This is the second of a four-part series reflecting on Douglas Greene’s, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024). The review-essay examines the New Kautskyists, Trotskyism, and the challenges facing socialists in the 21^st Century. The views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Red Spark.

PART TWO: MYTHOLOGIES OF TROTSKYISM

In The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024), Douglas Green has produced the most sustained criticism of the work of Karl Kautsky and the New Kautskyist current that has emerged in the last decade and a half. Greene’s critique, rigorously orthodox, places the debate on what seems at first a slightly surer footing.¹ For all its strengths, the weaknesses of Greene’s arguments are as significant, and the seemingly surer footing turns out to be almost as unstable, its uneven ground tilted in a different direction. Symptomatic is Greene’s stance toward what is, to some, the “holy trinity” of classical revolutionary Marxism Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg, who each form part of a “three-legged stool that offers the most all-embracing and astute critique of Kautsky’s methods and politics.”² The debate framed by the New Kautskyists, as outlined in Part One of this series, is principally over the relationship between Kautsky and Lenin, and hence Lenin’s place as a theorist, an innovator, who introduced a new theory of Marxist politics and the party. Greene chooses not to focus on this question but rather introduces alongside Lenin the two other famous revolutionaries of the moment, which has the benefit of allowing a survey of their positions but has the overarching negative effect of minimising their differences. His lack of distinction between the three revolutionaries each important in their own right, but not at all easily conflated is typical of a certain type of Trotskyism that doesn’t quite capture the distinct innovations made by Lenin his articulation of the strategy of hegemony and the consequent way this founds his argument for an organisation of unified, activist, Marxists (a position outlined in Part One of this series). Without making the distinction, we will see, Leninism is too easily misrepresented, typically as only the advocacy of a centralised, homogenous Marxist party, i.e., simply as Lenin’s organisational conclusions. The argument ultimately produces a valid defence of revolutionary Marxism shared by the “trinity” but an inadequate defence of Leninism. Let us see how these issues play out over Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, his account of events in April 1917, and finally the case of Luxemburg’s opposition to the right of nations to self-determination each of which represent a recurrence of the spontaneist or Economist approach that Lenin’s theory explicitly rejects.

TROTSKY’S PERMANENT REVOLUTION AND MISREADING OF 1917

Greene’s defence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and his correlate account of the Bolshevik debates during April 1917, against the critiques of the New Kautskyists, is symptomatic of the problem with a particular approach typical among Trotskyism.³ In Trotsky’s account (most easily found in The History of the Russian Revolution, but dating from his 1923 The New Course and 1924 Lessons of October), Lenin returned to Russia to realise that his “stageist” model of revolution, outlined in his 1905 pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, was profoundly inadequate.⁴ In this rendition, Lenin’s theory had misled the Bolshevik leadership into supporting the Provisional Government. The chief cause was that this theory purportedly ruled out anything but a long period of capitalist development after the bourgeois revolution. Implicitly, the bourgeoisie would rule during this time before capitalism developed enough to enable a socialist revolution. In some Trotskyist versions, Lenin’s strategy for a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” is misunderstood as meaning a bourgeois state rather than a synonym for a “workers and peasants” one.⁵ Attachment to this outdated theory thus led Lev Kamenev, Josef Stalin, and others to support the Provisional Government in February/March 1917 and subject the soviets to bourgeois leadership. Returning to this scene, Lenin had to thus break the “Old Bolsheviks” from their conservative modes of thought, their attachment to his own outdated theory, which had ended up in this reformist perspective. To do so, Lenin implicitly adopted Trotsky’s view of “permanent revolution.” Having “rearmed” the Bolshevik party, Lenin set the party’s course to take power, which would culminate in the “socialist” revolution in October 1917. Trotsky’s presentation of his theory and this narrative vacillated over the years now appearing closer to Lenin’s position, now veering away from it but his narrative consistently held to the superiority of his own theory and ultimately led to a misreading of events of 1917.

Leaving aside the precise historical details of these April 1917 debates which will no doubt continue to be argued the situation with regards to the various theories can be outlined: to the extent that the Bolshevik leadership (Kamenev and Stalin in particular) supported the Provisional Government, they in practice drifted to the Menshevik strategy of support for the liberal bourgeoise.⁶ They were in practice refusing to lead the worker-peasant alliance in independent struggle to carry the bourgeois revolution to its “conclusion,” which would then pave the way for a later socialist phase. To the extent this occurred, it was an abandonment of the strategy of hegemony, a relinquishing of workers-peasant leadership already won during the February revolution that overthrew the Tsarist state. Rather than forming a worker-peasant government, as Lenin’s theory proposed, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had voluntarily transferred political power to the liberal bourgeoisie and Kamenev, Stalin and others had capitulated to this.⁷ Lenin explained in his “Letter On Tactics” that “We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchkov) and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry [my emphasis RD], which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie.”⁸ To the extent the Bolshevik leadership supported the Provisional Government they were pursuing a reformist line, they were breaking from the Bolshevik strategy, and thus capitulating to a version of Economism, adopting the Menshevik (“New Iskra”) approach he rejected in his 1905 Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution:

“The Economists thought that leadership in the political struggle was not the concern of Social-Democrats, but, properly speaking, that of the liberals. The new-Iskrists [Mensheviks] think that the active conduct of the democratic revolution is no concern of the Social-Democrats, but, properly speaking, that of the democratic bourgeoisie, for, they argue, the proletariat’s guidance and preeminent part will “diminish the sweep” of the revolution.”⁹

What caused the “Old Bolsheviks” to retreat to a position infused with bourgeois-reformism, to the extent that that they did? Lenin found the source in the “gigantic petty-bourgeois wave [that] has swept over everything and overwhelmed the class-conscious proletariat, not only by force of numbers but also ideologically; that is, it has infected and imbued very wide circles of workers with the petty-bourgeois political outlook.”¹⁰ With regard to Stalin and Kamenev, he pointed out in the report he gave on his April Theses to the April 4 (April 17) meeting of Bolshevik delegates to the first All-Russia Conference of Soviets: “Even our Bolsheviks show some trust in the government. This can be explained only by the intoxication of the revolution.”¹¹ That is, Lenin was making precisely the same criticism of those Bolsheviks that he made in What Is to Be Done? of the Economists: they had adapted to the spontaneous movement, were lowering their consciousness to that of the movement, were “tailing” that movement, and hence (in their trust in the government) had drifted toward opportunism. Lenin’s exact same argumentation is apparent in both cases only the historically specific terms have changed. What Is to Be Done? and “The April Theses” are indissolubly linked by the very same strategic argument.

THE APRIL THESES: LENIN CALLS FOR THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION TO BE CARRIED TO ITS CONCLUSION

How then did Lenin understand the real relation of all class forces, the systemic analysis that constituted socialist consciousness (of the “irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system,” as he puts it in What Is to Be Done?)? Lenin’s analysis of the conjuncture runs like this: the February revolution had overthrown Tsarist political power, won crucial political freedoms, but was yet to carry out the central social (historic-economic) task of the bourgeois revolution destruction of the feudal landed estates (land reform). Lenin’s “April Theses” were a reaffirmation of his strategy of a worker-peasant alliance to carry out the central task of the bourgeois stage, land reform in the countryside (Thesis 6 of the “April Theses”). This meant seizing leadership of the revolutionary movement from the liberal bourgeoisie, who had no interest in developing the revolution any further. This strategic line was condensed in the Bolshevik slogan, “All Power to the Soviets!” For this position to be victorious, the Bolsheviks needed to fight the opportunist and liberal leadership of the movement, not adapt to the prevailing level of current consciousness, but raise the broad masses to socialist consciousness (a picture of the system at that moment in all its relations), and win hegemony the strategy he outlined first in What Is to Be Done? This victory occurred in October, when the Bolsheviks come to power in alliance with the Left Social-Revolutionaries (the political representatives of the peasantry). October was therefore the seizing of power by the democratic dictatorship (democratic meaning not yet socialist) of the proletariat and peasantry, represented by the government of the Bolsheviks (the party of the proletariat) and the Left SRs (the party of the peasantry) in the form of the soviets.

Lenin’s “April Theses” are thus founded in his two-stage theory, itself a development of the strategy of hegemony elaborated in What Is to Be Done? (he specifically refers to his argument in Two Tactics as a continuation of his struggle against Economism). The theses expressed an anti-war, anti-imperialist position, a political break from the liberal Provisional Government, bank nationalisation, and the crucial task of the bourgeois democratic revolution land reform. The task, the theses indicate, is specifically not to immediately introduce socialism (see Thesis 8 of the April Theses): “It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.”¹² So the April thesis did not suggest the commencement of a socialist stage but explicitly ruled this out. “The April Theses” did, of course, note that the demand to end the war could not be brought about within the framework of capitalism, and so Lenin was already introducing the need to make the socialist transition in the future. Occasionally, Lenin would use the shorthand of “socialist revolution,” or more often “proletarian revolution,” to describe a political revolution which would institute a Soviet State, whose attitude to the underlying social relations would be in the interests of the workers and broad masses (which is how one assesses the class nature of the state) and therefore would begin the transition toward socialism. But in terms of its first, historic, socio-economic tasks, the October revolution was not yet the introduction of socialism the process was still in its bourgeois phase. The bourgeois phase was not counterposed to this socialist phase, as Trotskyists often pose it, but a step toward it.

The evidence then is clear enough: Lenin did not “convert” to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution but rather demanded the Bolsheviks act in line with their own long-held theory. Lenin himself writes in 1918, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, that Kautsky was resuscitating the “old Menshevik ‘theories’ about the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution, i.e., the old distortion of Marxism by the Mensheviks (rejected by Kautsky in 1905!), are now once again being rehashed by our theoretician.”¹³ Against this argument, he reaffirms his own position, and argues that things had turned out exactly as the Bolsheviks had predicted in 1905:

The Bolsheviks [in 1905] formulated the alignment of class forces in the bourgeois revolution as follows: the proletariat, winning over the peasants, will neutralise the liberal bourgeoisie and utterly destroy the monarchy, medievalism and the landlord system. It is the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants in general that reveals the bourgeois character of the revolution, for the peasants in general are small producers who exist on the basis of commodity production. Further, the Bolsheviks then added, the proletariat will win over the entire semi-proletariat (all the working and exploited people), will neutralise the middle peasants and overthrow the bourgeoisie; this will be a socialist revolution, as distinct from a bourgeois-democratic revolution. (See my pamphlet Two Tactics, published in 1905 and reprinted in Twelve Years, St. Petersburg, 1907.)¹⁴

That is to say: in 1918 Lenin specifically reaffirms his strategic model outlined in the 1905 Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. Lenin continues:

Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the “whole” of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one.¹⁵

Over a year after the October Revolution, well after the fact, yet not far enough to forget significant details, Lenin expressly indicates that the Bolsheviks enacted a two-stage uninterrupted revolution, in accordance with his writings from over a decade before. Lenin even gives dates for each stage of the revolution, explicitly describes the October Revolution as carrying the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion:

The victorious Bolshevik revolution [of October] meant the end of vacillation, meant the complete destruction of the monarchy and of the landlord system (which had not been destroyed before the October Revolution). We carried the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion. The peasants supported us as a whole. Their antagonism to the socialist proletariat could not reveal itself all at once. The Soviets united the peasants in general. The class divisions among the peasants had not yet matured, had not yet come into the open. That process took place in the summer and autumn of 1918.¹⁶

How have the legions of Trotskyists failed to account for these passages, with their specific and direct references to Lenin’s earlier 1905 position? The likely cause is simply confirmation bias, to which we all fall prey to at times, but this is a particularly zealous form of it bound no doubt to the “identity” of Trotskyism. By contrast, no Trotskyist I know has come out and argued that Lenin misunderstood the meaning of events, which would be perfectly legitimate and consistent with upholding Trotsky’s position this is the reverse of the argument I am making, that Trotsky misunderstood the meaning of events in 1917. We could then discuss whether land reform, division up of the landed estates, is a task of the bourgeois revolution or the socialist phase. What cannot be sustained is the claim that Lenin “converted” to Trotsky’s theory and abandoned his own.¹⁷

TROTSKY AND LUXEMBURG: SPONTANEISM RETURNS

This question, as we noted earlier, is symptomatic of a larger issue: a misunderstanding of Lenin’s strategy of hegemony, his argument for the “all-round” struggle, and his analysis of spontaneity and consciousness. In fact, Lenin’s “two-stage” theory and Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” reflect the contrasting methods the Bolsheviks and Menshevik/Economists took toward these questions. Trotsky’s theory was developed while he was still a Menshevik and is marked by both workerism and a mechanical-spontaneist view of politics (what Hegelians would call “Second International Marxism”).¹⁸

In his pre-1917 writings on permanent revolution, Trotsky argues that the spontaneous movement of the working class would inevitably and immediately, regardless of any party’s political decisions, be compelled to drive beyond the bourgeois revolution (within 24 hours he claims in his 1909 essay “Our Differences”¹⁹) to the socialist stage. Immediate socialist transformation would mean the revolutionary government would “enter into hostile conflict with the broad masses of the peasantry,” isolate the working class and the revolution, which would thus need to be saved by the international revolution.²⁰ Here Trotsky agrees with the Menshevik’s assessment of the working class and the peasantry as anti-revolutionary. In these formulations, classes are forced inevitably to act according to iron “historical” logic, they are compelled to spontaneously drive onward, and no socialist party would be able to hold them back. Illustrative of this perspective, Trotsky wrote in his 1904 attack on Lenin, “Our Political Tasks”, that Marxism “teaches that the interests of the proletariat are determined by its objective conditions of life. These interests are so powerful and so inescapable that they finally oblige the proletariat to bring them into the realm of its consciousness, that is, to make the attainment of its objective interests its subjective concern.”²¹

There is precious little space in Trotsky’s pre-Leninist position for politics. The process of building an alliance and ensuring the majority support for the process, Lenin’s strategy, becomes impossible because classes act “as they will,” spontaneously. Trotsky’s position is thus workerist, and Lenin correct to point out that, “From the Bolsheviks Trotsky’s original theory has borrowed their call for a decisive proletarian revolutionary struggle and for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, while from the Mensheviks it has borrowed “repudiation” of the peasantry’s role.”²² So Trotsky’s insistence on the independent action of the working class, rather than subjection of it to the liberal bourgeoisie (suggested by Alexander Martynov, who was one of Lenin’s chief targets in both What is To Be Done? and Two Tactics, expressing in his person the continuity between Economism and Menshevism), makes it a revolutionary, but ultraleft, workerist, and spontaneist, theory.²³ In other words in 1917, it was Trotsky who adopted Lenin’s theory in practice, not the reverse.

Douglas Greene will have none of this. His section on What Is To Be Done? de-emphasises Lenin’s overarching strategic logic outlined in Part One of this series despite quoting several of the most important passages. This conflates Lenin into simply one member of the “revolutionary holy trinity,” whose chief contribution was an argument for the need for a centralist party (Trotskyists sometimes argue that Lenin created the party and Trotsky the strategy: they needed to come together for the October 1917 revolution to occur). His affirmation of Trotsky’s narrative around the “April Theses,” relies on evidence only that Lenin refused to support the Provisional Government and instead argued for all power to the soviets, i.e. proof that Lenin’s theory was revolutionary.

Greene’s slightly supercilious dismissal of the essential continuity of Lenin’s positions which he claims repeats the “accusations of Trotsky’s [Stalinist] opponents from the 1920s such as Lev Kamenev” is not only fragile but rather unfortunate.²⁴ In fact, the Stalinists chose permanent revolution as a point of dispute in their factional battle against Trotsky for good reason: they sensed that here was one of their opponents’ weak points. After abandoning his theory of permanent revolution briefly (the program adopted by the 1926-7 United Opposition advocated a two-stage theory)²⁵, Trotsky made the error of resuscitating it as a centrepiece of “Trotskyism.” Admittedly, he recast it in The Permanent Revolution (1930/1931) with a Leninist hue but retained its overall thrust.

Since then, adherence to the theory bound Trotskyism to the ever-present threat of ultra-Left sectarianism in careless hands, permanent revolution formed a rod with which to beat national liberation struggles that didn’t drive immediately to socialism. That such accusations were typically made by socialists in the imperialist nations, who had rarely led mass struggles, let alone revolutions, made the phenomenon particularly distasteful. When fused with the theory of State Capitalism, the concoction could become especially noxious: no revolutionary movement could live up to the fantastic prescriptions of this type of book-wielding doctrinaire and so in this view the “best” revolutions seem to be those that were defeated before they could “betray” the correct line. Spain, Germany good. Cuba, Vietnam bad.²⁶

By making these types of criticisms, many Trotskyists collapsed into what Lenin dubbed “Imperialist Economism,” a conscious reference to the earlier trend that was the target of What Is To Be Done? Imperialist Economism developed during the First World War and was associated not so much with Trotsky but with Rosa Luxemburg. Indeed, placing Luxemburg as one of the “three pillars” of anti-Kautskyist thought is even more difficult to sustain than with Trotsky. Her 1904 article against Lenin, “Organisation Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, is one of the chief sources of the “textbook interpretation” (as Lih himself notes in a devastatingly fair section of Lenin Reconsidered), and unlike Trotsky, she never openly embraced Leninism.²⁷ In place of Lenin’s strategy, in the period before the First World War, she advocated one infused with spontaneism, workerism, the belief that the working class would solve its organisational problems in the course of the struggle. That is, she advocated the views of Lenin’s opponents, who often cited her to bolster their position. Lenin in turn denounced the “organisation-as-process” theory of Luxemburg during 1905 in his critiques of the Mensheviks. “Imperialist Economism” was criticised by Lenin for “just as complete a misinterpretation of the relationship between socialism and democracy” as the “late and unlamented Economism of 1894-1902” (Here is another direct and positive reference to his earlier argument, for those too-eager to divorce it from his later positions).²⁸ In the Imperialist Economist perspective, the anti-capitalist economic revolution, i.e., the socialist revolution, was necessary to abolish national oppression. Any independent struggle for national self-determination, separate from socialist struggle, signalled a capitulation to the bourgeoisie. Here then the democratic tasks could be ignored in favour of the class struggle of workers. The affinity of this position with Trotsky’s permanent revolution should be apparent: since both tend toward workerism, and in many formulations suggest that the socialist revolution would occur effectively at the same time as the bourgeois democratic one (telescoped, intermingled, depending on one’s formulation).

Around 1918, Luxemburg turned toward the Bolsheviks: she concluded that Marxists must organise separately from reformists, that a centralised party was needed, she supported (critically) the Bolshevik revolution against the Mensheviks, reversing her earlier allegiance. Yet there is little evidence she ever assimilated Lenin’s argument against Economism, which provides the foundation for his idea of the role of the party. A centralised organisation of socialist revolutionaries is, as we have seen, only one part of “Leninism”. It is instead the organisational conclusion of Lenin’s strategic outlook. As such, it was a position sometimes shared by Lenin’s opponents, though for different reasons (Eric Blanc notes the widespread centralism of many parties in the “East”).²⁹ Luxemburg’s Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania party (SDKPiL) was politically narrow and centralised and still, in Lenin’s view, a proponent of “Imperialist Economism.”³⁰ Luxemburg’s position against national self-determination was a workerist failure to engage in the “all-round” struggle against all injustices and oppressions, no matter who is affected, and so an Economist misunderstanding of the role of democracy and the bourgeois-democratic stage, in the revolutionary process. Lenin wrote in the “National Program of the RSDLP” in 1918 that, this was Rosa Luxemburg’s “amusing error” and that “in their fear of playing into the hands of the bourgeois nationalism of oppressed nations, people [like Luxemburg] play into the hands not merely of the bourgeois but of the reactionary nationalism of the oppressor nation.”³¹ In line with Luxemburg’s affinity with Left Communism, “the leadership of the SDKPiL was the most consistently opposed to united front practices. As Antti Kujala has observed, it ‘reacted to the question of collaboration between the social democrats and the other revolutionary parties and opposition movements the least favourably of any party within the whole of the Empire.”³² Her failure to unify the Marxists into a united force in Germany is only one side of her error; sectarianism and workerism in Poland is the other. From this perspective, Greene’s position is unsettlingly incomplete, since the German Revolution of 1918 can be considered, in many respects, as evidence not for the validity of her criticisms of Kautsky but also as evidence for the failures of Luxemburg’s strategy and organisational positions.

Trotsky and Luxemburg cannot therefore be parts of a “three-legged stool” in their criticisms of Kautsky without serious qualifications.³³ Theirs is, from a Leninist perspective, an inadequate criticism of Kautskyism, since they both share some of the traits of “Economism” and “sponteneism” Luxemburg more obviously than Trotsky. The latter’s manifests chiefly in his one pre-Leninist theory, permanent revolution, but remains mostly (though not totally) absent from his other post-1917 work. From 1917 onward, Trotsky’s work on the united front, on the rise of the bureaucracy Soviet Union, on the role of the revolutionary party, on revolutionary strategy in general, are not only consistent with Leninism, but some of the finest contributions in the tradition.³⁴ Indeed, his theory of permanent revolution aside, after 1917 he is, to borrow a phrase from Tariq Ali, one of the three central figures of the Third International (besides Lenin and Gramsci). Nevertheless, on the question of permanent revolution, and hence his interpretation of the Russian Revolution, he suffers from the recrudescence of his earlier Menshevik/Economist reasoning. If he forms one leg in a three-legged stool, next to Luxemburg and Lenin, then the metaphor must be refined: one of the stool’s legs is broken in half and the other seriously cracked this is not a stool to be resting on.

Leninism emerges as a strategy (of hegemony) which leads to a conclusion that a party of revolutionary Marxists is necessary to carrying this to victory. It could be understood in its early expression as the combination of the arguments in What Is to Be Done? and those in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. These provide the foundations for Lenin’s later theoretical innovations. If you adopt only the strategic argument, you are likely to produce a broad left or Kautskyist party. If you adopt only the organisational one, you end up building an organisation tainted with sectarianism (and often workerism). Leninism is the combination of both strategy and organisational conclusions.

BEYOND REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM TO LENINISM

Greene’s book is thus valuable and flawed a neat exemplar of Trotskyism itself. Ultimately, Greene fails to challenge the New Kautskyist’s erasure of Leninism “Lenin was not an original theorist” effectively. His defence is common among certain trends of Trotskyism. To choose one: it is perfectly acceptable to a Luxemburgist strain like the International Socialist Tendency, whose central theoretician was Tony Cliff. This tradition’s attitude to movement activity and the role of the party, to class consciousness and “revolution from below”, to the labour aristocracy and imperialism, to revolutions in the Global South, come from Luxemburg, Left Communism, or indeed Kautsky himself as much as from Lenin. This tradition’s lack of distinction between the “trinity” allows Economism and sponteneism to smuggle itself back in unannounced. In the end, this is what Greene’s book allows, even if it doesn’t advocate it. A defence of Leninism will need to be found elsewhere.

Leaving aside these theoretical and historical debates, Greene’s approach that of a “negative critique” without positive alternate construction has another unfortunate effect. It let slip the opportunity to engage in more contemporary questions. After all, no theoretical revival occurs without context, which places certain important problems on the order of the day. From this perspective, the revivals are typically responses to those questions. Emerging from the past, unsullied by the dramatic events following the First World War, Kautsky seems to be offering answers to those problems. Kautsky is no different from other surprising revivals (of someone like Carl Shmitt, say). His reemergence as a Marxist figure today comes from the idea of Kautsky as alternative to Stalinism and Trotskyism especially as alternative to the tragic victories and inspirational defeats of the Twentieth Century, the “age of extremes” in Hobsbawm’s words. Without those problems of today, Kautsky would likely have remained a figure in Lih’s historical reconstruction, of intellectual rather than practical import. Instead, a small intellectual current was born, producing thoughtful and influential publications (Jacobin, in particular, is no small achievement), along with modest, though not insignificant, political projects aligned with it.

The Kautskyists do not provide, however, the only possible answers to the unspoken questions. Before we can produce alternatives, however, we must recognise the legitimacy of them. On this, Greene’s book is of no help, since he provides only a negative critique. The third part in this series will grapple with these contemporary problems and the strategic options facing socialists.

Footnotes

1. On dialectics and Kautsky’s philosophical weakness, Engels’ famous 1891 “Preface” to The Class Struggles in France, on Kautsky’s ambiguous position on the nature of the state, his tendency toward gradualism all these Greene covers with some accuracy, even if we might not agree with his emphases or every conclusion. In Greene’s account, Kautsky commits to a parliamentary strategy from the 1891 Ehfurt Program; conversely, Kautsky was, as the New Kautskyists claim correctly, much closer to Lenin than Greene is prepared to admit; from my perspective, the evidence that Kautsky represented a “mechanical” Marxism, from which Lenin broke, is debateable All of these will be further explored in a more comprehensive examination of Kautsky, in the forthcoming “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky.” ↑
2. Douglas Green, Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (Routledge, 2024), p85. ↑
3. For some of the significant contributions see: Ben Lewis (ed), Kautsky, “Prospects of Russian Revolution,” introduced by Lars T. Lih and available here: https://www.academia.edu/5787087/KautskyLeninandtheAprilThesisintroducedbyLarsTLih. See also, LarsT Lih’s articles: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1450/supplement-back-to-nevsky/, and “Democratic Revolutions in Permenenz,” Science & Society, Vol. 76, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2012), pp. 433-462. In “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism,” Lih argues that Lenin and Kamenev differed over whether the “bourgeois revolution” had reached its conclusion. For Lih, “It was about a basic question of strategy: namely, should we continue with the old Bolshevik wager on the worker-peasant alliance? Or do we move beyond it now? Not in the future, but now? That is what I think the dispute was.” This provides a foundation for the argument that Lenin, by abandoning the peasantry, had drifted toward Trotsky’s position but Lih implicitly recognises the ultraleft nature of this drift based on Trotsky’s (and the Menshevik’s) repudiation of the role of the peasantry, and so assesses Kamenev’s position as more formally correct. Naturally, this argument is of a very different form to that of the Trotskyists, who would vehemently deny that this was Trotsky’s theory at all. If Lenin did drift at this time, it was, as we shall see, only temporary (as Lih notes). This article can be found here: https://links.org.au/lars-lih-ironic-triumph-old-bolshevism-april-debates-and-their-impact-bolshevik-strategy. Their critiques were prefigured by others during the literary debate of 1924 most effectively by Bukharin (see his piece, “The Theory of Permanent Revolution. An Article by Comrade N.I. Bukharin,” which appears to have influenced Gramsci, in Frederick C. Corney (ed), Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, p.514-554 but more recently by erstwhile Australian socialist Doug Lorimer (I alerted Lih, and from memory Blanc, of this book some years ago). Lorimer’s short book can be read here: https://www.dsp-rsp.org/doug-lorimer/1998-01-01/trotskys-theory-of-permanent-revolution-a-leninist-critique.html.
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4. “Stageism” is for Greene something of an original sin. Quite why it should be so self-evidently a problem is not clear, but one can see immediately how rejection of it might encourage ultraleftism if there is simply one “stage” then everything can happen now. ↑
5. Trotsky makes much of the “algebraic” character of Lenin’s formulation, the fact it doesn’t state who would have hegemony in the process (the working class) and then ironically reproduces the same type of formulation by for a “Workers and Farmers Government” in his 1938 Transitional Program. See: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text2.htm#wg ↑
6. One advantage of Lih’s claim that the Bolshevik leadership did not support the Provisional Government to the extent claimed by Trotskyists is that it erases the exceptionalist view of Lenin, without whom, in some readings of Trotsky’s narrative, the revolution would have never occurred a frighteningly individualistic perspective, reminiscent of the “great man of history” perspective, but also incredibly depressing for contemporary Leninists, since who among us is a Lenin? By contrast, this is implicitly also an argument for a Leninist party, schooled in the strategy of hegemony. For Lih’s argument, see https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1450/supplement-back-to-nevsky/ and also https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1332/for-or-against-agreementism/ ↑
7. In his biography of Stalin, Suny quotes the Georgian in 1924 admitting that he and others did in fact begin to adapt to an opportunist position, which provides the narrative that Lenin “re-armed” the party some evidence. On the other hand, any re-arming also occurred rapidly and without too much resistance hardly evidence of a significant crisis in the party. Perhaps the best way of considering Lenin’s return was as a re-orientation or re-adjustment, but here we’ll leave the question to the historians. See Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2020, p.611. ↑
8. “Letters on Tactics,” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 45-46. ↑
9. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, LCW, V9., p.110. Once again, against all those who would challenge the idea, Lenin insists on the continuity of his argument, from Economism all the way through to after 1917. ↑
10. Lenin, Collective Works, vol. 24, p. 62. ↑
11. Lenin, Collective Works, vol. 36, p. 437. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 437. ↑
12. Lenin, V. I. “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (a.k.a, The April Theses)”, available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm ↑
13. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 294. This is also available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/subservience.htm ↑
14. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 294-295. ↑
15. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 300. ↑
16. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, p. 301. ↑
17. We also find this nostalgic clasping onto Trotsky’s narrative in Paul Le Blanc’s response to Eric Blan’s challenge here: https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/did-the-bolsheviks-advocate-socialist-revolution-in-1917. Le Blanc’s reply is here: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1176/supplement-the-bolsheviks-socialist-revolution/ ↑
18. The mechanical nature of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution laces the debate with unrecognised irony, since its adherents typically claim it to be exemplars of “dialectical” flexibility. The issue of “mechanical” Marxism will be rejoined in “The Curious Case of Comrade Kautsky” and “Again, on the Trotsky-Gramsci Question” (likely forthcoming in Historical Materialism). ↑
19. Trotsky, “Our Differences,” available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch25.htm ↑
20. Trotsky, “Preface to the First Edition, 1905, available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/pre.htm ↑
21. Trotsky’s “Our Political Tasks“ (1904), available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/ch03.htm. Plekhanov, in a later argument against Lenin, makes precisely the same argument: “if the socialist revolution is a necessary consequence of the contradictions of capitalism, then it is clear that at a certain stage of social development the workers of capitalist countries would come to socialism even if left to themselves” (Cited in Samuel Barron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism, Standford University Press, 1963, p. 251.) ↑
22. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 419. ↑
23. Trotsky’s analyses of struggles in China (1927), Spain (1936-9), are 1. Typically revolutionary when placed beside the Stalinist strategy of those moments (which led to historic defeats) and 2. They remain laced with ultraleftism, making them of ambivalent value. At times they are prescient and insightful, at others misleadingly sectarian. ↑
24. Douglas Greene, p.142. Greene implies a capitulation on the part of Lih to Stalinism, which commonly relied on the distortion of the historical narrative (most famously even painting Trotsky out of photographs which showed him together with Lenin). The point however is to defend Lenin against Stalinism. ↑
25. See the section on China, where Lenin’s theory is upheld against the growing Stalinist-Menshevik position: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1927/opposition/opposition.pdf ↑
26. It is often forgotten that Kautsky was one of the first theorists of State Capitalism, here uniting with Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick and other Left Communists, whose theories eventually coalesce in Tony Cliff’s position. Greene is silent on this lineage. ↑
27. Luxemburg’s article can be read here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/ Lih points out that, “One explanation for this coalition is that it goes back to a similar coalition in 1904. At that time, two heroes of the activist tradition – Lev Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg – were Mensheviks or, at any rate, were prepared to work with the Mensheviks in combatting Lenin. Even today, a few oft-quoted sentences from Trotsky and Luxemburg are among the main props of the textbook interpretation.” (Lenin Reconsidered: What is To Be Done? in Context, Haymarket, 2008, p.21). The relationship of Lenin and Luxemburg’s theories will be outlined in more detail in a forthcoming article: “Luxemburgism and Leninism.” No doubt the continuing publication of Luxemburg’s Collected Works will uncover more nuances to Luxemurg’s positions, from which a more definitive portrait can be drawn. ↑
28. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow Publishers, Moscow, 1964, Vol. 23, p. 76. ↑
29. Blanc, like others, reduces Leninism to the argument of a “centralised party” and so conflates the SDKPiL and the Bolsheviks. Blanc argues that: “Rosa Luxemburg offers an illuminating case, especially because her views on party-building have so often been mistakenly counterposed to those of Lenin. Luxemburg’s DSKPIL in Tsarist Poland shared all of the attributes that are generally said to be the distinct features of Bolshevism in fact, her party was consistently more disciplined, top-down, and politically narrow. Yet during this very same period, Luxemburg did not seek to transform the German SPD along such lines nor did she even organise a distinct political tendency in Germany until after 1914.” Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, (1882 1917), Brill, 2021, p.93-94. He can thus make the claim that, “her party in Poland was consistently more ‘Leninist’ than the Bolsheviks.” Eric Blanc, p.237. ↑
30. Lih’s argument is that Lenin adopted the argument for a “party of a new type” for the tactical reasons that Luxemburg seems to have done the need to organise under repression from an absolutist state, but that this would be abandoned under more democratic conditions like those in Germany, where a more Kautskyist party is appropriate. This aligns with Luxemburg’s practice and Lenin only formally abandons it in 1912-1914. Luxemburg’s famous article, however, correctly senses that there is a strategic difference between them. ↑
31. Lenin, “National Program of the RSDLP,” Collected Works, Vol. 19. See also, Lenin, “The Rights of Nations to Self Determination,” Collected Works, Vol. 20. ↑
32. Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire, (1882 1917, p. 209. ↑
33. Instructive here is Alan Shandro’s response to IST member Paul Blackledge’s review of Lenin’s Logic of Hegemony, “Lenin and the Contradictions of Hegemony: Reply to Paul Blackledge.” Shandro notes how Blackledge defends not Lenin’s position but that of his opponents, under the cover of Leninism, just as he notes Blackledge’s implicit equation of the importance of Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin, in effect dissolving Leninism into a more general “revolutionary” Marxism. Shandro writes perceptively: “This brings us to Blackledge’s second criticism, that I portray Lenin as alone in his critique of Second International orthodoxy, omitting Luxemburg and Trotsky. Now if this orthodoxy is portrayed as “fatalism”, it goes without saying that Luxemburg and Trotsky broke with it. But as I assert above and demonstrate in the book, this portrayal is irredeemably flawed. It is not evident that the duo escaped the orbit of Second International orthodoxy as it figures in my account. Apparently, it is permissible to discuss Lenin’s thought only to the extent it aligns with Luxemburg and Trotsky. The interpretive practice of construing Lenin’s writing in terms of categories freighted with the meanings of others is ubiquitous in the western literature. This kind of practice is well calculated to reduce Lenin’s thought to the commonplaces of his milieu; it cannot aid in understanding the distinctive movement of his thought, how he thought.” His final devastating lines are, “Lenin’s ‘mature’ Blackledge’s word, not mine conception apparently consists in purging it of any reference to leadership in alliances across class divisions. That is, according to Blackledge it would consist in reverting to what amounts to a Menshevik conception of hegemony.” Exactly right. ↑
34. His writings during the 1920s and 1930s are, with few exceptions, remarkable in their strength of analysis and political acumen. The Third International After Lenin, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, The Revolution Betrayed, History of the Russian Revolution these are essential works of the Marxist canon. ↑

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