For most commentators — from the revolutionary left to anti-communist conservatives — Lenin was a political innovator. According to mainstream historical accounts, Lenin abandoned the strategy and tactics of the pre-1914 European socialist parties that made up most of the Socialist (Second) International: building broad, class-based political parties committed to combining political and social democracy. He rejected the pre-war movement’s optimism about the capacity of workers to build their own organizations and the inevitability of socialism. Lenin was the inventor of a new form of political organization — a tightly organized, highly centralized, conspiratorial party of “professional revolutionaries” (intellectuals) well versed in Marxist theory. This party would take power and rule for the workers. In this account, there is a straight line from Lenin’s pre-revolutionary politics to Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship. Few on the left have done more to debunk these myths than Lars Lih. His Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008) thoroughly discredits the claims that Lenin, worried about the capacity of workers to make a revolution, advocated a new form of political organization. [1] Instead, Lenin emerges as a mainstream left-wing European social democrat (the term all pre-1914 socialists used to refer to themselves), a loyal follower of Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the Second International, and an advocate of building a party like the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) “under Russian conditions.” Lenin’s famous 1902 pamphlet What is To Be Done? was thoroughly unoriginal, embracing the SPD’s vision of a fusion of socialism with the worker movement, and prioritizing the struggle for democracy, the “light and air of the worker movement.”
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