It is easy to criticise history, but harder to criticise yourself.
As ‘leftists’ in Britain continue to debate on their proper relationship to the Labour Party, it is worth tracing the background of the idea that it might be productive for revolutionaries to support the party. (The Labour Party, on its own terms, has never been a revolutionary party, and has always been committed to achieving socialism - somehow - by working within the administration of the capitalist state.) In the 1920 work, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Vladimir Lenin argued that since the majority of the working class in Britain supported the Labour Party, to denounce Labour would simply alienate the Communists’ desired base. As such, according to Lenin, the then emerging Communist Party of Great Britain ought to organise in support of a Labour government, which would then either be destroyed, or fail, or betray the workers. In doing so, the Communists would simultaneously win the trust of the masses, and successfully bring them over to revolutionary struggle. This would become the official line of the CPGB; whilst the CPGB is no more, the influence of this position on communists in the UK is still palpable.
In this text, the term ‘infantile’ has a number of resonances. Generally, it seems to refer to the consciousness of his opponents, but sometimes, its usage seems to imply that he is specifically addressing a divergence between his opponents and the proper stage of struggle. Lenin opens the text by writing that
it might have seemed [following the October Revolution] that the tremendous difference between backward Russia and the advanced countries of western Europe would cause the proletarian revolution in these latter countries to have very little resemblance to ours.
As this phrasing should suggest, Lenin seeks to argue the opposite; that as the site of the first successful proletarian revolution, western European communists must take Russia as their model. Indeed, the key insight of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party by which the Russian Revolution was won, as recognised by the majority of global communists, was that it was the weakness - or, if you prefer, the historical infancy - of capitalist imperialism in Russia that made conditions ripe for socialism. Whilst Marx recognised the role of imperialism in capitalist development, the ramifications of this for revolutionary practice are recognised in the Marxist tradition as the distinctively Leninist insight.[1]
In calling his western European opponents ‘infantile’, Lenin means that they are refusing to learn from the experience of their comrades in Russia. However, at time, for example, when discussing parliamentarism as the proper site of revolutionary struggle at this historic juncture, Lenin’s use of ‘infantile’ seems to imply that the ‘Left-Communists’ political consciousness does not reflect a stage of struggle appropriate to advanced capitalism. It is worth noting that the main figure in Britain that Lenin’s critique is leveled at is Sylvia Pankhurst who, whatever her faults, which I’m sure were many, seemed to have acted as a hub for anti-colonial organising in the period, hosting both the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in the midst of international Black-led campaigning against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and Claude McKay, the Jamaican radical who formed a bridge between Garveyism and Communism in this period. In 1922, McKay made the link Lenin didn’t.
The revolution in England is very far away because of the highly organized exploitation of the subject peoples of the British Empire.
If, as Lenin argues, the advanced state of capitalism in England has situated English working class struggle within institutions such as parliament, it has only done so by integrating that class into capitalism. Lenin himself recognised his fact four years earlier in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, where he quotes Engels;
The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.
If in 1858, when Engels wrote this, the English proletariat were “becoming more and more bourgeois”, what had they become by the 1920s? Engels, and later Lenin himself, in Imperialism, provide the basis for understanding the alignment of British workers with capital as not only ideological, the product of a false consciousness, but material, on the basis of shared interests in the British Empire.[2] In advocating a coalition with the Labour Party, Lenin thereby misses the possibility of collaboration between revolutionaries in Britain and ongoing rebellions and mobilisations in the colonies in the same time period.[3] These anti-colonial movements demonstrate that it is simply wrong to claim the majority of those struggling under the power of British capital continue are loyal to the Labour Party, even if this upsets the neatly staged relation between infantile consciousness and advanced capitalism Lenin invokes.
Our current debates on the Labour Party are still caught in Lenin’s contradictions between his central theoretical insight and a tendency towards stageism that is only strengthened by his polemicism. His use of the term ‘infantile’ is usually to dismiss his opponents as stubborn, lacking self-control, and refusing to grow with experience. The Bolsheviks, Lenin argues, were successful in Russia on account of three factors; first, the level of political consciousness and discipline that had been attained by the core revolutionary cadre, secondly, the unity of that cadre with the masses, and thirdly, uniting the first two, by a form of leadership that guided the masses along the correct path via their own experience, rather than attempting to impose ideas from above. Revolutionaries in the west will not succeed, Lenin writes, without absorbing these lessons. Re-reading ‘Left-Wing’ Communism a few months back, I was newly struck by how poorly I fare against his standards: the need to constantly return to struggle as the barometer of politics, to test ideas and practices in experience, and of the masses as the central agents of this struggle. I am still as much part of these contradictions as anyone.
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I was provoked to put this down on paper by this article, ‘British communism’s patriotic disease’, by Alfie Hancox. Whilst it serves as a useful historical account, it’s emphasis on internationalism as the ideal response to ‘progressive patriotism’ neglects the role of alternative nationalisms in the real formations of global anti-imperialism. The report to the Comintern by Claude McKay, cited above, suggests other possibilities - Cedric Robinson’s very different critique of Lenin, in chapter 9 of Black Marxism, is also worth reflecting on.
I have yet to get round to it, but I am very interested in reading this work on Queer Black Marxism in Claude McKay. The role of sexuality in an alternative politics of inter/nationalist socialism in Britain is something that deserves more attention.
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[1] See The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, by Walter Rodney.
[2] That Lenin can quote other parliamentarians on the threat posed by the Labour Party simply indicates the competition between a bourgeois based on international capital, and a bourgeois based on national capital, in the midst of ongoing imperial restructuring - a contradiction, that despite the shifting parties representing it, has not abated, and which lies at the heart of Brexit and its aftermath
[3] See Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in the West Indies, Mexico, and New York City, 1919-1939, by Margaret Stevens.