Afternoon Comrades.
It is Lenin’s birthday today. I know, before you log off, instantly bored of yet another hero-worshiping puff-piece on importance and all the things you “should” be doing, this is not it, nor is going to be some sort of biographical piece that exists to justify my own thoughts and create some sort of sense of academic superiority. Fuck all that.
It is Lenin’s birthday today and yes, if you follow any sort of socialist / communist social pages you will know by now, but, today, let’s approach the person and his contributions to a socialist revolution from different angles.
Of course, I could spend our time writing endlessly about the fuckery of the capitalist war machine and offer reactionary puff pieces that are so utterly in vogue, but why? For one, none of the shit “the man” gets up is worthy a reaction other than fuck that. Want a take on the student protests in the US? Sure, go and support them, make food, bring blankets, put bodies on the floor. Easy. Done.
Want a take on the imperialist genocide in Gaza? Sure, it’s wrong and irrespective of whatever political identity you wear today, helping to stop it is the bare fucking minimum you can do. Easy. Done. Want a take on Biden & Trump?`Sure, fuck them all. Easy. Done. Want a take on the deeply racist fuckery happening all across Europe? Sure, get organized and put an end to the capitalist boot licking that results in oppression and murder. Easy. Done. None of this reactionary bullshit is even worth a tweet and my disdain for these bloated reactionary “takes” grows boundless, for as long as we remain reactive to their oppression we will lose. End of.
So let us, on the man’s birthday, ask a few questions instead.
For one, how relevant is his work to you and me today? If you are like me, working your ass off, trying to keep the bills at bay, trying to put food on the table without having to resort to some shady ass shit like making meth, want to live a decent life in the sense of leaving this world better than you found it, punching up and never down, and aren’t 18, fresh at university, starting self-proclaimed revolutionary anti-capitalist cells, what is the point of reading, understanding let alone celebrating Lenin’s birthday?
Right?
There are so many different pre-conditioned layers involved in this that it is going to be a bit difficult to unravel but here we go and I am going to be using my own experience with his work to hopefully put this in a little context. To be clear, I do, personally, genuinely cherish is work in philosophy and politics but I am not one for hero worship. I leave that desire to entirely fictional characters from Twin Peaks and X-Files.
When I was starting off on this path, being critical of the capitalist hegemonic experience in all its depth, I was like most 15-16 year old shit bags, I think they call them edge-lords these days, and I understood that by simply putting up pictures of revolutionary communists such as Lenin ( Che, Castro, Subcomandante Marcos etc etc ) you would get an antagonistic response from those who held power over you, parents and teachers alike. Again, I won’t deny the shithead that I was at that age. It wasn’t until much later at University that I started reading Lenin in earnest, not because I wanted to but because the people that I was studying kept on refering to him, mostly Gramsci. The indoctrinated cold war- post cold war racism towards anything Russian and Soviet was well and alive in the mid to late 90s (as it is today) and thus, despite my dawning understanding of Internationalism and what anti-capitalism entailed at the time I was weary. For one, I still didn’t understand, truly, what the point of learning something from 135 years ago could do for me, and my work in whatever orgs I was involved in then.
We’ve all been there and it’s fine, again, I and we were young and that’s just how it is, especially, when you are involved in this work and you had current examples of work to look up to - such as the EZLN for example. Yet, and again, this is purely personal but I do think it nails the question if Lenin is relevant today for you and me is that at some point, especially after reducing my involvement in the day-to-day activities of these orgs, I realized that every single revolutionary I looked up to kept referring to his work. And thus, I picked up a few books and started reading.
What’s important here is to note, and we have gone though this a number of times, is that at this point I started to understand that what I was reading wasn’t holy writ, but, a person’s understanding of their material realities around then according to their understanding of the science behind Marx - I know, a lot to take in but plainly:
Lenin’s philosophical and political work started making sense when read through that lens. What became clearer in the decades that followed, is, and that is the even more important part, that not only did he see the world for what it was, but applied that knowledge to the best of his abilities to change it.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it. - Marx
Coming back to the original thought, that, if what we want to achieve in life is to leave it better than we found it, then merely reading history to impress a bunch of wankers on the internet ( since dinner parties are clearly a thing of the past ) is a waste of time, or in academic speak: deeply unserious. The underlying point of reading theory, his theory for example, but also countless others, is as Lenin said it:
Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.
Again, it is absolutely vital to apply to this to yourself, you decide how revolutionary you want to be, what you want changed and then how. “Read Theory” is often misused by young internet edge lords to do exactly that, sound edgy, and we can all leave it at that. We don’t punch down, we punch up. Yet, reading theory, say for example, Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” or “What is to be done?” within the framework of seeing how he applies the scientific method of dialectical materialism, how he applies it to his material realities illustrates how we can do the same. Simply, and despite the ever evolving monstrosity of Capitalism, the underlying man-made mechanisms of this existence remain the same and throughout history, our history of working people around the world who have had enough of this bullshit, have applied this understanding to change their world for the better.
So yeah, happy birthday old man. Thank you for allowing us to continue the work we all have to do that you and many other have started before us. Is Lenin worth your time, I say yes, but keep the above in mind.
Also, Comrade Alex wrote something on this train of thought earlier, have a look here:
We serve the revolution.
Yours,
V.