Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on activism from the blog Base and Superstructure. This takes many forms. The focus here is on political activism, above all on activist organizing and base-building. One concern is how to build effective movements. There’s also a need to create solidarity with fellow members and build coalitions with other groups. The main aim of good movements is to work together to advance material interests. This section also includes critiques of electoral work, and discussion of how and when to use elections to advance activist goals. Navigating the balance between grassroots work and electoral work is difficult for everyone.
Readers know I don’t talk much about the sectarian left. You know, the kinds of smaller leftist groups based on certain ideologies, e.g., Marxist-Leninist groups, Maoist groups, and so on. I spend a lot of time – both as a blogger and a local DSA chapter leader – discussing strategy on the left. I’ve even posted a couple of times on the DSA caucuses. But I mostly ignore the sectarian left during all this.
Why?
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post on V.I. Lenin‘s essay ‘What is to Be Done?‘. I read it in a collection of essays called the Essential Works of Lenin. The same book contains his work The State and Revolution, which he wrote much later on the eve of the October Revolution.
In the other post, I noted some of the good and bad of Lenin. He thought a great deal about strategy and tactics. Along the way, he laid out a lot of insightful critique of magical thinking and bad strategy on the left. On the other hand, he clearly had an intolerant, authoritarian style and personality. This served him poorly, both as a philosopher and as a leader.
These same issues reappear in The State and Revolution. But we get something new in the later text: Lenin on the verge of power, now using a quasi-religious reading of the classic texts of Marx and Engels to justify his own views. One of Lenin’s uses of Engels struck me in particular.
With that in mind, let’s take a brief look at this line of thought in The State and Revolution.
Every now and then, I blog about political and movement strategy. Those posts hit certain themes. I’ll hit those themes here, too. But I hope to do so in a fresh way. So, I’ll start with a claim: ‘Bark at the moon’ is a terrible political strategy. In fact, it’s not a political strategy at all.
It’s certainly not a strategy when it comes in the form of social media slacktivism. But it’s also a non-strategy in its more sophisticated forms.
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Readers hardly need an intro to V.I. Lenin. To this day, he’s still a hero to the Marxist-Leninist left. Why? He defeated Russian capitalism, founded the Soviet Union, and guided revolutionary movements around the globe. And to most anarchists, he’s still a villain. Why? He broke Russian anarchism and turned communism into an authoritarian ideology.
I’m not going to wade too heavily into that debate. I’ll take a more modest aim here. Recently I started reading the Essential Works of Lenin. From that collection, I’ll say a few things about Lenin’s short book ‘What Is to Be Done?‘
While much of the material looks at the specific situation in Russia, I think we can learn a few things from it. Even things we can apply in the 2020s. Lenin can teach us a number of things about both good activism and what to avoid.
As some readers might know, Jacobin ran a study of working-class voters. The study hits an unusual depth, and it provides lots of useful info.
In the past I’ve criticized many views on elections and politics expressed in Jacobin. As have many others on the left. But let’s not play up any ‘feud’ with Jacobin. I read the magazine, and I also read Jacobin’s more academic journal Catalyst. And I think they do some great things with this study. They point to some of their own errors, and they show an interest in doing real electoral work that doesn’t fall prey to the magical thinking that’s all too common on the left.
And so, let’s take a look at the Jacobin study. What can it teach us about working-class voters? And what can it teach us about building solid leftist electoral campaigns?
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