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Lenin in a year writings of a revolutionary

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that Lenin's 1894 work What the 'Friends of the People' are and how they fight Social-Democrats remains an indispensable weapon for revolutionaries today, not merely as a historical curiosity but as a living demonstration of the Marxist method in action. Its central thesis is that Lenin's polemic against liberal Narodnism — a movement that had degenerated from revolutionary terrorism into petty-bourgeois reformism — provides the template for combating contemporary liberalism within the workers' movement. The claim is that the same idealist, ahistorical reasoning that led the Narodniks to imagine a uniquely Russian path to socialism, bypassing capitalism and class struggle, reappears today in the form of moralistic appeals, eclectic reformism, and the refusal to confront the objective laws of capitalist development.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws directly on Lenin's application of historical materialism and the dialectical method, as developed by Marx and Engels. The article foregrounds Lenin's insistence that Marxism is a scientific sociology — one that treats society as a "living organism in a state of constant development" rather than a "mechanical aggregation of individuals" open to arbitrary rearrangement by well-meaning reformers. This is contrasted with the "subjective method" of the Narodniks, which Lenin skewers as a form of wishful thinking that substitutes moral outrage for concrete analysis of class forces.

The article also situates Lenin's work within the broader Marxist tradition of polemical intervention. It traces the baton-passing from Plekhanov, who first established Marxism in Russia by refuting Narodnik exceptionalism, to Lenin, who deepened and extended that critique. The theoretical stakes are clear: either revolutionaries base themselves on the actual laws of motion of capitalist society — including the progressive, if brutal, role of capitalist development in creating the material conditions for socialism — or they retreat into utopian schemes that ultimately serve the existing order.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article connects Lenin's polemic directly to the present conjuncture in two ways. First, it draws a parallel between the liberal Narodniks of the 1890s and today's petty-bourgeois "theorists" who treat capitalism's contradictions as accidental features that can be corrected by better ideas and moral appeals. The argument is that contemporary reformism — whether in the form of NGO-style activism, electoral centrism, or academic leftism — reproduces the same idealist error: the belief that history can be moulded at will, without confronting the objective constraints of the capitalist mode of production.

Second, the article situates the series within the RCI's own political project. The launch of Lenin in a Year is explicitly tied to the founding of the Revolutionary Communist International in June 2024. The claim is that Lenin's method — proceeding from an "unsentimental assessment of the facts" to elaborate a "bold revolutionary plan of action" — is precisely what is needed to rebuild a revolutionary international in an era of capitalist crisis, war, and the exhaustion of reformist strategies.

Where the Argument Continues

The article announces that the series will continue with The Development of Capitalism in Russia, written while Lenin was on trial and in exile between 1896-99. That text is positioned as a further polemic against Narodnism, this time focused on exploding the myth that Russian capitalist development was artificial or state-imposed. The broader corpus to which this belongs includes the new biography In Defence of Lenin by Rob Sewell and Alan Woods, which the article recommends as a "vital textbook on how to build a revolutionary party." Readers should also look to the RCI's founding conference materials and the ongoing output of Against the Stream for the practical elaboration of the political line sketched here.

Connections

This article connects most directly to Lenin's own What the 'Friends of the People' Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894) and The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). The theoretical tradition invoked is that of Plekhanov's early Marxist writings, particularly his polemics against Narodnism in the 1880s. The article also implicitly engages with the broader Marxist literature on the relationship between economic determinism and revolutionary agency — a theme central to Engels's later letters on historical materialism and to Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. For contemporary readers, the article should be read alongside the RCI's programmatic documents and the ongoing debates within the Marxist left about the nature of the current conjuncture, particularly the relationship between imperialist war, capitalist crisis, and the tasks of building a revolutionary party.

Key Quotes

  1. "What Marx and Engels called the dialectical method—as against the metaphysical—is nothing else than the scientific method in sociology, which consists in regarding society as a living organism in a state of constant development (and not as something mechanically concatenated and therefore permitting all sorts of arbitrary combinations of separate social elements)."

  2. "Just as Darwin put an end to the view of animal and plant species being unconnected, fortuitous, 'created by God' and immutable, and was the first to put biology on an absolutely scientific basis by establishing the mutability and the succession of species, so Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities."

  3. "The whole of their philosophy amounts to whining that struggle and exploitation exist but that they 'might' not exist… if there were no exploiters."

  4. "The onset of capitalism is progressive 'despite all the horrors of the oppression of labour, of gradual extinction, brutalisation, and the crippling of the bodies of women and children, etc.—because it AWAKENS THE MIND OF THE WORKER.'"

  5. "When its advanced representatives have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread, and when stable organisations are formed among the worker to transform the workers' present sporadic economic war into conscious class struggle—then the Russian WORKER rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) along the straight road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION."