It is impossible to imagine his friend and collaborator Julius Martov saying such a thing. Although both men had worked closely together since their time in the St Petersburg Combat Union in the 1890s, they were temperamentally very different. Where Lenin was “hard”, disciplined and implacable, a man who in the opinion of his own wife was “quite unable to write about the ordinary side of life”, Martov was his polar opposite–a disheveled, warm-hearted idealist, widely liked and respected for his innate decency and honour. Like Lenin he was a convinced Marxist, but he was far more “classical” and European in his interpretation of the doctrine.
Martov had lived with and learnt from specific industrial struggles in Vilno. Lenin, although in 1895 under the influence of Martov and On Agitation he had begun to concern himself with the conditions in St Petersburg factories and to write leaflets and guidance to workers about them, emerged from a much more scholastic Marxist background and was never to lose its taint. His tendency to issue instructions to the masses was revealed with compelling clarity in his most important and influential work What Is To Be Done?, published in 1902 and named after Cherneshevky’s novel of 1863.
What Is To Be Done? made up in blunt-force impact what it lacked in literary panache. In an iconic passage Lenin asserted:
The history of all countries shows that the Working Class, exclusively of its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.10
Lenin was clear that socialism must be brought to the masses by the intelligentsia. He was adamant that “…the development of an independent ideology amongst the workers, as a result of their own struggle, is out of the question” and therefore “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without” (his emphasis). On their own workers could, at best, formulate trade unionism, “and trade unionism signifies the mental enslavement of the workers to the bourgeoisie”.11
Lenin was not alone amongst Iskra’s editors in wanting a united Russian Marxist party with a consistent message and a centralised leadership to direct the strands of activity within the Empire. With the ever-present threat of the Okhrana, it made sense that the party’s Central Organ be small and based abroad. But Lenin pushed further into centralisation with his proposal that the Local Committees of the party should be composed exclusively of “fully convinced Social Democrats who should devote themselves entirely to Social Democratic activities”. There should be no part-time members or those who worked for a living elsewhere. These stable mini-centres should direct all other subordinate bodies (factory branches, discussion circles, literary circles) and their decisions should be binding on those bodies. No one but the full-time professional revolutionaries would set policy.
This was the Ur-text of the Vanguard Party–a concept which Eric Hobsbawm rightly called “Lenin’s formidable contribution to Twentieth century politics”.12 He meant it positively, but the concept of the Vanguard Party was one of the most disastrous things ever to befall the socialist ideal, one reason it was opposed from the start by most Russian socialists. They saw immediately that Lenin’s plan was a radical departure from the large and growing socialist parties of Europe, most of which were formed between 1885 and 1905, and which for all their flaws were organically rooted in the working class and the trade unions.
Reflecting Germany’s position as the new industrial powerhouse of Europe, the largest and most significant was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). By 1914 it had over one million members and an entire support structure for them–libraries, choirs, youth clubs, crèches, health benefits, financial loans, occupational training, etc. Even Finland’s Socialist Party, formed in 1899, followed the model of the German SPD, despite Finland being a territory of Imperial Russia. The Belgian Labour Party, formed in 1885, called the first general strike in European history in 1893 to demand universal male suffrage. Its victory meant that by 1911 it had grown to 276,000 members and was a major force in Belgian politics. By 1904 the Italian Socialist Party, created in 1892, had secured a fifth of the national vote. Even the United States had a mass socialist party with roots in the trade unions and a popular leader, Eugene V. Debs. In Australia a reformist labour (but not socialist) party formed the federal government in 1912.
The picture was not uniform. Although the German SPD was relatively united, Italian and French socialists were torn between syndicalism and parliamentarianism. The leadership of the French Socialist Party was contested by the passionate syndicalist Jules Guesde and the radical parliamentarian Jean Jaures. The British Labour Party, founded in 1906 and not to adopt any kind of socialist creed until 1918, emerged over decades out of the cooperative movement, Chartism and single-issue campaigns like the Land and Labour League. These coalesced eventually into the Independent Labour Party, founded in 1893 and led by Kier Hardie, and finally into the Labour Representation Committee/Labour Party. The drawn-out formation of the Labour Party, and its ambiguous and contested relationship to socialism ever since, has been a true reflection of its working-class base–class conscious but non-ideological, politically collectivist but personally individualistic, periodically militant but culturally conservative.
Russia was very different. With secretive, conspiratorial methods justified by the conditions of Tsarist autocracy, Lenin ploughed on. His strongest asset was the time he devoted to the concerns of Iskra’s Praktiki back in Russia. This gave him a loyal following within the activist base and deflected the concerns of those who felt he was becoming too dictatorial. For these reasons Martov and other leaders of the nascent RSDLP did not openly attack What Is To Be Done?. Despite the fact that its language was brutal, it described and recommended what most RSDLP activists were already doing. Martov and others did not realise that whilst they saw the paper as “a bearer of propaganda and agitation and to a lesser extent as a mutual information bulletin for Social Democrats”,13 for Lenin it was something else. For him the paper was useful not only to propagandise for his conception of a highly centralised party run by professional revolutionaries, but also as the means to create that party.
In 1903, revolutionaries and socialists of all kinds were dependent on the newspaper, the agitational leaflet and the political meeting to reach, inform and mobilise potential supporters. Today these methods of communication and organsation are almost irrelevant, replaced by the Networked Individual and Networked Social Movements, which through creative use of social media have fundamentally changed the rules of political engagement. All mainstream political parties now utilise social media (websites, Twitter feeds, etc.), but these are still messages from on high. At the grassroots are independent activists who use digital and social networks–Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Indymedia–to create and sustain independent, ad hoc anti-capitalist campaigns and actions.