C:\Users\Pedro Pistelli\Dropbox\Lenin (Critical Lives) - Lih, Lars.mobiPage: 15The aim of the present biographical essay is to keep the focus on both Ulyanov the flesh-and-blood personage and his rhetorical creation, N. Lenin.Page: 28This was Social Democracy, a movement that seemed to combine a mass base with genuine revolutionary fervour (and so the connotations of `Social Demo cracy' during this period were almost the opposite of what the term means today). The Social Democratic strategy was inspired by Marx's teaching that the working class as a whole had a world-historical mission to win political power in order to introduce socialism.Page: 29 `united by combination and led by knowledge' that is, to help the workers organize and to imbue them with socialist ideology.Page: 29This reasoning led Alexander to throw away his life with no result other than a hardening of government repression. Russian socialist radicalism had arrived at a dead end.Page: 29The Social Democratic strategy of educating workers by mass campaigns was perceived as the only realistic way to get to socialism, but it could not be applied without political freedom and there seemed to be no way to obtain the requisite political freedomPage: 30Vladimir's search in the years following his brother's execution led him to the conclusion that a stripped-down, bare-bones version of the Social Democratic strategy could be applied even under tsarism as a way of obtaining the political freedom required for a full and unadulterated application of the same strategyPage: 30The author who had the most influence on him was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, an outstanding radical journalist and scholar of the 1860s.Page: 31Lenin learned many things from Chernyshevsky, but perhaps the real legacy of the older writer to Lenin was a visceral hatred of philistinism. Lenin felt that Chernyshevsky had a `pitch-perfect' sense of what was truly revolutionary and what was `philistine' compromise and conformismPage: 31October 1888Page: 31 the properly Marxist stage of Vladimir's evolution began, as he participated in illegal Social Democratic reading circles and began to cut his teeth on Marx's Capital.Page: 32But what if a mighty, irresistible force was even now at work, vastly increasing the potential for a mass movement despite tsarist repression? If so, even a relatively feeble and persecuted Social Democratic party could have a tremendous effect, if a way could be found to tap into this vast potential.Page: 32What Lenin perceived behind the dry statistical tables of land ownership and employment was the creation of new fighters who were both willing and able to wrest political freedom from the grip of the absolutist tsarist government. Page: 32the urban environment gave the factory workers special leadership qualities. Their concentration in towns and in large-scale factories made them easier to organize. Page: 33The narod, Lenin insisted, was even now breaking up into two opposed classes: workers on one side and a new bourgeoisie of peasant origin on the other. Ultimately, these two new classes would be bitter enemiesPage: 33The kind of pre-capitalist exploitation still prevalent in Russia was worse, because it relied on coercion, personal dependence, lack of mobility and isolation. Page: 34Lenin's seemingly offhand parenthetical comment `and not only economic' reveals the connection between his learned Marxist analysis and his passionate heroic scenario.Page: 34Mikhailovsky'sPage: 34Capitalism (cheered on by the Marxists) would force the crushed and impoverished peasants to migrate to the cities, become factory workers and (after a generation or two of capitalist hell) carry out the socialist revolution. Page: 34In his memoir, written in the 1920s, he tells us that Vladimir Ulyanov `sharply and definitely spoke out against feeding the hungry'. The young Marxist insisted that the famine was `a progressive factor.Page: 35The young Lenin becomes a walking, talking embodiment of the most hostile stereotypes of Russian Marxism circulating at the time. Many historians still today believe in the accuracy of this polemical caricature of Russian Marxism in general and Lenin in particular. But Lenin's actual vision of the `other way' created by capitalism was far otherwise.Page: 35In reality, Lenin gave capitalism the mission of transforming the peasants, making them effective fighters while still in the countryside, and thus making possible a democratic revolution based on the masses and not on the isolated and therefore terror-wielding intelligentsia. Page: 35 But in 1899 he wrote that `Social Democrats cannot remain indifferent spectators of the starvation of the peasants and their destruction from death by starvation.Page: 35the proletariat has been given the role of leader; `the strength of the proletariat in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total population'; the deep-rooted remnants of serfdom give rise to the profound revolutionary drive of the peasantryPage: 36No, Sasha, we will not get to political freedom by throwing away our lives in futile attempts to frighten the government into concessions. There is another way: an epic national struggle in which the urban workers will lead the newly galvanized narod. This will work, Sasha! It is guaranteed by the authority of the greatest socialist of all, Karl Marx.Page: 37 had, to his own satisfaction, demonstrated the objective potential for applying a Social Democratic strategy to Russia: an underground party inspires urban factory workers with a sense of their historical mission to lead the narod against tsarism.Page: 38In many ways Kautsky's book was unoriginal popularization. But a clear exposition of basic principles, an inspiring application to the contemporary situation and a compelling overarching narrative can have a profound impact on events, whether it is original or not.Page: 38 In the Erfurt Programme Kautsky wrote that Social Democracy has a tendency to become more and more `a Volkspartei, in the sense that it is the representative not only of the industrial wage-labourers but of all the labouring and exploited strata and therefore the great majority of the population, what is commonly known as the Volk' (= narod in Russian).Page: 38 According to Krupskaya the final push for this life-defining commitment was Lenin's `work among the workers of Piter [St Petersburg], conversations with these workers, attentive listening to their speeches'. Page: 39The Social Democratic strategy was what the Russian revolutionaries had been groping toward, through heroic mistakes and suffering.Page: 40When two-thirds of it showed up in 1923 Lenin's companions and first biographers Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Krupskaya were thrilled. They saw Friends of the People as proof that right at the start of his career Lenin had acquired the essentials of the world-view that guided him for the rest of his life and they were right. Page: 41When the advanced representatives of this class assimilate the ideas of scientific socialism and the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker when these ideas receive a broad dissemination when durable organisations are created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle, then the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle toTHE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.