Revolutionary ABC and Beyond

Over lunch, some years ago, a fine scholar whom I deeply respect, and whose contributions to Lenin studies have been profound, responded to a comment of mine in which I was consciously repeating a point once made by Rosa Luxemburg, a partisan of the mass strike, when she denounced the “parliamentary moles” of the German Social Democracy, insisting that it is “not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.” (Luxemburg 2010, 227)  My friend’s response: “That’s very dangerous.”

Some years later, at the conclusion of an academic conference, I was chatting – over late-night snacks and drinks with this same friend along with two very fine younger historians of the Russian Revolution.  My three companions – all of whom sympathized with the goals of the Bolsheviks – reflected that the revolution ended up having very terrible outcomes, the opposite of what the revolutionaries had been fighting for.  This was, they agreed, a pattern shared by most (if not all) revolutionary struggles.  Their shared conclusion, at that moment, seemed to be that it really doesn’t make sense to be a revolutionary.

It was late, and I grew silent, keeping to myself my disagreement.  I believe that revolution is, increasingly, humanity’s only hope.  I share with Lenin, Luxemburg, and their co-thinkers the passion and sense of urgency that animated them.  They are lifetime valued comrades from who I want to learn as much as I can.  At the same time, I want to help more and more people learn from the experience and ideas of these comrades, from their successes and their mistakes, so that we can be more effective in doing what they tried to do, and what must still be done.

What I have written here wrestles with the challenge: “what is to be done?” Specifically, what practical political steps make sense in the face of today’s realities?  Two pieces of writing are here melded together, composed as I have faced that challenge.

In 2025, my approach to problems of history, society and current events can be termed Marxist.  But long before that became my approach, I had sought to make sense of (a) negative realities around me, (b) the future I hoped for, and (c) how I thought it might be possible to move from present realities to the hoped-for future.  In Part One my starting point is in the realm of a more or less non-Marxist (or pre-Marxist) a-b-c.  I then move, in Part Two, to greater elaborations and details, with Marxist categories more pronounced.

For example, my vision of a good society sketched in Part One involves qualities that – when taken together – are often referred to as socialism or communism, but such terms, essential to the language of Marxism, are reserved for Part Two.  In that later part of this essay, I try to envision how one of the Marxists I most admire would have approached the a-b-c of reality, alternative, and strategy.

Part One seeks to clearly present some essentials for revolutionary activists, based not on studying such people as Lenin and Luxemburg or historical accounts of their revolutionary struggles, but more on lived experience over the past six decades. This is followed by an effort to go beyond those essentials – posing the more complex question of “what would Lenin do” if he was facing the changed realities that we are facing.  Of course, Lenin – as he sometimes did – might come up with “wrong” answers, and so might we.  But we have a responsibility to do as he did.  We must try to come up with the best answers we can, and then do what we can to take action based on those answers, refining those answers based on the lessons of further experience and study.

Sorting such things out must be a collective process, and it must cross borders to embrace the experience and thinking of comrades in multiple countries.  Different variations of this second piece of writing were shared in a variety of cities: Boston, Chicago, Dublin, Havana, London, Istanbul, Mexico City, Pittsburgh, Sao Paulo.  My hope is that the ideas here can benefit from an even broader process of critical engagement.

Part One

Here is a relatively simple revolutionary “ABC” relevant to today’s realities:

A. The Context in Which We Find Ourselves. Horrific and catastrophic realities increasingly engulf our world.  Wildfires, tornados, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves on an unprecedented scale, are accompanied by the resurgence of genocide, ethnic cleansing, total war, and the proliferation of authoritarian regimes that oversee dramatic erosions of human rights, civil liberties, public services, healthcare and housing. These realities flow relentlessly from the dynamics of the political economy that dominates our planet – capitalism.  Incredibly powerful elites, enjoying immense profits from this toxic system, have the capacity and the will to manipulate, repress, and kill people on a vast scale in order to protect the system which gives them wealth and power.

B. Hope for the Future. If there is to be any hope for the future of humanity, it is necessary to take that wealth and power out of the hands of the elites and to share it among the great majority of the people – forging a new revolutionary system that provides liberty and justice and a decent life for all.  The only force that can possibly be capable of bringing about such change consists of the majority of people themselves, whose lives and labor make possible any social-economic-political system in our present-day world.

C. The Hopeful Pathway. “The great majority of the people” can become a force for human liberation only through the spread within it of the consciousness that this must be so, and through the action and self-organization that can make it so.  The consciousness, action, and organization necessary for human liberation can only be developed through actual struggles for the betterment of people in the here-and-now, but with the understanding that this must prepare the way for more fundamental, revolutionary change.

Those acting to create this revolutionary outcome can only hope to be successful through an increasingly complex and sophisticated process involving a serious interplay of theory, analysis, and practical activity on a local, regional, national, and global scale.  This requires the development of a set of organizations capable of carrying on this work – a set of coherent revolutionary collectives within countries throughout the world, sufficiently open to critical thinking and innovative activity to actualize the pathway to a hopeful future.  The forging of such collectives must be understood as a process.

Three Mistakes

There are all too many examples of revolutionary-minded activists making one of three possible mistakes:

1. Attempting too quickly and impatiently to create what is necessary but does not yet exist – constructing, instead, sects which rigidly interpret reality and rigidly constrain the thinking and activities of those who become members of the sect.

2. Succumbing to delusional posturing, which can take collective but also individual form. The collective form of posturing is associated with the sects mentioned in point #1.  They perform rituals that have become all too common: distributing newspapers and other literature, organizing meetings and classes, holding forums – all in a manner seeking to show the “revolutionary” superiority of the sect.  Such activities constitute sectarian rituals to the extent that they are not connected to improving the lives and advancing actual struggles of workers and the oppressed.  The individual form of posturing is assumed by those inclined to rise above the sects, but in a manner that replicates their limitation: composing books and essays, attending and speaking at conferences and forums, etc. whose primary purpose involves a demonstration of the “revolutionary” superiority of the individual.

3. Withdrawing into a reflectiveness that pushes against delusional posturing but is largely passive, failing to pose a serious challenge to the horrific and catastrophic status quo.

There is an urgent need to push past such mistakes, finding a way to advance a genuine revolutionary process – capable of drawing ever-increasing numbers of people into critical consciousness and organized activity (mindful and strategic) that pushes back against the damage and oppression of the capitalist status quo and moves in the direction of a socialist future.  (It makes sense to do a periodic, self-critical “reality-check” to determine the extent to which this is being accomplished.)

Organizing to Advance a Genuinely Revolutionary Process

The revolutionary process must inspire and nurture insights, creativity, passion, commitment, and a shared learning among increasing numbers of people who will work together to make real the revolutionary pathway.  This can only be generated by, and become real within, the largely horrific and catastrophic context in which we find ourselves.  That fact poses immense and multi-faceted challenges for those animated by the ABC of revolutionary activism.  So far, we have not been successful in fully comprehending and overcoming those challenges.

The comrades who came before (including Marx and those following him) have much to teach us – both through their triumphs and their failures.  One of our foremost tasks is to learn from them, but in a special way.  What we learn must not become a set of chains that constrict us, a set of rigid dogmas, but rather must be a guide to action in the here-and-now.  Such action must be a collective process through which we continue to learn from each other and from the realities around us, seeking to apply to new situations what the comrades from earlier days have to teach.

An essential aspect of this collective process must involve revolutionaries coming together to carry out practical work to build actions and advance struggles that push against oppressive realities and toward the hoped-for future.  Such actions and struggles will generate triumphs and failures from which much can be learned – and such learning is necessary if the hoped-for future is to be achieved.

A Practical Example: Pittsburghers for Public Transit

At the request of the Editor of Communis, I will add here a “case in point” of how to apply these organizational and action-oriented principles and tenets to current realities.

Beginning in 2010, a united effort of socialist groups and other activists in Pittsburghers for Public Transit (PPT) joined forces with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85.  The purpose of this united effort was to defend for public transit in what seemed an uphill struggle under both Democratic and Republican administrations at the city, county, state and federal levels.

Since the 1980s, business interests and the right wing have crusaded for aggressive policies of laissez-faire capitalism (neoliberalism). Public services – won over the years through struggles by working people – have been the target of late. Their successful efforts have cut funding for public transit systems, public education, public housing, public parks and libraries, the public postal service and more.

This, combined with a push to lower taxes for the rich, and reality of stagnant or diminished wages of working people, resulted in a shrinking tax base that made public services shabby and inadequate. Right-wing ideologues create the problem, then insist that “privatization” and “market mechanisms” are the solution. But this makes things worse – capitalism functions not to meet the needs of the majority of people, but to maximize profits for private business owners.

The breadth of participation in PPT became one of its hallmarks. Those becoming an essential part of the mix included members of Workers International League, International Socialist Organization, Solidarity, the Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist Alternative, the Sierra Club (especially concerned with environmental benefits of public transit), the United Electrical workers, UNITE-HERE, Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and especially ATU Local 85. Community groups and unaffiliated activists (including veterans of the Occupy Pittsburgh movement) also joined in.

PPT educational activities included creating a website, production and mass distribution of two attractive tabloid-size handouts, informational flyers, news conferences and opinion pieces in the local daily newspaper. Activists organized picket lines, street meetings, demonstrations and rallies with hundreds of people participating. At one of the largest protests, in June 2012, activists took part in a well-publicized act of civil disobedience involving what came to be known as “The Transit Twelve.”

The 2012 escalation inspired PPT to develop a “Transit Bill of Rights” calling for:

1.Safe, reliable and affordable public transit that is accessible to all.

2. Public transit that meets the needs of each community – no communities left out.

3. Living wages, benefits and safe working conditions to ensure dignity for transit workers.

4. Dedicated and sustainable funding for public transit.

5. Equitable distribution of public transit costs so all corporations pay their fair share.

In 2013, PPT campaigned to pressure the state legislature to halt further cuts or attacks on transit workers and transit users, and to support dedicated funding for public transit. PPT’s new full-time organizer, Helen Gerhardt, played a central role. A petition drive secured 5,000 signatures for the Transit Bill of Rights. A mass rally for public transit in Pittsburgh’s Market Square was followed by February and June actions in Harrisburg coordinated by PPT, drawing together an accumulating number of coalition partners throughout Pennsylvania, leading to the November 2013 passage of Transportation Bill, Act 89, with funding that would prevent further cuts – at least for the next five years.

But damage had already been done to communities turned into “transit deserts” from earlier cuts. This was the case with the working-class suburbs of Baldwin and Groveton. In 2014, with PPT’s new full-time organizer Molly Nichols playing a pivotal role, Baldwin became a focus for action. More than 30 volunteers, including PPT members and ATU volunteers, surveyed over 500 community members documenting transit needs and consequences of the cuts in the Baldwin community.  After more than a year of organizing and agitating, PPT secured a significant victory. The Port Authority announced in June that four routes would be extended, including two to serve Baldwin and Groveton. The expansion in service added 39 new bus drivers and 13 maintenance workers’ jobs. (LeBlanc and McAllister-Erickson 2015)

The late Molly Nichols eloquently explained the spirit and meaning of the PPT experience:

I want to be a part of the radical voice that is shifting the conversation and saying that this system is not acceptable, it needs to change …  The kind of communities we’re creating [is made up] of people who recognize: “I have power.  I have power with the people that I’m at a table with if there’s six of us, then I have power when ten of us go to a [Pittsburgh Transit] board meeting and say something about it, then I have power when a hundred of us are on the street demanding public transit.”  And then the next time around we can go demand more funding for education or better housing opportunities or combatting racism or sexism or homophobia.  That’s a beautiful thing.  (Mougianis 2023)

The Revolutionary Organization We Need

There is an urgent need to create an organization of revolutionaries that is at the same time a revolutionary organization.  This means not simply being a meeting place or resting place for activists engaged in a diverse range of projects to gather for the purpose of describing to each other what they are doing and/or discussing revolutionary ideas.

The organization that is needed must be a collective through which activists can discuss and decide on ways in which revolutionary perspectives can be used to help build and advance struggles and movements that effectively push against oppression and exploitation.  Discussions should lead to decisions, and decisions should be implemented collectively – hopefully in ways that will lead to triumphs, and in all cases providing lessons (negative as well as positive) that will be helpful in bringing us closer to the hoped-for future.

 

The organization we need must avoid the impatience, the sectarianism, and the posturing that have been fatal for so many efforts of would-be revolutionaries.  Coherence and consistency must be balanced with openness and critical mindedness.  A high degree of responsibility is required by all members at all levels in such an organization – a profoundly democratic functioning in which honesty, transparency, shared information, and mutual accountability permeate the collective discussions and decisions that guide activities of those who are part of it.

It can be legitimately argued that repressive activities carried out by the capitalists, their State, and their subordinates sometimes necessarily limit transparency and democratic functioning within a revolutionary organization.  But if such a justification is consistently used to violate the democratic-collective process of the revolutionary organization, its members will need to develop a mode of functioning consistent with such an organization’s democratic health and revolutionary fiber.

The experiences and insights of various sectors of the working-class majority (encompassing the diversity of occupations and skill levels, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, age, etc.) must be incorporated into the consciousness, concerns, and struggles of the revolutionary collective.  At the same time, since capitalism is a global system, there is the need for a cross-fertilization of ideas and coordination of activities involving a variety of cultures and countries to ensure the strength and effectiveness of revolutionary organizations around the world.

It’s Time – if … if … if …

The saying that “timing is everything” has been said to mean that “the success of an action or decision often depends on the right moment to execute it.”  This can be a recipe for paralyzing indecision.  How is one to know when is the right moment?

It may be helpful to recall that the First International in which Karl Marx was prominent, the Second International that included such revolutionaries as Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin and others, and the Third International formed under a leadership that included a variety of revolutionaries, were not cults formed around any so-called Great Leader, but involved the coming-together of diverse political currents, responding to the shocks flowing from the development of global capitalism, and (in the case of the Third International) catastrophes of imperialism and global war. Ours is surely a time of catastrophe – politically, economically, ecologically, and more.

If one is clear on what we have called the “revolutionary ABC,” and if the question of forging a revolutionary organization is seen as a process, and if the need to avoid what we have termed the “three mistakes” is kept in mind, and if the urgency of a revolutionary organization is balanced with a sense of critical-mindedness and openness, then perhaps it is time to begin.

Part Two

What Would Lenin Do?

Lenin should be seen as a human being who can be shown to have made more than one serious mistake.  But as Lenin himself noted, “he who never does anything never makes mistakes,” and Lenin did quite a lot (Lenin 1922).  His development of Marxism’s revolutionary cutting edge has relevance for the future.  The great African American poet, Langston Hughes, expressed his global impact in these lines (Hughes 1946):

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

I want to focus on some ways in which revolutionary activists can make use of his ideas today.  If we do it right, we can draw useful notions from what this comrade has to offer, as we face such realities as anti-racist upsurges, the multi-faceted escalation of feminist struggles, the immense challenges of climate change, wars in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere.  In the United States, we have also been faced with the phenomena related to mild socialist Bernie Sanders and super-capitalist Donald Trump.   Rightward veering “Trumpism” poses an especially ominous threat – one that dovetails with the ascent of right-wing authoritarians around the world, such as Milei in Argentina, until recently Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, Putin in Russia, and Erdoğan in Turkey.  I will focus on the U.S. electoral realities later in this presentation, because I am most familiar with them.

In the face of such circumstances, what would Lenin do?  To deal with this question adequately, I think it will help to broaden it.  Is it possible for us to make use of Lenin’s ideas 100 years after his death, and if so – how?  Another way of posing this question would be to ask: “What would be Lenin’s approach to using Lenin’s basic orientation 100 years after his death?”

Lenin’s Approach

All the specifics of Lenin’s analyses cannot simply be assumed to be applicable in the very different context of our time.  At the heart of Lenin’s political approach is the notion that while the use of Marxist theory is essential for building revolutionary movements and struggles, it must be used not as a dogma, but as a guide to action.  Related to this is the dialectical notion that “nothing is constant but change.” Essential to Lenin’s dialectics is also a recognition that continuities are blended intimately into the changes.

Another essential element in Lenin’s orientation involved the non-dogmatic utilization of historical materialism, which helps us see three realities: (1) economic development is central to the development of history; (2) the incredibly dynamic capitalist system is the dominant form of economy in modern times; and (3) class divisions are decisive, and under capitalism a small minority of capitalists secure immense wealth and power by exploiting the labor of, and squeezing wealth out of the lives of, the great majority of people who make up the working class.

Despite multiple changes – for example, in the size and nature of the working class (which is bigger and more occupationally diverse than it used to be), and, for example, in the structures and technologies associated with today’s capitalist system as a whole – the underlying dynamics of capitalism remain similar from Lenin’s time to ours.   The three points I identified as part of historical materialism manifest themselves differently than was the case 100 years ago, but nonetheless they continue to operate and to shape the reality of our own world.

Two essential elements were constant in Lenin’s approach.  One was not to settle for simplistic and comforting dogmas, but instead to approach everything with a critical mind, to base one’s understanding on what he called “stubborn facts,” seeking real information, with a drive to keep learning and learning and learning about the complexities of reality.  A second essential element involved a refusal to settle for Marxist analysis as simply a passive contemplation of what and how things are.  Lenin refused to detach social, economic, and political analysis from an activist engagement, from the restless and insistent question: what is to be done?

For Lenin – from the time he became a young Marxist activist, down to the end of his life – this added up to an insistence that we must not bow to the oppressive and exploitative powers-that-be, and that we must never to submit to the transitory “realism” of mainstream politics.  Instead, all political action should be measured by how it would help build the working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organization that will be necessary to overturn capitalism and lead to a socialist future. (Le Blanc 2024; Lenin, 2008)

At this point we must emphasize something that should be obvious, but which many would-be Leninists lose sight of.  In Lenin’s time, throughout the capitalist world there were powerful and influential socialist workers’ movements – influenced by revolutionary Marxist ideas – that were more or less predominant among millions of working-class people, in their workplaces and communities and political life.  Developments of the twentieth century – often insidious, often horrifically violent – have undermined this reality and pounded it to rubble.  The mass workers’ consciousness and movements, and the influential revolutionary organizations have persisted only as faded fragments where once they were powerful.  For those remaining committed to Lenin’s basic approach, this lends an urgency to the notion that all political action should be measured by how it would help rebuild what has largely been lost.

Centrality of the Working Class

To what extent is it still useful or relevant to retain Lenin’s (and Karl Marx’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s) old focus on the working class?  I continue to be influenced by the kinds of points C. L. R. James made in the early 1960s, when this question arose within his own organization in the United States.  James explained the context in terms that seem incredibly similar to what we are facing now.  He said: “Large sections of the American population are horrified and revolted at the rapid degeneration of American society.”  He continued: “The sense of crisis is national, and has attained such a scope that one cannot see how the American bourgeoisie will be able to handle it.”   It seems to me James’s next point has greater resonance than ever:

Whatever form a solution or the beginning of an attempt at solution will take, it seems fairly obvious that for the first time the American working class will have to assume, will be forced to assume national responsibility, think its own independent thoughts, carry out its own independent actions. (James 1962)

James concluded:

It is to me certain that if the American working class should find itself, not necessarily at the very start, but rapidly enough, forced to intervene independently in the task of national regeneration, that one of the first things it will do is to reorganize the process of production. If it will act at all – and either it will act, or the degeneration of American society (and world society) will continue.

Some of James’s comrades split from him on this, moving in the direction of what later assumed the label of “identity politics.”  Shifting class to the margins of their analyses, they gave pride of place to such identities as race, gender, and age.  Over the past few decades, the counterposition of “class” versus “identity” has absorbed much energy and attention.  But I am influenced by the blending of the two by my mentor George Breitman, a seasoned working-class intellectual, at the end of the 1960s:

The radicalization of the worker can begin off the job as well as on. It can begin from the fact that the worker is a woman as well as a man; that the worker is Black or Chicano or a member of some other oppressed minority as well as white; that the worker is a father or mother whose son can be drafted [into the military]; that the worker is young as well as middle-aged or about to retire.  If we grasp the fact that the working class is stratified and divided in many ways – the capitalists prefer it that way – then we will be better able to understand how the radicalization will develop among workers and how to intervene more effectively. Those who haven’t already learned important lessons from the radicalization of oppressed minorities, youth and women had better hurry up and learn them, because most of the people involved in these radicalizations are workers or come from working-class families. (Breitman 1971, 101)

Focus on U.S. Realities

If all this is true, then Lenin’s basic political orientation continues to have relevance – which means that political action should be measured by how it helps rebuild mass working-class consciousness and movements, as well as effective revolutionary organizations, bringing us back to the question of “what would Lenin do” in relation to developments and struggles of our time.  I will focus on U.S. realities, with which I am most familiar.  Other parts of the world face their own specific realities, which overlap with what I will touch on here.

Some questions are less complex than others.  Surely it is crucial to support anti-racist struggles against police violence associated with the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” as well as an end to the U.S.-funded slaughter by the State of Israel of thousands of men, women, and children in Gaza.  As masses of people are mobilized around such perspectives and find that their mass pressure can force decision-makers to grant reforms, saving and improving lives, the result can be radicalizing in ways that advance the consciousness and self-confidence of significant components of the working class.  There are, of course, super-militant activists who scoff at reform because revolution is needed, insisting on more radical demands which are understood only by the most radical activists.  The result is revolutionaries’ self-isolation in much smaller and less unified protests.  More than once, such super-militant activists criticized Lenin as being far too tame and lame to embrace their self-isolating demands and tactics.

Reform and Revolution

This kind of division flared among Lenin’s Bolsheviks after 1906, leading to a sharp and acrimonious split in 1909.  Some preferred urban guerrilla warfare and revolutionary consciousness-raising among socialist activists, as opposed to the mass electoral and reform activity championed by Lenin.  But here, as always, Lenin’s measure of what made sense was not adopting the most “revolutionary” stance.  Instead, the measure was what would actually help generate working-class consciousness, expand the mass workers’ movement, and enhance the experience and influence of the revolutionary organization.  The organization of the super-militant Bolsheviks soon disintegrated, while the Leninist-Bolsheviks became a hegemonic force in the Russian workers’ movement.

In the same period, Lenin carried on a relentless struggle against a component of the Menshevik faction tagged “the Liquidators.”  These comrades wanted to focus on organizing for reforms by restricting themselves to legal activities allowed by the Tsarist autocracy.  They were abandoning the original program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party of overthrowing Tsarism through a democratic revolution.  Lenin was in favor of fighting for reforms – but not through abandoning revolutionary commitments.  This would not advance mass working-class consciousness and movements, nor would it help build an effective revolutionary organization. (Le Blanc 2024, 50-65)

The Democratic Party in the U.S.

How does this apply to political developments and realities in the United States?

In 2016, Bernie Sanders campaigned as an open socialist to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.  He directly challenged corporate capitalist control of the Democratic Party, calling for far-reaching social and economic reforms beneficial to the working-class majority.  Millions of people, including substantial layers of the working class, responded positively.  Hundreds of thousands of young activists flocked to support the Sanders campaign, a large percentage of which swelled the membership of Democratic Socialists of America from several hundred to almost 100,000.  A growing number of activists went on to run as open socialists on the Democratic Party ticket – some getting a significant percentage of the vote, and some even getting elected. The idea of socialism, defined variously but positively by millions of people, became part of the political mainstream.  This was repeated in the Sanders Presidential campaign of 2020.

Sanders was denounced by some who saw themselves as far more revolutionary.  These super-militant activists (plus super-militants who were not very active, except on the internet) made rejection of Sanders into a measuring rod to separate those who were presumably true socialists and those who were phonies.

It can be argued that Bernie Sanders is sincerely in favor of socialism, and that his two Presidential campaigns had important and positive qualities and outcomes.  But key aspects of his approach have been highly problematical.

• It is evident that Sanders is not a revolutionary socialist. He has pointed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s liberal-capitalist New Deal of the 1930s and to the welfare-state capitalism of Scandinavia as an example of socialism.
• Another problem was that there was no way to ensure accountability of most socialist candidates running as Democrats to any socialist program or constituency.
• More than this, the Democratic Party really was (as Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders emphasized more than once) a capitalist party that would not tolerate efforts to turn it into a socialist party.

Several years ago, a challenging “socialist moment” truly existed in the Democratic Party, with clearly limited shelf-life.  Either Sanders and others would be driven out of the party, or they would end up doing the bidding of the Party’s pro-capitalist leadership.  For key travelers on this socialist road through the Democratic Party, it is this second option that has been chosen.  If Lenin found himself on this particular road, he would now be urgently posing the question: what is to be done?

Contending with Donald Trump

This brings us to the question of Donald Trump, who is far from a typical conservative or reactionary Republican.  He is a self-promoting huckster a populist demagogue, and an irresponsible authoritarian who is quite happy to encourage the growth of, and to mobilize for his own purposes, large-scale fascist movements that are crystallizing in the United States.  Given the current balance of forces, both in 2020 and 2024, there was one one possibility of actually stopping him: electing his Democratic Party rival, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris.

What would Lenin do?

It seems to me that Lenin  would continue to be guided by what guided him in the past: helping build the working-class consciousness, the mass workers’ movement, and the revolutionary organization that will be necessary to overturn capitalism and lead to a socialist future.  I envision him emphasizing four points:

Point #1. Tell the truth.  Both Trump and Biden (or Biden 2.0) favor the interests of the rich over the rest of us.  They are our enemies, not our friends.  To campaign for either means telling lies – something we must not do.

Point #2. At the same time, face the truth.  Any left-wing political parties running candidates in this election are not serious alternatives in the 2024 elections.  Despite their truly admirable intentions, they have no chance of winning or of advancing the interests of the working class.

Point #3. One may choose to consider pulling the lever for Biden (or Biden 2.0) in order to register most effectively popular opposition to the figure who presents a qualitatively greater evil: Donald Trump – but the Bidens and Harrises themselves are part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Trump has gained credibility because of the inevitable failures of political figures such as Biden.

Point #4. It makes sense to concentrate time, energy, and resources on two things:

(a) Working hard to advance real non-electoral struggles through which we can build victories and consciousness.

(b) In tandem with such struggles, carrying out socialist education and agitation (focusing on the mess we are in, how we got into this mess, and the pathway to get out: which means building independent social struggles and movements, plus creating our own working-class political party).

Eco-Leninism and Revolutionary Internationalism

We must recognize that our own daunting task of recreating a global mass socialist movement will have to occur in an era of catastrophe – the destabilization and unraveling of the global environment and a consequent wave of economic calamities and mass fatalities.  In this we are cursed by good fortune turning into bad fortune.

Fortunately, a scientific consensus projects that climate change might still be halted, preventing our planet from being overwhelmed by cascading catastrophes.  This will require dramatic, decisive immediate action on a global scale.  Unfortunately, the necessary changes will be too costly, in the short run, for the businesses and governments that make the decisions.  So far, the necessary changes are not being implemented.

Liberal politicians offer reassuring rhetoric, phony compromises, and inadequate policies.  Fake populists on the extreme right deny the realities of climate change altogether, resorting to authoritarian, bigoted, and violent policies in response to ominous problems threatening our world.  As increasing millions of the world’s people are impacted by the cascading catastrophes, a mass disillusionment with the capitalist status quo is likely, with a deepening radicalization.

In contrast to Lenin’s time, we lack the mass labor and socialist movements in most countries where they existed in the early 20^th century.  We must create the mass movements we need – more or less from scratch.  But how?

I want to focus here on what strikes me as one key element.  Some analysts have urged what they call a Green New Deal.  (Some use different labels: a strategy for climate jobs or climate justice.)  “In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and childcare, and much more.”  So says social critic Naomi Klein.  She adds: “The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them” (Klein 2019, 26).  This transitional approach combines multiple goals: people before profit, decent homes and good communities for all, health care for all, education for all, mass transit and communication systems for all, nourishing food, access to cultural and recreational nourishment, creative outlets, genuine liberty and real justice for all.

To the extent that we can build such struggles and such a movement – while expanding a deepening consciousness within the working class based on such experience – we are creating conditions out of which it will become increasingly possible to build the kind of mass socialist workers’ movement that we need.  We can be open to building organizational coalitions and even class alliances around specific demands, but our struggle requires an elemental political independence from – not reliance upon – capitalist politicians.  Our struggle must be based on the elemental needs of the working class, which are in collision with the drift and dynamics of capitalist profit-making.  The logic of our struggle goes in the direction of increasing democratic, working-class control over economic policies and developments.  To the extent that there is success in such efforts, combined with an understanding – a consciousness – of the meaning of (and need for) such struggles and victories, a force for an actual socialist revolution can be advanced.

Learning From Past Freedom Fighters

While I am convinced that struggles around climate change must increasingly become central to revolutionary socialist efforts in countries throughout the world, it is also absolutely true that there are a number of other struggles – some existing now, and some that will flare up in the future – on which socialist activists will be compelled to focus attention and energy.  In all cases, however, I think they will be well advised to utilize the Leninist approach outlined here.

Stemming from today’s conditions and from the consciousness of expanding layers of youth and the experiences of the laboring majority, it may be possible to build a fundamental challenge to the existing system of power, and to create a better world.  As we strive to advance that process, there is much to learn from the ideas, the insights, and the experiences of freedom fighters who went before.  Lenin – with all of his accomplishments and insights, all of his mistakes and heroic efforts – is among the freedom fighters we should look to.

 

Works cited and referenced

Breitman, George (1971). “The Current Radicalization Compared With Those of the Past,” in Towards an American Socialist Revolution, A Strategy for the 1970s, ed. by Gus Horowitz. New York: Pathfinder Press.

Hughes, Langston (1946). “Lenin,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/portugues/hughes/1946/mes/90.htm.

James, C.L.R. (1962). Marxism and the Intellectuals. Detroit, Facing Reality Publishing Committee; Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1962/destruction-paper/ch02.htm.

Klein, Naomi (2019). On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Le Blanc, Paul (2024). Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. London: Pluto Press.

Le Blanc, Paul and Jonah McAllister-Erickson (2015). “A Win for Pittsburgh Public Transit,” Socialist Worker, August 5; https://socialistworker.org/2015/08/05/a-win-for-pittsburgh-public-transit

Lenin, V. I. (1922). “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm.

________. (2008). Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. by Paul Le Blanc. London: Pluto Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa (2010). Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. by Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott.  London: Pluto Press.

Mougianis, Dean (2023). “Tribute to Molly Nichols,” You-Tube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhEQGbEZKCA.

 

Paul Le Blanc