This is a book written in anger, and the anger was earned. Lenin composed it in October and November 1918, in the worst months of the civil war, with a Socialist-Revolutionary's bullets still lodged in his body — Fanny Kaplan had shot him on 30 August — while the young Soviet republic fought for its life against White armies, famine, and the intervention of a dozen foreign states. He wrote it after reading Karl Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which charged the Bolsheviks with strangling democracy in the name of socialism. The edition's own preface remembers that Lenin "was literally burning with anger" and sat up night after night to answer. He was right to burn, and the tradition from which this introduction is written has always said so.
Kautsky had been, for a generation, the Pope of Marxism — the guardian of the doctrine after Engels's death. In August 1914 that authority collapsed: the German Social-Democratic Party voted the war credits for the Kaiser, and Kautsky supplied the theology for the surrender. To Lenin he was a renegade, a man who had deserted the cause he once led, and when the deserter began lecturing the republic that had actually made the revolution, Lenin answered with the whole weight of Marx behind him. The answer holds up. Kautsky's master-category, "pure democracy," is a fiction: democracy always has a class content, and the parliamentary republic he idealised is, for the propertyless, "democracy for the rich" — formally equal, materially rigged at every turn by money, the press, and the courts. Against this Lenin restored what Kautsky had buried: that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" is not Lenin's coinage but Marx's own, the content of the Paris Commune — the rule of the labouring majority, suppressing the resistance of the dispossessed minority. Kautsky, posing as the friend of democracy in general, had "turned Marx into a common liberal," draining the revolution out of him to make him fit for respectable company. On these points Lenin scores hits that have not aged, and the Fourth International has never wished them unscored. Its own founder answered Kautsky in the very same voice: Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism (1920) took up the identical quarrel and defended the Red Terror as the necessary answer to the White — the plain truth that a revolution besieged by men who shoot workers cannot fight them with a debating society. To read The Renegade Kautsky sympathetically is not to make excuses. It is to grant that on the war between revolution and reformism, Lenin and Trotsky were right, Kautsky was wrong, and the civil war was real.
It is true that Lenin, pressed to a formula, wrote hard words: the revolutionary dictatorship is "rule won and maintained by the use of violence… unrestricted by any laws." Read as a doctrine for all seasons, the phrase is dangerous, and honest revolutionaries have said as much ever since. But it was not written for all seasons. It was written by a man describing an emergency he had not chosen and did not expect to outlast the year — the temporary, ruthless self-defence of a workers' power with its back to the wall. The danger in it was genuine: a rule exercised by a party in the name of a class can decay into a rule over the class. But the decay, when it came, was not the logical unfolding of a sentence in a pamphlet, as both liberal anti-communists and Soviet catechists have pretended in their opposite ways. It had causes that Lenin's detractors never mention and his idolisers could never admit.
Those causes were objective, and Trotsky set them out in The Revolution Betrayed. The revolution had staked everything on spreading to the industrial West; the German revolution failed, and Soviet power was left marooned in a ruined peasant country. The civil war this book defends had, in the very act of winning, consumed the class that was supposed to rule — the advanced workers killed at the front or drawn up into the state machine — and the soviets emptied of the living argument that had filled them in 1917. Into that vacuum rose not the proletariat but an apparatus: a bureaucracy that made itself the arbiter over an exhausted society and then its master. The dictatorship of the proletariat became, by degrees, the dictatorship of an officialdom over the proletariat — the precise inversion of everything this book argues. Lenin saw the beginning of it and spent his last active months fighting it: against Stalin's brutal handling of Georgia, against the swelling apparatus, in the suppressed Testament that begged the party to remove Stalin from a post he was already abusing. He died with that fight unfinished, and the apparatus won.
Then the apparatus did to Lenin the thing that is the real subject of introducing this book today: it reified him. Over his widow Krupskaya's protest it embalmed his body and raised a shrine to it; it froze his living, self-correcting thought into a catechism it christened "Marxism-Leninism"; and it minted a ritual couple — "Lenin and Stalin" — that yoked the revolutionary to his gravedigger and let the second draw on the authority of the first. Stalin, who had already boiled "Leninism" down to a manual in his Foundations of Leninism of 1924, was hailed as "the Lenin of today." The purpose of the cult was never reverence; it was licence. A Lenin turned to stone can be quoted for anything, and this text above all was quoted for the proposition that proletarian rule is "unrestricted by any laws" — now pointed exactly where Lenin never pointed it: at the peasantry in the collectivisation famine, at rival socialists, at the Left Opposition, at the Old Bolsheviks in the dock of the Moscow Trials, at the workers themselves. A formula written to defend a workers' republic against its class enemies was made the warrant for a bureaucracy's terror against the working class.
Which brings us to the volume in your hands: Jim Riordan's translation, from Volume 28 of the Collected Works, issued by Progress Publishers in 1974. By 1974 the state printing this defence of soviet power had not held a free soviet election in half a century. The living, arguing soviets whose superiority to parliament is the beating heart of Lenin's case had been hollow instruments of the apparatus since the 1920s; the Constituent Assembly was merely the first of the rival bodies suppressed, and the last were the factions, oppositions and parties of the revolution's own left. The Soviet editorial framing lets none of this show. Its preface presents Kautsky's every charge as slander and Lenin's every answer as vindicated by events — when the plain event of the intervening half-century was that Kautsky's one prescient fear, that a power answerable to no rival would devour the democracy it claimed to fulfil, had come true: not, as Kautsky imagined, through Bolshevik wickedness, but through the Stalinist counter-revolution that the pamphlet's own editors served. The apparatus needed Lenin timeless because its own existence was the standing refutation of his confidence.
There is a second afterlife of the renegade, and it is the one the Soviet edition could least afford to notice. If in the East the dictatorship of the proletariat was inflated into the dictatorship of an apparatus over the proletariat, in the West it was quietly handed back to Kautsky. By the later 1970s the great Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain — the Eurocommunists — had renounced it outright: Santiago Carrillo's Spanish party struck the term from its programme in 1978, and with it went everything Lenin had wrung from Marx in these pages, surrendered to the "pure democracy" this book exists to demolish. Ernest Mandel, answering them for the Fourth International in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, showed the surrender was no accident but the doctrine's own trajectory: the parties of "socialism in one country" had travelled, by way of the popular front and peaceful coexistence, all the way back to the renegade their tradition was founded to bury. Lenin's polemic outlived its target only to watch him reborn — this time inside the parties that still flew the red flag.
So read this book, first, for what it is: Lenin at his most formidable, dismantling a great authority who deserved dismantling, in defence of a revolution that deserved defending. Refuse it to the liberal reading that folds Lenin into Kautsky, and refuse it just as firmly to the official reading that folds Lenin into Stalin. The honest way to read it is the way its author would have wanted and its publisher could not permit — as the argument of a revolutionary for the rule of the working class, and therefore as the sharpest available indictment of the state that reprinted it, which had put the rule of officials in the workers' place and called the substitution Leninism. This book was not the licence for what followed. It was one of the things betrayed.