Surviving Dark Times

There are periods when working class struggle is on the rise. This was the case from 2008 to 2016. There was a rising arc of struggle as people all over the world responded to the economic crisis. In Ireland we had the mighty water charges movement. But this wave came to an end and the level of working class mobilisation in Ireland began to fall. Then we had a pandemic that saw people locked in their homes. Demoralisation gave an opening to those who spread divisive poison in our class, but this just led to further demoralisation. Every revolution gives birth to a counter revolution. We didn’t have a revolution in 2008 to 2016 but those massive social movements provoked a push back. Past revolutionaries like Lenin lived through the defeat of uprisings and had to survive the dark times that followed. We can learn from how they built in those years.

The Tsar unleashed a wave of savagery in revenge for the Russian revolution of 1905. Workers had launched an uprising in Moscow that had been defeated, while massive protests and mutinies had broken out across the whole of Russia. “Black Hundred” gangs, made up of criminals, street hawkers, landowners, merchants and Tsarist cops, committed dozens of pogroms against Jewish people. They were organised by the Tsarist police. Government terror after 1905 descended into mass murder, with at least three thousand hangings of revolutionaries in the so-called “Stolypin terror”.

The Tsar tried to tame the revolution with talk of a parliament, called the Duma, while at the same time unleashing counter revolutionary gangs on the working class and Jewish people. A Russian Social Democratic Labour Party “Unity” Congress, including Lenin’s Bolsheviks, took place on April 25th 1906 as the elections to the Duma were taking place. It was clear that the bourgeois liberal Kadets had scored large victories. They’d won 184 seats out of 497 seats. The peasant “Trudoviks” - a breakaway from the Socialist Revolutionaries - won 124. As struggle fell back the Tsar dismissed the Duma after just 75 days - disbanding it in July 1906. That Summer massacres of Jews spread across the whole of Russia. Lenin had agreed to unite in one party with the Mensheviks because during the 1905 revolution they had recruited many workers and Lenin wanted access to those workers, but he wanted to expose the Mensheviks and tear those workers away from them.

After the conference Lenin put out a statement to the party that pointed to mistakes that “bear the stamp of the erroneous views of the former “Menshevik” faction.” The conference rejected his safeguards on parliamentary work. The Mensheviks won control of the party newspaper and seven out of ten seats on the united Central Committee, the Bolsheviks won just three. Lenin wrote: “There is a RIght and a Left wing in all the Social-Democratic parties in Europe; and their existence in our Party has been evident for a long time. A more distinct line of demarcation between the two, a clearer definition of the points of disagreement, is essential for the health development of the Party, for the political education of the proletariat.” Lenin argued for a “ruthless ideological struggle” within the new united party. Let the workers now see the reality of working with the Mensheviks. Experience would soon show that unity with saboteurs was next to impossible.

The party had agreed to boycott the elections but the election of several worker deputies on lists alongside liberals made Lenin pay attention to the Duma debates. He saw how useful the Duma could be if genuine revolutionaries got in there and made speeches denouncing the system. “The worker deputies got into the Duma through non-party channels. Nearly all, or even all, got in by direct or indirect, tacit or avowed, agreements with the Cadets.” Lenin was for telling the truth to the workers about this alliance with the liberals: “to hush it up, as many Social -Democrats are doing today, is unpardonable and useless.”

It wasn’t enough to declare you were a socialist deputy “one must pursue a genuinely Social-Democratic workers’ policy.” Lenin wrote: “We warmly welcome the manifesto of the Workers’ Group of Duma deputies… but in our opinion it also contains certain flaws”. The socialist deputies had declared they wanted the Duma to “strive” to convene a constituent assembly. Lenin pointed out the pointlessness of indicating a bourgeois Cadet Duma would challenge the Tsar. Lenin also complained they didn’t use the first Duma sessions to make a real demonstration. He wrote frequent reports on Duma speeches, pointing to the class interests that lay behind every speech. Lenin saw the parliament as a platform from which they could educate the working masses and aid a recovery of the workers’ movement. This platform provided a vital connection to the masses in a period when struggle was beaten and the mood of the workers was low.

The Menshevik dominated Central Committee of the united party soon moved against Lenin and tried to ban him from making his arguments publicly. He was sanctioned and put on trial. Lenin argued that: “Criticism within the limits of the principles of the Party Programme must be quite free… not only at party meetings, but also at public meetings… Such criticism, or such “agitation”… cannot be prohibited. The Party’s political action must be united. No “calls” that violate the unity of definite actions can be tolerated.” Lenin was arguing for absolute freedom of debate, in front of the workers, in papers and at public meetings but unity in action. Nothing should be hidden from the workers: “The Central Committee’s resolution is essentially wrong and runs counter to the Party Rules.”

He also indicated how his view of utilising parliament for revolutionary propaganda was opposed to giving the impression the Tsarist Duma could solve any of Russia’s problems. Submitting Duma Bills with a rake of tiny details left the public “hopelessly confused.” Lenin wrote, quoting a Menshevik article that had for once taken the correct line: “this project-mongering (passing bills in the Duma) obscures, blunts and corrupts the mind of the public, for “in any case, these laws will never be put into operation. Before that can be done, power must be wrested from the hands of those who now hold it.”

Lenin argued that “to satisfy the urgent needs of the mass of the people all power must be in the hands of the people… The proletariat’s struggle for political freedom is revolutionary, because its object is to secure complete democracy. The bourgeoisie’s struggle for freedom is opportunist, because its object is to obtain sops, to divide power between the autocracy and the properties classes.” The Menshevik weakness on the Duma was because they thought that the “liberal bourgeoisie must be the “boss” in the bourgeois revolution.” But Lenin argued that “alliances and negotiations with the Cadets are the worst way of exercising pressure on them… it will mean blunting the independent struggle of the Social-Democrats.” Lenin described how the Mensheviks repeated the standard justifications from opportunists everywhere: “We must be practical politicians; we must join in the demand for small things… This is how all the opportunists, all the reformists, argue… We must choose - between the existing evil and a very small rectification of it.” But this logic leads to “the conclusion we need no revolutionary programme, no revolutionary party and no revolutionary tactics. What we need are reforms, nothing more.” Lenin understood that “they substitute the bourgeois theory of “united “,“social " progress for the socialist theory of the class struggle as the only real driving force of history.”

The revolution was the best guarantee of reforms: “Only by such tactics can real progress be achieved in the matter of important reforms… Reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms. The most effective way to secure real reforms is to pursue the tactics of the revolutionary class struggle… they are only real in proportion to the intensity of the class struggle.” As news of a new Duma came out Lenin understood they needed every platform they could, arguing that the “Left-Wing Social- Democrats must reconsider the question of boycotting the State Duma… History has shown that when the Duma assembles opportunities arise for carrying on useful agitation both from within the Duma and around it.” They could educate the masses from within the Duma and “prove to them that the Duma is “useless””. They should use the Duma to continue the call to revive the revolution.

Later Lenin would write that: “The Bolsheviks’ boycott of “parliament” in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience and showed that, when legal and illegal parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle are combined, it is sometimes useful and even essential to reject parliamentary forms. It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively and uncritically to other conditions and other situations. The Bolsheviks’ boycott of the Duma in 1906 was a mistake, although a minor and easily remediable one. The boycott of the Duma in 1907, 1908 and subsequent years was a most serious error and difficult to remedy, because, on the one hand, a very rapid rise of the revolutionary tide and its conversion into an uprising was not to be expected, and, on the other hand, the entire historical situation attendant upon the renovation of the bourgeois monarchy called for legal and illegal activities being combined.”

In his later writings he would argue that parliamentary activity is important even during a revolution. In “Left Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder” he wrote: “Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice… it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution.”

Lenin took elections seriously. His argument was simple - if revolutionaries didn’t stand in elections they were giving workers’ votes to someone who would betray the workers. The Social-Democrats in the Duma had made many mistakes and Lenin was sure Bolsheviks would have done a better job. But Menshevik control of the party was becoming a real hindrance. The more they tended toward opportunism, the greater leverage it gave to those who wanted to boycott all electoral work. As Lenin would later write: “Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities complemented each other.”

The Mensheviks deduced their slogans to merely express whatever was popular. Lenin wrote that this represented “the petty-bourgeois idealist and not the proletarian materialist point of view. It deduces “natural succession” to power from the most widespread “idea” (“in the eyes” of the people), and not from the realities of the struggle.” Slogans weren’t to be deduced from what most people happened to want: “It is based on the usual method of the opportunists: the attempt to prove that the most moderate slogan is the most reasonable one… Bernstein said: Social revolution is supported only by a section of the proletariat, whereas social reform is supported by many social-liberal elements.” The call for “unity” of the entire opposition was attractive to the Mensheviks but Lenin pointed out that the “addition of a vacillating and treacherous opposition to the actually fighting revolutionary elements does not always produce a plus, more often it proves to be a minus.”

Lenin demanded “no blocs or agreements whatever between the Social-Democrats and any other parties to be tolerated at the lowest stage of the elections.” Lenin was for standing in elections to promote revolutionary politics - political compromises for seats defeated the purpose of standing in the first place and any agreement with the Trudoviks was for the higher stages and only for the practical purpose of the proportional dividing of seats. Lenin outlined the basic principles of socialist participation in parliaments. Electoral work was “one of the means of enlightening and educating the proletariat and organising it in an independent class party.” This stood Marxism apart from both “bourgeois liberals, on the one hand, and from anarchists on the other.”

Election campaigns weren’t an end in themselves but rather “we subordinate this campaign to the interests of the class struggle.” On alliances Lenin warned they had to “watch every ally from the bourgeois democrats as they would an enemy.” Again he noted the groupings of parties according to the classes they represented. “It is clear that a real party agreement with the Trudoviks is impossible.” It was more to their advantage to “preserve complete independence in order to exert a really revolutionary influence…It is absolutely impermissible for Social-Democrats to blur these distinctions.” Lenin demanded they use elections to reveal which class each party represented: “clarity as regards the class grouping of the parties is of supreme importance.” He argued for “no agreements whatsoever at the lower stage, when agitation is carried on among the masses” - at the higher stages it was permitted to enter into a practical agreement with the Trudoviks to push out the Cadets. That required no sacrifice of political positions.

A common argument raised against Lenin’s strategy of ousting the Cadets is common today: but won’t you let the Black Hundreds in by doing this! You have to support the liberal to stop the far right. Lenin admitted that in some areas the socialists standing might “split” the vote and let a far right Black Hundred in but Lenin still argued against a joint list with the Cadets. A “joint list would be in crying contradiction to the whole independent policy of the Social-Democratic Party… We would undermine our principles and the general revolutionary significance of our campaign… We would deprive ourselves of the opportunity to gain an estimate of our forces. We would lose what is lasting and durable in all elections - the development of the class-consciousness and solidarity of the proletariat. We would gain what is transient, relative and untrue - superiority of the Cadet over the Octobrist.” You could elect Cadets everywhere. They still wouldn’t fight. Socialists would fight: “Why should we jeopardise our consistent work of socialist education?” The Mensheviks voted for a bloc with the Cadets pointing to the Black Hundred danger. But by tailing the Cadets they were involved in “reconciliation with Tsarism, that is, with the Black Hundred danger.”

Later, during the election campaign to the Fourth Duma, Lenin would return to this theme: “Fifty liberals in the Duma will give the people a pile of sham democratic speeches, thereby corrupting the people, and a few “reforms” which, to begin with, will be confined to wash-basins, and secondly, will be held up in the Council of State… Five democrats, on the other hand, will use the Duma rostrum to explain to the people a number of truths of democracy (and workers will use the rostrum also to explain some of the truths of socialism).” By democrats he meant genuine revolutionaries fighting for democracy for the workers and peasants.

Lenin also reminded socialists that they should not “keep quiet about our socialist aims” and not just stand on immediate demands. They must “speak simply and clearly in a language comprehensible to the masses… without flamboyant phrases, without rhetoric, but with facts and figures, they must be able to explain the questions of socialism and the present Russian revolution.” To illustrate these points an election statement, written by Lenin, called for “a socialist system of society” and called on workers to use the elections to “strengthen the real champions of liberty and socialism.” He called for a “relentless war on opportunist confusion” - telling the workers that party unity with the Mensheviks was a sham. The Mensheviks “dwell in two abodes”, Lenin wrote. They talk to “fine gentlemen about blocs with Cadets” while offering workers a “non-party labour congress”.

He saw the bloc with the bourgeois liberals as the death of any real unity with the Mensheviks. He called their deal “the finishing touch that definitely marks the Mensheviks as the opportunist wing of the workers’ party.” But what about party discipline? He’d previously described party discipline as “unity of action, freedom of discussion” but now he said “every action is valuable, of course, only because and insofar as it serves to push things forward and not backward.” That meant “class conscious workers must never forget that serious violations of principle occur which make the severance of all organisational relations imperative.” If the Mensheviks united with the liberals then the Bolsheviks had to break with the Mensheviks.

He reminded branches that the Menshevik Central Committee could not order them to form a bloc with the Cadets: “There are two platforms before the Party” he wrote. The Mensheviks walked out of the St. Petersburg meeting of the party on election strategy when Lenin’s position won. Lenin saw the election campaign like any other aspect of class struggle - an excuse to rouse the masses. He wrote: “Elections meetings in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A gust of fresh air from the street penetrates into the musty atmosphere of intellectualist political chicanery… The Cadets try to drag everybody… to the Right… The Bolshevik Social-Democrats call the masses to the Left.” He wrote their instability wasn’t because of personal weakness but because “the petty bourgeois is inevitably inclined to follow in the footsteps of the liberal.” He said that “the unity of the party is most dear to us. But the purity of the principles of revolutionary Social-Democracy are dearer still.”

In January 1907, as elections took place, Lenin fled to Finland as the security situation worsened. The election results confirmed Lenin’s prediction that “the proletarian masses are Social-Democratic in their aspirations and sympathies.” The RSDLP won 65 seats. The peasant Trudoviks were the largest block with 104 of the 518 seats, while the Cadets won 98. The Black Hundred threat that had been a feature of Cadet and Menshevik agitation didn’t materialise. The Socialist Revolutionaries won 37 seats - taking many city seats from the socialists. Lenin explained the SRs “defeated mostly and in the main the Menshevik Social-Democrats” but where a Bolshevik stood the Bolshevik, in most cases, won. Tailing the Cadets was losing votes. Workers didn’t trust the liberal bourgeoisie: “The rout of the Mensheviks in the big factories is the first warning the proletarian masses have given the vacillating opportunist intellectuals!” Lenin argued the Mensheviks were entirely to blame for votes lost to the SR’s. The terrorist SR’s could posture as the radical option when the Social-Democrats were opportunist. Lenin called the Mensheviks “blacklegs” - an old word for “scabs”.

Leading Bolshevik intellectuals like Alexander Bogdonov couldn’t adapt to the new situation - the falling back of the revolutionary wave - and took an ultra left view towards the election campaigns. Bogdonov called his faction the “Forwardists” - but what was the point of shouting “forward” when no one was following? They made a caricature of Bolshevism and instead of making a concrete analysis of the international and national situation they just continued to issue slogans appropriate to the revolutionary period. Slogans, like truth in general, are contextual. In the dark night of the counter revolution Bogdonov believed his radical slogans could summon up the light of revolution. Lenin was able to examine the complexity of social life and draw his slogans from the concrete situation.

During 1905, Lenin wrote, the Bolsheviks had learned to “speak French” but now it was time to “speak German” - he meant that they had to transition from the methods appropriate to a revolutionary period, to slow steady building up of forces appropriate to the period of counter revolution. Lenin didn’t have an easy time as Bogdonov’s group dominated the Bolshevik faction.

Under the pressure of counter revolution the Bolsheviks split: Bogdonov’s group the Otzovists (”recallists”) demanded the recall of their Duma deputies and the “Ultimatism” faction wanted an ultimatum given to the Duma deputies to follow a strict party line. The party collapsed with both main factions reporting huge losses of members. Martov said the party had collapsed like “a deck of cards” and Krupskaya wrote “we have no people at all.” These were difficult times. But Lenin was determined to fight on. “Wavering, disunity and disintegration - such have been the general features of this half-year” Lenin wrote in the Spring of 1908. The political movement was falling back just as an economic recession was pulling the ground out from under workers. The two combined to produce profound demoralisation. The recession amplified the already existing rightward drift. If the pendulum of class struggle had been swinging left the recession could have accelerated the rising struggle, but the opposite was the case. Middle class revolutionaries jumped ship, but Lenin saw it as a necessary evil: “Take one of the very characteristic… external expressions of the Party crisis. I mean the flight of the intellectuals… But the liberation of the Party from the half-proletarian, half-petty-bourgeois intellectuals is beginning to awake to a new life the new purely proletarian forces accumulated during the period of the heroic struggle of the proletarian masses… The Party has already entered the straight road of leadership of the working masses by advanced “intellectuals” drawn from the ranks of the workers themselves.”

Lenin was against voting for budgets that were administered by the Tsar, he proposed that: “Voting for the (Duma) Budget as a whole is declared wrong in principle. The Conference is of the opinion that, as regards voting for particular items in the Budget, the Duma group should be guided by the principle of our programme that Social-Democrats firmly reject reforms involving tutelage of the police and the bureaucracy over the working classes.” After the conference the party continued to fall apart: “A year of disintegration, a year of ideological and political disunity, a year of Party driftage lies behind us. The membership of all our Party organisations has dropped. Some of them - namely, those whose membership was least proletarian - have fallen to pieces.” It was in this context that the Mensheviks, in a fit of reformist despair, started arguing for the liquidation of the illegal underground party. The Tsarist cops were willing to let the Mensheviks preach for a “legal party” while the Bolsheviks were persecuted at every opportunity. As the Bolshevik Mikhail Olminksy wrote: “They suffered less from police persecution. They had many of the writers, a good part of the lecturers and on the whole most of the intellectuals”.

Whenever the tide flows to the right people retreat into their personal lives. Party members focused on their families or on getting a new job. Lenin, as usual, conducted a war on two fronts - against the liquidators on both sides. The Mensheviks wanted to do electoral work but dissolved the party structures thereby disconnecting the party from the workers, the ultra lefts would liquidate the party’s connection to the masses by refusing to do electoral work: “The liquidators on the right say that no illegal RSDLP is needed, that the Social-Democratic activities should be centred exclusively on legal opportunities. The liquidators on the left go to the other extreme: legal avenues of party work do not exist for them… Both are liquidators of the RSDLP, for without the methodical judicious combination of legal and illegal work… the preservation and consolidation of the RSDLP is inconceivable.” In 1909 Lenin expelled Bogdonov from the Bolshevik centre although he was still allowed to remain as a member of the faction. He called Lenin a “semi-Menshevik”.

Lenin explained: “For all its revolutionary phraseology, the theory of otzovism and ultimatumism in practice represents, to a considerable extent, the reverse side of constitutional illusions based on the hope that the Duma itself can satisfy certain urgent needs of the people. In essence, it substitutes petty-bourgeois tendencies for proletarian ideology.” At the 1910 Plenum meeting the RSDLP took a rightward turn to liquidationism. The right Mensheviks argued to dissolve the party and build a broad labour movement instead.

In the Summer of 1911 Lenin was still fighting against the liquidators while the three Bolshevik members of the Central Committee had been arrested. The party was in a mess as “everywhere in the localities there are informal, extremely small and tiny Party workers’ groups and nuclei that meet irregularly.” The elections to the Fourth Duma were drawing near and Lenin wanted the party to prepare. The spark he so wanted to rekindle was about to ignite in a matter of just months. “The first aim of our Party at the forthcoming Fourth Duma elections is to educate the masses in socialism” he wrote. The party had to fight on two fronts: “against the government and the parties openly supporting it, as well as against the Cadet Party.”

Lenin regarded the liquidators as “a separate party” and argued the Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks should conduct their own campaign. Without a socialist programme a party “cannot be an integral political organism” and without day to day tactics, based on the programme, “we might have a circle of theoreticians, but not a functioning political entity.” The three key slogans, or “whales of Bolshevism”, would be: 1) a republic 2) the confiscation of landlords’ estates and 3) the eight hour day for the workers. The first demand indicated they wanted to fight for “political liberty”, but they must use the slogan to “prove that revolution is necessary.” The second slogan “is not a question of ‘how much land does the peasant need’: the Russian people need to confiscate the entire land of the landowners.”

The third slogan was an attempt to rouse the workers to fight for an eight hour day when the counter revolution had allowed the bosses to steal so much. Lenin wrote: “The election platform can be expressed in three words: for the revolution!” These immediate and popular Bolshevik demands were also illegal - calling for a republic could get you arrested, calling for confiscation of the landlord’s estates was against the law. Standing up at the public meeting and advocating the Bolshevik “three whales” would get you carted off to prison, exiled or killed.

The role of worker electors in the election campaign was to: “Educate and organise the working class, unite it in an independent party… explain to the working class its historical aims… To begin with they must always pursue a principled line, endeavouring to organise the forces of democracy… and to help them cast off the influence of the liberals… The technical work of the election campaign must be subordinated to this task.” Lenin saw the election campaign as a class struggle just like any other; they had a “duty to bend all their efforts to develop the most energetic, persistent activity.”

The Prague Conference of January 1912 was a fully Bolshevik conference of the RSDLP. Trotsky, Bogdovov and the Mensheviks refused to accept the conference. The conference assumed the mantle of the party as a whole. Even though there were only 20 to 25 delegates, this conference saw the Bolsheviks step up as a party in their own right just as working class struggle started to rise again. The motion on the elections revealed Lenin’s serious and methodical approach to election campaigns. “The main task of our Party in the elections… is socialist, class propaganda and the organisation of the working class… The main election slogans of our Party in the forthcoming elections must be: (1) a democratic republic (2) the eight-hour working day (3) confiscation of all landed estates.” All propaganda was to be linked back to the main demands while they were to conduct a “merciless struggle against the tsarist monarchy… at the same time steadfastly exposing the counter-revolutionary views of the bourgeois liberals.”

They also had to distinguish their party from all the other “left” parties, particularly the petty bourgeois parties. “Particular attention must be paid to dissociating the position of the proletarian party from that of all non-proletarian parties and explaining the petty-bourgeois essence of the sham socialism of the democratic (chiefly Trudovik, Narodnik and Socialist-Revolutonary) groups”. As for election agreements? Lenin’s motion argued they would put forward candidates in all working class areas and “forbid any agreement whatsoever with other parties or groups… Social- Democratic candidates cannot be bound by any kind of political commitment, nor must Social-Democrats be prevented from resolutely criticising the counter-revolutionary nature of the liberals.”

As for candidate selection: “Assemblies of workers’ delegates, guided by the decisions of the illegal Party organisations, must decide who precisely is to be elected to the Duma for the workers.” Once elected it was their duty to use the Duma to explain the class nature of all the other parties. The recovery of the working class movement also meant they needed to beef up their organisation. They argued that “nuclei in unions organised on an industrial basis should, whenever local conditions permit, function in conjunction with Party branches organised on a territorial basis.” The Duma campaign would help with this recovery by the forming of “workers’ and other voters’ committees for each district, each street.” They also criticised the Menshevik focus on an “insurance bill” in the Duma as spreading “bourgeois illusions” and approved the vote of their Duma representatives against the bill while explaining to the workers that “no real improvement in the workers’ conditions is possible unless there is a new revolutionary upsurge.”

The Mensheviks launched their slogan for the election campaign: “dislodge reaction from its positions in the Duma.” But this suggested a Cadet Duma would fight the Tsar! This slogan, Lenin wrote, “is not a Marxist, not a proletarian, not even a democratic, but a liberal slogan… Martov accepts Marxism only insofar as it is acceptable to any educated liberal.”

Lenin’s own election material was much more radical: “Time was, and not so long ago, when the slogan ‘Down with the autocracy’ seemed too advanced for Russia. Nevertheless, the RSDLP Party issued the slogan, the advanced workers caught it up and spread it throughout the country; and in two or three years this slogan became a popular saying… The Russian Social- Democrats, the Russian workers will succeed in making ‘Down with the tsarist monarchy, long live the Russian Democratic Republic!’ a nationwide slogan.” When the Mensheviks again rolled out the Black Hundred threat to justify tailing the Cadets Lenin wrote that “there is a swing to the left in the country; therefore do not believe the liberal fables about the danger of the Black Hundred victory.”

Lenin explained: “The bourgeois fellow travellers… began to turn their backs on the Social-Democratic Party. This defection took two forms - that of liquidationism and of otzovism.” Lenin, often isolated, held out for revolutionary Marxism, waiting for the day when the workers would prove all these bourgeois and petty bourgeois pessimists wrong. It’s a testament to Lenin’s faith in the working class that he kept fighting all throughout the dark years. He could see the light ahead. The workers were going to rise. You either do whatever you can to make that rising more effective or you’re a barrier to the revolution.

He was able to use elections to maintain contact with the masses and prepare for a coming upsurge in struggle. He opposed reformist approaches to elections and insisted on telling workers the truth about the Tsarist state and about the weak liberal opposition. He also bitterly fought those who took an ultra left approach to election work, expelling Bogdonov from the Bolsheviks. The ultra lefts would disconnect the party from the masses. These are lessons we can take on board today. Knocking on every door in a working class estate, fighting for a seat in a local council or in the Dáil, this work gives you serious roots and far more authority within the working class. You can then use that authority to organise workers and argue openly for a working class rebellion that puts workers in the driving seat of a planned economy. We are in a time of preparation. Let’s use it.