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Title: Leninism, a fascist ideology
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: March 27, 2007
Language: en
Topics: Leninism, fascism, state socialism, Spain, Russia, Lenin, anti-Bolshevism
Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/leninism-fascist-ideology-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Translated from the Spanish original. Source: http://www.nodo50.org/tortuga/Leninismo-ideologia-fascista

Miguel Amorós

Leninism, a fascist ideology

“Liberation! It is remarkable how persistent human criminal instincts

are! I use deliberately the word ‘criminal’, for freedom and crime are

as closely related as—well, as the movement of an airplane and its

speed: if the speed of an airplane equals zero, the airplane is

motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any

crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of

freedom.” Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1920.

Today, the existence of more or less virtual immobilist sects that

proclaim their loyalty to Lenin is more related to the neuroses that

haunt individuals immersed in the modern conditions of capitalism, than

it is to the war of ideas waged by rebels against the ideologists of the

ruling class. Time is not forgiving, and the final collapse of Leninism

that took place between 1976 and 1980 has caused those true believers

who still exist to live in a state of schizoid survival. As Gabel has

already pointed out, the price they pay for their faith is a split

consciousness, a kind of double personality. On the one hand, reality

refutes their dogma right down to its smallest details, and, on the

other hand, the militants’ interpretation must distort, constrain and

manipulate reality to the point of delirium in order to make it conform

to their dogma and to manufacture a Manichaean fairy tale without any

contradictions. As if it was a Bible study class, the fairy tale has all

the answers. The Leninist fairy tale overcomes the anxiety engendered in

the believer by the contradictions that arise from practice, and

constitutes a powerful means of escaping from reality. The result would

be merely pathetic as far as the rest of us were concerned if the

debates that once flourished among a combative proletariat like that of

the sixties were taking place today, but given the current state of

class consciousness, or, which amounts to the same thing, given the

spectacular inversion of reality, where “the true is only a moment of

the false”, the presence of Leninist sectarians in the few rank and file

discussions that are taking place today only contributes to the reigning

confusion.

The objective role of the sects consists in the falsification of

history, the concealment of reality, distracting attention away from

real problems, sabotaging reflection on the causes of the capitalist

victory, obstructing the formulation of adequate tactics of struggle,

and, finally, preventing the theoretical rearmament of the oppressed.

The fossilized Leninists of our time are no longer (not being capable of

such a thing) the vanguard of the counterrevolution that their

predecessors were thirty or even sixty years ago, but their function is

still the same: to work for domination as agents provocateurs.

Given the current decomposition of the Leninist ideology it might be

more fitting to speak of “Leninisms”, but rather than lose ourselves in

the nuances that separate the various sects we shall attempt to set

forth their shared characteristics, the ones that most clearly define

all of them, that is, their resolute denial that a workers revolution

took place in 1936, and the equally steadfast assertion of the existence

of an always-advancing working class and the belief in the advent of the

leading party, the guide of the workers on their march to revolution.

The first trait was bequeathed to them either by the defeatist and

capitulationist analyses of the Belgian journal, Bilan, or by the

triumphalist dictates of the Komintern and the Communist Party of Spain.

Whereas the former considered it an imperialist war, the latter

considered it a war of independence; in both, the proletariat had to

allow itself to be crushed.

In the Leninist universe, Lenin is the Virgin Mary; the working class

that his devotees talk about plays the role of Christianity. A Shi’ite

of Leninism, that is, a Bordiguist, complains on the internet: “If you

take away the working class, what is left to us?” In effect, the working

class has a ritual, therapeutic or, if you prefer, psychological

function for the Leninists. It is an ideal entity, an abstraction, in

the name of which power must be seized. The problem, however, is not

just that it does not exist; it has never existed. Invented by Lenin on

the basis of the Russian model of 1917, a minority working class in a

feudal country with an overwhelmingly peasant population that was

amenable to an external leadership composed of intellectuals organized

into a party, is not exactly something you see every day. It belongs to

a dead past. It is an anti-historical, utopian ideal. No kidding: the

“Posadista” Trotskyist sect believed that it was located among the

extraterrestrials of a distant galaxy, and that these extraterrestrials

sent flying saucers to Earth with socialist messages. The messages of

the UFOs must have been spread far and wide because the Leninist

proletariat is found in every planetary soup; according to the Leninist

press its epiphany could take place at any moment, in the civil war in

Iraq, for example, or in the demonstrations of the French students, or

in the formation of a “leftist” trade union federation, although most

often it is thought to be expressed in labor struggles.

Since there is no history for Leninism after the storming of the Winter

Palace, it would seem that since the Russian Revolution there have been

neither significant defeats nor significant victories; at most there

have been minor setbacks along the course of an otherwise unswerving

evolutionary line that leads to a pure working class, one that awaits

the priests of the church, their leaders, the rightful members of the

“party”. For the real historical subject of the Leninists is not the

class but the party. The party is the absolute criterion of truth, which

does not exist by itself but only within the party, in the correctly

interpreted sacred scriptures. Within the party, salvation; outside the

party, eternal damnation. This hallucinatory vanguardism is the most

anti-proletarian feature of Leninism, for the idea of the one messianic

party is foreign to Marx; it comes from the Masonic and Carbonari

bourgeoisie. For Marx the party was the whole ensemble of forces that

are fighting for the self-organization of the working class, and not

just an authoritarian, enlightened, exclusive and hierarchical

organization.

It is very revealing that the Leninists now see particular economic

interests as class interests, when they are no longer class interests,

while, during the 1970s, when they were class interests, they treated

them as trade union affairs. The difference lies in the fact that in the

1970s the proletariat was fighting in its own way, with its own weapons,

the assemblies. This is what transformed partial demands into class

demands. But Leninists despise the really proletarian forms of struggle

and of organization: the assemblies, the elected and revocable

committees, the imperative mandate, self-defense, coordinadoras,

councils…. They despise them because, as forms of workers power, they

ignore the parties and dissolve the State, even the “proletarian” State.

This is why the Leninists were just as careful as the mainstream media

to conceal the existence of the Assembly Movement during the 1970s,

because they are the enemies of a real working class that in no respect

resembles the one they imagine, and they hate its specific

organizational forms for obvious reasons. Unlike Marx, for Leninists

existence does not determine consciousness, because the latter has to be

inculcated by way of the apostolic ministry of leaders. According to

Lenin, the workers cannot attain any more than a trade unionist

consciousness and they must submit to playing the role of simple

executors; the trade unions that regiment and control them are therefore

the transmission belts of the party. This does not prevent the Leninists

from praising the assemblies and the councils if this allows them to

exercise some influence and to recruit some disciples. During the 1970s

they even supported these institutions but as soon as they felt

themselves strong enough they betrayed them, just as Lenin did, mutatis

mutandis, with the Soviets.

The journal Living Marxism, edited by Paul Mattick, expounded the

slogan, “the struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against

Bolshevism”. During the 1950s managerial capitalism evolved towards the

totalitarian modes of Soviet State Capitalism. Today, when the communist

bureaucratic class has converted to capitalism and the world is being

dragged towards fascist domination by the technological road, Leninist

ideology is a leftover, dusty museum piece. It does not study capitalism

because capitalism is not its enemy; of course it does not want to fight

against it. It just makes like garlic, and “repeats”. The principle

labors of each sect consist in competing with the other sects by

emphasizing “… the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from”

the class movement (Marx).

The theoretical battle against the Leninists is therefore no major

undertaking, something like kicking a zombie, but insofar as Leninism

constitutes the basic framework of the new ideologies of the

counterrevolution, such as Hardt-Negrism, this battle should not be

entirely neglected, and it is with this purpose in mind that we shall

recall a few basic banalities concerning Leninism that anyone can find

in the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, the councilists (Pannekoek,

Gorter, Rühle) or the anarchists (Rocker, Voline, Arshinov). Leninism,

by way of Negri and his followers, as was previously the case with

Stalinism, its most extreme form, is undergoing a complete return to the

thought and the practice of the bourgeoisie, concretely displayed in the

totalitarian stage of globalization, as manifested in its defense of

parliamentarism, political compromise, the cell phone and spectacular

movements. Negrism is ideologically based upon the weak and losing

fractions of domination, the administrative political bureaucracy, the

trade union apparatus and the middle classes, who are interested in

upholding capitalism with State intervention. But Leninism has not

changed. It has always defended interests contrary to those of the

proletariat.

In the Russia of 1905 there was no bourgeoisie capable of leading the

struggle against Czarism and the church as a future ruling class. This

mission had to be assumed by the Russian intellectuals, who sought to

clarify their nationalist impulses in Marxism and found their best

allies among the working class. Russian Marxism assumed a completely

different form than Orthodox Marxism, since in Russia the historical

task that had to be fulfilled was that of a bourgeoisie that was too

weak to carry it out: the abolition of absolutism and the construction

of a national capitalism. Marx’s theory, as adapted by Kautsky and

Bernstein, identified the revolution with the development of the

productive forces and of the corresponding democratic State, and favored

a reformist praxis that, although appropriate for Germany, was not at

all appropriate for Russia.

Although Lenin integrally accepted the social democratic revision of

Marx, he knew that the mission of the Bolshevik social democrats to

overthrow Czarism could only be fulfilled by means of revolution, and

greater forces than those of the Russian liberals were needed for such a

revolution to succeed. A bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie,

and even against the bourgeoisie. The workers revolt of 1905 left the

absolutist regime badly wounded and the revolution of February 1917

finished it off. Although the latter was a workers and peasants

insurrection it did not have a revolutionary program or explicit

slogans, which is why the representatives of the bourgeoisie took their

place. The bourgeoisie, however, could not rise to the occasion, while

the proletariat was politically educated and conscious of its goals;

soon, the revolution lost its bourgeois character and adopted a

decidedly proletarian air. During July-August, 1917, Lenin was still

advocating a bourgeois regime with workers participation, but seeing the

progress made by the Soviets or workers councils, he changed his mind

and proclaimed the slogan of ‘all power to the Soviets’, and even wrote

a theoretical work on the extinction of the State. But the idea of

horizontal power was foreign to Lenin, who had organized a party on the

vertical, centralized model of the bourgeois military, with orders

always being given from above, with the leadership and the rank and file

clearly separated. If he was in favor of the Soviets, it was only for

the purpose of using them to seize power. His primary goal was not the

development of the Soviets, which had no place in his system; it was

instead the conversion of the Bolshevik party into a bureaucratic state

apparatus, and the introduction of bourgeois authoritarianism into the

army and the power structure. As for the Soviets, the protagonists of

the October Revolution, their power was soon usurped by a “proletarian”

State they did not know how to destroy. In the name of “the dictatorship

of the proletariat”, the Bolsheviks fought workers control and the

spread of the revolution to the workshops and factories, and generally

any sovereign manifestation of workers’ initiative in institutions

characterized by direct democracy. In 1920 they put an end to the

proletarian revolution and the soviets were no longer anything but

castrated and decorative bodies. Later, the last strongholds of the

revolution, the sailors of Kronstadt and the Makhnovist army, were

annihilated.

At the same time that the Bolsheviks were destroying the Soviets, the

Bolshevik emissaries arrived in Germany, where councils were being

formed by the working class, councils that were on the verge of becoming

effective institutions of proletarian power, in order to deliver a stab

in the back to the revolution. Wherever they went they discredited the

slogan of Workers Councils and advocated a return to the corrupt trade

unions and the social democratic party. The German council revolution

collapsed under the pressure of the calumny, intrigue and isolation that

resulted from the activities of the Bolsheviks. Upon its ruins the old

social democracy and the postwar German State would rise, with Lenin’s

blessing. Lenin did not hesitate to fight the defenders of the council

system by heaping them with insults in his followers’ favorite pamphlet,

Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. In this text, he took off

his disguise. Smothering the left communists and the councils under an

avalanche of false accusations, Lenin defended his All-Russian

pseudo-socialism, whose further elaboration by Stalin would reveal it to

be a new kind of fascism. He was utterly incapable of perceiving that

the liberation of the oppressed can only be achieved by way of the

destruction of power, terror, fear, threats, and constraints.

One could not imagine better preconditions for the establishment of a

bourgeois order than the absolute separation of masses and leaders,

class and vanguard, party and trade unions. Lenin sought to bring about

a bourgeois revolution in Russia and formed a party that was perfectly

fitted to that task, but the Russian revolution took on a working class

character and spoiled his plans. Lenin had to use the Soviets to achieve

victory so that he could later destroy them. Communism plus

electrification gave way to the NEP and Stalin’s Five Year Plans, thus

inaugurating a new form of capitalism where a new class, the

bureaucracy, played the role of the bourgeoisie. It was State

Capitalism. In Europe, the working class was stifled, discouraged and

led to one defeat after another until it was demoralized and lost faith

in its own slogans, a path that would lead to its submission to Nazism.

Hitler seized power so easily because the social democratic and

Stalinist leaders had so corrupted the German proletariat that the

latter did not hesitate to surrender without a fight. “Brown Fascism,

Red Fascism” was the title of a memorable pamphlet in which Otto Rühle

demonstrates that the Stalinist fascism of yesterday was simply the

Leninism of the day before yesterday. His essay was the inspiration for

the title of this article.

The parallels that can be drawn with respect to the Spanish situation in

1970–1978 are obvious. On the one hand, the official Stalinist communist

party advocated an alliance with sectors of the ruling class to force a

democratic conversion of the Francoist regime. Its power derived

principally from its manipulation of the workers movement, which it

attempted to enroll in the fascist trade union apparatus. All the

Leninist methods to prevent workers self-organization were faithfully

practiced by the Spanish Communist Party. The left wing parties, which

emerged for the most part from the disintegration of the FLP and splits

from the PCE and the Workers Front of the ETA, did the same thing. All

of them attacked the PCE for not being Leninist enough and for not

pursuing, as Lenin did, a bourgeois revolution in the name of the

working class. They competed with the PCE for the leadership of the

Workers Commissions, which was futile because by 1970 the Commissions

were no longer a social movement but the organizations of the Stalinists

and their sympathizers in the factories. In order to get elected they

made concessions to the genuine working class forms of struggle, the

assemblies, but they never gave them any real support. After the events

at Vitoria on March 3, 1976, the differences between the splinter groups

and the PCE evaporated and they followed the PCE in its politics of

compromise. They participated in elections, reaping the most resounding

failures. They disappeared, leaving a trail of small sects in their

wake, but their political suicide was also that of the PCE, which after

1980 was transformed into a token, symbolic party, with a mercurial

ideology, supported only by some proletarianized fragments of the middle

and small bourgeoisie.

We can learn a few things from the classical critique of Leninism upon

which our essay is based. First, that the foundations of action that tip

the social scales against capitalism are not discovered by means of

organizational methods of the kind that characterize trade unions or

parties, or parliaments, or state institutions, or any institutions or

groups that are in any way involved in any aspect of domination. Second,

that activists must place the highest emphasis on the capacity for

association, the fortification of the will to act and the development of

critical consciousness, and these factors must be emphasized even more

than immediate interests. And third, that the masses must choose between

experiencing and instilling fear.