Abstract
The news from Cairo as these lines are being written—late summer 2013—is that supporters of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood are bracing for a violent confrontation with the military. Morsi’s government, the product of the mass protests that brought down the three-decade-old rule of Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, Egypt’s edition of the “Arab Spring,” was itself victim to “the streets.” Increasingly, the latter felt that what they had achieved with Mubarak’s overthrow was being undermined by the Islamist regime. But if the democratic movement knew what it was against, it couldn’t agree on what it was for. Into that breach stepped the one institution in Egypt that at least had a leadership—the military. Four chapters and almost a year ago, I stated that Egypt’s democratic revolution was still up for grabs and asked, “Is there a leadership with a program prepared to rule in the name of the movement?” The evidence so far suggests not.
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Notes
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), p. 284. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 10, p. 284.
David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Introduction to Their Lives and Works (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), p. 100.
Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 353n32. On the retrieval of the materials in 1920, see Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 253.
Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), ch. 6, pp. 113–37, provides inter alia a few details on Martov’s Duma work.
Hal Draper, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto (Berkeley: Center for Socialist History, 1994), p. 321, argues convincingly that Engels substituted “whenever” for “as soon as” in the aforementioned sentence for the 1888 translation of the Manifesto that he supervised. He did so to acknowledge that the expectation in the original 1848 document about the bourgeoisie was not fulfilled.
Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 187.
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 16. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 21 p. 16.
My article, “A Return to Lenin—But without Marx and Engels?” Science & Society 73, no. 4 (October 2009): 452–73, details how Lenin began to have second thoughts about the German party before August 1914.
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 81. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 13 p. 81.
Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” Marxists.org (1940), http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm.
For the best-known example of the claim that the subjective factor was inconsequential in the Russian Revolution, Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Conclusion.”
Joe Hansen’s “The Seven Errors Made by Che Guevara,” in Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: The Trotskyist View (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), is most instructive on the consequences of this turn.
The focus here is on books that claim to be overviews of Lenin’s life. Therefore, works such as Paul LeBlanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990) or Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006), which respectively look at Lenin’s organizational ideas and his famous book, are not discussed here.
Neil Harding, Lenins Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 25. While it’s possible to treat his book as sympathetic to Lenin, his Leninism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) is a different story. There he repeats the standard anti-Lenin formulas—for example, the “elitist and anti-democratic disposition of Leninism” (p. 174). These failings, he asserts, can be traced to Marx and Engels; the central claim of the book is that “Leninism was authentic Marxism” (p. 6). As for what he thinks of “authentic Marxism,” his tendentious and dishonest review of my Marx-Engels book (Democratization 8, no. 2 [Summer 2001]) leaves no doubt.
Alan Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Power: A History of the Bolshevik Party from the Early Beginnings to the October Revolution (London: Wellred Publications, 1999). That he hardly acknowledges Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, in what poses as a thorough reading of Bolshevism, is telling—an egregious attempt to turn Lenin into a supporter of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005).
Lars T. Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York: Stein and Day, 1984).
Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1957).
Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 523.
Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vols. 1–3 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985–1995).
Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For the most informed critical review, see Lars T. Lih’s review of Pipes’s collection, which he compares with the more complete, 420-document, and more accurately translated and less tendentious Russian edition, in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 35, nos. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2001): 301–6.
Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy (Pontypool, Wales: Merlin, 2013).
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 186.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). I predicted as much in my “Class Struggle under ‘Empire’: In Defence of Marx and Engels,” International Socialism no. 96 (Autumn 2002): 47–70.
Forever etched on my brain when I first read them more than thirty years ago are the all-so-instructive lines in Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009) about the decisive moments in the drama of1917: “The Bolsheviks did not summon the masses for the April demonstration. The Bolsheviks will not call the armed masses into the streets at the beginning of July. Only in October will the party finally fall in step and march out at the head of the masses, not for a demonstration, but for a revolution” (p. 369).
At the end of 2012, Syriza held a national conference to begin the process of transforming itself into a political party, and the differences between those who want to moderate its message in order to become the governing party and those who want to stay with the radical vision quickly manifested itself. Engels’s comment made in 1887 about a workers’ party “getting bourgeois” is apropos: “It is a misfortune that overtakes all extreme parties as soon as the day for them to become ‘possible’ draws near.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 48 (New York: International Publishers, 1975– 2004), p. 115. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 48, p. 115. In his speech to the party convention in July 2013, Alexis Tsipras made a number of proposals about the electoral process and party discipline but didn’t make clear if Syriza’s parliamentary group would be subordinate to the will of its rank and file.
Mandela, evidently, according to new revelations prompted by his death on December 5, 2013, had in fact been a member of the SACP. See Bill Keller, “Nelson Mandela, Communist,” New York Times, December 8, 2013, p. 8.
The latest news from South Africa suggests this may now be underway. The largest trade union—Numsa, the miners—announced that it would break with the Triple Alliance and “would seek to start a socialist party aimed at protecting the interests of the working class.” See Lydia Polgreen, “South Africa’s Biggest Trade Union Pulls Its Support for A.N.C.,” New York Times, December 20, 2013.
August H. Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 213. I didn’t employ a crystal ball for my prediction about the crisis but the analysis that the US Socialist Workers’ Party began making with the 1987 Wall Street stock- market crash.
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Nimtz, A.H. (2014). Conclusion. In: Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389954_4
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