Lenin -tragic icon

Lenin - tragic icon On the centenary of his birth, who remembers Lenin, even in that part of the world that had transformed him in an icon? In this sense Lenin is a tragic icon. From 1902 when with his What to do? he gave identity to his 'Bolshevik' party and up to the 1923 essay Better less but better, which laid down the conditions for running power: his actions and thinking have a tragic significance, for how they were disregarded - first by those who took over his role after him, in his country - and then in those parts of the world attracted by the Russian '17. The USSR - and not Lenin - served as a reference for men and countries where social conflicts were attempted and where the political system allows the activity of socialist and communist parties. Lenin with his political roadmap had imposed himself often through controversial choices; the first was his return to Russia with the train of the German enemies, the second was the agreement with the left-wing revolutionary socialists afterchoice that the Bolshevik party was in the minority at the Constituent Assembly of 1918, and the third choice was to accept the utopian-maximalist wave of ‘war communism’ during the brutal bloody conflict between the 'Reds' and the 'Whites'. Lenin accept the utopian phase because of the social and economic chaos in Russia, which had just been freed from tsarism. He had been clear that the road for country survival was another since January 1918 while being aware that it was an unacceptable proposal at the time. When it became possible - with 'the whites' defeated and the country at risk of famine - he convinced his party that for country survival Russia had to experiment a sort of capitalism - the NEP- a policy for the economy that put factories, trains and education and administrative affairs back to work and entrusted their management to men able of putting to work. The men were technicians, outside of the Bolshevik party, but such decision was related to country survival and to Lenin's beliefs that the manual workers were not able to cope with target. THE NEP’S CHOICE Power had to be run, and in the Russian case, party structures had to be built - from Moscow to the periphery. And according to Lenin it could be done precisely because there were technicians willing to work so that Russia could have again an economy and administrative structures - essential for its survival. As soon as possible it was decided the creation of 'a single plan' ex novo, after NEP training and with a project of a post-capitalist economy. In that target there is the link between Lenin and Marx, the master of an alternative universe: a post-capitalist economy, a post-bourgeois politics, a workers' politics. While it is true that Lenin with the Bolshevik party had created a party capable of withstanding the competition of the other parties, outside Russia Lenin's role remained paradoxically marginal compared to that of Stalin. Without Lenin there would have been no Bolshevik victory and no Stalin, but Lenin was been in charge of Russia only for five/six years, instead Stalin for thirty years and in the imagination of anyone who wanted to change the state of affairs is Stalin the reference leader. Between Lenin’s political prospect and Stalin's construction of Soviet system, we must understood why the men of money with their society, politics, culture, ideology were not been defeated. In the Lenin/Stalin confrontation, Stalin's workerism won but at same time the first different power than bourgeois power lost. We have to understand why and how. For Lenin the workers, who had taken over the factories like the peasants had taken over the agricultural estates, were not able of running them and were not interested in doing so. There are furious articles by Lenin on this issue, also on Pravda. In the time when Lenin was in charge in the name of the working class - ideologically in power - what was the program, what were the levers? For Lenin the issue was on the one hand to accept the management of those technicians able of keeping up the country, and on the other hand was to invest the party with the task of turning the Bolshevik workers - and only if they were capable - into professional politicians. The link between capital and labor In the history of capitalism as soon as it was possible, the owner of the factory replaced the worker with the machine, and so becoming precarious the manual labor. It was and is a rule of capitalistic system. In Soviet Russia the opposite happened: the worker remained in control of machine, strong enemy of technological innovation. In Europe, following the events created by the Second World War, conditions had been created for a compromise, a historic one, between the needs of entrepreneurs, the expectations of the labor and the political representations by those two actors. The target was a coexistence within their respective roles. The roles were about capital and labor, and they barely touched on politics with a capital P. The European compromise has been short-lived because of two phenomena that matured in the twilight of the 20th century. The first phenomenon was capitalism's push for technological and financial innovation, which gives the greatest proof itself in the great country across the Atlantic. In America, for historical reasons peculiar to the country, conflictual relations between workers and managers remained marginal. Quite a different situation from the German, Italian, northern European situation in the second half of the 20th century, very often open to agreements. The second phenomenon was the history of Soviet system and Lenin/Stalin contraposition, explicit in Lenin's final recommendations, dictated to the secretary, and addressed to the party leaders, inclined to understand him. Lenin’s concerns First concern was the party' skill to govern a country, so disrupted by revolution and war, and a party who had not yet professionalism needed to govern. The mistrust of rank and file party for the NEP, and the utopianism-maximalism of intellectuals, and some stances at the highest political levels, showed that it is one thing to overthrow the old power and another to build a new one, especially when the new power has the working class as its reference point, not only in the ideological sense but in its reality of manual labor. Nobody like Lenin had the courage to make public how difficult the change could be. The Paris Commune was a proof. When the Bolshevik party 'lasted' a day longer than the Commune, Lenin pointed that target to a party on which he based his hopes of change. The Bolshevik party stood to change as the bourgeoisie stood to industrial capitalism and as the aristocracy stood to its centuries-old hegemony. Was Lenin's party a worker party? Ideologically it was, it was born out of political cultures that made the working class in power the project. And inside and outside Russia, Lenin was his guiding man. The image had its own ideological coherence but did not entirely correspond to the thinking of the author not only of What To Do? but also of his book on Russian capitalism. The party-prince Lenin wanted the Bolshevik party could be a party-prince, according to some European past models, adjusting it to the very peculiar Russian case. He lacked the time to implement such a duty. And soon after his death, in 1924 Stalin moved away from Lenin’s concerns about workers’ role. In Stalin vision there is his workerism, the faith in the labor capacity to manage the power such as intellectuals and technicians had made for capitalistic power. In his vision in Soviet Russia it was arrived the time for workers and peasants to run. China is the proof of how right Lenin was been when between the noun 'party' and the adjective 'worker', party had to rely on the noun. Indeed China party won creating such a soldier who identified himself with party, first in the war against Japan and then in his country, a country where the ideology of a workers' power, of a ruling working class, was just an ideology for a very small intellectual elite. Indeed Mao was introduced to the universe of Soviet experiment by reading Bucharin and Preobrazensky's 'The ABC of Communism', the handbook, translated into a lot of languages to make known the Soviet system. After war against Japan, China lived a long phase of dependence on the Soviet system until it sought its own road and found it just in Lenin. In fact, at a great distance from Lenin in terms of culture and history, China used the all-European matrix of the party as a party prince, and creates again capitalism to its advantage, re-proposes a second NEP, and with the labor force at work, party plans a future different from the Stalinist workerism. The difference lies in the re-establishment of the distinction between the official theory 'of the dictatorship of the proletariat' and the day-to-day affairs of a party-prince with the task of ruling country with economic, political, social, administrative tools in the hands of men able to accomplish the task. Men that were professional politician, and experts in technological innovation, economists, scientists. Stalin’s workerism In Russia, the almost immediate choice - with Lenin yet to be buried - was workerism, a Stalin choice. It was a choice that reversed Lenin's thought and the occasion to advance it was the speech in April 1924 on 'The Principles of Leninism'. Specifically, the more appropriate title would have been 'how to reject Lenin's political issues of his last years'. When at the Party Congress on the successes of the first five-year plan, Stalin made the promise that the USSR would exceed in just twenty years, the economic growth that England had achieved in two centuries, for the Soviet experiment the path to defeat was already marked. The defeat stemmed precisely from unipolar focus on the economy, on the antagonism between the Soviet system and capitalism, between the workers in government through the party and the men in power with the means and the experience and the culture of capitalism. In theory, Stalin's choice was in line with Marxist and social-democratic tradition but its implementation was the denial of what Lenin tried to do and foremost what his party had begun to do. Stalin saw Lenin's NEP as an interlude imposed by the chaos of the post-war period which however in the meantime had recreated roles according to the ways of capitalism. Roles and ways valued with distrust by the party rank and file and also making some tensions between 'red managers' and workers, who ideologically were at the top of the social ladder, and instead have been reverted to merely work force. When the manager was a technician with a bourgeois background, the tension could escalate into a conflict for which a trade union would be needed. And indeed when such a hypothesis matured, a debate on the trade union was ignited to the evident estrangement of most of the party. Equally alienating was the great success of peasant market, despite the fact that it had solved the supply difficulties of the cities. Stalin's workerism stemmed from his political and cultural aversion to NEP some aspect of capitalism and in concert with distrust towards Lenin's cosmopolitan fellow leaders. In Stalin vision if working class was in power, the task of running the economic and administrative apparatus of the country, fell to the working class. The task meant that - officially and even blatantly - the worker had to assumed top positions, albeit informally very often the technician remained behind him with the duty to teach him just his official task . The detachment of Lenin's line, of his caution about the capability of manual workers to assume sic et simpliciter the duties of managers, was explained as the unpostponable achievement of worker-running in the hands of the workers. The 1928 trial - the Sachty case - against engineers and technicians, accused of sabotage, made official the dividing line between the party ‘s rank and file and the country’s intelligentsia. That trial was the first open Stalin step toward workerism. The most urgent target was to turn the worker into a running man. After more than a decade in which bourgeois economists and their former pupils of Bolshevik faith had discussed and discussed how to make a plan that overcomes the system based on private ownership, the first plan that got underway in 1929 was adapted to skills of workers who had to implement it. From the PCUS Central Committee came meticulous plan orders, expressed as simply as possible - and therefore elementary operations - for any activity required by functioning of sectors such as factories, health, education, and so on. The orders set out the operations to be performed so that the workers could do them or control technicians who performed them. The party had created a command network and rules that ruled out unplanned initiatives, and in this sense Soviet party was became just that so much criticized by Rosa Luxemburg. The leaders had to have a working-class or a peasant social origin and they used party apparat to enforce the Central Committee Program which had as primary concern the growth of economy. The first interest was the industrialization of the country, a dogma for Stalin party. The identification between economic growth and socialism was the dogma that tested the ability of the working class to govern Soviet Russia. The question is whether such a dogma could ever have come out from Lenin's head. The ability of workers' power, of overcoming capitalism, was been the Lenin primary concern, precisely because Lenin was Lenin, he assessed the difficulties that the party had to face in order for the manual workers to rise to the status of a class able to govern the country, to go beyond their own self-interest. For Lenin, the difficult step was in the party's ability to make worker convinced and responsible of 'his' duties. How to achieve this? For Lenin, a Marxist intellectual from a bourgeois background, it was the party's task to get the manual worker to learn step by step, to act like the ruling class of the country. Instead Stalin's workerism stemmed from a strong will to experiment sic et simpliciter the leadership role of the manual worker, to skip the learning stage, and for example to depose the famous rector of Moscow University and put in his place the last of his assistants - of solid Bolshevik faith. Very soon the former figures who had contributed to the country's resilience to revolutionary first years, were replaced with new party leadership. Stalin leadership First of all there is ostracism towards bourgeois intellectuals 'the enemies of the people', and then distrust for the charismatic Bolshevik leaders returned to Russia with Lenin's train. Their being professional politicians, writers and scientists was an obstacle for the sake of worker as a worker. The workers who attended the trials against so many Bolshevik politicians and intellectuals, symbols of the past power, had to be the proof that manual workers were the new power. Stalin's party was promoting them in the belief that only they were in line with the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the time was ripe to invest working class with the duty of dictatorship. And dictatorship means the exercise of command, the ability to achieve the execution of what the country needed. And it was on this knot - the ability to command - that Lenin had questioned himself and his answer was that a transition phase need until the party could count on professional politicians of working class extraction, for whom the country interest counted more than their own. Stalin cuts that knot and promotes the manual labor as the tool of ruling the country. The gap between the ‘new’ party and the difficulties of workerism in the workplace sheds light on the validity of Lenin's concerns. Very soon difficulties emerge in the workplace with respect to an ex novo Soviet leaders that replace the expelled Bolshevik professionals. What happened was that the labor, legitimized in their ideological hegemony, used it with an execution of the plan, which took into account labor needs, almost always informally negotiated with the foreman. From the very first five-year plan there have been 'two' plans, there was the official one, decided at Party Congress, and there was the real one on which no Central Committee representative had precise data. The Stalin workerism had produced a sort of popular management of economy. The people imprint The people imprint - born in the workplace where labor had its role and a 'value' for it – was extended to the whole of social relations. First of all, it permeated the party and with it the government, which over time would adapt to act in 'two-fold'. There was the government party that with its economic growth that officially was competing with the economies of the capitalist countries and there was the ruling party divided into two different ‘worlds’, in one people imprint prevailed and a simple person especially if he is a worker sought and often obtained the satisfaction of its own individual interest, however minuscule it was. In the other ‘world’ there were the “closed cities” where scientists and technicians planned and implemented the strategic-military apparatus to protect Soviet system. In the most of the country the success of workerism was evident: for example in the large factories it was the worker who was master of the machine just was in the early days of European industry. Technological innovation was a risk not to be taken. In this sense people imprint, the Stalin's political choice of workerism, could be considered as the main cause of the defeat, of the collapse from within, of an economic system that after seventy years reproduces the plan in the almost same form of the first five-year plans of 1929. And first of all a ruling party acting as universe where there no place for political and social issues. For Lenin, the dictatorship of the proletariat had the target to create the political and social and economic alternative to the world of capitalism. Lenin left the scene before he could inspire a policy whereby workers' power would reached its own specific maturity and ability, as it had been for aristocratic and bourgeois power. If his words written and spoken are to be believed, the hypothesis of a workers' power holds. Who is writing wants to believe that it holds up and that with Lenin in charge the Soviet experiment would could had a different outcome, and not a so bad end. An end that it could not to be attributed to Lenin. Alternative per il Socialimo, N.72/2024 PAGE 1