The question of questions

‘Lenin’s Final Fight’
invaluable for today

Book documents battle to defend
proletarian course in Russian Revolution

BY BRIAN WILLIAMS

An upgraded edition of Lenin’s Final Fight with a new introduction by Jack Barnes and Steve Clark has just been published by Pathfinder Press. The Spanish edition La última Lucha de Lenin is now available and the English version will be out in mid-February.

The book documents the political battle led by Vladimir Lenin within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between September 1922 and March 1923 to continue advancing the political course that brought the workers and peasants of Russia to power five years earlier.

These lessons are invaluable for working people today. “As capitalism in the twenty-first century enters its deepest economic and social crisis since the decades spanning the first and second imperialist world wars,” the introduction states, “programmatic and strategic matters in dispute in the communist workers movement in the early 1920s once again weigh heavily in prospects for the working class worldwide to advance along its historic line of march toward the conquest of power.”

The introduction summarizes the central questions in this fight that affected the lives of tens of millions. “Control over revenues from the Soviet republic’s import and export trade; structural changes to facilitate improving the class composition of state and party bodies; a transformation of the organization of agricultural production and exchange; special steps to guarantee equality of rights and self-determination for nations and nationalities formerly oppressed by the tsarist empire; increased political priority and funding of literacy programs and schools as part of broader efforts to open education and culture to the toilers and to party cadres working in government bodies; civil treatment of party members and coworkers as an unqualified precondition for leadership.”

“The battle was not primarily over economic policy or methods of administration,” the introduction notes. “It was a political fight over the class trajectory of the Soviet republic and Communist Party.”

By late 1920 working people in the young Soviet republic emerged victorious from nearly three years of civil war, launched by Russia’s toppled landlords and capitalists who were assisted by invading armies from 14 imperialist powers, including London, Paris, Tokyo, and Washington.

As the civil war deepened in 1918, the Soviet government mobilized the working class to expropriate the capitalists, consolidate a state monopoly of foreign trade, and initiate centralized economic planning, bringing into existence the world’s first workers state.

The civil war, however, devastated the country. By 1921 desperate living conditions facing working people produced “the gravest” crisis in Soviet Russia since the October 1917 revolution, Lenin noted. There was growing discontent among considerable sections of the peasantry and among workers.

In response, the government adopted a series of economic measures known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The requisitioning of peasant surpluses enforced during the civil war was replaced with a graduated tax on peasants’ harvests. The government legalized small markets for farm products and later for other goods. Privately owned enterprises were permitted in rural and small-scale industry.

Widening class inequalities
Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders were fully aware that these measures, which were necessary to revive production and trade, widened class inequalities between and within the working class and peasantry and generated new petty capitalist layers, especially rich peasants and traders known as the “Nepmen.”

Would the workers and peasants prove capable of defending and advancing their state power? This was the central question being posed. Lenin explained, “The fate of our republic will depend on whether the peasant masses will stand by the working class, loyal to their alliance, or whether they will permit the ‘Nepmen,’ i.e., the new bourgeoisie, to drive a wedge between them and the working class, to split them off from the working class.”

In a report to the March 1922 11th Communist Party congress, printed in the opening chapter of the book, Lenin, while noting the need for continuing NEP measures, insisted it was time for the party to “call a halt” to further retreat.

“It was resistance within the central party leadership to adopting and implementing the measures necessary to halt the retreat that, half a year later, erupted in the multifront political battle by Lenin to reassert the revolution’s proletarian course,” the introduction states.

Proletarian internationalism
By late 1922, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, which included 21 autonomous republics and regions, was collaborating with soviet republics in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belorussia, Georgia, and Ukraine to form a voluntary Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Joseph Stalin instead proposed their “entry” into the Russian Federation. Lenin opposed this as a violation of the Bolsheviks’ long-standing proletarian internationalist course. He also took issue with how communists from Georgia were treated in a dispute over national rights.

Lenin wrote, “Internationalism on the part of oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question; he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view.”

In the course of this dispute and others Lenin called for removing Stalin as the party’s general secretary.

The political battle waged by Lenin within the Soviet Communist Party leadership in 1922-23 did not end in victory. The introduction explains, “The civil war devastation, above all the deaths and political exhaustion of broad sections of the most conscious and selfless cadres in the working-class vanguard, compounded by the defeats of revolutionary struggles throughout Europe and Asia, weighed too heavily in the scales.”

Triumph of Cuban Revolution
However, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 marked a renewal of the example of a communist government following the course that had been halted with the defeat of Lenin’s final fight.

Experiences over the past century, the introduction notes, “have confirmed that the proletariat’s conquest of state power and expropriation of capitalist-owned land and industry have no automatic bias toward the construction of socialism. The proletarian dictatorship opens the transition from capitalism to socialism. The victorious workers state can then either go forward toward socialism—as an integral part of the world revolutionary struggle against imperialist exploitation and oppression—or backward toward laying the basis for capitalist counterrevolution. Advances are made possible by resolute communist political leadership, by deepening politicization of a growing working-class vanguard—prepared for the inevitability of the unexpected and unforeseen—and, above all, by new victories in the world revolution.”

A talk by then Cuban president Fidel Castro at the University of Havana in 2005 discusses aspects of this question. “Some people thought that socialism could be constructed with capitalist methods. That is one of the great historical errors,” stated Castro. “One of our greatest mistakes at the beginning of, and often during, the revolution was believing that someone knew how to build socialism.”

Barnes and Clark add, “That could only be discovered in practice by the combat-tested and politicized toilers themselves.”

Those seeking to end capitalist exploitation and oppression through charting a course for the working class to take political power will find invaluable lessons to build upon in Lenin’s Final Fight.