by IWU-FI
March 5, 2024
Lenin’s legacy lives on in the 21st century.
We feature speeches by Miguel Sorans Socialist Left, Argentina) and Josep Lluis de Alcazar (Internationalist Struggle, Spanish State), leaders of IWU-FI, at the tribute to Lenin on his 100th death anniversary. The event was held in the city of Barcelos, Portugal, on 21 January 2024 at the headquarters of MAS (Socialist Alternative Movement), the Portuguese section of the IWU-FI.
________________________________________
“Lenin remains one of the greatest figures of Marxism and revolutionary socialism, ” said Miguel Sorans.
I would like to begin by thanking, on behalf of Josep Lluis and myself, the leadership of MAS Portugal for the invitation to give this talk. It is in homage and remembrance of the great socialist leader Lenin on the 100th anniversary of his death. At the 8th IWU-FI World Congress, held in December, we approved a campaign not only on this day but throughout the year, to remember and disseminate his legacy. We start today with the first tribute. So here in Barcelos, MAS Portugal has the privilege of starting this campaign. Yesterday we held the extraordinary congress of the Portuguese section of the IWU-FI, the MAS. We had a successful congress, and for us, that is partly a first positive tribute. Lenin led the struggle to build revolutionary internationalist parties to make the revolution, to push forward the mobilisation and to put an end to capitalism and imperialism.
PICTURE 2; Miguel Sorans, with Renata Cambra and Joseph Lluis del Alcazar
It was precisely on a day like today, 21 January, but 100 years ago, in 1924, that Vladimir Lenin died. He was the prominent leader of the Bolshevik Party, which had taken power with the Soviets. It was called the Communist Party of the USSR. He was the outstanding leader of the first revolutionary socialist workers’ state in the world and the founder of the Third International.
Lenin’s very premature death was a great blow to the USSR, to the Third International and also to the revolutionaries of the world. It was premature because he was only 54 years old. He could have had many more years to continue to lead the revolutionary process. And it was a blow because his personal, subjective weight, beyond the importance of the party and its leaders and militants, was superlative. We want to remember what Lenin contributed because his contributions are still valid for us. Many see Lenin as a figure of the past or as a utopian.
Lenin remains, after the geniuses Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, one of the greatest figures of Marxism and revolutionary socialism, together with Leon Trotsky. His contributions were very important, and he put them into practice and reality. He was not just a great intellectual, although he produced hundreds of books and articles; his complete works comprised 54 volumes. The essential thing about Lenin is that his theoretical and political contributions were always for action, furthering the revolution and advancing humanity.
He, along with Marx and Engels at a different time, shared the belief that only a revolution, the mobilisation of workers and oppressed sectors, could change a country and humanity. The first update he made was about the party’s character, which I will later develop further on the role of socialist or workers’ parties until the beginning of the 20th century. Because he gave it the character of a revolutionary party for revolutionary action.
The second fundamental contribution of Lenin is that he defined the new epoch from the beginning of the 20th century. The change of the historical epoch is taking place in the capitalist world. He defines it as the beginning of the stage or epoch of the decadence of capitalism. And this decadence reached its peak of expression and will be deepened, up to the present day, with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He also reaffirmed the internationalist character of the revolutionary process.
He also broke definitively with socialist reformism and with class conciliation, of ruling within bourgeois democracy for the bourgeoisie. And Lenin could do this because he lived in a different historical period from Marx and Engels. They were two great revolutionaries, but they did not have the conditions for socialist change, because it was the epoch of the development and rise of capitalism. We are talking about the 19th century and in particular from 1870 until 1910. A period of splendid development of the productive forces, technological leaps, and big industry, and also of great exploitation.
But capitalism, in the big European countries, because of this exploitation, growth, and profit, gave many concessions to the workers’ movement, both economic and political, in social policies. So it was not a stage, a period where revolutions predominated, but reforms predominated. The working class believed in the possibility of peaceful evolution in the world with reforms and not with revolutions.
The bourgeoisie makes concessions, including the legal and political functioning of the parties. They built large workers’ parties that still exist in Europe, from the Second Socialist International. Led by the German Socialist Party, they were mass parties that took part in elections. For example, the German Socialist Party in 1911 had 173 deputies. They ran big trade unions, had workers’ clubs, a press, and a lot of money as well.
It was the stage where what we call reformism was being strengthened: believing in reform and that today we have 100 deputies, tomorrow 300, and so on. In a way, it happened, because there were governments of socialist workers’ parties, but “socialist” governments with the bourgeoisie, without changing the system. In Germany, Hitler came to power because of the collaboration between governments and the bourgeoisie of the Social-Democratic Party. A “socialist” government assassinated Rosa Luxemburg, with Karl Liebknecht, in January 1919.
PICTURE 3: Lenin speaking to the masses in 1919
The heyday of capitalist development was ending, and its irreversible decline was beginning. The free market, the free competition of liberalism ended, and imperialism, monopolies, the struggle between imperialist countries to monopolise markets, and the productive forces no longer grew. And this Lenin defined in the book “Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism”, which he wrote in 1916. This “higher” phase was not a sign of progress, but rather a period of decadence caused by inequality, misery, and oppression. Ratifying the concept that was already in Marx and Engels and the Communist Manifesto, that socialism must be a world change because the capitalist system was a world system. Beyond the fact that capitalism exploited the world by dividing it into national borders.
Lenin also contributed, given the change of epoch, to the actuality of workers’ revolution in different countries. With the approach bequeathed by Marx, who presupposed that the revolution had to take place first in the big imperialist countries, the most advanced ones. It was considered that at the final, highest point of the development of the productive forces, there was a crisis and that only the proletariat could change it. Imperialism advanced to exploit more colonies and semi-colonies, benefiting its proletariat with gains and improved living conditions. Lenin came up with the definition that revolution could begin in backward countries. He defined it as that “the weakest link” could break the imperialist chain. He did not say “revolution will take place” in Russia exactly. But indeed it happened because Russia was one of the most backward countries in Europe. He explained his hypothesis, stating that only a revolution could improve the conditions of workers and peasants under tsarism.
The epoch of reform was ending, and this entire period of wars and revolutions was opening up. A socialist party was needed, but a revolutionary party for action. Opposed to the character of the parties of social democracy, which believed that everything could be done through elections, using Parliament and believing that by making pacts with the bourgeoisie, evolutionarily and peacefully, misery and exploitation could be overcome.
Lenin said that to develop socialism they needed a revolution in Germany because it was a great industrial power. Also in France. And there were conditions because later, in 1918, the German revolution broke out. The revolution has to begin in a country. Lenin and Trotsky said it, and we say it: internationalist socialism does not hold that the revolution has to start everywhere at the same time. It starts in one country, but it has to continue, to spread to other countries, to advance. And that was the prognosis and the line of Lenin and Trotsky.
In Russia, as you know, a civil war broke out after the triumph of the revolution. The “Whites”, the reactionaries and the Russian counter-revolutionaries, supported by fourteen imperialist countries, provoked a three-year war. Amid this extremely serious situation for the revolution, Lenin, and Trotsky called for the founding of the Third International in 1919. Its first four congresses, its texts, and its resolutions were the compendium of a revolutionary programme and policies which are still valid today.
PICTURE 4: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Russian Bolshevik leader, on 25 May 1919 in Red Square during a military parade.
In 1914, it culminated in the last break. Until the outbreak of the imperialist war, Lenin, and his Russian faction, the Bolshevik party, remained active in the Second International. The socialist parties’ betrayal was endorsing an inter-imperialist war, defending the bourgeoisie and engaging in military conflict with the working class. The German Socialist Party urged their proletariat to fight the French proletariat, and the French Socialist Party did the same against the German proletariat. And so on in the rest of Europe. It was a total betrayal: most of the leadership of the Second International crossed the line of what had already been bordering on reformist policies and the Second International became a monster, what Lenin defined as the bankruptcy of the Second International, because of its break with internationalism.
In 1915, Lenin with other revolutionaries, among them Trotsky, not yet a member of the Bolshevik party, were against the war. They were a minority and held a meeting in Zimmerwald, Switzerland. The saying says that all the internationalists could fit into two cars on the trip from Berne to this town to hold the meeting. There were very few of them.
There was the first meeting, where they agreed that the Second International was useless and something new had to be built with a programme to break away from the bourgeoisie. To break with class conciliation, with governing with the bourgeoisie or for the bourgeoisie, whether imperialist or non-imperialist. They sketched out a revolutionary programme for a revolution to be applied the following year in the Russian Revolution, which was then unleashed. This was the embryo of what would later become the Third International, which was to be founded in 1919, after the triumph of the Russian Revolution. Even during the civil war, when power was seized, when the socialist revolution triumphed in Russia, Lenin, in his internationalist conception, said “It is necessary for the revolution to continue, to spread”. Russia was a backward country, but Lenin did not say “It is good that it is a backward country”. That the first socialist revolution took place in a backward capitalist country had its difficulties. Russia was a predominantly agrarian and peasant country, although it had large industries and a strong proletariat.
In a few words, the concept that was counterpoised to reformism was the need for a revolutionary struggle. The trade union struggle was positive and necessary, but insufficient. The working class had to be political and build its revolutionary party. It had to have a political character and not a character of conciliation with the bourgeoisie: it had to seize power, to change the state in a revolutionary way. It had to achieve a workers’ state and for that, it needed a party to lead and take power from the bourgeoisie and to build a new power. He proposed a centralised functioning, what was called democratic centralism. A party that was democratic in the elaboration of its lines, in its internal life, in its discussions, just as we continue to practice as revolutionary socialists, as Trotskyists. But when presenting its policy and slogans, at the moment of an action, a strike, a political action, also an election, the entire party acts as one fist.
And even more so, if there is a revolutionary process. The party has to act with a single policy: it is a party that confronts the reformist, and bourgeois parties, the police force, and all the power of the bourgeois state. It has to intervene before the working class with a single line and not with the characteristic of the social-democratic parties, where one says one thing, another says another. They are parliamentary parties.
Lenin argued that the revolutionary party cannot act like that, because it is confronting its enemies to lead a revolution. That was called democratic centralism. Unfortunately, later, under Stalin, it was to be transformed into bureaucratic centralism. Stalin’s dictatorship distorted the construction of what the party was for Lenin. Lenin became a caricature of Lenin. This new conception of revolutionary party building was original to Lenin. He set it down in the famous book “What is to be done?” in 1902, long before he defined the new epoch, the epoch of imperialism. And this is how he developed his revolutionary political and organisational alternative to the reformism of the old social democracy.
First, we believe that Lenin’s legacy is still valid. Because 100 years later, it can be seen in real life that the decay of the imperialist capitalist system is sharper than ever. Right here in Europe, where decades ago the working class could still have a better standard of living, obviously higher than in Latin America or Africa, let alone Asia. We often say that Europe has become “Latin Americanised”: there is inflation, and there is an immigration crisis that affects the people who emigrate to each country. It is all a tremendous social and humanitarian explosion, added to the capitalist environmental destruction. More than ever before, the need for revolutionary change has been raised.
Second, the failure of the governments of class conciliation and of the pseudo-leftist governments that, in the name of false socialism, rule against the working class, against women and the oppressed sectors. As you live in Portugal saying that socialism, the Socialist Party, governs. And it is almost the same as a liberal government. In the Spanish State, they alternate the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, named after the Spanish revolution, and the right-wing liberal Popular Party. Sometimes it is not even noticeable what the changes are, beyond the language: the first speaks of “socialism” for holidays and the other does not.
In Latin America Lula; us in Argentina, Peronism; the failure of Syriza in Greece; the disaster made by Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela; Podemos in the Spanish State. With their double talk and lies, they end up dangerously favouring the resurgence of the ultra-right, because of the confusion of the masses. The traditional bosses’ parties and even bourgeois democracy itself are discredited and questioned by the masses. This discredit is fed by these traditional left-wing political leaders who make disastrous governments and then blame the people. They say that the people “understand nothing”. No, no, they are to blame for the growth in Portugal of the far-right Ventura. Vox in the Spanish State. Or that, in Argentina, for the first time, we have a crazy fascist like Milei. Le Pen in France, Meloni in Italy or Trump in the United States. They are phenomena appropriate to the reality of each country, but they show politically this decadence.
Well, this is as far as I have got to give way to the exposition of comrade Josep Lluis de Alcazar, on what we could call Lenin’s last battle. Because of his genius and his ability to perceive reality within the framework of his revolutionary conceptions, he noticed the dangerous advance of the bureaucracy, in the Communist Party that governed the former USSR. Lenin, in his last two years, already very ill, hardly speaking, waged his last battle against bureaucratisation, which was headed by Stalin.
“Lenin identified the possibility of continuing the revolutionary process, displacing Stalin” – said Joseph Lluis de Alcazar.
As Miguel Sorans said, the last two years of Lenin’s life were very important, although they were continually interrupted by illness, between 1922 and 1923, and he died in January 1924. In 1922, he was practically six months away, as he was not in a fit state to work. He could not take part in either the 1922 or 1923 Communist Party congresses.
PICTURE 5: Joseph Lluis del Alcazar, a leader of the IWU-FI and Internationalist Struggle, Spanish State.
There is always a reference document, known as his testament, dictated in March 1923, which we will talk about later. There are also a series of letters and some important articles to confirm what were the concerns that led him to wage “Lenin’s last great battle”.
That battle is going to have two pillars. First, how the national question was being dealt with. Second, as Miguel said, a process of bureaucratisation within the Party and the state. He would devote his efforts to these two issues in the last two years of his life. From March 23rd onwards, he ceased all kinds of writing, letters, etc. because of his illness.
We attach great importance to these two central themes. The national question is also interrelated with the question of bureaucratisation, because the commissar for the question of nationalities was Stalin, and the party secretary was Stalin. So this issue started a political confrontation that ended up leading to a complete rupture between Lenin and Stalin.
The issue arose in Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, because of a policy of centralisation regarding nationality. This led to clashes between the political commissar, the special envoy to Georgia, and the leadership of the former Bolshevik Party, now known as the Communist Party. The Georgian leaders opposed the whole policy of centralisation pursued by Stalin and his envoys. Lenin intervened and wrote a famous letter against Stalin, denouncing the Russian oppression of the Georgian people. There were even physical confrontations between leaders sent by Stalin and the Georgian ones. Lenin denounces these events and the disloyalty between leaders. These methods would go to extremes with Stalin, who would impose political issues and eliminate discussions and differences through brutal methods of persecution and elimination of leaders, etc. These precedents in Lenin’s life against Stalin have their importance.
Lenin defends the right of nations’ self-determination, a Bolshevik tradition, against a stronger Russia. Dictator Putin himself said that the problem of Ukraine today stems from Lenin’s mania for defending the right to self-determination of the people. He was paying for it a century later, and he had to solve it in his way, by invading Ukraine, which, according to him, “was always a part of Russia”. He agreed with Stalin in denying this right to national self-determination and had meant it as important in the struggle to overthrow tsarism and Lenin’s legacy.
We continue to defend and use Lenin’s criteria in analysing the conflicts with which we identify in the class struggle. Therefore, we stand with the working class and the people, against the bourgeoisie and oppression. We are with the oppressed people against the oppressors. When there are inter-imperialist clashes, we are indeed for the defeatism in both camps.
The outline helped us address the First World War and subsequent conflicts, leading to the formation of the Soviet Union. This is relevant to our analysis of the Palestinian issue. We are with the oppressed against the oppressor. Or this is how we understand the Ukrainian issue, where there is indeed an attempt at occupation, an attempt to bring Ukraine under Russian domination. Lenin came up with the idea of giving rights to the people and Putin wants to rectify this and bring Ukraine back under the boot of Russian domination. This is independent of how we do it in one case or another, considering the leadership and international relations it may or may not have. Which we have nothing to do with. We still use Lenin’s method to support people’s uprisings, like in Iran, against the Ayatollah.
It helps us examine the proletariat, the class struggle, and the inter-imperialist tensions without dividing the world into two blocks. It helps us identify issues of this kind.
PICTURE 6: Last picture of Lenin alive.
It has always been said that the revolution was made and the Soviet Union was formed. This is not so. There were a series of intermediate stages and an enormous number of agreements to bring together the melting pot of people that had been brought down by Tsarism. This union was just what they did when the first battle was fought. The Union was achieved in 1922, but until then, they sought to create a federation. A union is always stronger, and they were working on associations, even non-common ones, for each Soviet republic that was being formed. They were fitting in, they were looking for, respecting what Lenin said: “A little, bend the bow slightly ‘the other way’ and put practice a little more in the forefront.” In other words, if history has been pushing the people after centuries of Russian oppression, we have to go back, to be more patient, even more. Because we have to show them that indeed, what we don’t want is to continue with any oppression under socialism.
So all of these links when the first clash began, these last battles of Lenin’s, were forging what was the union, what would later become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
And it was precisely Stalin who was the commissar of nationalities. And in the face of this issue, as he wanted to impose it, a first battle would begin.
There is one characteristic of these last two years, and that is that in letters, and later we will also see it in his will. Lenin seeks Trotsky’s support. He writes to Trotsky to wage these battles together. And that will happen in the two major cases, the one I was talking about, the struggle over the national question, and then the question of bureaucratisation. And also with another one which may go unnoticed, which was in November 1922. In the Central Committee, without Lenin, who was absent because of illness, and without Trotsky, a measure was taken to weaken the monopoly of foreign trade. I do not want to dwell on this. Lenin wrote to Trotsky and told him that this measure must be immediately reversed.
From December onwards, Stalin and the party apparatus abolished the November measure and remained there.
On the national question, Lenin establishes contact with the Georgian opposition to Stalin’s centralist and “Great Russian” policy. And he asks for help, he tells the Georgian leaders that there is agreement. So we go to battle together at the Congress. He thought he was going to be present at the Congress, but then illness prevented him from fighting the battle directly.
But this issue is important. He expresses the concern, not only that national oppression should not be generated again but also for the internal treatment of the party. Because between the relations in the party and the relations we seek in Soviet society, there is no room for disloyalty or lack of recognition in the relationship between comrades.
History proved Lenin right because the acceleration of the centralising apparatus once again put pressure on nationalities which, at that time, had found for the first time in centuries a space of their construction. That this had voluntarily led them to what we are for, namely freedom, the best guarantee for finding relations of unity. No unity is firm if it is not based on freedom. This is the conviction that internationalism has to make. We will impose an internationalism in which borders will fall. No, it is precisely the freedom of the people. There is no contradiction, on the contrary, that is the unity we seek.
Trotsky has a little book which is about Lenin’s last great battle. And he says that the problem was not one of the political differences on the national question. It is not that one says “this measure is excessive”, but that two political systems are confronting each other. The one he claims, with Lenin, is based on historical necessity and where we want to go. Stalin’s is based on the need for an apparatus and how to manage better, more easily and, according to one’s own needs, an apparatus for a territory. Trotsky says: “It is not that we have a difference, it is that we have two opposite ways of looking at the same problem”.
So it seems to me that this is not a detail either, because all this indicated a tendency that Stalin’s was like a mistaken “socialism”. No, it was no other. It is not that it was wrong socialism in points, in things, but that it effectively generated a system, a reasoning that has nothing to do with Marxism, that has nothing to do with the Leninist tradition.
The second part. In 1922, Stalin concentrated on three very important positions within the party. Until 1919, the organising secretary had been Sverdlov, and the role he had played had been very important within the party. After his death, Lenin did not want him to be replaced by a single person, but three members were appointed in a kind of commission that would function with the organisational matters of the party.
Until then, there had been no general secretariat. However, there was a series of internal interests within the party that led to Stalin being appointed as General Secretary in 1922. He was a general secretary; he was commissar to the nationalities. He held another role as the commissar for workers’ and peasants’ inspection, a post meant to prevent power and management accumulation. He had to protect the people. That was the purpose of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. There were no instruments for factory management. And then there was a counter-power that effectively tried to look after the living conditions of the people so that there would be a fit, a control. All three were in the figure of Stalin.
Lenin said, at the appointment, “he is a cook who can prepare too many spicy dishes”. A little more sensitivity to the dish is what is needed”, he explains.
That’s when a battle begins. And that battle is because he begins to effectively detect the process of bureaucratisation, of distancing, of control that is slipping away. That an autonomous power is developing within the party, within the state, and that the road to socialism cannot come from there.
In this, he also agrees with Trotsky. On how we fight to create counter-powers, to prevent this accumulation of power from accelerating a process of bureaucratisation. He wrote an article to advance with proposals: let’s enlarge the Central Committee, let’s create in the Central Committee a control commission with comrades who have nothing to do with the administrative structure to compensate, to prevent, to watch over. And there the clash with Stalin grew rapidly. To the point that in this confrontation they stopped or tried to stop the publication of articles by Lenin that he wrote for Pravda, the party newspaper. In other words, the whole apparatus began to act to isolate Lenin. Because he had launched a battle, which directly hit the main nucleus of the leadership, which at that time was not only Stalin; there was also the whole bureau of the organisation. Kamenev I think was in it at that time.
The organisational bureau and Stalin even started a campaign where they tried to justify that some articles came from the personal influence of Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. That Lenin was very ill… Stalin’s poor treatment of her ends with a letter from Lenin with the concrete severance of her relationship with him. Lenin says – in one of the articles – that it is not only the national question, but that the inspection no longer acts as a guarantee and that new resources must be found to restore people’s confidence in the Soviets, in the Soviet regime and so on. Because it is deteriorating and has to be restored. And this is expressed in the testament where he directly states the need to remove Stalin from the role he occupies. In that text, he goes on to characterise the leaders of the Bolshevik party, and in particular, he dwells on Trotsky. He recognises the fact that he can continue the work and that he is sometimes overburdened by administrative tendencies to solve and so on. That he sometimes has an excess of self-confidence, and so on. But there is a kind of bet on Trotsky.
Lenin addresses his “testament” letter to the party congress, but Stalin prevents the delegates from accessing the text. The first reading takes place in May in a select committee of the Congress. Lenin wanted to secure a more open point to be read by Congress as a whole. The party apparatus forbids it and a restricted reading is made for some militants. And then this document is kept, it is not disclosed at all, so as not to weaken Stalin’s position.
PICTURE 7: On the left, Lenin speaking in Moscow in 1920 to the troops leaving for the civil war, to his right with Trotsky. On the right, the same picture, but with the Stalinist intervention, without Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union.
At that moment, Trotsky says, Radek, another party leader, told him, “With this will they will no longer be able to come after you” (…) “From now on you are endorsed by Lenin”. And Trotsky replied: “No, now they will come after me, without any objection”. And indeed, from that moment on, a strong campaign against Trotsky was built up. Trotsky’s past differences with Lenin were revived. Stalin was seen as the natural continuator of Lenin and Trotsky, as the continuator of the previous differences. All to defeat Trotsky in his confrontation with the bureaucracy.
There is an obvious point of rupture with all this, which advances a process of bureaucratisation and absolute control. Even when Kamenev and Zinoviev fell out of favour and went into opposition, they explained how they had constructed the idea of Trotskyism as a reference point to be confronted, precisely to compensate for the fact that Lenin identified the possibility of continuing the revolutionary process, displacing Stalin and relying on cadres like Trotsky.
So it seems to me that the issue is important because the reading that is made from the bourgeois media is the continuity between Stalin and Lenin. It wasn’t like that. The revolution had an ebb, that ebb, that isolation, served for the emergence of forceful accommodation to that situation and supported by that tendency… an apparatus capable of building incomplete socialism, of being a counter-revolutionary force in the workers’ state. Which is a little the definition we have arrived at.
The 100 years of Lenin and the defence of socialism necessarily have to give an explanation and a relentless struggle against all those processes of bureaucratisation, of degeneration that have nothing to do with the socialism that not only Marx and Engels, but Lenin, Trotsky, etc., proclaimed. And which we advocate.
At present, amid the crisis of capitalism and so on, we continue to believe that the solution is socialism and that socialism is reached in a revolutionary way. That we are part of an international like the one defended by these leaders 100 years ago and that this is the road that can give a perspective and a solution to the crisis of capitalism and the sufferings of the working class and humanity.
