Hi John, In “Lenin’s Verdict on Kautsky in State and Revolution,” Lih makes the claim at the end that Lenin had “a double standard for himself and Kautsky, leading him to blame Kautsky much more than he would have blamed himself” for neglecting Marx’s writings on the lessons of the Paris Commune. Lih’s evidence for Lenin’s own neglect of Marx’s writings on the Commune is that Lih “found nothing at all about ‘the Commune state’ or its radically democratic institutions” in Lenin’s writings other than a few commemorative references applauding the heroism of the Communards. My citation of Lenin’s “Plan of a Lecture on the Commune” from 1905 indicates that Lenin did study Marx’s writings on the Commune soon after the outbreak of the 1905 revolution. Unfortunately, we do not have the full text of the lecture that Lenin gave in Geneva, only the outline for the lecture, but I do think that this outline is proof enough that Lenin was not applying a double standard to Kautsky and himself. Lenin was thoroughly familiar with the radical democratic features of the Commune state years before writing “State and Revolution.” Also, Lenin’s criticism of Kautsky’s changing views on the nature of the state did not begin with State and Revolution but started at least as early as 1912 as a result of Kautsky’s debate with Pannekoek. Bottom line, Lih exaggerates Lenin’s intellectual dependence on Kautsky.

Hi Gil, Thanks for your close attention to my blog and your helpful suggestions. In this case, I have lost track of the issue we are discussing. Could you run this by me again? The article (“Lenin’s Verdict”) was posted two years back, but it is important and continues to get significant readership. I’d be pleased to make improvements?
Best regards, John

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/profiles/kautsky.htm

Two Trends in the American Socialist Movement: Why We Should Throw Kautsky Out With the Bathwater – John Peterson January 31, 2019
https://socialistrevolution.org/two-trends-in-the-american-socialist-movement-why-we-should-throw-kautsky-out-with-the-bathwater

Kautsky and the Parliamentary Road to Socialism – A Reply to Eric Blanc ByRob Rooke – July 18, 2019 https://www.socialistalternative.org/2019/07/18/kautsky-and-the-parliamentary-road-to-socialism-a-reply-to-eric-blanc/

Revolution or the Democratic Road to Socialism? A Reply to Eric Blanc. Donald Parkinson 2019.04.13 https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/04/13/revolution-or-the-democratic-road-to-socialism-a-reply-to-eric-blanc/

Social Democracy and Imperialism: The Problem with Kautsky Matías Maiello May 25, 2019 https://www.leftvoice.org/social-democracy-and-imperialism-the-problem-with-kautsky

Steady rightward trajectory Jim Creegan 02.05.2019 https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1249/steady-rightward-trajectory/

The Lenin-Kautsky Unity-Rivalry Debate John Willoughby December 1, 1979 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/048661347901100408?journalCode=rrpa

The case of the disappearing Lenin Kevin Corr and Gareth Jenkins 10th October 2014 http://isj.org.uk/the-case-of-the-disappearing-lenin/ Note: “This, then, is the context for taking seriously the intellectual debate initiated by the outstanding Canadian Marxist scholar, Lars Lih.”

Notes on Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered March 9, 2012 http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2012/03/notes-on-lars-lih-lenin-rediscovered/

Lars Lih’s trajectory over time is interesting

There is something dubious about the way Lih leaves out the *very next sentence* of the paragraph he is quoting. Here is the full paragraph.

“Kautsky, the spokesman of the German Social-Democrats[,] seems to have declared: I abide by revolutionary views (1899), I recognize, above all, the inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902), I recognize the advent of a new era of revolutions (1909). Still, I am going back on what Marx said as early as 1852, since the question of the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state is being raised (1912).”

By lopping off the final sentence, Lih tries to conceal the fact that this paragraph is, in fact, precisely “a sum-up of [Kautsky’s] opportunist errors”.

Lih tries to get around this by moving the goal posts so that he need only consider the period ending with The Road to Power in 1909. But this amounts to cutting in half the thread that Lenin is tracing.

Lih’s argument essentially boils down to the idea that Lenin continued, to the end of his life, to be a fan of Kautksy’s prewar writings. But so what? He continued to admire Plekhanov as well. In neither case does Lenin’s capacity to continue admiring these men’s works do anything whatsoever to undermine his analyses of where they went wrong.

He proposes to consider Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” not as a political whole, but rather by focusing only on what he seems to believe confirms his own views:

“One of the most instructive illustrations of Lenin’s conflicted attitude toward his former mentor is the section in State and Revolution devoted to Kautsky-when-he-was-a-Marxist. For Lenin, the cut-off point for Kautsky’s Marxist period was 1909, as we shall see below. He therefore divides his discussion in State and Revolution into two sections, one for material up to and including 1909, and another devoted to an article published by Kautsky published in 1912. Here we are interested only in the first section that is devoted to Kautsky’s earlier writings.”

The “we” that is “interested only in the first section that is devoted to Kautsky’s earlier writings,” is not all of us engaged in this discussion.

Nor am I impressed with this:

“Sometimes Lenin’s drive to expose Kautsky’s evasiveness approaches the limits of coherence: ‘From 1852 to 1891, or for 40 years, Marx and Engels taught the proletariat that it must smash the state machine. Yet, in 1899, Kautsky, confronted with the complete betrayal of Marxism by the opportunists on this point, fraudulently substituted for the question whether it is necessary to smash this machine the question of the concrete forms in which it is to be smashed.'”

I have no academic credentials of my own so perhaps to some this will seem a naive question, but I will pose it nevertheless: “What is less than coherent here?”

It is one thing to point out, as Lih accurately does, “During the summer in Petrograd, when he [Lenin] was in hiding from the Provisional Government, he wrote up his notes into the book we know. He clearly had neither the time nor the bibliographic resources to conduct research into Kautsky’s actual published views.”

It is quite another to suggest that Lenin’s brief summary of a perfectly clear thought, “approaches the limits of coherence.” Even with my admittedly modest formal education I do not find it lacking coherence at all.

“State and Revolution” is over 100 years old. It is subject to review and criticism like any other piece of writing. But can Lih point to any other criticism that questions its “coherence”? Or is this a new discovery? I remain open to further evidence but no evidence is provided here, strictly an assertion.

Finally for now, we find this:

“A key takeaway point: no one should think they have acquired any kind of grasp on Kautsky’s actual views by reading State and Revolution.”

Once again Lih’s certainty outraces the available evidence. He concedes that Kautsky was a “mentor” to Lenin in earlier years when Lenin considered Kautsky a Marxist. We know that Lenin was a careful student of Kautsky’s writings, long before he wrote “State and Revolution,” when — as Lenin explains in his postscript — he was “interrupted” by a genuine revolution.

Is it too much to concede that Lenin’s earlier study of Kautsky’s writings gave him, at a minimum, SOME grasp of Kautsky’s ideas? Or that he might have communicated SOME grasp of them in his work? I admit, the questions are rhetorical.

In ‘A Contribution To The History Of The Question Of The Dictatorship’ (1920) Lenin refers to the Bolshevik draft resolution in 1906, that calls for the Soviets to be transformed into Provisional Revolutionary Governments: “it must be pointed out that these institutions are bound to collapse unless they are backed by a revolutionary army and unless the government authorities are overthrown (i.e., unless the Soviets are transformed into provisional revolutionary governments)”.

By the way, Trotsky in 1906 wrote: “The Soviet is the organized power of the masses themselves over their component parts. This is a true, unadulterated democracy, without a two-chamber system, without a professional bureaucracy, with the right of the voters to recall their deputy any moment and to substitute another for him.”

In the third ‘Letter from Afar’ Lenin quotes himself from 1915 (ie prior to late 1916), that Soviets should be organs “of revolutionary rule”, and again implies that he held this view for a long time:

‘It might be asked: What should be the function of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies? They “must be regarded as organs of insurrection, of revolutionary rule”, we wrote in No. 47 of the Geneva Sotsial-Demokrat, of October 13, 1915.
This theoretical proposition, deduced from the experience of the Commune of 1871 and of the Russian Revolution of 1905, must be explained and concretely developed on the basis of the practical experience of precisely the present stage of the present revolution in Russia.’

Furthermore, contra Sawer’s claim, Lenin did already in 1912 read the polemic, which touched on the question of the state, between Kautsky and Pannekoek. He wrote to Kamenev: ‘look up Pannekoek and make closer contact with him: Kautsky replied to him on some cardinal issues in an extremely opportunist way.’ In 1915 Lenin also approvingly published Pannekoek’s article ‘Imperialism and the tasks of the proletariat’, which repeated his claim about the need to destroy the state.

–
In case what I’m claiming is true, one could ask: why then didn’t Lenin specifically/publicly intervene against Kautsky on the question of the state by 1912?

Well, his 1912 letter to Kamenev could I think indicate that it was in any case not due to lack of importance of the issue:

‘It is very desirable to make closer contact with the Left (especially Pannekoek […]) and to carry on agitation among them for a principled rebuff to Kautsky. It’ll be disgraceful if they do not revolt against such opportunism! Unfortunately they are short of people: Radek is practically a luminary among them.’

By the way, prior to writing his Renegade Kautsky, Lenin made the same complaint about the lack of a critique of Kautsky among German communists.