This is partly a response to the efforts by pro-Democrat commentator Hasan Piker at portraying his “vote blue” position as being compatible with Lenin. The best way to refute Piker’s sophistry is by looking at the arguments Lenin actually made. And here, among the most relevant arguments are the ones from What It To Be Done, a work that Piker has emphasized he’s read and that repudiates the very same politics which Piker represents. Those being the politics of economism, which reduce the class struggle to narrow workplace battles and (in the case of what Piker’s camp advocates for) social programs.
The way that the economists portray their position as revolutionary, even though they omit the question of the capitalist state, is by placing a moronic amount of significance on politicizing the workers’ struggles. This is how I would describe the tone of Lenin’s ridicule towards the economists, who he identifies as being either inauthentic or genuinely foolish in their rhetoric about what class war means. What they did in Lenin’s time—and what they’re still doing today—was use these specific struggles as a substitute for the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie. And, in their demagogic rhetoric, elevate these struggles to being the height of class struggle, the greatest actions to take inspiration from. They spoke with excitement about “lending the economic struggle a political character,” as if merely fusing economic fights with a surface-level “politics” is what can liberate the workers.
It’s this part of Lenin’s analysis on reformist philistinism that gives crucial context to certain statements he made on the American two-party system. Statements that directly discredit the “vote blue” position, and that show what economism looks like in the USA. Concluded Lenin: “In all bourgeois countries, the parties which stand for capitalism, i.e., the bourgeois parties, came into being a long time ago, and the greater the extent of political liberty, the more solid they are…The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties. This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.”
While these American economistic philistines uphold the Democratic Party as a vehicle for workers struggle, they justify this position by centering the spontaneous sentiments of the masses. By pointing to how many of the masses gravitate towards electoralism during their initial phases of political radicalization, and concluding that this popularity for electoralism means it’s the optimal strategy.
Something Lenin observed is that this reformist, electoralist politics comes from the same mentality that the ultra-leftists have, wherein they advocate for mindless violence as a way to capture the moods of the masses. He wrote that “Political activity has its logic quite apart from the consciousness of those who, with the best intentions, call either for terror or for lending the economic struggle itself a political character. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and, in this case, good intentions cannot save one from being spontaneously drawn ‘along the line of least resistance’, along the line of the purely bourgeois Credo programme. Surely it is no accident either that many Russian liberals — avowed liberals and liberals that wear the mask of Marxism — whole-heartedly sympathise with terror and try to foster the terrorist moods that have surged up in the present time.”
For how we can lead the class war away from such worship of spontaneity: among the most practical of changes we can make at this stage is to progress beyond the narrow, inwardly focused practice which represents the default within organizing. We must stop limiting our engagement to the few who’ve already been recruited into our organizational sphere, or who may still become brought into it; for the time being, we’ve recruited essentially everybody who will become part of a core cadres during the present era. Our only path forward is to build a broad, anti-Epstein coalition among the popular masses, going into the parts of the people who won’t become cadre members but are willing to work with us on fighting the primary battles. This is how we break the workers movement out of its stagnation; a stagnation that Lenin identified during his own time, and that completely parallels today’s problems inside the movement.
What Lenin described within the economistic and reformist circles was a severely limited range of thought, which translated to work that exclusively involved the economic struggle:
Let us take the type of Social-Democratic study circle that has become most widespread in the past few years and examine its work. It has “contacts with the workers” and rests content with this, issuing leaflets in which abuses in the factories, the government’s partiality towards the capitalists, and the tyranny of the police are strongly condemned. At workers’ meetings the discussions never, or rarely ever, go beyond the limits of these subjects. Extremely rare are the lectures and discussions held on the history of the revolutionary movement, on questions of the government’s home and foreign policy, on questions of the economic evolution of Russia and of Europe, on the position of the various classes in modern society, etc. As to systematically acquiring and extending contact with other classes of society, no one even dreams of that. In fact, the ideal leader, as the majority of the members of such circles picture him, is something far more in the nature of a trade union secretary than a socialist political leader.
If you’ve spent time in the Democratic Socialists of America, or in DSA-adjacent “Marxist-Leninist” orgs like the PSL, you’ve experienced what this mode of practice is like. It’s endless reviews of particular events or topics which could be useful to the struggle, if the ones running these study circles actually understood what leadership of the class war looks like. It’s a lack of interest in addressing the matters that are most relevant to the struggle during the present moment, which translates to a surface-level view of working-class history. When an organization is stagnant in these ways, its “contacts with the workers” amount to mere union organizing, which all of proletarian revolutionary history has shown is not enough. But this narrow mode of practice keeps the movement trapped in a self-defeating cycle, lacking the self-awareness needed for gaining real skills in how to wage political struggle.
At this stage, building an anti-Epstein coalition is the best way we can overcome these insular habits. They’re habits that anyone can fall into, even if they reject the identity politics worldview that’s traditionally defined modern left politics; we need to understand that the problem the socdems pose, where they’re seeking to take the substance out of class struggle, is not dependent on the presence of wokeism. The socdems have recently been shifting away from the woke posturing that used to be ubiquitous within the left, and are now making use of a more classical economism which resembles the left politics of the Roosevelt era. We must fight the reformists the same way that Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought them: by actually taking a leadership role within the class war, forsaking all spontaneity fetishism so that we can provide the masses with substantial guidance.
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