The following text was read by the author on 21 March 2024 at the panel discussion “Revolution and the people: Leninism, aesthetics, and politics”, together with Jason Barker and Tora Lane as co-panelists, and Alexander Stagnell as chair, held as part of the international series of events Leninist Days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin. It is presented now in a revised and slightly edited version.

From One Revolution to Another: The Dramaturgy of the People

Marxism as the ground under our feet and Communism as the horizon toward which our political practices gain their sense. Marxism and Communism. Indubitable ground and unsurpassable horizon: two sources of wish-fulfilment that, despite signs to the contrary—when all else is shaking and fragmenting around us—impress themselves all the more obstinately.

Here I speak personally.

In addressing you all, it is, perhaps, a sentiment shared.

For today facts speak to us in tongues, reason enough not to allow the facts to speak for themselves. And, as we know, because it is an axiom of Marxism, one cannot “see”—let alone hear—the facts without taking a “class-based” standpoint. A class standpoint, moreover, infused with theoretical content. For as we also know, to see properly—which is to say incisively—is not simply an empirical question. It is one of theoretical centrality. A question of being equipped with the correct theory, furnishing thought and practice with the conditions of visibility by which possibilities can be affirmed, negated, re-plotted, and from out of which we are to intervene in the world, and make an effective cut into the actual state of affairs.

Today when taking the measure of our own times we experience antagonisms tangibly enough but the form (political, aesthetic, theoretical) which they are taking remains unstable, unreliable, and opportunistically framed. So much talk of “the people”, the wheeling out of shoddy prefabricated linguistic constructions that fuzzily frame things in terms of the “common folk versus the elite”, “us against them”, etc. It is precisely here, that one would suspect the “class-based standpoint”—that is, to see things from the position of the proletariat—to be sorely lacking today in any embedded emancipatory movement. Political articulations de-anchored from material conditions: where what prevails is the spectacle of empty slogans and where, as one used to say, “social chauvinism” rules the roost. This is where we are today: groundless, rudderless, horizons obscured.

The People.

Let today’s panel discussion not be too much of a concession to our battered times. It is unwise to encroach on the territory of populism, for neither Marxism nor Communism is ably served by it.

At the same time, it would be wrong to think that the tradition of revolutionary struggles could do without the figure of the people. The revolutions of 1789, 1793, 1848, 1871, 1905, 1917, follow a narrative-historical arc drawn by means of “the people” (both as referent, by which I mean “the masses on the march”, and as an Idea, by which I mean the attempt to present “the all”). It is what brings together: the speeches of Jean-Paul Marat and Robespierre during the Jacobin revolutionary sequence of the French Revolution; Babeuf and the “conspiracy of equals” at the dog-end of the French Revolutionary sequence. It is what brings together the words of Jules Michelet, writing on the eve of 1848, that “the people” are the principal actor of the revolution. It is what moreover ties together the French and Russian Revolutions. Since it is not just a footnote to history that Russian revolutionaries were fascinated by the event of the mass of people taking to the political stage during the French Revolution. Even if the outcome was the consolidation of the bourgeoisie, the politico-strategic questions at stake, immanent to revolution (with respect to its vicissitudes, the complex class forces at play, and the political role needed to keep together the fragile alignment of dissatisfied classes) are brought into focus with respect to the “People”, both as an Idea of the all and as real multiplicity. It is to ask: how to align the oppressed classes, to fuse them into a whole, collectively emancipating itself from the yoke of yore? Writing in 1919, during the throngs of civil war—with the revolutionary gains fragile, with much of the revolution to achieve, Lenin would draw a direct parallel with the French Revolution, stating that the greatness of it lied in the simple fact that “it succeeded in rousing the vast masses of the people in defence of its gains and they resisted the whole world”.

From one revolution to another. From the years 1789-1794, in France, to 1917 in Russia (and all the spasmodic insurrectionary events in between), the “people” shows its elasticity in providing the narrative arc for revolutionary events.

What I plan to do in this presentation is to say something about the people in the Marxist, Marxist-Leninist traditions. I want to present this, however, by showing the undecidable position that the “people” has within Marxism/Marxist-Leninism. Undecidable, not simply because the People is an ambiguous signifier; imprecise in its sense that makes it a victim of being pulled from Right to Left and Left to Right.

This we need not have a discussion about. Clear as it is.

Rather, I will speak in terms of the undecidable position that both the category and referent of the people has within the Marxist revolutionary tradition, based on whether one is operating on the strictly “theoretical” or political terrain of Marxism. Everything will hang, in fact, on the very terms I began with: Ground and horizon. Marxism and Communism. Because if Marxism still serves as a ground for us, it is as a theoretical fundament—a watchword for rigour, clear and precise analyses of our conjuncture. But Communism, as horizon? How are we to think it other than as speaking to our political vocation? As the focus imaginarius that promises a “classless society”, a society that promises the “all” of the people—what Marx and Lenin will refer to as the outcome of a “real people’s revolution”. Something I will return to near the end of my talk.

Now, forgive me. You will scratch your heads and say: “why present things dualistically in this way, David? Why draw a quite conventional distinction between a “theoretical” and “political” standpoint, when we all know Marxist-Leninism saw them as a unity?’ This after all is what gives Marxism both its explanatory and emancipatory power: the unity of theory and practice. This, for sure, is how things have stood. And fully acknowledging (as I began) that today a symptom of the political paralysis we face on parts of the Left, which borrows a thing or two from Populism, is the absence of any theoretical ground in the direct service of an emancipatory politics, I will nonetheless insist on what we can call a “cleft”, a split, with respect to two different standpoints—theoretical Marxism and political Communism – on the question of the people within Marxism, generally, and in the work of Lenin, in particular. This cleft, as I will describe it, alters the limitations and productivity of the term of the People with regards to politics and theory, though at the same time, this alteration will not constitute a “contradiction”, though it definitely produces a torsion. What, furthermore, it does bring to light is the discursive complexities surrounding how the people is at the same time operative and inoperative in Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

At the end, I will offer an example of how, when thought from a strictly political viewpoint, as Lenin does in State and Revolution, the “people” as both a referent and an Idea, on the one hand, and a “class” politics, as a mode for thinking the stakes of emancipation, on the other, are not antithetical. History, and let’s say more precisely, the history of “emancipatory struggles”, provides much food for thought on this relation. It requires us to complexify how the two interweave (politically) even though from a theoretical viewpoint they just as quickly come apart. From a political viewpoint, we are thrown upon the old question surrounding the relation between the multiple and unity; that is, between the complex and multitudinous character of social relations and lines of antagonism in society, and the revolutionary imperative to organise, to lead a mass movement that, infused by its own multiplicity, effectively broaches the “all”. Something that Antonio Gramsci would have spoken of in terms of “the formation of a popular will”.

First, though, I will offer some short reflections on the scientific method of Marx, specifically focusing on Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse. And how, from a strictly theoretical viewpoint, there are clear reasons to be skeptical surrounding the idea of the People as effective for a rigorous critical analysis of social forms. The “1857 Introduction” by Marx has been held up by Marxists as the nearest thing approximating a method that Marx presented. It has been regarded as Marx’s contribution to a critical or, as Stuart Hall once framed it, as a “historical epistemology”.

In the section dedicated to the “Method of Political Economy”, Marx sets out to expose the fundamental defects of the scientific method of classical political economy. In part he demonstrates this by means of the category of the “population” (Bevölkerung), the standard starting point for classical political economy. Marx derides the category of “population” as an example of the “false” or “pseudo” concrete. Even if appearing as the real (wirchlichen) presupposition for all possible economic relations, the idea of “population” shows itself to be anything but “clear and distinct”. It comprises of multitudinous determinations (e.g. topographical distinctions (town/country), class differences (proletariat/bourgeoisie), class relations and practices, etc. It soon becomes evident that starting with population—as what designates the people of a particular territory—will yield but a chaotic presentation (Vorstellung). What is demanded is a forensic scrutiny of its constituent and multiple parts; according to which a unity (not simple, but complex) is a “concentration” of a diversity of elements (“a rich totality of many determinations and relations”). The category, which had once been seen in its concrete simplicity, is interrogated because it is abstract in its one-sidedness. A one-sidedness that must be redressed by showing how the real concrete is a concentration of multiple (often antagonistic) relations and contents.

Why is this passage significant in a discussion of Leninism, Revolution and the People? For three capital reasons. First, it is a reminder that critical revolutionary thought errs when it takes the most common referents (population, the people, the masses) as the concrete and simple starting point. Second, Marx draws attention to the fact that what is at stake coheres around the German word, Vorstellungen. In English, we are not assisted much by the fact that Vorstellung is translated as “conception”, as “mental image”. It is more helpful to see at stake the problem of Vorstellung, as a problem of presentation (because to speak of “presentation” rather than “conception” or “mental image” permits us to say something broader than the concept, more amenable as it is to both politics and aesthetics). Third, analytically speaking, the avoidance of indetermination is paramount. Pseudo-concrete categories (such as the people, population, etc.) confound in their received obviousness, they are marred by their congenital elasticity. They are, put scientifically, the explanandum not the explanans.

This establishes the method, the way of Marxist thought. A method of thinking that wrests the act of thought away from two related dangers: the passive receptivity of an object that is assumed to be read off the surface of phenomena (empiricism). But, equally, the unclipped wings of a thinking that would understand itself as entirely autonomous from the determinate historical situations within which it thinks and run amok in an adventurist frenzy (speculative metaphysics).

Thought appropriates the real. Marx is clear about this. And as a form of appropriation, thinking shows itself active, not contemplative. But, at the same time, what thought appropriates is not its own figment. Rather, it appropriates what is given. It must take its point of departure from the real, from what it finds—albeit, in its contradictory and antagonistic, complex and multifarious form. The real as a point of departure, but also the point of destination. Through this process, the real is transformed, along with thought itself. It is transformed by virtue of having demonstrated that the possibility of unity of a category is possible only through, and not in spite of, the richness of multiple determinations.

Unity through multiplicity. This will be crucial. Because the question is whether theoretical thought handles the relation between unity and multiplicity in the concepts it presents in a different way to political thought in how it presents (in the form of declarations, programmes, political prescriptions)? This question is to be posed because Marx’s “1857 Introduction” goes further than providing us with the conditions issuing Marx’s Critique of Political Economy with its scientificity. It is suggestive in specifying a set of modal differences in how thought (whether political, aesthetic, scientific) grasps and transforms the concrete. This is key regarding the question of the people, where the pseudo-concretion of the People is handled differently depending on whether our manner of approaching it is strictly political or theoretical. In the manner it is presented today, the People comes to us as something both omnipresent and chaotic: it is, in its pseudo-concretion, an empty abstraction. This is the problem. The solution, theoretically, would be to follow Marx: through a process of granulation, to descend from the false concrete by means of specifying its historically situated determinations (specific class relations and forces, specific modes of exploitation, specific forms of economic exchange). Here, though, one has to wager when approaching the same state of affairs both politically, does the same logic hold? Or is it a different form of thinking, reasoning, a different sensibility, toward the problem of the people entailed?

In order to ascertain more precisely these differentially calibrated sites, Lenin can be taken as an index. Here for the sake of delineating some distinct paths of thinking, I shall juxtapose two texts by Lenin. The first is Lenin’s 1894 polemic against the Narodniki entitled What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats? A text that broaches the problem of any politics, which while claiming to appeal to the people, is ultimately hamstrung by the vacuity of any rigorous theoretical insight into the situation it is seeking to intervene in order to establish a link with the masses. In this text, we can say that Lenin’s critique of the Narodniki (the so-called “friends of the People”) can be used as an analogue for indexing the theoretical vacuity undergirding so-called populists of our own time. It is a reminder of the need for the rigours of theoretical analysis. The second text to be considered is State and Revolution, written in the fullness of revolutionary fervor in 1917. Here, I will suggest that Lenin shifts terrain, from a strictly theoretical critique in 1894 to a political-strategic position whereby the “people” becomes a concrete political operator. This text is a reminder of the centrality of the category of the people for revolutionary thought.

First, the early text from Lenin: What the “Friends of the People” Are? Lenin demonstrates how the revolutionary potency of Marxism lies as a discourse that unifies theory and practice. This, in stark contrast to the position of the Narodniki (often, though doubtless incorrectly and anachronistically referred to as the first populists). Between the 1860s and 1880s in Russia, the Narodniki had served as the locus for articulating grievances against Tsarism, but whose theoretical underpinnings and primitive utopianism surrounding rural life were underdetermined and flaccid. In Russia, by the 1890s, after Plekhanov and others translated, published, and disseminated the writings of Marx and Engels and, later, institutionally, through establishing the Social Democratic Party of Russia—Marxism would supersede Narodnikism as the framing for revolutionary activity.

Lenin’s text is to be seen within this context of the emergence of Marxism in Russia.

What is of interest here is that, in What the “Friends of the People” Are?, Lenin does not so much question the appeal to the “people” as much as question, we can say, whether the people is best served by “friends” who seem to lack any theoretical grounding that would give direction to the masses. They lack the requisite theoretical insight in order to better come to terms with the determinate historical situation they are supposed to act within. In this text Lenin returns to the Marxian point from the “1857 Introduction”, namely a defense of the rigours of the scientific method in interrogating the real. The Narodniki are repudiated for being chaotic in their mode of presentation, offering a hodge-podge of ideas pulled out of history; as Lenin writes, they “senselessly pluck individual elements from various social formations”. What this amounts to is a “simple mechanical aggregation” of ideas. None of this is clearer than their romanticization of the rustic life of the Russian peasant—the embodiment of the simple life of the “people”—a throwback to primitive communism which was meant to serve as the model for socialism. What friends could the Narodniki be other than false friends armed with pseudo-concrete ideas.

Evident from the early text by Lenin is that, in his confrontation with the Russian Narodniki, the target of critique is not the people as an object of political reflection (on this Lenin remains relatively quiet). Rather, what is lacking is any properly theoretico-scientific approach in the service of the revolutionary movement: one that could pierce through the pseudo-concrete that gives rise in equal measure to metaphysical alibis to the present state of affairs and a jumbled-up picture/presentation of the facts.

Things proceed in a different way in Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the early months of 1917. But if I say different, it is important to add that this is not to be regarded as an incompatible way. It is different in the manner in which the terrain for thinking shifts. We shift from an epistemological to a political terrain, from the question of knowledge to that of action. This shift is not seemless or continuous. It involves rather, as I said before, a cleft, a breach, and thus (in some qualified sense) a leap…

It has been customary to point out that State and Revolution is said to mark Lenin deviating from Leninism, “intoxicated by the possibilities of revolution” to the point that he permits himself the opportunity to fancifully daydream, etc. State and Revolution is not to be dismissed as Lenin giving into utopic fantasy. This reading has to be rejected in that State and Revolution is an instance of Lenin engaged in a political mode of thinking. In the service of such a thinking, the category of the “people” plays an important role in some significant passages. Here, the “people” is not held up as simply a “pseudo-concrete” that requires greater analytical rigour, and for which the Narodnikis had in the 1894 text been reproached for lacking.

In Chapter 3 of State and Revolution, Lenin enjoins us to analyse the “experiment” of the Paris Commune through the prism of political action, “to draw the tactical lessons” based on historical experience. In order to pave the way for drawing these lessons, Lenin draws once more on the writings of Marx. But in a different way to the text from 1894. The stakes are now different; not theoretico-epistemological, but strictly political. Lenin quotes from Marx’s letter to Ludwig Kugelmann from 12^th April 1871 (a correspondence that Lenin was very familiar with, in that, already in 1907, Lenin had written the Russian preface to the publication of this letter exchange, where he deemed Marx’s letter from 12^th April 1871 of crucial relevance and remarked how “he would like to see Marx’s ‘enthusiastic letter to Kugelmann hung in the home of every Russian Social Democrat and of every literate Russian worker”). What does Marx write in this letter that is worthy of being hung above the mantelpiece of revolutionaries? Let me quote the significant lines and then sketch out how Lenin comments upon them.

In his letter of 12^th April 1871, one month into the unfolding events of the Paris Commune, Marx berates Kugelmann for not supporting the heroic Parisians, reminding him that:

If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!

Marx writes that “the next attempt of the French Revolution” will not involve the transfer of State machinery from one class to another. The State machinery will need to be smashed. The “destruction of the state”, Marx goes on to surmise, is the sine qua non of a people’s revolution (Volksrevolution), a people’s revolution that Marx qualifies by using the word Wirchlichen as an adverbial intensifier: which is to say, a “real people’s revolution” will be the final, and realised, outcome of revolutionary history. It will mark the dissolution of all classes, the end to the State as the central organ for class rule, and the instantiation of Communism. Communism = a real people’s revolution. The terminus for the history of revolutions.

Significantly, Marx directly cites the French Revolution, in that whatever successful revolution is to come (and Marx, from afar, politically supporting the events in Paris, understands it as a chance attempt to be affirmed) will follow the Great French revolutionary sequence of 1789-94—and will do so as a development and a continuation of it. Any narrative arc of revolution must be drawn from the historical event that augmented the fundamental break with the ancient regime, marking as it did the event of the people entering onto the political stage, and carrying over to the advent of Communism as the destruction of the State and the realization of a people’s revolution.

Lenin underlines in his own commentary on Marx’s letter to Kugelmann precisely the articulation made between the “smashing of the state apparatus” and a “real people’s revolution”. Rather than pass over it, Lenin comments specifically on Marx’s use of “people’s revolution”. But he does not just unthinkingly take on and take up Marx’s reference to the people. He draws further attention to this phrase, by commenting that Marx’s way of phrasing things is “no slip of the pen”. Indeed, he further stresses its importance by not only saying that it is “an extremely profound remark” of Marx’s.

“No slip of the pen”, “an extremely profound remark”. This much is clear: in emphasising its conscious use, Marx’s reference to the people is, for Lenin, not to be admonished as relaxing the rigour of Marx’s theoretical thinking, which would be subject to any symptomatic analysis. Marx is to be taken literally, at and for his word. From the viewpoint of Communism as a political task.

Why does Lenin make a point of drawing special attention to what could be otherwise disregarded as simply a semantic matter? Given what we have already noted with respect to the status of Marxism as a theoretical-scientific discourse, suspicious of pseudo-concrete terms that are “abstract”, “chaotic”, “indeterminate”, marred by their own elasticity. From a strictly political viewpoint, it is the elasticity of the term, “the people”, that joins revolutions over time, across times and spaces and social forms. It is moreover a category that is not simply what is found wanting with respect to “contextual specificity”; rather, we could say, the emergence of the people—as a question, an idea—is contextually specific to the birth of any revolutionary irruption. To make this point more exact, it is important to note that, as paradoxical as this will seem, Lenin uses the term “people’s revolution” as a way to criticise those who would otherwise try to specify within “Revolution” as a genus, different sub-species of revolutions; that is, “a bourgeois revolution” in contradistinction to “a proletarian revolution”. One may assume that to mobilise the terms “bourgeois” and “proletarian” as adjectival markers would better distinguish the historical specificity and the determinate tasks of one revolution over another, better granulate (we can say once more) the different social forces and relations operative within a particular revolutionary episode. Lenin says: no, these ascriptions (bourgeois and proletarian, which would appear to have the merit of being grounded in social relations) are in fact themselves at risk of abstraction, thereby making the difference they would wish to index between revolutions itself abstract.

Lenin acknowledges that while not all bourgeois revolutions are people’s revolutions, a people’s revolution can be bourgeois as well as proletarian. A people’s revolution straddles, it traverses the divide. Any artificial distinction between types of revolution (bourgeois or proletarian) would elide this crucial detail. Talk of “bourgeois” and “proletarian” revolutions, Lenin remarks, is the imprecise and reified language of revisionists, which speak the language of “class struggle”, but do so in, as Lenin puts it, a “lifeless” way.

In an important passage, from the same part of State and Revolution, Lenin draws from the experiences of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Lenin stresses how it needed to harness the will, the capacities, and the demands of the oppressed. Even though the Revolutionary sequence between 1905-1907 was not successful, it (to quote Lenin)

was undoubtedly a “real people’s” revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.

A “real people’s revolution” is for Lenin in evidence in the failed revolution of 1905-1907, which ended in pernicious State repression and terror (just as had been the case in 1794, 1848, 1871). In one way, this is in tension with what Marx writes to Kugelmann, in that for Marx “a real people’s revolution” will only be realised once revolutionary history is accomplished (with the advent of the classless society, of Communism). It is in tension, because revolutionary history ends not in 1905; it failed, and on its own terms. Nonetheless, Lenin writes that it can be counted as a real people’s revolution, in a sense different to the one that Marx considered during the days of the Paris Commune, insofar that it served as an event and not an advent, an opening up of Russian society to a plethora of grievances and demands that threatened to tear the Tsarist regime asunder. Thus, the revolution, was a people’s revolution—and not a proletarian one—because, as Lenin describes, “the mass of the people’ (that is, the “very lowest social groups”—the pöbel) “crushed by oppression and exploitation, imprinted their own demands upon it”.

The masses on the march, the multitudinous people, formless, we must be aware how this makes some uncomfortable. Leninists can be counted among them, possibly. But definitely, liberals and revisionists who would like to play with such metaphors in order to discredit the very idea and possibility of a revolution. Lenin, and Leninism, in their own ways would show caution. This may indeed be so. A lesson in the need for guidance, the leadership of the proletariat, as the class in and for itself, a vanguard party, a revolutionary theory, etc., to steer the tumult of revolutionary fervor opened up by the masses in the right direction. While some of this would need to be placed in question, other parts do not. Only to say that the “people” arises as a political category—and one is tasked with a strictly political understanding of it—precisely in revolutionary moments. Lenin appreciated this (irrespective of theoretical misgivings). He appreciated it in 1907, in 1917 (between the February and October Revolutions). He appreciated because he had studied his history of revolutions and was learning the lessons of political experience, stretching back from 1789 to his own present.

We are invited to do the same.

David Payne