Chapter 6 Lenin said so Himself¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 6: Lenin said so Himself¶
This chapter subjects four recent attempts to argue that Lenin later changed his view of the October Revolution as a socialist, proletarian revolution establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat to rigorous critique. The central contention is that these interpretations—advanced by Jenness, Lorimer, and others—lack scholarly rigour and rely on selective quotation taken out of context.
The argument that from October 1917 to summer 1918 the Soviet regime constituted the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry (RDDPP) foreseen in Lenin’s Two Tactics is systematically dismantled. Jenness’s case rests on four pillars: peasant support for the Bolsheviks; Left SR participation giving the government a two-class character; the revolution not extending to the countryside until summer 1918; and the government limiting itself to bourgeois-democratic tasks until the Left SRs departed. Each is shown to be flawed. Peasant support was common to all three schemas—Lenin 1905, Lenin 1917, and Trotsky 1906. The Left SRs joined only after accepting the Bolshevik programme, including socialist goals; they did not determine policy, and their participation was brief. The claim that the state’s class character is determined by its economic base is formalistic: Lenin and Trotsky held that the proletariat first seizes state power, then uses it to transform the economy. Lenin’s State and Revolution focuses on smashing the old state machine, not the economic base, and sets no interim form like the RDDPP.
Lenin repeatedly stressed the socialist nature of the October Revolution and the proletarian nature of the resulting state power. In March 1918, he stated the October Revolution brought about the dictatorship of the proletariat, the sole type of state corresponding to the transitional period between capitalism and socialism. He saw the Russian Revolution as an integral part of the international revolutionary upsurge. The schema of 1905 was turned on its head, and a permanentist perspective accepted as a guide to action. Lenin emphasised the Soviet regime accomplished “at one revolutionary blow” all that could be done instantly: private ownership of land was abolished without compensation, and within months big capitalists, factory owners, banks, and railways were expropriated without compensation.
The chapter also addresses Lorimer’s pamphlet, which misrepresents Lenin by combining quotations from different periods a-historically, backdating Lenin’s 1917 strategy onto 1905. Lenin’s 1905 position, consistent with Marx and Engels, held that socialist transformation in Russia required simultaneous or prior socialist revolution in Western Europe. By 1920, Lenin described the differences between the RDDPP and the Theory of Permanent Revolution as “matters of detail”. After 1917, Lenin consistently defined the October Revolution as establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, dropping the RDDPP as a dead slogan. None of the authors attempting to prove Lenin’s support for the RDDPP after April 1917 cite a single passage where Lenin endorsed it as a necessary form or described the post-October regime as such.