Marxism shows Lenin ‘Another Way’
The first stage in Lenin’s groping toward ‘another way’ was straight-forward student protest against government over-regimentation of university life. After passing his final gymnasium exams in spring 1887 with his usual high marks, Vladimir entered Kazan University in the autumn of that year to study law. There he got immediately into student politics and came to the notice of the authorities when he was involved in a disruptive student demonstration. Since the authorities had to submit reports on all participants, we have a verbal snapshot of perhaps Vladimir’s first attempt at leadership: ‘[On 4 December, V. Ulyanov] threw himself into the first assembly hall and he and Poliansky were the first to dash along the corridor of the second floor, shouting and waving their hands, as if to inspire the others. After leaving the student meeting, he handed in his student card.’11
Kicked out of university, Lenin was sent to live under police observance in the nearby village of Kokushkino. Lenin later complained to Krupskaya about the way polite society dropped his family after Alexander’s execution. This social rejection should not obscure the support and sympathy that polite ‘liberal’ society gave the students expelled from university, loading them with gifts as they left. In fact, over the years, the Ulyanovs certainly benefited from their connection with Alexander and the prestige that this connection gave them in the eyes of a public opinion that was extremely hostile to tsarism.
Lenin later recalled that the following summer in the village of Kokushkino was the most intensive bout of reading of his entire life. His reading pushed him to the next stage of his evolution as he discovered the Russian revolutionary tradition. The author who had the most influence on him was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, an outstanding radical journalist and scholar of the 1860s. Chernysh evsky had been in Siberian exile since 1864 and had one year to live when Lenin read his works in 1888. Lenin found out his address and sent him a letter, although he never got a reply. Lenin learned many things from Chernyshevsky, but perhaps the real legacy of the older writer to Lenin was a visceral hatred of philistinism. Lenin felt that Chernyshevsky had a ‘pitch-perfect’ sense of what was truly revolutionary and what was ‘philistine’ compromise and conformism.
In October 1888 restrictions were loosened enough to allow Vladimir and his family to move back to Kazan. Here the properly Marxist stage of Vladimir’s evolution began, as he participated in illegal Social Democratic reading circles and began to cut his teeth on Marx’s Capital. Here began the love affair with the writings of Marx and Engels that continued all his life.
In 1889 the Ulyanovs moved to the Volga city of Samara, where for the next few years Vladimir continued his Marxist self-education and began to work out his own Marxist interpretation of Russian reality. Lenin’s Marxist reading of the vast social changes going on in Russia provided him with the basis of his heroic scenario of class leadership and, in so doing, pointed to the ‘other way’ his brother had failed to find. Vladimir could now be confident that ‘the force was with him’ – the force of History, with a capital H.
The dilemma facing Alexander Ulyanov and the Russian revolutionary tradition as a whole was that political freedom was necessary in order to prepare for a socialist revolution based on the masses, but political freedom itself was impossible to achieve without a mass movement. But what if a mighty, irresistible force was even now at work, vastly increasing the potential for a mass movement despite tsarist repression? If so, even a relatively feeble and persecuted Social Democratic party could have a tremendous effect, if a way could be found to tap into this vast potential.
Looking through his Marxist spectacles, Lenin perceived such a mighty force: the capitalist transformation of Russia. In the long run, of course, capitalist transformation would lay the necessary groundwork for a successful socialist revolution. But socialist revolution was not Lenin’s most urgent problem. He was much more interested in possible mass support for the preceding democratic and anti-tsarist revolution that would install political freedom. What Lenin perceived behind the dry statistical tables of land ownership and employment was the creation of new fighters who were both willing and able to wrest political freedom from the grip of the absolutist tsarist government. These fighters consisted of the new classes created by capitalist transformation out of the old Russian narod. There were several such classes, each with its particular role to play in Lenin’s heroic scenario.
The first of these new classes was the urban factory workers. The urban workers’ assigned role in Lenin’s scenario was to be ‘the sole and natural representative of Russia’s entire labouring and exploited population and [therefore] capable of raising the banner of worker emancipation’. The factory workers were the natural leaders of the narod because they directly faced in pure form the same thing (Lenin was convinced) that confronted all Russia’s labourers, since ‘the exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature’. But while capitalist exploitation provided a link with the narod in the countryside, the urban environment gave the factory workers special leadership qualities. Their concentration in towns and in large-scale factories made them easier to organize. Even more important, they were in a position to read and heed the Marxist message about the causes of and the remedy for capitalist exploitation. In contrast, in the countryside, ‘exploitation is still enmeshed in medieval forms, various political, legal and conventional trappings, tricks and devices, which hinder the working people and their ideologists from seeing the essence of the system which oppresses the working people, from seeing where and how a way can be found out of this system.’12
The second class created by capitalist transformation was the exploited workers who remained in the countryside. Lenin’s heroic scenario depended crucially on the argument that capitalist exploitation was ubiquitous, not only in the cities, but in villages and farms all over Russia. These rural workers may not have been able to play the role of class leaders, but they could step into the essential role of class followers. Capitalism was shaking them up, pushing them out of their villages and into a brave new world. And when such a worker ‘leaves home to tramp the whole of Russia’ and ‘hires himself out now to a landlord, tomorrow to a railway contractor’, he will see many things not previously visible. He will see that
wherever he goes he is most shamefully plundered; that other paupers like himself are plundered; that it is not necessarily the ‘lord’ who robs him, but also ‘his brother muzhik’ [fellow peasant], if the latter has the money to buy labour-power; that the government will always serve the bosses, restrict the rights of the workers and suppress every attempt to protect their most elementary rights, calling these attempts rebellious riots.13
This newly visible rightlessness gives the village poor a stake in a political revolution. The narod, Lenin insisted, was even now breaking up into two opposed classes: workers on one side and a new bourgeoisie of peasant origin on the other. Ultimately, these two new classes would be bitter enemies. Social Democracy could therefore not undertake to organize or lead peasant farmers. Nevertheless, the emerging peasant bourgeoisie was yet another mass force in support of a political revolution. As opposed to elite factory owners, who resented tsarism but could always cut a deal with the authorities, the new bourgeoisie of the narod, the peasant farmers, were willing to fight and fight hard to rid the country of the coercive ‘survivals of serfdom’ and, in particular, the social and economic privileges of the landed estate-owners.