2. An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks’ Success¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin opens this chapter by asserting a near-universal recognition that Bolshevik rule—enduring two and a half years, let alone months—was impossible without two things: iron discipline within the Party, and the unreserved support of the entire working-class mass, meaning its thinking, devoted, and influential elements capable of leading the backward strata. He immediately grounds this in the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, defining it as a ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie’s power, Lenin argues, lies not only in international capital and durable international connections but also in the force of habit and, crucially, the strength of small-scale production. Small-scale production, still widespread, engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. This necessity for a long, stubborn, life-and-death struggle demands tenacity, discipline, and a single, inflexible will.
Lenin then poses the central analytical question: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained, tested, and reinforced? He provides three conditions. First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard, its devotion, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain closest contact, and merge in certain measure with the broadest masses of working people—primarily the proletariat, but also non-proletarian working masses. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership, strategy, and tactics exercised by this vanguard, provided the broad masses have seen from their own experience that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party capable of overthrowing the bourgeoisie cannot be achieved; all attempts fall flat into phrasemongering and clowning. These conditions, Lenin stresses, cannot emerge at once but are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience, facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory which is not a dogma but assumes final shape in close connection with a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.
The chapter’s core historical argument explains why Bolshevism alone could build this discipline. Lenin points to two historical peculiarities of Russia. First, Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a very firm foundation of Marxist theory. He traces how progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by brutal tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory for half a century—from the 1840s to the 1890s—following every “last word” from Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism, the only correct revolutionary theory, through unparalleled torment, sacrifice, revolutionary heroism, searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia acquired a wealth of international links and information on world revolutionary movements such as no other country possessed. Second, Bolshevism went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in its wealth of experience: a rapid and varied succession of legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local and mass, parliamentary and terrorist forms of struggle. No other country concentrated such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes, a struggle that, owing to Russia’s backwardness and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity and assimilated the “last word” of American and European political experience.
The polemical thrust is directed against those who salute the Soviets and Bolsheviks without profound analysis of the conditions that made their discipline possible. Lenin is arguing against a superficial or voluntarist understanding of revolutionary discipline, insisting it cannot be conjured but is the product of a specific history, correct theory, and organic connection to the masses.