up production in order to fulfill a human need.

China has also been the nation leading the world in deployment of new nuclear power plants, a form of energy that produces no carbon pollution. According to the World Nuclear Association, China has 47 plants currently in operation, 12 under construction and 168 in the planning stages. These new power plants are of modern designs quite different from those in the United States, mostly built in the 1970s. 

They incorporate many passive safety features to prevent meltdowns such as those that occurred at Chernobyl and Fukushima, requiring no human intervention to prevent disaster. Some reactors in the research stages are even proposed to run on alternative fuels such as thorium and be cooled by liquid metals like sodium instead of water, offering further increased efficiency and safety. 

Nuclear power has been shunned by most countries of the capitalist West for decades. The high upfront costs represent too high of a risk to the private monopoly banks of Wall Street despite their high lifetime output and lack of carbon emissions. A powerful and righteous anti-nuclear movement rebelled against dangerous capitalist abuses of nuclear energy and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Socialist China, however, believes it can use its collective wealth to plan for the long term and build these power plants safely with the goal of accommodating growth in a way that prevents pollution.

Groundbreaking efforts in Cuba

While the People’s Republic of China is the socialist country with the largest economy and most resources at a national level, other socialist countries have made their own contributions to fighting climate change. Many of these efforts were undertaken out of necessity due to the countries’ positions as nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism, but embraced for the positive effects they have brought about.

In the 1990s, Cuba went through an incredibly difficult time in what is called the “Special Period” after the dismantling of socialism in the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the state. Nearly overnight, Cuba’s largest trading partner was no more and, due to the U.S. imposed blockade, foreign imports of oil and fertilizers were no longer available to the island nation. They had to innovate in order to survive and in the process reduced their dependence on fossil fuels.

With fuel to run tractors and trucks in short supply, agricultural products on large farms became difficult to harvest and ship to the population in cities. In response, the Cuban government began practicing intensive urban farming on state-owned plots in the cities. 

These “Organipónicos,” as they are known, are cultivated with advanced organic methods to increase yields without synthetic fertilizers and because the fields are already in the cities, the amount of fossil fuels needed to be burned to transport them is greatly reduced. 

Cuba, known internationally for its sugar production, also uses the waste from the harvest to reduce their fossil fuel usage in ways that are uncommon in capitalist countries. By locating power plants designed to burn the waste products of sugar refining in major agricultural areas and near refineries, Cuba has tapped into an efficient and renewable form of electricity that avoids fossil fuels. 

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) also went through its own period of intense hardship in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, known there as the “Arduous March.” They, too, were cut off from oil imports and fertilizers. 

The issue in the DPRK became how to irrigate their fields without oil to run the pumps that supplied water to the fields. In response, the country launched a popular campaign to construct massive dams in the mountains of the country which would allow stored water to flow downhill to the fields via gravity instead of using pumps. These dams were constructed mostly without the assistance of heavy machinery and represented a countrywide mobilization of the people to improve the country. 

Additionally, Vietnam faced great devastation at the hands of the U.S. military during the 1960s and 1970s, including chemical warfare in the form of Agent Orange and other toxic compounds that killed many Vietnamese people and much of their natural environment. Since then, under the guidance of the socialist government, the nation has planted millions of trees, which not only clean the air but also sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the forest.

These examples are just some of the ways that the world’s socialist societies have taken steps to preserve the environment and which reduce their contribution to global climate change. To be sure, none of these societies are examples of the full potential for humanity to live with minimal harmful impacts on the environment. However, their actions show that their social systems based on public ownership of the principal means of production and long-term planning are the basis for the all encompassing action that is needed to prevent disastrous climate change. 

If these countries can do so much good with so much less wealth than that held by the United States, what could we do if we got rid of the bankers and CEOs that rule this country and decided to use our wealth for human needs, including preventing climate change?

Sunday, April 26, 2020 at 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM EDT

Everywhere 2 pm West Coast, 4 pm Central, 5 pm East Coast

George Plekhanov did not have Lenin in mind when he wrote his remarkable essay on “The Role of the Individual in History.” But the following paragraphs describe Lenin more than anybody else you can think of.

“A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time — needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes.

“In his well-known book on heroes and hero worship, Carlyle calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is a beginner precisely because he sees further than others and desires things more strongly than others.

“He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying those needs.

“He is a hero, but he is a hero not in the sense that he can stop the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course (of history). Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal. And the power is terrible.”

The ‘beginnings’

Aside from the exclusive emphasis on the male sex and the rather literary use of the world “terrible,” this is an almost perfect description of the relation of the individual to the historical process — and not only the “great” individual.

But it may be a little incomplete just to say that great people are “beginners,” because the historical forces they represent and the leaders and thinkers who preceded them also produce those people, too. In that sense, they are “continuers.”

Lenin would have been the first to admit — and even proclaim — that he, too, was a continuer, especially of Karl Marx and even of Plekhanov himself in that thinker’s earlier period.

However, in Lenin we have an example of a person who, although also a “continuer,” actually did clearly begin not one, but several, very important aspects of the struggle for the inevitable socialist future of humanity.

Let us review the main “beginnings” that he was personally responsible for.

But first a few words on his character and personality, which are not always clear from his writing or even from some biographical descriptions.

Love and struggle

The age of complete world socialism that Lenin visualized and fought for will bring about the end of all hunger — hunger of material goods as well as for food for everybody on earth. This can undoubtedly be achieved with the constantly improving machinery and technology already evident in the present age. This technology needs only to be released from the death-grip of an outlived profit-hungry, war-mad social system.

With a new economy and a new system, the socialist age will eventually bring the spirit and practice of universal cooperation, love and consideration for one’s neighbor, and the fullest development of every individual without the necessity of trampling upon any other individual.

To bring about this age, however, requires not so much a program to convince people in the present age to love their neighbors, etc. (which would be utopian if not false and hypocritical), as it requires a relentless struggle against the ruling class enemy which resists the coming into being of the socialist age with all its might.

This struggle, in turn, requires a different kind of person to engage in it. It also requires a plan, a strategy, a theory and a leadership.

Lenin provided all those, but in order to do that effectively he had to conduct himself and even shape himself in a certain way.

Necessary explosions

He was passionate in his will to bring about the revolution to usher in the socialist age, but so absolutely devoted to the task that he was ruthless toward its enemies and, whenever necessary, critical toward its friends. This alone required a certain austerity and at times aloofness.

His devotion to the goal, together with the constant deep study to prepare himself for battle, did not always prepare people for the occasional explosions of his great store of political ammunition. He was irresistible on the platform, but infinitely more from the logic and the political power of his position than from any so-called “charisma.”

This, of course, required a “terrible” intensity on his part.

Humor, personal love, relaxation and other human attributes he had, of course. But these were not part of the highly political personality that his contemporaries were usually acquainted with.

A well-known Menshevik named F.I. Dan said of him (probably after Lenin gave him some well-deserved political blow):

“What are you going to do with a guy who talks, writes, thinks and breathes nothing but revolution 24 hours a day?”

This was probably not meant entirely as a compliment.

But it gives us an inkling of why Lenin became the leader of the revolution, if not why Dan became one of its leading opponents.

1895: First Marxist workers’ organization in Russia

At the age of 25, Lenin founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which was the first Marxist workers’ organization in Russia.

(Some time before that, Plekhanov had formed the Emancipation of Labor Group, but it was composed of professionals and exiles.)

As a result, Lenin was arrested on Dec. 8, 1895, and sent first to prison for 14 months and then to Siberia for three years. In both places he constantly kept in touch with his revolutionary followers and also wrote a powerful book, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.”

1900: ‘The Spark’ is lit

In 1900, Lenin founded the first nationally circulated illegal Russian Marxist newspaper. It was called Iskra (The Spark) and was edited and printed abroad.

Its editorial board included Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich and other prominent Marxists.

It reached thousands of workers in Russia who, in turn, read it aloud to thousands of others.

1903: A new kind of party

Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party. He didn’t do this merely by setting up a banner and coining a few good slogans and calling upon people to rally ‘round. He did it after long struggles with the old anarchist-populist elements in the 1890s and then against a new opportunist trend among the Marxists called “economism.”

While he already had great prestige in the movement, he did not necessarily have the full confidence of all the other leading Marxists at the time — nor did he have confidence in all of them. He was dissatisfied with some of the attitudes among them — attitudes about party membership and responsibilities.

So he proposed at a convention of about 60 leaders held in exile that every party member become, in effect, a professional revolutionary. That is, the party must be a party of cadres whose main interest in life was the socialist revolution and who would subordinate their other activities to the needs of the party.

A political bombshell

When he made this proposal it was like dropping the proverbial bombshell. It led to an irreconcilable split. The Mensheviks (meaning minority) walked out. It later became clear that underneath the simple words describing what a party member should be was a determination to make the socialist revolution. And underneath the opposition to those words was not only a softness in general, but a different view of the coming revolution.

The concept of a party is generally known at the present time (although not generally practiced), but the difficulties in forming the party and keeping it together under Czarist rule are somewhat less known and even less understood.

From the very beginning, the road was hard.

But Lenin knew he was right. And he was more right than he knew. Even Lenin could not have foreseen in 1903 the sequence of events in 1917. He could not have known that the Mensheviks would actually oppose the October Revolution tooth and nail.

As a matter of fact, even the Mensheviks themselves could not have dreamed in 1903 that their own leader in 1917, I.G. Tsereteli, the president of the Soviets (until September, when the Bolsheviks won the Soviet elections), would shortly after the revolution go down to Georgia and actually organize an armed counterrevolution against the new Soviet state.

1905: Revolution and insurrection

There were many tests and crises for the new party, which were reflections of and responses to the crisis-torn Czarist regime and the workers’ struggle against it.

In the 1905 revolution, for instance, when the Petersburg Soviet members were all arrested, the Bolsheviks under Lenin (who had secretly returned to Russia from exile) led the Moscow uprising.

The insurrection was beaten down, though it lasted several days before it ended. This put an even deeper chasm between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks — the latter saying: “They shouldn’t have taken up arms.”

1907: Reaction and bourgeois parliament 

During the events of 1905, the Czar had been forced to “grant” a representative parliament called the Duma. All the real revolutionaries, mostly Bolsheviks, boycotted this Duma, which they regarded as an attempt to co-opt the revolution.

But during the reaction after the revolution was over, Lenin was the first of the revolutionaries to recognize that the times had changed. Even though he had been the first to advocate insurrection, he now proposed taking part in this more or less fraudulent Duma. He was at first opposed by the majority of his own central committee, although he later convinced them to do it.

(Lenin was called inflexible and stiff-necked by his enemies, but he was really a superb tactician who tried to take advantage of every possible means of struggle, including the parliamentary.)

1908: The socialist heaven must stay on earth

During the reaction, there was a struggle over Marxist philosophy led by supporters of a form of mysticism which tried to establish itself in the party and actually form a new “religion.”

Lenin led this fight and wrote a powerful and thoroughgoing rebuttal to the philosophical revisionists known as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.”

This did not come easy, either. Besides the tremendous theoretical work required, he had to rebuke his personal friend, the great novelist Maxim Gorky, who helped the party with funds and in other ways, too. And he had to attack leading comrades while being temporarily in a bloc with George Plekhanov, who had now become a Menshevik but still fought for the materialist view of history.

That was how Lenin saw the issue of Marxist theory and the materialist method.

How easy it would have been to gloss over the mystical maunderings of a few leaders and just make a few remarks about them! But that wouldn’t have been Lenin, and it wouldn’t have maintained the party’s sharpness in doctrine and method that was necessary to make a revolution.

1913: Right of self-determination 

There was also an important, and in the light of later events, historical dispute with Rosa Luxemburg, an otherwise very revolutionary comrade, over the question of self-determination.

Luxemburg thought the socialist revolution would solve national oppression, and anyway, the leaders of some of these oppressed nations were oppressors too, so how could a workers’ party support them?

Lenin not only led a debate against this view, but was the first to set down in theoretical form the whole question of the defense of the rights of colonies and semi-colonies (called neo-colonies today) to secede from imperialist oppressors.

Later, during the First World War, when he refused to support the imperialist countries, he took care to make exception for small countries fighting for their liberation.

This was extremely difficult to do at that time, because the small European countries fighting in the First World War (e.g., the Balkans) had completely sold themselves to the big imperialist countries and it appeared to revolutionaries like Luxemburg that there never would be any progressive war by any small country.

1914: ‘Turn the imperialist war into civil war’

The greatest test for Lenin personally, parallel to that of the 1917 revolution itself, was in taking his uniquely revolutionary position on the First World War.

Earlier, the European socialist parties had all pledged themselves to oppose the coming war. But, when the war actually came, the parties capitulated and each — except for individual holdouts — supported its respective imperialist government.

In Germany, for instance, 110 socialist members of the national congress voted for the war. Only one, Karl Liebknecht, voted against. (There were other great German leaders who agreed with Liebknecht, like Rosa Luxemburg.)

It was about the same in the smaller socialist parties.

In Russia, however, all five Bolshevik representatives in the Duma, along with some “internationalist” Mensheviks, voted against the war. And they were all sent to hard labor in Siberia. (So much for parliamentary immunity!)

But Lenin not only opposed the war: he went further and proposed that socialists use the war situation to work for the overthrow of their respective governments.

“Turn the imperialist war into civil war,” he said.

And he developed the doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” — that is, the proposition that the defeat of your own imperialist country, your own ruling class, is preferable to their chauvinist victory, especially if the defeat is brought on by the people’s struggles for their rights and for progress and socialism.

Needless to say, the imperialist rulers of all countries persecuted the opponents of their war. And they accused the strikers and fighters for justice of being enemy agents. Even a literary opposition to the war was tantamount to treason.

‘Second International is dead: Long live the Third!’

Furthermore, Lenin condemned all the socialists who supported the war or half-supported it. He condemned the whole Second International and called for the establishment of a Third (Communist) International.

He was the first person to do this. And he found no answering echo for some time, not even among the most resolute anti-war fighters in all countries.

All this was in the first few months of the war. And it must be remembered that the chauvinism and hysteria on both sides had reached heights not previously known in the modern world — and never known on such a worldwide basis.

The pressure to conform was very intense. Even within the anti-war part of the Social Democratic parties, there was a strong tendency to go along with Karl Kautsky, leader of the Second International, who had a centrist position. But Lenin vigorously condemned this grouping and Kautsky in particular for not declaring war on their own ruling class.

He took an equally hard line in his own country, of course. Plekhanov, the “Father of Russian Marxism,” supported the war, objectively supporting the same Czar against whom he had fought for most of his life.

Lenin, who had blocked with Plekhanov on the question of Marxist philosophy, now mercilessly condemned him for his terrible capitulation.

But Lenin’s hard line helped to further harden the Bolshevik Party and prepare it for the revolution that came in 1917.

1917: It began on Women’s Day

The revolution itself began on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1917, with a demonstration of women textile workers. It came like a thunderclap in the middle of the war under the very nose of the Czarist court.

After five days of constantly increasing strikes and street demonstrations, first unarmed and finally armed, the Czar abdicated and the capitalist democrats took over with a so-called “provisional government.”

From the start, the workers and soldiers (the latter mostly peasants in uniform) established huge councils (“soviets”) that really rivaled the provisional government, but appeared to be only auxiliaries.

‘All power to the Soviets!’

Within a month after the spring revolution, Lenin came back from exile and immediately raised the slogan, “All power to the Soviets.”

This slogan may seem simple enough and clear enough to revolutionaries looking at it from the vantage point of history.

But it caused a great furor in the whole movement when he raised the idea.

In fact, of all the difficult, creative revolutionary positions that Lenin ever took, this one was the boldest, the most courageous, the most heroic, one might say. For he mobilized his whole party, the party he had worked with and sacrificed so many years to build, in an effort to do something that had never been done before and appeared to many wise heads to be absolutely suicidal.

What? Make another revolution just weeks or months after the first? Not only that, but to make a socialist revolution, a proletarian revolution, without allowing a period for capitalist rule (after the fall of feudalism) of the type that had developed in all the advanced countries?

Obviously, an attempt to take power followed by a failure would destroy the Bolshevik Party completely and every chance to be an opposition party in the new democratic capitalist regime would be lost.

On the other hand, think of all the wise people today who will tell you how Marx was wrong about the socialist revolution coming first in Western Europe and that its success in the underdeveloped East proves that Marx’s whole thesis was wrong.

In the Russia of 1917, every socialist of whatever faction was more keenly aware of this proposition of Marx than the smartest kibitzers of today. And it was precisely this thought (in addition to sheer worry and fear) that paralyzed the movement. It was this mental paralysis that Lenin had to overcome and the Bolsheviks had to cure in action.

Furthermore, Lenin called for the Soviets to take power at a time when the Bolsheviks were in a small minority in the Soviets.

This alone required a deep historical understanding and a clear historical perspective.

If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had failed to see the special situation in Russia — both theoretically and practically — if they had failed to apply living Marxism to the given, historical Russian conditions, there might have been no successful socialist revolution in Russia. And if so there would not have been any in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and probably not so soon in China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in the subsequent period.

The “beginner,” who was part of the inevitable and unconscious force of history, had begun a whole chain of revolutions and a new phase in the world socialist revolution first conceived by Karl Marx.

Originally published in 1989, on the 65th anniversary of Lenin’s death.

From a talk given on Sept. 2, 1993, introducing a series of classes on basic Marxist concepts after the destruction of the Soviet Union.

We’re looking into the arsenal of weapons in the struggle against the imperialist bourgeoisie. We will inspect the weapons from the viewpoint of their readiness in the forthcoming class struggle of the working class and the oppressed people against capitalism and imperialism.

Right after the first imperialist world war started in 1914, and the carnage of workers began, a number of anti-war groups called a meeting in a neutral country. I think it was Lenin who said the important thing wasn’t how many came, but that they came to the meeting. And having come, they considered what to do.

In a large measure, this is what we have to do. The Marxist movement has suffered an August 4, 1914, catastrophe. But we are in a position to recuperate and regenerate the movement. And in no other place on earth is the situation more favorable, objectively and historically, than right here. This audience must not underestimate it.

Why study Marxism?

Why do we need to go over Marxism? Why can’t we just assign comrades to read this and that and then go on to the business of the war in Nicaragua, or what’s going on in the imperialist attacks on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or what’s happening with the Palestinians?

We have to have a basic evaluation of what is going on. An examination of our ideological weapons. Which ones are more useful. Which are most likely to be used in the near future. Which are to be held for a later date.

The bourgeoisie regard their system as eternal, not subject to fundamental change. This differs radically from Marxism, which teaches us that capitalism is a transitory social formation. Like feudalism and slavery, it will have to give way to a higher form of society.

The bourgeoisie cannot give an objective assessment of the real trends in capitalist society. Everything they do is calculated to serve self-interest of the most venomous type, which goes along with imperialist brigandage all over the globe.

Our purpose in reviewing Marxism is to prepare us for the storms and stresses of the next period. We have every confidence that Marx’s prediction of a revolutionary storm will come true. We need to re-examine our basic armor with a view to its operational effectiveness. That is what our study is about. We will go from the abstract to the concrete this time around.

We don’t need a scholastic, pedantic recitation. We need a critical review, not from the viewpoint of revisionism and renunciation but from the viewpoint of reinforcing and strengthening the heritage that has been bequeathed to us by the great leaders of the past.

In this short session we will look at the latest phase of capitalism, which Lenin called imperialism. Many decades ago, he wrote the pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” I’m sure you’re all acquainted with it. Every one of us is duty bound to read and study it.

Lenin’s five characteristics of imperialism

There are at least five characteristics of imperialism that Lenin thought important in characterizing this stage of capitalism. And they are still true some 77 years later.

He first of all mentioned the concentration of production, of capital, the development of competition into monopoly. How does it happen? What is the interplay between monopoly and competition? One doesn’t replace the other. They both exist. How is it different today from Lenin’s period?

The bourgeoisie is always discussing competition and monopoly. There are thousands of cases in the courts that deal with monopoly and competition from the point of view of their problems. On the one hand, they want to restrain monopoly, yet they also want to strengthen it. They’ve had two world wars and another one could be coming. How do you restrain and foster monopoly at the same time? It’s a dual process.

Lenin tells us about the merging of bank capital with industrial capital and the creation of finance capital.

Then there is the export of capital which has become extremely important as distinguished from the export of commodities. The U.S. exports not just commodities but loans all over the world. That’s got to be studied. How important is this difference?

Lenin also writes about the formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among themselves.

General Electric, Westinghouse, and one or two Japanese companies share their market on a world basis. But it’s not a stable agreement. They establish arbitrators and courts of arbitration to issue awards and all that, but they don’t keep the agreements, basically because they are thieves and pirates. It’s utopian to expect them to have gentlemen’s agreements among themselves, especially when billions of dollars are at stake.

Redivision of the world

According to Lenin, the world was already shared out among the great capitalist powers when he wrote “Imperialism” in 1916. The wars since have invalidated a lot of this. Some imperialist countries have become stronger and others weaker. Japan has become stronger. Britain, Holland, Belgium, and others have become weaker. What has taken their place, of course, is U.S. imperialism. It attempts to take over everything that is not nailed down.

A fundamental feature of imperialism is also the fusion of the capitalist state with the banks and industry. The industrialists carry on a struggle to maintain some form of independence among themselves as against the finance capitalists, but this independence is overturned and giant financial and industrial corporations get fused. This doesn’t solve the contradiction, but brings it within a certain area of agreement.

Henry Ford and finance capital

Let me give you an example of what Lenin means about the fusion of industry with finance capital. Henry Ford and his empire existed for a considerable period as a family unit. No banks, no insurance companies owned the Ford company. It all belonged to one family.

He was so fearful that Wall Street, meaning the bankers, would take it over that he launched an anti-Semitic campaign. He subsidized two or three publications of an anti-Semitic character in order to chastise and expose Wall Street.

What was the real problem? He didn’t want his industrial empire to succumb to finance capital. He wanted it to stay in the family.

From the Leninist conception of imperialism, this meant that Ford, as an industrialist, was attempting to ward off the fusion of finance capital with his industrial empire. In the end, he and his son capitulated. They made it a stockholding company where everybody could buy the stock. The Wall Street firms that sell and float stocks, that lend and borrow money, made it like any other corporation — General Motors, Chrysler, IBM and so on.

It showed how it’s not possible to be an independent entity in the imperialist epoch. Least of all, you can’t keep the banks out unless you want to lose money. Ultimately, Ford capitulated to the financiers because he would have lost the competitive edge if he tried to stay independent.

The Thinking Machine Corp.

I would like to give you a more modern example. There’s a company called The Thinking Machine Corp. It develops very sophisticated, advanced computer technology. It’s not one of the Fortune 500 companies, but it does sell computers around the world, to the tune of $100 million.

Recently, this little company with about 500 workers was going through a shakeup in the leadership — all of whom were experts in high technology. They decided they wanted a new chief executive from the outside. Sometimes, when an organization can’t function because of disagreements among themselves, it’s best to get somebody from the outside.

So what did they do? They got somebody named Harold Fishman, a lawyer in the biggest corporate law firm in the U.S., and asked him to become the head of The Thinking Machine.

If they wanted somebody from the outside, why in the world pick a Wall Street lawyer who doesn’t know anything about technology? How is he going to run the corporation? The question was asked publicly. Why go to Wall Street? He is very brilliant. He’s got all the qualities that a lawyer and a corporate manager should have. But he is not a technology leader. So why get him?

IBM had laid off a lot of technology-wise executives. So had others. A great pool of talent is unemployed. Why go to Wall Street to hire Fishman?

It indicates that financial interests, marketing and the business of gains and losses take precedence over the needs of technological developments.

There’s a socialist principle involved in this. In a socialist U.S., production would be regulated by the workers in the interest of production for use. If this were a project in a socialist country, it might be necessary to call somebody in to settle the differences. But it wouldn’t be a corporate lawyer. It would be another technology leader.

For a while, it was progressive for industrial capitalism to gain advantages in the marketplace through the financiers. That financed the industrial base and helped it grow. But having established that, it strengthened parasitism.

It’s important for us to understand the inner workings, the mechanism of the relationship between imperialist industry and imperialist finance. And if this is not an example of the decay of imperialism, then I don’t know what is.

This example of The Thinking Machine also illustrates the fusion of the capitalist state with industry and finance, because they wouldn’t be able to sell many supercomputers around the world unless the vast army of U.S. officials were helpful in beating the competition.

Fusion of finance capital and the state

There’s still another aspect of imperialism that I should mention. Among the five characteristics that we have, this one is helpful in understanding a number of the others.

The capitalist state as we know it has three arms — the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The legislative is the most popular and has the power of the purse.

The ruling class has always been fearful of a popularly elected body, especially after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

But if you hand the members of Congress the budget of the United States, or a bill on how to sell bananas or computers, you’ll pretty soon see that your congressperson may not know much.

The ruling class has established a stratum of extra-governmental, extra-state personnel who make up an unofficial political arm of the capitalist state. They are called lobbyists. They are a power over and above the elected representatives.

If I ask my congressperson about how to get into the sugar business, they’ll tell me to come back after they’ve looked into it. But if I were a big bourgeois in business, I wouldn’t go to the congressperson. I would go to the lobbyist. The lobbyist has all the bills about sugar. As soon as the first one comes off the printing press, the lobbyist already has it.

If you need an interpretation, the lobbyist has it. If you ask which congressperson voted for what, they’ll tell you that, too. And furthermore, they work day and night and are omnipresent in Washington, in some of the most fashionable and richest houses.

Lobbying has erected a governmental apparatus over and above the Congress that has grown stronger and stronger in the epoch of imperialism. It’s an extra-legal apparatus to circumvent the legislative process as outlined in the Constitution.

For that reason, Leninists have always regarded suffrage and popular elections as merely a method of mobilizing the masses, of trying to educate the masses. But not really of accomplishing anything.

Alexandra Kollontai was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and one of the organizers of the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917. She was a leading Marxist theorist on women’s liberation and sexual emancipation. Kollontai was also the first woman in history to hold a cabinet-level position as Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Soviet government. 

If I were asked what was the greatest, the most memorable moment of my life, I would answer without any hesitation: it was when Soviet power was proclaimed.

Nothing could compare to the pride and joy that filled us as we heard pronounced from the tribune of the Second Congress of Soviets at Smolny the simple and impressive words of the historic resolution:

“All power has passed to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies!”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was unforgettable at that moment! He proclaimed the famous first decrees of Soviet power — the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. His penetrating, energetic and thoughtful gaze was fixed on the future — he saw that which we could not yet see: these decrees translated into reality, the future which we still had to attain.

It was amazing and unforgettable, this inspired concentration of Vladimir Ilyich as he stood on the platform of the presidium of the first Soviet legislative assembly as the Bolsheviks, in the first few hours after taking power, began socialist construction, the construction of a new world.

Vladimir Ilyich arrived at Smolny on the night of October 25 (November 7 on the modern calendar). He arrived from Lesnoye where, on the instructions of the party, he had been hiding from Kerensky’s bloodhounds.

The following day, Lenin set off openly to attend the conference of the Petrograd Soviet.

Some comrades tried to restrain Lenin, to prevent him from taking the risk of appearing openly in the Soviet. Those who lived through these moments will never forget this tense anxiety on Lenin’s behalf.

But the days of underground life were over. Lenin refused to listen to the words of precaution. He did not even try to persuade us otherwise, but hurried into the White Hall, where the Soviet was in conference.

Lenin understood better than we did the mood of the proletarian masses in the towns and villages, the mood of the soldiers at the front. He knew that they were waiting for him, waiting for his decisive speech.

And there was Lenin, at the door of the conference hall.

A whisper of voices rippled through the room: “Lenin!” For a long time, the enthusiastic applause of the deputies prevented him from speaking.

Lenin made an extraordinarily powerful speech that literally electrified the will of the Soviet’s deputies.

On coming out of the conference hall, Lenin turned to us with gentle irony:

“You see how the deputies responded. And still you were uncertain.” And he shook his head reproachfully, glancing sideways at his zealous bodyguards, his eyes gleaming. Lenin had taken direct leadership of the uprising into his own hands.

I remember the room at Smolny whose windows looked out onto the river Neva. It was a dark October evening, and a blustery wind blew fitfully from the river. An electric bulb shed its dim light over a small square table, around which were gathered the members of the Central Committee elected at the Sixth Party Congress. Someone brought a few glasses of hot tea.

Lenin was here, among us, and we were cheerful and certain of our victory. Lenin was calm, resolute. His instructions, his movements, had that clarity and force that one finds in a very experienced captain guiding his ship through a storm. And this storm was like no other — the storm of the great socialist revolution. …

Soon afterwards we heard the volley fired by the Aurora.

It was my happiness and great honor to work with Lenin in the first Soviet government as People’s Commissar for State Welfare.

During the first weeks of its existence, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) met at Smolny, on the second floor, in the corner room known as “Lenin’s study.”

The conditions in which the Sovnarkom held its meetings were extremely Spartan, even more than Spartan, so that it was difficult to work. Lenin’s table was pushed up against the wall, and an electric bulb hung just above it. We, the members of the Sovnarkom, sat around Vladimir Ilyich, some of us behind him. Nearer to the windows stood the table of N. P. Gorbunov, the Sovnarkom secretary who took the minutes of the meetings. Every time Lenin gave the floor to someone, or made a comment to Gorbunov, he had to turn round. Yet no one thought of moving the table into a more convenient position. Everyone was busy with important matters, and no one had time to think of his own convenience!

Let me give one example that vividly illustrates the lifestyle of the Sovnarkom members, and of Lenin himself, in those hectic days.

The incident I am about to describe occurred shortly after the closing session of the Second Congress of Soviets. Some Swedish comrades from Stockholm had sent Vladimir Ilyich and myself (I had worked in Sweden during my political exile) some Dutch cheeses in memory of times past. This present could not have been better timed. I remember how, once, after a fierce political debate with Socialist-Revolutionaries at a meeting, I suddenly felt faint.

“Are you ill, Comrade Kollontai?” asked one of the Red Guards, holding me up.

“No,” I answered. “I am just hungry.”

The Red Guard immediately offered me a ruble “to buy a bit of bread,” and when I refused, he found out my address, brought the bread himself and left without leaving his name.

Thus, I confess that I was happy to be able to offer some cheese to Vladimir Ilyich. The head of government was as undernourished as we were.

Just before a Sovnarkom meeting, I showed the round, red Dutch cheeses to Vladimir Ilyich. He was immediately concerned that we should have our share.

“They must be divided up among you all. And don’t forget Gorbunov. Will you see to it, please.”

Lenin went into his study, and I spread out a newspaper on the table in the adjoining room, found a knife and began to cut up the cheese to give the comrades for supper.

However, my presence was required at the Sovnarkom meeting. I went, leaving the knife and the cheese on the table. As was often the case in those days, the meeting went on until late at night, and I forgot about the cheese. When I returned, the cheese was no longer there. The knife and the newspaper were still on the table, but no cheese, not even a crumb. … The guard at the door had changed many times during the day. The portions of cheese had been taken by the guards on duty as part of their rations, and it was not surprising that in the course of the day it had been distributed among their comrades.

I went into Lenin’s study where he and Gorbunov were checking the minutes. (This was standard practice with Lenin, and every day we learned from him to be most thorough and accurate in our work.)

“What has happened?” asked Lenin. I told him, and he burst out laughing.

“Well, was the cheese good?” he asked with a frank smile. “You didn’t taste it? That’s a pity. However, it doesn’t really matter: if we don’t eat it, others will.”

Lenin’s eyes shone with a warm, gentle smile, an unforgettable expression which seemed to say: Well, if the People’s Commissars didn’t get any cheese for supper, at least the soldiers or the workers did — and quite right too!

And Lenin went back to the minutes, to the current business of the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars.

The great man continued his enormous task of creating the first Soviet state in the world, a task that constitutes an immortal page in the history of mankind.

Source: Marxists Internet Archive

The great African American poet and Harlem Renaissance figure, Langston Hughes, wrote two poems about V.I. Lenin in the 1930s. They reflect the tremendous spirit of hope that the Russian Revolution breathed into the national liberation struggles of Black people in the U.S. and all oppressed peoples around the world.

Lenin 

Lenin walks around the world.
Frontiers cannot bar him.
Neither barracks nor barricades impede.
Nor does barbed wire scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown, and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.

Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.

Ballads of Lenin

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
High in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.

I am Ivan, the peasant,
Boots all muddy with soil.
I fought with you, Comrade Lenin.
Now I have finished my toil.

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Alive in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And make me room.

I am Chico, the Negro,
Cutting cane in the sun.
I lived for you, Comrade Lenin.
Now my work is done.

Comrade Lenin of Russia,
Honored in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And leave me room.

I am Chang from the foundries
On strike in the streets of Shanghai.
For the sake of the Revolution
I fight, I starve, I die.

Comrade Lenin of Russia
Speaks from the marble tomb:
On guard with the workers forever —
The world is our room!

From a presentation at the online press conference, “Fighting Racism During the Coronavirus Crisis,” on April 4, 2020.

In 1981, a mysterious illness began to appear in the gay community. One of the first and most noticeable symptoms was Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KC), which created purplish lesions on the skin of the afflicted. 

Because the first people diagnosed with the syndrome were gay men, many in the ruling class started calling it “Gay Cancer.” It wasn’t until the latter part of 1982 that leaders and the media stopped calling it this. But the next name chosen was just as bad and even more stigmatizing to the sufferers: gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome (GRID). 

In addition to KC, a cluster of gay men in Southern California and New York City were also getting sick with pneumocystis pneumonia. This led to the diagnosis of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Today many researchers believe that KC and AIDS were and are two separate epidemics. 

The attitude of the government, including then-President Ronald Reagan, was that the affected appeared to be only gay men and intravenous drug users — people who didn’t deserve any special attention, much less support. It wasn’t until hemophiliacs developed PCP pneumonia and other opportunistic infections that the government suddenly felt it should respond. 

We must never forget Reagan’s shameful legacy, the lack of leadership he showed in the fight against AIDS. Reagan is to blame for the thousands who died and continue to die as a result of his cowardice, his fear of the powerful religious right and the “immoral majority,” who gave Reagan his road to the White House. 

These included the misogynist Rev. Jerry Falwell, who used AIDS as the tool and gay men as the target for the politics of fear, hate and discrimination. Falwell said, “AIDS is the wrath of god upon homosexuals.” And Reagan’s communications director Patrick Buchanan stated that AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” 

On May 31, 1987, as his second term was coming to an end, Reagan finally spoke on the issue of the day. But not before 36,058 people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. 

Although the Centers for Disease Control reported that HIV could not be transmitted by casual contact and Reagan knew this, he continued to fan irrational fear by saying: “And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, ‘This we know for a fact, that it is safe.’ And until they do, I think we just have to do the best we can with this problem. I can understand both sides of it.” By both sides he meant parents who were demanding that children with AIDS be kicked out of their schools — including kindergarteners. 

That is what I remember Reagan for, wiping out a whole generation of gay men, many of whom were my dear friends! When I visit a gay bar today, I’m struck by the lack of gay men my age. Most are in their twenties, thirties, some in their forties, or in their seventies. Very few are in their fifties or sixties. A whole generation is gone due to Reagan’s unequivocal indifference towards the lives of the poor and the oppressed. 

It was the activists and freedom fighters of the 1980s and 1990s and even today that made the U.S. government provide housing, health care, financial assistance, needle exchange, treatment and many of the services that people with AIDS have today, though it is still far from sufficient. The fight is not over. 

Today we see much the same murderous response from the ruling class and all its cronies to Covid-19. They show the same callousness towards all of us that they did to people with AIDS. Some on the right want to blame Covid-19 on the so-called “acceptance” of the gay community. Racist 45 started calling it the “Chinese virus” and condoned violence against our Chinese and other Asian siblings.

We can’t depend on them. We have to stand up for each other, especially the most oppressed, the prisoners, the homeless, the poor, the immigrants, including those being held in concentration camps, and for the working class in general. 

We will not die for Wall Street! We demand:

Freedom for all prisoners, including political prisoners;
Provision of a healthy, safe place for released prisoners;
Release of immigrants from all concentration camps;
Unemployment insurance or income for all workers;
Health care for all;
Increase in food stamps;
Increase in Social Security Insurance benefits and for the disabled;
Personal protective equipment (PPE) for all workers required to stay on the job;
Paid medical leave for all.

The Communist Manifesto was originally called the “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” When Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their famous pamphlet, it was not just the worldview of two individuals. It was written as a program of action for a revolutionary organization called the Communist League, made up of German, French, English, Dutch and Spanish workers.

You can’t really understand the Communist Manifesto or the Marxist political program if you separate it from the revolutionary party.

Why is a revolutionary Marxist party so important?

The party takes in the big picture of the working-class struggle. It’s a bridge between the day-to-day struggles of the workers, on one hand, and the Marxist perspective of worldwide socialist revolution on the other. Marxism and the masses come together through the party.

Lenin described this relationship in his book “What Is to Be Done?“

He wrote: “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. … The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships between all the various classes and strata and the state and the government — the interrelations between all the various classes.”

Lenin went on to explain: “Communism represents the working class, not in relation to a given group of employers, but in its relation to all class forces in modern society, to the state as an organized political force. We must actively take up the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness.”

Here are two examples. During the carnage of World War I, the Russian working class made a revolution. In March 1917, a strike by women garment workers set off an uprising that overthrew the czar, who represented the old feudal landowning class. A new government was formed representing the capitalist class, the bosses and bankers. But at the same time, workers and soldiers had begun to create their own bodies of self-government, which they called soviets (a translation of the word soviet is committee or assembly).

The new capitalist government made many promises to the people. They promised to end the war, to feed the hungry, to give land to the peasants. Lenin and his communist party — called the Bolsheviks — believed the government wouldn’t live up to its promises. They said the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants should take over and run things for themselves. But most workers were not ready to take this step. They wanted to see what the new government would do.

The communists proved right. The capitalist government did not, and could not, keep its promises. When the czarist general, Kornilov, threatened a counterrevolution, it was the Bolsheviks, not the government, that organized the workers to defend the gains of the revolution.

Over the course of several months, the masses learned through their own experiences — and with the guidance of the Bolsheviks — that the government would not give them bread, land or peace. So in November 1917, the working class, led by the communists, rose up and threw out the capitalist government.

The soviets took power and began a socialist transformation in Russia.

Without the slogans, leadership and Marxist clarity of the Bolsheviks, a successful working-class revolution would not have been possible.

Now for a current example. Jan. 1, 2020, was the 61st anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Many of us are inspired by the courage of the Cuban people, who are determined to maintain their independence and their socialist system in the face of continuing U.S. threats and blockade.

Many people wonder how the Cuban people have been able to stay so united, so revolutionary, during a long period of setbacks. After counterrevolutions in the USSR and Eastern Europe took away Cuba’s main trading partners, the country’s economy dropped steeply. Any capitalist government in such a situation would have fallen.

Cuba’s secret weapon was the determined revolutionary leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Comrade Fidel Castro and the PCC kept the consciousness of the masses high through this “Special Period” by explaining the phenomena that affected their everyday lives in the context of the global class struggle.

Every important economic and political decision is made with the direct input of the Cuban people, who meet regularly to discuss and debate how best to maintain the revolution in difficult times.

The vast majority of the Cuban people support the Communist Party and the revolutionary government because the leadership has maintained a high level of honesty about every crisis and setback, including the current tightening of the blockade by Donald Trump. Despite these difficulties, Cuban medical workers have deployed around the world to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is the power of a revolutionary Marxist party united with the working class. It can stave off counterrevolution and mobilize the people under the most trying circumstances — right under the nose of U.S. imperialism.

Some socialists say we don’t need a revolutionary party here. They will admit that Marx and Engels made a good analysis of capitalism. But they don’t like the idea of a revolutionary party. These forces will try to convince you that a Marxist-Leninist party is “undemocratic,” that you don’t need a disciplined, united party in a “democratic” society like the U.S.

But the capitalist ruling class is highly centralized. Look how they unite their politicians whenever they want to get something done at our expense. Both Democrats and Republicans lined up behind the multi-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, bailing out the banks and Wall Street, and continuing murderous sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, People’s Korea and many other countries during a global pandemic. 

The ruling class has the media, academia, the Pentagon, the CIA and huge armies of cops and fascist thugs at its beck and call.

The working class needs its own centralized, revolutionary leadership, a party that can see the bigger picture and can give clarity and decisive leadership to the working-class struggle.

Written in 1990 and first published in the Summer 1993 issue (#18) of Liberation and Marxism magazine.

A new book on the Russian Revolution by the professional anti-communist Richard Pipes, “History of the Russian Revolution” (1990), informs us that Lenin was a cruel, cowardly leader (but of course with plenty of “charisma” to account for his success), inflicted with a “lust for power” — meaning personal power rather than proletarian power, and intellectually a definite secondrater.

The accusation of having a low IQ is by no means the worst thing this writer with a sophomoric conception of a revolutionary has to say about Lenin. But Pipes’ claim is worth repeating here if only to introduce a little-known comment on Russian literature made by Lenin in 1910, when he had more time to deal with such things than during the 1917 revolution that disturbs this professor the most.

“In the words of Bertram Wolfe,” he says, “Lenin was the only man of high theoretical capacity which the Russian Marxist movement produced who possessed at the same time the ability and the will to concern himself with detailed organizational work. Plekhanov, who on meeting him in 1895 dismissed Lenin as a second-rate intellect, nevertheless valued him and overlooked his shortcomings because, in the words of Potresov, ‘he saw the importance of this new man not at all in his ideas but in his initiative and talents as a party organizer.’ Struve, who was repelled by Lenin’s coldness, contempt and cruelty, admits to having ‘driven away’ such negative feelings for the sake of relations which he regarded as ‘both morally obligatory for myself and politically indispensable for our cause.’”

Potresov and Plekhanov became Mensheviks; Struve became bourgeois; and Wolfe was a renegade U.S. communist who, to put it most charitably, became a State Department socialist.

Pipes continues with a putdown of Lenin’s internationalism and allegedly the “reason” he understood Russia so badly:

“Lenin was first and foremost an internationalist, a world revolutionary for whom state boundaries were relics of another era and nationalism [except the nationalism of the oppressed, which Pipes forgets here! — V.C.] a distraction from the class struggle. He would have been prepared to lead the revolution in any country where the opportunity presented itself, and certainly Germany rather than his native Russia. He spent nearly one half of his life abroad — from 1900 to 1917, except for two years in 1905-1907 — and never had a chance to learn much about his homeland.” (!!!)

“I know Russia poorly,” he quotes Lenin as saying, “Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, the exile — that’s all.”

(These three places where his childhood and early manhood were spent would have given him a tremendous advantage over our Kremlinologist “expert” even if he had not studied the Russian situation so deeply from afar!)

“Although he was no stranger to the sentiment of nostalgia for his homeland, Russia was to him an accidental center of the first revolutionary upheaval, a springboard for the real revolution, whose vortex had to be Western Europe. In May 1918, in defending the territorial concession he had made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, he asserted: ‘We insist that it is not national interest (but) the interests of socialism, of world socialism that are superior to national interest of the state.’”

Pipes looks sourly on this truly revolutionary statement and since in other lines he says the Bolsheviks took German gold to make the revolution in 1917, he obviously is telling his readers that the Soviets should have continued the war against Germany in 1917 and that Lenin was only using Russia as a laboratory test, so to speak.

“Lenin’s cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia’s literary classics — Turgenev excepted — most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. … Lenin’s knowledge of history, other than that of revolutions [!!], was also perfunctory.”

Pipes has read somewhere that at the age of 14 or 15 Lenin was an avid reader of Turgenev’s romances and has assumed, since Lenin became so single-minded a revolutionist, that he could not have read much else.

However, it would be hard to find any other political writer, Russian or otherwise, who quoted so many of his country’s authors — and so many times — in his political and polemical works. Chekov, Pushkin, Gogol, Saltykov-Schedrin, Goncharov, Gorky, Tolstoy, even Dostoyevsky, whom he regarded as a reactionary. His wife Krupskaya tells us that the young people around the movement told her the same thing about Lenin when she first met him — that he had no use for literature since he was a 24-hour revolutionist. But she said he kept a whole shelf full of Russian classics at the foot of the bed when they were in Siberian exile and would read them over a second and third time for relaxation.

He did indeed use everything he could about literature to help the revolution. And he understood the connection of one to the other, we will venture to say, better than Mr. Pipes.

The following excerpt from one of several essays he wrote right after Tolstoy’s death in 1910 may illustrate this with a certain poignancy and literary as well as political effect:

“Leo Tolstoy is dead. His universal significance as an artist as well as his universal fame as a thinker and preacher both reflect, each in their own way, the universal significance of the Russian revolution.

“L.N. Tolstoy emerged as a great artist when serfdom still held sway in the land. In a series of great books, which he produced during more than half a century of literary activity, he depicted mainly the old, pre-revolutionary Russia which remained in a state of semi-serfdom even after 1861 — rural Russia of the landlord and the peasant. In depicting this period in Russia’s history, Tolstoy succeeded in raising so many great problems and succeeded in rising to such heights of artistic power that his works rank among the greatest in world literature. The epoch of preparation for revolution in one of the countries under the heel of serf-owners became, thanks to its brilliant illumination by Tolstoy, a step forward in the artistic development of humanity as a whole.

“Tolstoy the artist is known to an infinitesimal minority even in Russia. If his great works are really to be made the possession of all, a struggle must be waged against the social system which condemns millions and scores of millions to ignorance, benightedness, drudgery and poverty — a socialist revolution must be accomplished.

“Tolstoy not only produced artistic works which will always be appreciated and read by the masses, once they have created human conditions of life for themselves after overthrowing the yoke of the landlords and capitalists; he succeeded in conveying with remarkable force the moods of the broad masses that are oppressed by the current system, in depicting their condition and expressing their spontaneous feeling of protest and anger. Belonging, as he did, primarily to the era of 1861-1904, Tolstoy in his works — both as an artist and as a thinker and preacher — embodied in amazingly bold relief the specific historical features of the entire first Russian revolution, its strengths and its weaknesses. 

“One of the principal distinguishing features of our revolution is that it was a peasant bourgeois revolution in the era of the very advanced development of capitalism throughout the world and of its comparatively advanced development in Russia. It was a bourgeois revolution because its immediate aim was to overthrow the tsarist autocracy, the tsarist monarchy, and to abolish landlordism, but not to overthrow the domination of the bourgeoisie. The peasantry in particular was not aware of the latter aim, it was not aware of the distinction between this aim and the closer and more immediate aim of the struggle. … 

“Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness, the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasant mass movement. His heated, passionate and often ruthlessly sharp protest against the state and the official church that was in alliance with the police, conveys the sentiments of the primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of serfdom, of official tyranny and robbery, and of church jesuitism, deception and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred. His unbending opposition to private property in land conveys the psychology of the peasant masses during that historical period in which the old, medieval land ownership, both in the form of landed estates and in the form of state allotments, definitely became an intolerable obstacle to the further development of the country, and when this old land ownership was inevitably bound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly. …

“But the vehement protester, the passionate accuser, the great critic at the same time manifested in his works a failure to understand the causes of the crisis threatening Russia, and means of escape from it, that was characteristic only of a patriarchal, naive peasant, but not of a writer with a European education. His struggle against the feudal police state, against the monarchy, turned into a repudiation of politics, led to the doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and to complete aloofness from the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905-1907. The opposition to private property in land did not lead to concentrating the struggle against the real enemy — landlordism and its political instrument of power, i.e. the monarchy — but to dreamy, diffuse, and impotent lamentations. …

“The contradictions in Tolstoy’s views are not contradictions inherent in his personal views alone, but are a reflection of those extremely complex, contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determine the psychology of various classes and of various sections of Russian society in the post-reform, but pre-revolutionary era.

“That is why a correct appraisal of Tolstoy can only be made from the viewpoint of the class which has proved, by its political role and its struggle during the first denouement of these contradictions, at a time of revolution, that it is destined to be the leader in the struggle for the people’s liberty and for the emancipation of the masses from exploitation — the class which has proved its selfless devotion to the cause of democracy and its ability to fight against the limitations and inconsistency of bourgeois (including peasant) democracy; such an appraisal is possible only from the viewpoint of the social democratic [i.e. communist] proletariat.”

Of course, Lenin subordinated everything to the revolution and he subordinated the revolution itself to the socialist emancipation of the human race. That shines out in every word of the above quotation. And it does not make any difference whether his unsparing police-minded critic has read this particular essay or not. On the basis of everything else in his book, he would only have done so to find a sentence he could quote to somehow show ignorance, cruelty, narrowness, personal power-hunger, etc., etc. And the careful analysis of a writer’s connection to revolution would escape him anyway, on account of his own much more obvious and much less artistic connection with the counterrevolution.

April 19 marked the 77th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On that day in 1943, approximately 500 Jewish fighters launched an attack against Nazi forces occupying the city fo Warsaw, Poland. 

With its invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany began a major effort to concentrate the country’s Jewish population into segregated neighborhoods, also known as ghettos. In Warsaw, some 400,000 Jewish people were packed into less than three square miles of space. 

For the four years leading up to the uprising, Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto experienced constant terror and violence from the Nazi forces. These terrors included torture, starvation, executions and random delivery of Jewish people to Nazi death camps. The Nazi regime was determined to complete its genocide of the Jewish people. 

Leading up to the 1943 uprising, Jewish resistance organizations took control of the ghetto. The most prominent of these was not only a Jewish organization, but also a communist one. It’s name was Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa. The English translation from the Yiddish name is “Jewish Combat Organization.” It was led by Jewish communists such as Mordechai Anielewicz and Zivia Lubetkin.   

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was not just one of Jews against Nazis, but of the working class against fascism. Without the communist political pole in the resistance movement, the uprising likely would not have happened. 

The start of the revolt was planned to coincide with the first night of the Jewish holiday, Passover. The uprising lasted almost a month. The Jewish socialist forces continued to fight regardless of being outnumbered and outgunned. As retaliation, 57,000 Jews were murdered or deported to death camps. 

On the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it is important to remember this act of Jewish and socialist resistance. All too often, mainstream media and historians peddle the myth that “the Jews just walked into the camps.” 

The brave revolutionaries who gave their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 77 years ago might beg to differ. On this day, we remember their sacrifices in the struggle against capitalism and fascism.