Anti-Leninism

Anti-Leninism is the opposition to thought known as Leninism or Bolshevism.

Opposition to Leninism and to the person of Lenin can be traced back to the split in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. Bolshevik opposition to Lenin arose with the emergence of the Otzovists (or Recallists), who opposed participation in parliament. They included Alexander Bogdanov, Mikhail Pokrovsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Andrei Bubnov. Menshevik opposition to Leninism and Bolshevism was essentially based on what they saw as Lenin's authoritarian nature and methods for achieving a Marxist state. Such opposition was only heightened following the October Revolution, such as Martov's denunciation of the restoration of the death penalty [1]. Anti-Leninism in the context of Russian Communism can also be seen in the context of those individuals that wanted Lenin removed as state leader during his reign of 1917-1924, this was both from moderates who saw policies such as War Communism as too extreme and hardliners who saw policies such as the New Economic Policy as a capitulation to capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein have criticised Lenin that his conception of revolution was elitist and essentially 'Blanquist'. Rosa Luxemburg as part of a longer section on Blanquism in her "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" (later published as "Leninism or Marxism?"), writes: "For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and Blanquism is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself. Blanquism did not count on the direct action of the working class. It, therefore, did not need to organize the people for the revolution. The people were expected to play their part only at the moment of revolution. Preparation for the revolution concerned only the little group of revolutionists armed for the coup. Indeed, to assure the success of the revolutionary conspiracy, it was considered wiser to keep the mass at some distance from the conspirators.

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