This is the fourth and concluding part of a 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, Stalinism, 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 FOUR: STRATEGIC PROBLEMS AND UNCERTAIN RESOLUTIONS

Twentieth Century socialism was a history of heroic defeats and tragic victories. An accurate accounting, I argued in Part Three of this series, cannot be made without an adequate assessment of the contradictory role of Stalinism, as alternately progressive and reactionary, as clarifying and confusing, its international activity reflecting or inverting the contradictory position of the Soviet bureaucratic regime. Assessing its arc across the “short” century, from 1917 to 1990 requires the contemporary Marxist to keep their dialectical sensibility acutely honed. On the one hand, Soviet support of global liberation movements, its ability to build progressive institutions and parties, its immense cultural impact, must be balanced with its zigzags from ultra-Leftism to opportunism. These zig-zags often contributed to historic defeats: from the ultra-Left Third Period, which helped facilitate the rise of fascism in Germany, to the Popular Front strategy, which (as a revivified form of Menshevism), paved the way for the Shanghai massacre of 1927, defeat in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and the overthrow of Chile’s Popular Unity government (Salvador Allende was himself an avowed Kautskyist), in the 1973 Pinochet coup.

Victorious revolutions following the Second World War the Cuban, the Vietnamese, the Chinese broke from to some extent, or sidestepped, the Stalinist strategies. The case was different in the imperialist nations, where the official communist parties typically and ironically for our argument here developed increasingly toward policies that resembled Kautskyism, now bolstered by the theoretical weight of Western Marxism. The affinity between the New Kautksyists and Eurocommunism is evident when Eric Blanc writes, in an argument that might have been found in Eurocommunist Nicos Poulantzas’s 1977 book State, Power, Socialism:

Even at his most radical, Kautsky rejected the relevance of an insurrectionary strategy within capitalist democracies. His case was simple: the majority of workers in parliamentary countries would generally seek to use legal mass movements and the existing democratic channels to advance their interests. Technological advances, in any case, had made modern armies too strong to be overthrown through uprisings on the old nineteenth-century model of barricade street fighting. For these reasons, democratically elected governments had too much legitimacy among working people and too much armed strength for an insurrectionary approach to be realistic. History has confirmed Kautsky’s predictions.¹

But for the New Kautskyists, this is not a response to new developments, not a reflection of late capitalism’s “development” and “complexity” (as Eurocommunists and Post-Marxists argued from the 1960s onward). In this argument, the mass action, “insurrectionist,” approach has always been off the table.² The irony here is redolent: the New Kautskyists present themselves as the solution to the problem of official communism, which in the form of Eurocommunism once held the very views that the New Kautskyists now hope to revive.³ The socialist worm of ouroboros eats its own tail.

Critics of the New Kautskyism can thus respond in turn: where has there ever been a successful example of such a parliamentary strategy even when it is supported by external “outside” mass action or institutional working-class power (powerful unions, movement organisations etc)? Isn’t Kautsky’s strategy the utopian one, unable to adequately account for events during the Twentieth Century?

MASS ACTION AND THE WEST

The history of the Twentieth Century still reveals that most progressive victories, most reforms, have occurred only on the backs of or in interaction with mass action campaigns. Gains had principally to be won on the streets or suffer “elite capture.”⁴ To choose one example: the civil rights movement in the USA emerged in the mid-1950s, spurred on by symbolic tragedies and events (the murder of Emmet Till, Rosa Park’s famous arrest for refusing to sit in the “coloured section” of a Alabama bus), growing to intensified actions in the South, including the freedom rides and Martin Luther King’s march on Alabama, before its shift in focus during the late 1960s to the inner-city ghettos and the radical black youth in the north (the Bay Area, Chicago, Manhattan). Such on-the-ground activism allowed and propelled the introduction of civil rights reforms. Here Malcolm X’s radical attitude retains its full force: nothing is given by the elites for free but must be wrestled from them against their will.⁵ Even if such mass movements never approach any kind of radical social transformation, they remain the essential component historically for progressive social change. This understanding unites Leninists with Luxemburgists, Left Communists, Anarchists, New Leftists, and the broad category of social movement activists.

Why does mass action possess this quality? First: it proposes that everyone is an agent, an active participant, rather than a passive onlooker here it is a revitalisation of the idea of citizenship, born with the French Revolution. It is an assertion of democracy not capitalist democracy but popular democracy, that of the working class and the broad masses. Socialism, after all, is the massive extension of democracy over society. Revolutionary mass action is, in this sense, the moment humanity consciously takes control of history, becomes the subject of history, not simply its object. As individuals and groups enter struggle, they learn rapidly, in leaps and bounds, about the nature of the real political forces at any conjuncture. They listen, they act, they choose, they make decisions, they weigh up arguments, they push themselves forward, they realign themselves from one set of ideas to another, they suffer defeats and victories. In the roiling, shifting, seething struggle, they come to see not through a glass darkly, but face to face then shall they know even as they are known. In Lenin’s view, this (discussed in Part One) could only be successful if a united organisation of Marxists merges with and wins leadership of that movement through a strategy of hegemony: an “all-round” and “all-national” struggle against all forms of oppressions and injustice and abuse, no matter who (“which class”) is affected. In this practical process, the movement’s participants can reach anti-systemic consciousness, an “irreconcilable antagonism to the system as a whole” i.e., socialist consciousness. This would be “the practical, understanding of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life [i.e. political activity RD].”⁶ For Leninists, the various tactics (alliances and blocs, election campaigns, etc) are designed to stimulate and develop this mass action strategic perspective.

PROBLEMS OF LENINISM

This argument, when extended beyond the history of the Russian Revolution, poses obvious problems ones that underpin the emergence of the New Kautskyists. What explains the quiescence of the working class in the “West?” Why have mass movements so rarely transcended protest status to reach a transformational one whether political or cultural? Lenin’s answer to these questions most clearly crystallised during the First World War, as he developed three interrelated theories: imperialism, labour aristocracy, bourgeois-workers/revolutionary party. His argument ran like this: by enriching the imperialist nations, imperialism (theory one) built a stratum of the working class (theory two), a “labour aristocracy,” bought off with the riches sucked from the exploited world. This stratum, formed from workers in specific and privileged industries or positions, formed the material base for institutionalised opportunism. The key political institution that represented this stratum was a new form of bourgeois party (theory three), a “bourgeois workers” party, against which the Marxist party must battle. Parallel to these innovations, between 1912-1916, Lenin came to the final organisational conclusion of the arguments first mounted in What Is to Be Done? there could be no extended cohabitation of Marxists and opportunists within the same party. The challenges facing Marxists in the “West,” for Lenin, were less to do with class alliances (as in the Global South) and more to do with differentiation within the working class, where a privileged layer played the role of bourgeois agent. The problem here was particularly of unity within a fractured working class. Any strategy of “hegemony” would consequently be more complex and longer running in the imperial core. Conversely, any successful revolution in the “West” would find the transition to socialism easier than in the “East.”⁷ This truism highlights one of the tragic ironies of the Twentieth Century: the victory of struggle for socialism would be more likely in the very places it would be most difficult to sustain. As Lenin claimed, the breakthrough would occur not at the strongest point of the international system but at its “weakest link.”

Even armed with these three theories, after 1917 Lenin was initially wildly optimistic about socialist prospects immediately after the Russian Revolution. At the First Congress of the Third International in 1919, he described the coming victories as “assured.” Over the next few years, Lenin’s romantic, enthusiastic vision started to fray, replaced with a sense of anxiety as revolutions beyond Tsarist Russia Italy, Hungary, Germany, Finland were derailed or defeated. What was the problem? He maintained a faith in the “objective factor,” in capitalism’s role in propelling the revolutionary upsurge in the West a position he shared with most of the generation of the Second International, raised as they were on Kautsky, whose passivity was founded in such faith. In Lenin, this belief functioned differently: the objective crisis of capitalism would, in his mind, continue to foster social and political crises the problem would lie in the subjective factor, the question of the leadership of the movement. Thus, he developed the arguments of What is To Be Done? further. Without an active socialist party, spontaneous consciousness would be trapped in capitalism’s cul-de-sacs, and Lenin focussed on the need for any party to be tactically flexible, forging conjunctural alliances, participation in parliament or boycott of it, passing through both splits and unity processes, sometimes choosing independent activity or participation within a broader party.⁸ Confident of the objective conditions for revolution the reality of capitalist crisis and the consequent mass movements against the ruling order Lenin’s focus fell on the “subjective factor” the question of socialist activity as the crucial question. The Third International was formed in 1919 to help overcome the political weakness of the Marxist movement. At its Second Congress in 1920, all delegates were given a copy of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder his most significant contribution to socialist strategy and tactics in the West and an attempt to generalise the Bolshevik experience for all. He emphasised: “All efforts and all attention should now be concentrated on the next step, which may seem and from a certain viewpoint actually is less fundamental, but, on the other hand, is actually closer to a practical accomplishment of the task. That step is: the search after forms of the transition or the approach to the proletarian revolution [my emphasis RD].”⁹ At the end of that text, Lenin reflected on the failure of Kautsky:

[H]ighly erudite Marxists devoted to socialism as Kautsky, Otto Bauer and others, could (and should) provide a useful lesson. They fully appreciated the need for flexible tactics; they themselves learned Marxist dialectic and taught it to others (and much of what they have done in this field will always remain a valuable contribution to socialist literature); however, in the application of this dialectic they committed such an error, or proved to be so undialectical in practice, so incapable of taking into account the rapid change of forms and the rapid acquisition of new content by the old forms, that their fate is not much more enviable than that of Hyndman, Guesde and Plekhanov. The principal reason for their bankruptcy was that they were hypnotised by a definite form of growth of the working-class movement and socialism, forgot all about the one-sidedness of that form, were afraid to see the break-up which objective conditions made inevitable, and continued to repeat simple and, at first glance, incontestable axioms that had been learned by rote, like: “three is more than two”.¹⁰

The form that Kautsky and the others were “hypnotised” by, of course, was that of a strategy of parliamentarism.

Soon, however, a deeper problem arose for Lenin: even those communist parties who formally agreed with the Third International’s policies and Lenin’s arguments seemed incapable of applying this method. Any intellectual grasp of the theory of Leninism was not accompanied by a practical understanding of its application. The German party was the preeminent example of this, and we find it making radical tactical shifts, a la Bolshevik precedent, which are almost universally misjudged.¹¹ By the Fourth Congress of the Fourth International in 1922, Lenin’s tone had shifted profoundly. He noted that there had been a problem with translating the Bolshevik experience beyond Russia. Discussing the previous years’ resolution on the organisational structure and methods of communist parties, he said, “The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success.” He called for a return to first principles: “I think that after five years of the Russian revolution the most important thing for all of us, Russian and foreign comrades alike, is to sit down and study. we must take advantage of every moment of respite from fighting, from war, to study, and to study from scratch.”¹²

To study “from scratch” indicates the seriousness of the rethinking that Lenin was proposing, though naturally he doesn’t mean to retreat to a more simplistic theory (Kautskyism) or to reconsider Marxism in total, or to jettison his own first principles there is no sense in Lenin’s speech that the document mentioned was wrong, or their line of march should be reversed. On the contrary, the document is correct, and he “agrees with every line of it” he is not questioning his strategy and its organisational conclusions. Instead, he seems to be referring to the problem he outlined in Left-Wing Communism, that: “It is now essential that Communists of every country should quite consciously take into account both the fundamental objectives of the struggle against opportunism and “Left” doctrinairism [i.e. the struggle for Leninism], and the concrete features which this struggle assumes and must inevitably assume in each country, in conformity with the specific character of its economics, politics, culture, and national composition (Ireland, etc.), its colonies, religious divisions, and so on and so forth.”¹³ Underneath the “subjective factor” lay the “objective factor”, for they can never be truly separated, except conceptually: leadership must be of something after all what is that thing, the working class, and what landscape does it find itself in? Any examination of a “leadership” entails an analysis of what it is that is being led, and the conditions in which this occurs.

Left-Wing Communism gives us a hint of the paradox at the heart of this problem, which Lenin seemed to be slowly realising. In the pamphlet, Lenin claims that to understand the Bolshevik success, one had to understand its history, all the way back to its formation in 1902-3. Only this entire history explains the Bolshevik party’s success in 1917. The unspoken argument is that effective Leninist parties, with creative and flexible and imaginative leaderships at their helm, must be forged through their participation in real struggle over an extended period. The Bolshevik example was, however, double-edged. For all its instructive value, the Bolshevik experience bound to that of the Russian Empire itself in its final decades was something of an outlier. With a Tsarist regime that was beset by multiple, overlapping, and permanently heightened contradictions which ensured almost twenty years of ongoing, mass struggle. So, the success of 1917 was in part brought about by the 1905 rehearsal, which introduced the world to the soviet and allowed each actor to develop their strategies, analyse the alignment of forces, practice their roles. In a sense, the Russians had a practice run, and while the Bolsheviks failed the first time around, the experience positioned them all the better for the events of 1917. What nation was likely to experience anything like this sustained radicalisation? The exceptionalism of the Bolsheviks lies then in the scale and duration of the movement against the already-fragile Tsarist system. As the “weakest link,” Russia would make the transition more easily than anywhere else every other link was stronger, every other struggle would be more difficult. Lenin did not emphasise this in his pamphlet, since he considered that other nations would follow in Russia’s path. The national complexity of Germany, with its many cities and diverse loci of power, with its varied, relatively autonomous rhythms of political struggle according to region, more varied than the more centralised Russian State, in which a disproportionate place was taken by St Petersburg and Moscow. Without the peasant revolution, their demand for land, how would the dynamics of class alliances play out? What did this diversity and stratification, on a scale greater than in Russia, mean for the nature of the working class itself or strategy? Lenin was never able to reflect on these questions in any depth, in his last months, he was already engaged in the struggle against bureaucracy in Russia, whose rise also gave him pause for thought: as Lars Lih notes this in his biography Lenin, “only at the end of his career did Lenin make serious adjustments to his [heroic] scenario,” which envisioned a mass, empowered, politically conscious working class at the head of the “people,” marching triumphantly to victory. By his last article in February 1923, Lenin was looking toward the East the Asian world for coming breakthroughs. This perspective proved correct: China and Vietnam would be the next anti-capitalist breakthroughs, but what did this mean for the West?

LENIN’S HAUNTING INJUNCTION: STUDY FROM SCRATCH

From the early 1920s, the leading lights of the Third International thus confronted real problems for which there were no obvious and easy answers. They codified the kind of flexible strategy that Lenin had encouraged in a series of theses and resolutions: the united front tactic, the slogan of a “workers’ government”, transitional slogans. This even included the idea that a parliamentary victory a type of workers’ government might prove central to the development of socialist struggle. In the “On the Tactics of the Comintern,” the Fourth Congress of the Comintern stated:

Even a workers’ government that arises from a purely parliamentary combination, that is, one that is purely parliamentary in origin, can provide the occasion for a revival of the revolutionary workers’ movement. Obviously, the birth and continued existence of a genuine workers’ government, one that pursues revolutionary policies, must result in a bitter struggle with the bourgeoisie, and possibly a civil war. Even an attempt by the proletariat to form such a workers’ government will encounter from the outset most determined resistance from the bourgeoisie. The slogan of the workers’ government thus has the potential of uniting the proletariat and unleashing revolutionary struggle.¹⁴

The early congresses of the Third International remain crucial touchstones for their attempts to theorise the tactical flexibility that Lenin so emphasised. However, the elaboration of these types of tactical steps these transitional forms was quickly foreclosed by the rise of the Stalinist elite in Russia and the Fascist movements in the West. For the next twenty years this task would have to be undertaken from the margins. Of the three major figures of the Third International, the second, Leon Trotsky, spent the next twenty years applying these already codified perspectives from isolation for the most part his work was reaffirmation and application of previously established principles of the Third International rather than extension or development of them (the erroneousness of his theory of permanent revolution discussed in Part Two of this series notwithstanding). It fell to the third major figure of the Third International, Antonio Gramsci, to grapple with the unanswered problems from the enforced isolation of a fascist prison cell perhaps the only place it could have been done without excommunication from the now thoroughly Stalinised International.¹⁵ Gramsci understood the stakes: he had been the primary Italian Communist Party (PCI) representative in Russia at the time of the Fourth Congress which registered the period of retreat now facing the socialist movement a member of the extended Executive Committee of the International, and had spent an afternoon in a one-on-one meeting with Lenin late in 1922. In 1924, Gramsci had returned to Italy to redirect the PCI toward the United Front policy, for two years initiating a period of creative and tactically flexible Leninism rare among any of the communist parties of the time.¹⁶ His arrest in 1926 forever separated him from practical political activity and was part of long dark years for the PCI under Mussolini’s fascist regime. Gramsci’s confinement was a political and personal tragedy, but it produced his prismatic Prison Notebooks notes for essays he never had a chance to write a titanic achievement. Running through the notebooks was the problem posed by Lenin in 1922 at the Third International Congress: what has caused the inability of Leninism to be successfully practiced beyond Russia? Kaleidoscopic rather than organically unified, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks remain suggestive rather than conclusive open to multiple interpretations. Their subtitle might well read: handle with care.¹⁷

When a new flowering of Marxist theory occurred, it was generated by Stalinism’s own fracturing and self-critique in the wake of Khruschev’s 1956 “Secret Speech.” Two main streams of Western Marxism emerged: a Hegelian/humanist current and a Structuralist one. Antagonistic to each other, these streams produced significant and sophisticated work: on philosophy, social structure and the nature of “class,” state form and function, literature and culture. Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Althusser, Poulantzas, E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm all of these thinkers remain essential touchstones for contemporary Marxist analysis. Yet on the issue of strategy, with a brief Maoist revival aside, Western Marxism’s trajectory was mostly rightward, toward a reconfigured Kautskyism in the form of Eurocommunism. This in turn sparked a counter-current of Leftism in the form of autonomism, New Leftism, Guevarism, Luxemburgism all these developed outside the traditional communist movement. On the question of Strategy, then, contemporary socialists find themselves returning to the debates of “Classical Marxism,” of Kautsky and Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, Bordiga and Gramsci. As in this series, socialists scour this history for answers to the questions of reform and revolution, of parliament and mass action, of party and movement, of imperialism and nationalism. Lenin’s injunction to “study from scratch” haunts the Twenty First Century socialist movement like a spectre.

The contemporary forms of these problems require ongoing rethinking. Imperialism has mutated: de-colonisation enforcing the wealth transfer through other mechanisms such as unequal exchange, economic “agreements” and “treaties.” Formal national independence obscures the subjugation of the exploited. In this context, the form of anti-imperialist struggle will look somewhat different. At the same time, social relations within the exploited world have transformed, with a great deal of manufacturing now occurring there. Capitalist relations have extended to the countryside: increasingly, rural populations are workers rather than peasants. Among the most politically decisive of the Global South nations today are the so-called “semi-peripheral” nations (South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, the Philippines, Argentina, India, Mexico, Turkey, China), who either sit in the upper band of exploited nations or whose economies include a significant industrial or manufacturing sector, producing a working class of some potential power, and for whom a socialist victory might mean important improvements for substantial numbers of the population (rises in the standard of living, literacy programs, improve health-care systems, greater social mobility for marginalised groups, access to educations, etc). In such nations lies the greatest likelihood of socialist gains.

In the imperial core, neoliberalism has imposed a wildly individualistic culture, actively reconstructing the body politic and national institutions, implementing market mechanisms at every level, eviscerating the traditional working-class industries (in the former “rust belts”) and tearing apart their communities. Concurrently, there has been a growth in one-person small businesses (the gig economy), an enforced entrepreneurialism where everyone is their own “brand,” where employers can outsource their responsibilities to the individual, the sole contractor. In other words, there has been a swelling of the petit bourgeoisie from highly exploited gig-workers (uber drivers and the like) to white-collar loners working online.

The imperial core working class comprises most of the population, yet is increasingly fragmented, so that to speak of it as some unitary object can seem anachronistic. Fractured into profession and industry, class rarely features in the modern progressive’s “identities.” This transformation has been accompanied by a precipitous decline in unionisation and disintegration of support for the traditional social democratic parties, which have almost all transformed themselves into neoliberal progressivist ones. The consequence has been a gradual decoupling of class from party across the Western World, so that the former working class rust belts played some role in the recent election of Trump, in the Brexit vote, in the turn to the Right in the north of Italy, once the communist stronghold. With the two-party establishment consensus fraying at the edges, Broad Left Parties have managed to seize some of the disillusioned. Yet the socialist Left, with only a few noble exceptions (the DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the USA, the Belgian Workers Party, La France Insoumise), has barely raised their head from the canvas. Perhaps the greatest ideological challenge to any Left is the ongoing strength of nationalism, which is as deeply held and powerful as ever.

If political quiescence has been typical across the Western world without erasing the anti-Globalisation movement, anti-War movement, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Palestinian solidarity today is this a cause or consequence of the Left’s political defeat? An unspoken question hovers in the background everywhere: is capitalism so reconfigured, so complicated, so powerfully constructed with systems of coercion and consent, so replete with repressive desublimation, leaving the Western working class so atomised and stratified, so unrecognisably a “single group,” that there is no longer any hope in mass, active opposition to the ruling elite? Have we all become one-dimensional men and women? Are we simply plunging into barbarism in a slow apocalypse with no path through? Or is this all simply the result of an epochal political defeat of the Left, leaving collective movements leaderless and in disarray? These are less the questions of the New Kautskyists and more in the realm of Post-Marxism, where the world has transformed so powerfully under late capitalism that the old class notions, if they were ever relevant, are now obsolete relicts.¹⁸ They are, nevertheless, part of the New Kautskyist’s political unconscious part of the landscape from which they have sprung.

OUT OF THE ABYSS: KAUTSKY AND LENIN TODAY

For all the value the Kautsky revival has offered, whatever political projects it has inspired and sustained, close inspection reveals that the theory itself is not so much a solution to the strategic impasse as a symptom of it. Kautskyism has reemerged in the context of the historic defeat of the Eastern Bloc, the collapse of the socialist movement, especially in the imperial core (in both communist and social-democratic forms), in a period of political quiescence. It is a theoretical response to the shift in Left energies toward electoral projects: Corbyn and Sanders, at the time of writing the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York, as part of the Democratic Socialists of America. What may make sense as a tactical shift for the New Kautskyists has become a strategic orientation, now confirmed with the Pope of Marxism’s theoretical ballast. The danger is always to confuse the conjunctural for the long-term. This, I suggest, is the pitfall of the New Kautskyists: “There is barely any mass activity at the moment; it isn’t a viable strategy.” Its strategy of patience and parliamentarism is infused by the very mood and landscape it is intervening in. Perceptive readers of this series will already have sensed the argument I have been approaching: such judgements, the sort made by the New Kautskyists, are adaptions to spontaneous consciousness, to the surrounding progressive culture as it is today, infused with capitalist ideology. They are, if you like, Economist forms of thought of the sort we outlined in the first Part of this series. In examining the landscape of possibility, the New Kautskyists have started to absorb it. They have stared into the abyss of the present, and the abyss has stared back into them.

If there’s a rediscovery we need, it’s not so much of Kautsky but of Lenin. This series makes an extended case for Leninism’s specificities its strategy of hegemony and its organisational conclusions (a united party of Marxist activists). This approach is distinct from collapsing Leninism into broader revolutionary Marxism (as we find in Douglas Greene’s book). The real debate is, after all, about Kausky’s relationship to Lenin. The New Kautskyists are precisely the kinds of groups that Leninists would seek to ally with, forging unity on issues where there was agreement, attempting to develop ongoing links and projects.¹⁹ However, their claim that Lenin was not an original theorist is a significant misreading. They talk of a great forgetting, which has seen the Second International and Kautsky ignored, but Lenin too has been the subject of a great forgetting, buried beneath a century of ideologically driven debate.

Any Leninist who has been active in “broad left parties,” and who has been active in movements of some significance, knows the issues at stake and it is difficult to explain these to anyone who hasn’t. One becomes sensitive to the ways broad left groups encourage the dissolution of Marxism, the slow abandonment of activism, a bureaucratic distinction between members and leaders, a lack of unity and ability to carry out unified and productive work, replacing it instead with a strategy of passivity and “patience.” By contrast, Left Communist or Luxemburgist organisations often stand at the sidelines of movements, opposing conservative or reformist leadership from “below” but unable to win it for themselves. From this perspective, Leninism is quite pragmatic: do what works; don’t do what will undermine the struggle or socialist ideas; be involved in the key struggles of the day and, unless your organisation is too tiny to do this yet, apply the strategy of hegemony attempt to win the movement to socialist consciousness, to irreconcilable opposition to the “system as a whole.” For this, a Leninist group must be the best builder of social movements. They must ask: what does the movement/organisation need right now? How can it take the next step forward? How can it grow ever larger, ever stronger, ever more united and powerful? How can we approach the problem of transition that Lenin highlighted as so crucial.

Socialists might succeed or fail. Or more likely some ironic version between the two: the Twenty-First Century is as likely to be filled with ambiguity and ambivalence as was the last. Capitalism may not be entering its death agony as quickly as the biosphere. Socialism or barbarism seems an almost immediate question, as any clear-sighted observer of conditions in the Global South can observe. What kind of psychological repression is required to pretend that, in a globalised world boasting historic wealth, it is “civilized” to allow fifty percent of those living none of it? Whether a mass Leninist party can be built and whether it can win a place at the head of a mass, anti-capitalist movement is uncertain. Despite this uncertainty, Leninism’s focus on encouraging the mass movement to emerge, to develop, to create its own activists, its insistence of a systemic analysis all this is of value regardless. A Leninist group that helps build anti-capitalist ideas and social movements would be something not nothing. It is indeed the best path to winning reforms demanded by parliamentary representatives there is nothing the elite hate more than the presence of thousands on the street opposing their policies and becoming increasingly radicalised. Whether this project is successful, only the struggle will decide if not once and for all, then perhaps for “a moment,” which, as human beings is all that we ever really have.

Footnotes

1. Eric Blanc, “Why Kautsky Was Right (and Why You Should Care),” Jacobin Magazine, April 4, 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture. ↑
2. Massimo Salvadori’s intellectual biography, Kautsky and the Social Revolution, traces Kautsky’s evolution over his life and remains an important foundational work. ↑
3. This is perhaps too glib, since it is specifically revolutionary Marxisms that they locate as the problem. However, this still places on them the responsibility of accounting for Eurocommunism’s failures. ↑
4. To use Ol femi O. T w ‘s term in his excellent recent book depicting what Gramsci once called “passive revolution.” ↑
5. Later “equal rights” legislation or other legal reforms became means of co-opting and demobilising that mass movement, de-radicalising it, a process that involved the integration of members of oppressed groups into the Establishment institutions (universities, local government, progressive businesses) and progressive capitalist parties. Such “opportunities” were offered with one key condition, unspoken, unconscious you get the job so long as you abandon any fidelity to class and socialism. Welcome to Critical Race Theory. ↑
6. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm ↑
7. Trotsky famously made this same argument at the Fourth Congress of the Third International, which forms the starting point of Gramsci’s famous arguments about the State and Civil Society, the war of position and war of manoeuvre. ↑
8. This crisis of Leninism, based in overconfidence, is examined in Claudin, Fernando 1975, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Penguin. Pp.63-71. Claudin’s presentation of Lenin as fundamentally orthodox dovetails with the New Kautskyists. He also, as a Left Eurocommunist, argues much the same as Blanc, that Lenin misunderstood the cultural attachment of western workers to democracy. ↑
9. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch10.htm ↑
10. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch10.htm ↑
11. The “March Action” in Germany 1921 is the paradigmatic example, where the CP, with advice from the International’s representatives, organised a disastrous putsch. ↑
12. “Five Years Of The Russian Revolution And The Prospects Of The World Revolution
    Report To The Fourth Congress Of The Communist International, November 13, 1922” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/04b.htm ↑
13. Lenin, Collected Works V31, p 91. ↑
14. Available here: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics-of-comintern.htm ↑
15. This claim that there are three great figures of the Third International is made also by Tariq Ali in Dilemmas of Lenin. ↑
16. See https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/between-como-and-confinement-gramscis-early-leninism/ ↑
17. The Historical Materialism book series have done much to promote the work of Gramsci. Alvaro Bianchi’s Gramsci’s Laboratory and Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment are particularly valuable. ↑
18. Where once Laclau and Mouffe, with their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, were the doyens of this trend, then Negri and Hardt with Empire. The defenders of classical Marxism were firstly Norman Geras Discourses of Extremity and Ellen Meiksins-Wood, The Retreat from Class. ↑
19. Kautskyism, however, always contains within itself a possible tendency toward sectarianism. Since Leninists do not hold a “broad party” perspective, they become a problem: they make so much fuss about united perspectives and activity, about the question of leadership, when instead we could all just live happily in the all-inclusive party. From this perspective, one might then side against those who insist on unity around political perspectives i.e. political principle in favour of those who want to let any old ideas exist in a group and any self-proclaimed Marxist join and claim full membership rights regardless of activity i.e. unprincipled combinations (“circle-spirit” as Lenin sometimes called it). ↑

Source: https://red-spark.org/2025/07/19/kautskyism-and-trotskyism-reflections-on-doug-greens-the-new-reformism-and-the-revival-of-karl-kautsky-part-four/