Happy (Belated) Birthday to Vladimir Lenin!
Recently passed Lenin’s 153rd birthday. We celebrate Lenin as a very important theorist and practitioner of Marxism in his time; like we said before, his theory transformed Marxism into Marxism-Leninism, and his practice created the first workers’ state, caused fear and terror for the world’s ruling classes, and inspired tens of millions of workers and peasants to organize for revolution in other countries!
Because he analyzed capitalist-imperialism’s development and formulated the appropriate response to it from a proletarian perspective, we can truly be anti-imperialist; furthermore, with his analysis of imperialism, Lenin realized that revolution really was possible and even necessary in the underdeveloped, overexploited world because imperialism’s weakest links were there and because the national bourgeoisie there was ambivalent to revolution (forcing the proletariat to take lead). On top of that, Lenin saw that many workers in the imperial core were bribed away from revolution and into supporting reform and even supporting their nation’s financial bourgeoisie in its inter-imperialist conflicts; thus, he debunked reformist myths and revealed to us that only by working against imperialism can we bring about socialism.
Lenin explained why the vanguard party was necessary for the workers to take power. He said that unorganized, spontaneous uprisings were ineffective, and so he proposed the creation of a relatively narrow party entrenched among the masses that could educate, agitate, and organize them for revolution. Unlike the Menshevik position that supported undisciplined “organization”, Lenin said that the workers’ party had to be disciplined and centralist, just as much as it had to be democratic. Lenin’s defense of the Marxist positions on the state is indispensable. His book, The State and Revolution, is a necessary read for all revolutionary Marxists. The relations between the vanguard party and the state are covered in Lenin’s works as well.
With the October Revolution and the replacement of bourgeois democracy with proletarian democracy, the Soviet people achieved a lot of progress almost immediately, for women’s rights, rights to self-determination, workplace democracy, improvements in working conditions, and more were possible thanks to proletarian power! Under Lenin’s leadership, the proletarian state grew stronger to face the daunting threats, both domestic and foreign. Obviously, this was not an easy task, and it faced many trials and tribulations, but it was successful (contrary to capitalists’ lies).
During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks dealt with not just the Russian Empire/Republic remnants (the White Army), but also its allied countries (the Allied Powers of World War 1: Japan, the UK, US, and other allies and colonies), 27 anti-communist national separatist movements, the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and their collaborators, until 1918, when they lost World War 1), and various “socialist” (opportunist) groups that fought the Bolsheviks (Mensheviks, SRs, “Left” SRs, anarchists, and the Green Army). Because of these rival forces, the new proletarian state, the RSFSR, created a proletarian state, with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and the Cheka. The young Soviet republic faced many terrible conditions and very brutal conflict, making these workers’ state bodies more necessary. Despite all of the contradictions and all of the odds against them, the Soviet state survived, albeit at a great cost.
The “Red Terror”, a period (1918–22) in which the workers and peasants exercised their dictatorship over the bourgeoisie to defend the revolution, allegedly killed some tens of thousands of people. This is about the only count that could be attributed to the Leninist USSR, and even then there are issues. In addition, what justifies the numerous murderous crimes of the capitalist class that does not justify the “terror” used by the proletariat against the capitalists? There was a famine in 1921, and it killed an estimated five million people, but this famine was caused by the Russian Civil War, not the Bolsheviks’ policies. We could mainly attribute these deaths to the imperialist powers and reactionary Tsarist soldiers that started the conflict. Therefore, saying that the USSR under Lenin killed millions of people is dishonest.
A lot of violence had occurred prior to and during the October Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War. After the February Revolution, state repression, peasant rebellions, urban riots, anarchist attacks, and more all committed horrendous acts of violence, including torture, against others (even civilians)! Only with the Bolshevik seizure of power and the formation of a proletarian dictatorship did order and stability come back and peace spread across the land after the civil war.
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With all that and much more, we must thank Vladimir Lenin for his amazing theory and practice, and we seek to emulate him in our work today! Happy belated birthday, Comrade Lenin!