This is Lenin’s first book, and it survives as a torso. Part I is here; Part III is here; Part II has never been found. The Progress edition prints the two that exist, records the gap, and moves on. It is worth stopping where the edition does not, because almost everything this book came to mean afterwards turns on how it reached us and who assembled it.
In the spring and summer of 1894 a twenty-four-year-old lawyer named Vladimir Ulyanov wrote a long polemic against three writers on the Petersburg monthly Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth): N. K. Mikhailovsky, the most respected radical thinker of the previous generation; S. N. Krivenko; and S. N. Yuzhakov. They were Narodniks — populists, who held that Russia might reach socialism through the peasant commune without passing through capitalism, and who had begun to attack the new Marxist current as foreign, fatalistic and indifferent to the peasantry’s suffering. The title is sarcastic. The “friends of the people” are the men who called themselves that, and Lenin’s subtitle sets out the charge: A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists.
It could not be printed. It was hectographed — copied by a gelatine duplicating process, a few hundred at a time — and passed hand to hand through the study circles of Petersburg, Moscow and the provinces. The 1894 Publisher’s Note, reproduced here, is the note of the illegal duplicators, and this edition adds the Institute of Marxism-Leninism’s Note to the Present Edition, which we also reproduce. Both are worth reading: they are the book’s own account of how it travelled.
The text you have follows the Progress translation in Collected Works, Volume 1, rendered from the fourth, enlarged Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. The apparatus is theirs: the numbered notes at the back are the Institute’s, and we have kept their original numbering from the volume, so that a reader working against the printed Collected Works can follow both. Lenin’s own page-bottom notes, and the translators’ notes closing “—Ed.”, stay where they belong.
Strip away the names of forgotten magazine controversialists and the book is a sustained attack on a way of thinking, and the attack still lands.
Mikhailovsky’s school held that the study of society required a “subjective method in sociology” — that because social facts involve human purposes, the investigator must begin from an ideal of what would satisfy human nature and measure reality against it. Lenin quotes Mikhailovsky’s own formulation, and it is the hinge of the whole polemic:
“Sociology must start with some utopia”
Everything follows from that sentence. If you begin from a utopia, Lenin argues, you are not studying a society at all; you are ranking institutions against a standard you brought with you, and the standard turns out to be your own class’s self-image dressed as human nature. The alternative he proposes is not a rival ideal but a change of question: instead of asking what arrangement would suit people, ask what production relations actually constitute this society, and by what laws they function and change. It is the young Lenin’s clearest statement of the materialist method, made before he had any authority to invoke, and it is made by argument rather than by citation.
The second strength is empirical. The friends of the people insisted that Russian capitalism was a small foreign graft — a million and a half factory workers — while the real Russia remained a countryside of small producers. Lenin goes through the handicraft trades, the village workshops, the buying-up merchants, and shows an economy already thoroughly capitalist in its relations however pre-modern in its technology, with the small producer’s tiny holding not a refuge from exploitation but the thing that makes his exploitation cheap. He is scathing about the metaphysical habit of thinking in “naked and direct contrasts”, and the scorn is earned: it was, in 1894, the better description of Russia.
The third is political, and it is the passage the book is still argued over. Against both the terrorists and the liberal petitioners, Lenin concludes that the factory worker “is none other than the foremost representative of the entire exploited population”, and that the task is to turn scattered strikes and riots into the organised struggle of a class. What that entails he states with a precision most of his later readers have not matched:
And that is why it is the direct duty of the working class to fight side by side with the radical democracy against absolutism and the reactionary social estates and institutions — a duty which the Social-Democrats must impress upon the workers, while not for a moment ceasing also to impress upon them that the struggle against all these institutions is necessary only as a means of facilitating the struggle against the bourgeoisie
Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and we shall come back to what happened when they were pulled apart.
Say plainly what is weak in it. The tone is the tone of a very young man who has just found a method and cannot stop demonstrating it: exhaustive, sarcastic, line-by-line, often hectoring, and considerably longer than its argument needs. Lenin quotes his opponents at such length in order to convict them that the reader loses the thread of the indictment.
More seriously, the polemic is so intent on destroying the Narodnik answer that it concedes nothing to the Narodnik question. The question was whether a country entering the world market late, with a surviving communal agriculture, must repeat the whole Western sequence. Lenin treats any hesitation about that as a flight from facts into abstract schemes. Yet Marx himself had hesitated. In 1881 Marx drafted, several times over, a reply to Vera Zasulich in which he allowed that the Russian commune might serve as a starting point for social regeneration if a revolution came in time to save it, and he said explicitly that the account of primitive accumulation in Capital was expressly limited to Western Europe. Lenin cannot be blamed for not knowing this: the drafts were not published until 1924, and the Soviet canon afterwards kept them at the edge of the record, where they embarrassed the schema of five stages that the state had made compulsory. But the reader should know that on the central question of the book, the founder was less certain than his twenty-four-year-old advocate, and that the certainty in these pages is the polemicist’s, not the method’s.
And the last sentence, famous as it is, carries the germ of something the tradition paid for:
the Russian WORKER, rising at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) along the straight road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.
The prediction was, astonishingly, right. The word “straight” was not. Nothing in the thirty years that followed was straight, and the habit of reading history as a road with a known destination — a habit this passage models beautifully — is the one the official Marxism of the following century turned into a doctrine of inevitability, and then into an alibi.
Two things about this edition deserve more attention than the edition gives them.
The first is in the Preface to the volume, stated quite openly. The text printed here follows a copy of the 1894 hectographed edition which reached the Institute of Marxism-Leninism only in 1936, carrying corrections apparently made by Lenin himself; on that basis the Preface says the edition contains the exact text. The claim is almost certainly true. It is also worth knowing what else the Institute was doing in 1936 and 1937 — the years of the Moscow Trials, when the men who had made the revolution were being shot and removed from the photographs, and when the same apparatus was rewriting the history of 1917 wholesale. Scrupulous scholarship on a pamphlet from 1894 and systematic falsification of the recent past were carried on in the same building by the same institution. That is not a paradox. Accuracy about the distant past is the coin in which such an apparatus buys the authority to be believed about the near.
The second is Part II, and here the silence is genuine rather than culpable. The state that built institutes to publish Lenin entire, that recovered a manuscript thought lost beyond recall and a hectograph nobody had catalogued, could never produce a third of his first book. It is missing, and this edition says so. A canon is measured as much by what it cannot supply as by what it selects.
Then there is the reflexive test, which this book invites more sharply than most. Its argument for the Social-Democrats’ way of working turns on a proposition about the educated:
there can be no sectarianism when the task is that of promoting the organisation of the proletariat, and when, therefore, the role of the “intelligentsia” is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary.
That sentence was printed, in millions of copies, by a state governed for sixty years by a permanent apparatus of professional leaders drawn from the intelligentsia, whose reason for existing was that they were necessary. The text was safe to circulate because nobody was expected to hold the regime to it. That is what canonisation does: it converts a demand into a relic.
The measure of a living book is that people fight over it, and the fight over this one came late and from an unexpected quarter.
In the first months of 1983 the Executive Committee of the Fourth International published, in its French theoretical review, two articles facing each other across a single issue. Doug Jenness of the American Socialist Workers Party argued, under the title the review gave him — “Notre continuité politique avec le bolchevisme”, our political continuity with Bolshevism — that the early Lenin — What the “Friends of the People” Are above all — showed a Marxist who took the democratic and agrarian struggle with a seriousness that Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution had obscured. He named this book as the first of Lenin’s important works, and quoted the passage given above, on fighting side by side with the radical democracy, at length. Ernest Mandel’s reply, “Défense de la révolution permanente”, in defence of permanent revolution, ran in the same issue. The whole quarrel lay in whether you stopped that sentence at the dash. Jenness’s tendency, which would shortly leave the International altogether, needed a Lenin for whom the democratic struggle was the strategic centre; his opponents needed the second half of the sentence, where the democratic demands are the means of clearing the road to the struggle against capital, and where the party doing the impressing is an independent workers’ party and not a wing of the radical democracy. Ninety years after it was hectographed, an illegal pamphlet aimed at three magazine writers was the document on which a split turned.
Elsewhere it did what famous titles do. British Marxists footnoted page 153 of Volume 1 for the young Lenin on social production relations. In 1974 an Irish socialist paper, arguing about cattle prices and the ruin of the small farmer, praised “the system adopted by Lenin in his book ‘The economic content of narodism’” of rationing food to children, mothers and the wounded — a programme, it said, that saved millions of lives. No such system is in that book, or in this one. The writer was thinking of War Communism, a quarter of a century later, and had attached it to a title he had heard of. The mistake is not contemptible; it is what happens when a forty-five-volume edition stands on a movement’s shelf as an emblem of continuity rather than a set of books that get read. It is one of the reasons for issuing this one on its own.
Read for its conclusions, this is a period piece: the Narodniks are gone, Russkoye Bogatstvo is gone, and the question whether Russia would develop capitalism was settled by events within a decade.
Read for its method, it is not. The demand that you describe a society before you judge it; the refusal to let an ideal of human nature stand in for an analysis of who owns what and who works for whom; the insistence that the most modern and concentrated form of exploitation is where the capacity to end exploitation is formed; and the double duty in that one long sentence, to fight alongside the democrats without dissolving into them — every one of these is a live instrument, and every one of them was blunted by the state that put the author’s body on display. The young man who wrote this had no apparatus, no authority and no country. He had an argument, a duplicating machine and a conviction that the workers did not need to be enthused with perspectives, only helped to understand their position. That is the inheritance, and it is not in the mausoleum.