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Rereading Lenin: Context, Chronology, and Revolutionary Change with Alexander Herbert
What happens when you read Lenin completely, chronologically, and in context? You discover a thinker far more complex and pragmatic than most portrayals suggest.
In this illuminating conversation, Professor Alex Herbert shares insights from his ambitious "Lenin in 45 Volumes" project, where he's systematically reading Lenin's complete works in their original Russian. Herbert reveals how Lenin's ideas evolved significantly over time in response to specific historical conditions—a reality often obscured when revolutionaries and critics alike cherry-pick quotes without context.
Contrary to how he's often portrayed, the Lenin that emerges from this chronological reading supported electoral participation throughout much of his early career while maintaining principled socialist positions. His approach to the national question developed in response to concrete debates within the Russian Empire about language rights and cultural autonomy. We learn how Lenin distinguished between theoretical disagreements and personal animosity, maintaining working relationships with those he fiercely criticized in print.
The conversation explores fascinating historical specifics: debates about Ukrainian language in schools, the "liquidationist" trend within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and Lenin's early recognition of China's revolutionary potential. Herbert helps us understand how political positions that might seem contradictory actually reflected a materialist approach to changing circumstances.
Perhaps most valuable for contemporary leftists is the discussion of challenges Lenin couldn't fully anticipate—from modern environmentalism to the transformed nature of class in post-industrial economies. These areas require applying Marxist methods to new conditions rather than searching for ready-made answers in century-old texts.
Join us for this thought-provoking exploration of revolutionary theory, historical context, and the continuing relevance of materialist analysis for today's political struggles.
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Hello and welcome to VarmBlog. And today I'm with Professor Alex Herbert, who is running the project Linen in 45 Volumes, which is reading linen in all 45 volumes, primarily in Russian. I am interested in his work for a variety of reasons, but one of which is I found that many years ago, marx and Engels were used as ventriloquist pieces by people who would decontextualize certain statements from them. And then I had to go back and reread Marx and Engels in the context of political events, very slowly, very completely and almost forgetting everything I learned about them, not just from liberals but from other Marxist and sectarians.
Speaker 1:Recently I've been going through the work of the scholars Eric Van Rie, hal Draper, lars Lee Schraper, lars Lee, dominico Lacerdo, a bunch of different people and realize that this is also done with Lennon, maybe even more than it's done with Marx and Engels, that Lennon is quoted, decontextualized, he's, you know, misrepresented and I and I don't think intentionally um, so I wanted to have you come out on the show and talk about that, because you're 20 volumes in now. Um, you've been reading it systemically, chronologically and in russian, um, so, uh, how is that project going for you? And have you, what have you found have been the ways that people have kind of distorted this.
Speaker 2:Uh, first, thanks for having me on Um. I'm always like humbled when people invite me on their podcasts um or their their. Do you call it a vlog or a vlog?
Speaker 1:It's a vlog, but, but. But you know it's effectively a podcast at this point.
Speaker 2:So yeah, um, uh and uh, and particularly to talk about lenin, right, because there's so many people out there who claim to be, or who are, in fact, lenin experts. Uh, in some capacity. Um, but your introduction, the way that you set this up, I think, perfectly sums up the reason why I thought doing a project like Lennon in 45 volumes would be important. And I should say 45 volumes is how many volumes there are in the English language. Progress Publisher's version of it. The Russian version is a different number of volumes only because you know page numbers and stuff like that, but the contents are mostly the same and the chronology is the same.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I started, I think, like any kind ofodox Marxist-Leninist. When you go on or you on Instagram or whatever you know, you see a lot of people who also claim to be MLs that are citing Lenin when it comes to making certain arguments such as you know, like should communists vote, for instance, should we participate in electoral politics, or you know, the national question, or whatever like that. And you know, it occurred to me that most of the citations that people were making of Lenin just seemed like grossly out of context of context, because, on the one hand, you have people who will quote him in this sort of canonical text like, uh, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, or the state and revolution, right, these are the texts that you would expect any kind of uh have read. But then you get who quoted him in you know a, a small article that he wrote in 1904 or something that in response to you know some issue going on in the party or something like that that it made me think like, do these people actually know the context of 1904, what's going on here and why Lenin is making that precise, that particular argument at that particular time?
Speaker 2:And so I had figured okay, well, I'm a historian, I'm trained as a historian, that's what I got my PhD in. So I know the chronology really well. I know the sort of the timeline of events, I know the way that historians well, I know this sort of the timeline of events. I know the way that historians have argued, the historiography of of events. I know the historicism of events. I know the different frameworks that have been used to make certain arguments. And so I was like I can probably go through these readings chronologically with a historical perspective, a 12-year difference, but a lot happens in that 10 years.
Speaker 2:I am not the same person that I was 10 years ago and some of my ideas have evolved and changed. I still hold the same core principles, but I'm not as much of a I don't know what the word is militant, maybe Marxist-Leninist that I was 10 years ago. Right, I do still consider myself a Marxist-Leninist, but things change and so, understanding that, you have to kind of understand that historical actors also change with time. They respond in different ways to events as they occur, and any good Marxist, including Lenin, but any good Marxist, including Marx himself, knows that. As Marx says, you know, the shape that the revolution will take is contingent on its time and place. Context is everything, and so there's no control.
Speaker 2:F search for Lenin talking about electoral politics. That is sort of the key to the answer. You know what I mean. That's going to unlock definitively this answer to should we vote in bourgeois elections? Because it's different in 1904 than it is in 1907. It's different than 1910. You know it changes, it's responding to conditions, and so I thought that, you know, running this historical framework would help set that context up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember first encountering this idea of the eternal linen um, actually not in marxist linen circles, although it often shows up there too, but in weird left communist circles, potentially bordigas circles, where you know there's this deduction of an invariant program that just doesn't really change. Uh, which is also funny because I've kind of done with Bordiga what you've done with Lennon and realized that, oh yeah, there definitely is changes. So I I find this, this tendency to be universal, and I also find some people that I think are almost doing Lennon a major disservice sometimes by, even when they they're quoting him, collect correctly and putting him in context. They're like reifying, say, what is to be done in that period of lenin, without also dealing with his responses to russian nationalism. Um, uh are there, they're quoting the national question and like not quoting it through the developments in the russian empire. And uh are there.
Speaker 1:I think the the the most common thing I see is uh, and you haven't gotten to this period of lennon yet, but like um, using revolutionary defeatism in odd ways that mirror contemporary politics but don't really have that much to do with what Lennon was talking about in 1916. And so I have gotten really acute into taking this slowly, because Lennon is used as a ventriloquist domine so much of the time, and when I started reading him systemically, for example, like on the question of socialism in one country and again you're not really there yet and I think that comes up around really majorly and 1916, 1918 and 1921. But those questions change Like like they do change, like you just go in and look at what he says here and then what he says here and what he's considering here and listening to your work, one of the things that you pointed out that I found fascinating is, even though there was still that focus on, you know, on the Russians joining up with the Germans and this maybe core periphery linkage in Bolshevik thought, as late as probably 1920, lenin's noticing the importance of these national movements and what they say about self-governments and bourgeois self-governments outside of Europe, pretty early on, actually much earlier than I was expecting. So what other kinds of trends have you seen? Because you know you've done the first 20 volumes, which I think is what? 1898 to like 1913 or so?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right to the eve of the First World War is where I decided to take a two-month break, which is almost over. There's a lot of trends, there's a lot of things to unpack there. The national question definitely emerges towards the eve of the war, mostly not even in the Russian Social Democratic Party per se, although it does appear there, because what they are doing essentially is they're responding to debates within the Russian Duma. There's a big question in the Duma, surprisingly enough or coincidentally enough, concerning the use of Ukrainian language in Ukrainian primary schools. The nationalists in the Duma of course say no, everybody within the Russian empire needs to be taught and be speaking Russian in schools, particularly if they're going to have any kind of state funding or subsidy. The liberals make sort of the same argument. Right, they say, yes, we're okay with Ukrainians, they can speak Ukrainian at home, they can do whatever they want at home, but in the primary schools, right, just so that it's uniform, we should have them speak in Russian. And the Russian social democrats need to articulate their own argument within that broad Duma argument and they ultimately land on the decision that recognized the importance of natural autonomy of any oppressed nation within the empire. And they begin to with the help of Lenin although I will say Lenin is not really great when it comes to working on a theory of nationalities, but he's starting to anyway the idea being that we'll recognize national cultures within a sort of umbrella institution, so long as they're willing to work towards building socialism, but ultimately we'll grant autonomy to the nations that are captured by the Russian Empire. And he has some definition of autonomy that is very particular to the Russian Social Democrats.
Speaker 2:Another of the big debates within the first 20 volumes is one that he spends a lot of time on is over factionalism within the party, particularly what's called the liquidationists. And, to make it very simple, the liquidationists were people that believed, people within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party who believed that the time to liquidate the party of its illegal activities had come right, that in order for the party to become a national, a party with national appeal, to win real power, it had to forsake its illegal activities that they admit were necessary in the early period but have no longer become necessary. So now we need to elect people into the Duma office and do legal activity, and Lenin says no. Lenin says, you know, as a party that really got its grounding in the underground, in underground, illegal, illicit activity. It needs to maintain that activity and they're not referring to to like bank robbing or anything like that. Um, lennon, by this time, by 1913, the party had already said no more bank robbing. You can't do that anymore because the, the bills are marked and so they can easily trace it back to us. Um, and so let's not do that. But what he's referring to is like leafleting in factories, technically an illegal activity, but one that is so important for the workers movement. And to give that up, according to Lennon, means that you're just allowing, you're disallowing the opportunity for workers to get exposure to the party. So the liquidationist trend is is a big one. That debate is huge, up until volume 20.
Speaker 2:Trotsky is a character that appears here and there. Trotsky, especially with the liquidationist debate, is somebody that tries to take the middle course. Right, he says Trotsky's whole thing is there has to be some kind of uh, uh, reconciliation that we can make between the liquidationists and the, the, what he calls the Leninists. Right, the people who are on the side of Lenin, and Lenin says that's impossible. Right, even saying that we should find some kind of conciliation is just saying that we should just accept the liquidationists because you can't have anything in between right to to eliminate to eliminate the illegal activity, uh, or any of the illegal activity is to concede to the liquidationists. And so Lenin has some insults for Trotsky at this time already.
Speaker 2:Let's see another. There really is no debate in this period from 1905 to 1913. There really is no debate about electoral politics. Lenin is on the side of voting right. He is in favor actually, of having a Russian social democratic candidate for the Duma represented in the Duma. What he is against is another faction within the party that emerges, called Otzovis, and the Otzovis are people who want to essentially allow the social democratic representatives to negotiate with liberals, to kind of side with liberals on certain things in order to push, you know, progressive legislation through. And Lenin, in theory, doesn't have problems with working out mutual agreements with liberals, but he does say, you know, at a certain point you have to give the party representatives in the Duma some kind of non-negotiation Right and you have to stick to that party line dogmatically. And and to make sure that people see you do it publicly. For Lenin, you know, publicity is major because if you have a, you know, just to give you a contemporary example, if you have a vote on taxes, on a new tax law coming up or renewing a tax law, to have a Russian social Democrat Compromise with a liberal to pass this tax law would be an embarrassment for the party. To pass this tax law would be an embarrassment for the party. And Lenin says no. They have to dogmatically defend the interests of the workers so that when it's reported that the one or two social Democrats didn't vote for the tax bill, people will read that in their newspapers and the news will spread and it will look good to the workers. And so these things have to be publicly done intentionally. So that's a sort of another debate going on. Those are the major things right now.
Speaker 2:As you said, it hasn't gotten to the split with the international. Another thing that does come up with the second international is the place of the Jewish delegation. The Jewish delegation in the Second International tries to latch itself onto the Russian party at first, and they're making this whole argument that these are like the Zionist socialists. They're making the whole argument that we are a part of the Russian Social Democratic Party's delegation and so therefore we deserve our own vote within the party delegation. That is still our own. And what Lenin says is that takes away from one of our votes, first of all. Second of all, it's prioritizing a ethnic group or nationality within the party that other ethnic groups and nationalities don't have. So, you know, balts don't have their own group, neither do Kazakhs or anything like that, or Ukrainians to do Kazakhs or anything like that, or Ukrainians. And so there's some debate there and the agreement that they end up working on working out is that the Zionist socialists would be what's the word they use like a fractional delegate, that they would be represented by the Russian party but they would not constitute their own full delegation on their own.
Speaker 2:Um, which is interesting and, you know, uh, worthy of its own thing. I will say that people who are interested in the debates on defeatism and stuff like that even though I'm not there in Lin, 45 volumes uh, I think it's craig nation's book on the second international and and um, uh and lenin, the zero wall left, I think, is what what the book is called. Even um is worth reading if you're interested in that. Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That's the book I go to for it too.
Speaker 1:One of the things I was going to ask you about this is, um, I am taken by the specifically russian uh context of a lot of this is not to say that linen wasn't active with the second international.
Speaker 1:He very much was, but we tend to read, for example, the national question in the debates between like panna cook and otto bauer and uh stalin later on, and linen in the context of the second international, and that it's beginning to split and not in the russian context.
Speaker 1:Like the russian context is specifically ignored, like the fact that the duma uh is is leading to this kind of concurrently to whatever's happening in the austro-Hungarian Empire that's leading Otto Bauer to think about this, is it's presented as like this is like discreetly within communism you know our socialism at this time and not also responding to local conditions on the ground, and I do think that's really important to know that some of this stuff in Lenin is, I wouldn't say, uniquely Russian, like you can learn from it in a. Let's see, if we had a viable Marxist-Leninist party that was more than 3,000 to 5,000 people in the United States, we could learn from this and have principles from this, but we still have to remember this is a very specific imperial context in which these people are beginning to develop their ideas and they come before in the international but that the international is not where they are, like organically emerging. Do you agree with me on that? Yeah, like organically emerging, do you agree with me on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, nationality's question in Europe more broadly is something that you know. I I was going to wait to plug this, but I'm. I'm teaching a class online that listeners can join on modern European history. It'll begin in the middle of July and lasts until the middle of August, so it's five weeks, one meeting per week.
Speaker 2:But I specifically talk about the emergence of nationalism as a movement, and it really must, you know, you learn about it, as the French Revolution sort of really expresses nationalism in the first major burst of energy. But it's Napoleon Bonaparte who exports it to the rest of Europe by founding the Duchy of Warsaw, by founding the Kingdom of Italy, by creating the Confederation of the Rhine for the first time. Right, it's Napoleon who's imposing these national codes on the rest of Europe, that's creating it. And so it's after the death of, or the expulsion of, napoleon that once you had let nationalism out of the metaphorical box, it's impossible to stuff it back in. And what we see is that where it suits the liberal constitutional monarchies like in, you know, here and there in France, but in Great Britain for the most part, and even in the United States when it suits them to support an independence movement, as it did in Greece in the 1830s, then they're all for it. They're all for national self-determination, because it's easier, it's a lot easier to negotiate with a newly independent Greek government than it is to negotiate with a very powerful Ottoman or Austrian king or emperor. And so what that means is that as these various places begin to break off of their imperial formations, particularly in the Balkans and in Austria-Hungary, it's kind of like a nesting doll right, one breaks off and then you find out that, okay, now there's three other nationalities that are claiming to be distinct from Greece, there's Macedonian, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And so the same thing happens in Russia. And it's in this period, in the 18, let's say 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, where the idea of Ukrainian nationalism becomes a very articulate idea that is boosted by, essentially, the bourgeoisie of Ukraine, that is, the nobility of Ukraine, and people whose economic interests are very much embedded in the idea of an independent Ukraine that can make their own financial decisions, independent of a Russian czar. And so you have that boiling up to the beginning of World War One, not just in Ukraine or the Balkans, but but the Baltic states as well, and pretty much everywhere in Poland, but the Baltic states as well, and pretty much everywhere in Poland, so that by the time Lenin is engaging with the question, you have fully articulated national identities and formations that are still existing in an empire, and that's why you know he refers to Russia as the prison house of nations. And you know people in Austria referred to the Austrian empire as the prison house of nations, and you know people in Austria referred to the Austrian Empire as the prison house of nations. But all of these empires, even Britain, is a prison house of nations essentially, and all of these national formations are striving for some kind of control and self-determination, primarily over their economic interests and their economic responsibilities to the world. You know, for example, this is after World War I, but after World War I Baltic states are created as independent entities because it's in the financial interest of France, britain and the United States to make what will effectively become. Yugoslavia is rich in natural resources, it has some of the old steel and coal mines that the Austrians and the Ottomans had set up, and it becomes a kind of de facto colony of Britain and France in this interwar period, in the Balkans too, because they make more money from France and Britain than they do from allying themselves with, you know, austria, which is a failing empire at that point, or no longer an empire, in Turkey, which is another failing empire. So the same thing is going on before World War I.
Speaker 2:The question is, what do we as socialists do with nationalities now? And you know, marx says in Lenin writes early on that the proletariat is a nationless people or it's a nationless mass. We all belong to the same socioeconomic identity. Therefore, you know, socialists don't concern themselves with nationalism, national identity. But by the time we get to 1913, at least 1912, it's pretty clear that the socialists need a better, more articulate position on nationalities than just dismissing it, because what they're seeing is that it's a very real thing. It has mobilized people in the Balkans, it has mobilized people in the western part of the Russian Empire, and so you have to take it serious. And that's sort of the historical context, that that sets up Lenin as a figure trying to work out a socialist theory of nationalities, not, in my opinion, not doing so well at it, not being as clear and concise as I think he is in other topics, but nevertheless it's a it's an early debate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, what I was going to ask you is that you keep on hinting that you you don't think, at least in these early volumes, that he's particularly articulate on it. I, I will say that, well, I'm not a big fan of stalin for the most part. Uh, I think stalin's more articulate on it than lenin is, and some of the other positions in the debate are more articulate too. But lenin has this in my mind and I can, you can tell me if you disagree with this. This want to like dialectically combine sometimes opposing positions within the socialist movement. I think you really see that in imperialism, the highest edge capitalism. Again, you haven't got there yet, although you're right there. Right, that's soon, or maybe it has already happened. I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, it's soon, I mean I've read it already, but it's it's not on the, chronologically not there yet. In the, in the volume I, I will say that, uh, yeah, stalin is more, more, uh notorious for having uh written a nationalities policy. That's partially because when, when the revolution happens, stalin is put in charge of uh, the commissar of nationalities, essentially, and lenin says, linda says it's on you, mr georgian, to figure out a nationalities you know position that we are, we, the, the Russian socialists, are to take, and a lot of people don't know this, but Lenin, I mean Stalin, effectively refers to Bukharin the party theorist to try to help him work it out, and so, in fact, stalin's entire nationalities theory is mostly a Bukharinist theory, theory that okay, I didn't know that that's funny um, stalin is not a good theorist at all.
Speaker 2:Even even stalin's like theoretical articulation of socialism in one country, I don't think is that good either. But yeah, that's another one that's attributed to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean, I do find this, I do find the nationalities and national liberation movements to be probably the bugbear of socialism, because the, the traditional Marx answer that you also see articulated by, like Rosa Luxemburgbourg and and anton panacook and the council of communists, etc. Uh doesn't answer a whole lot like how do we deal with multiple languages? What are like um, how do we not set people off if we're not recognizing national policies, that this is not somehow a different form of imperialism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I find the Otto Bauer answer to be at first interesting, but it kind of leads to the problem that Lennon was talking about with the Bund in the context of the Russian party, but like everywhere. So you have, you're dividing internally to one party, having like these, like we might call them today, like ethnic caucuses to represent cultural nationalism, but they're not really supposed to have complete political independence.
Speaker 1:And um, the, the, the lenin answer on autonomy and I want to ask you a little bit about that, because that is that has come up in what you read so far um is interesting because it's also not quite political independence and it's not unique to lenin. Sun Yat-sen has a similar policy in China with his like, with his nationalism program and he has, like, the five historical Chinese nations and they're semi-autonomous but together. And I find it really hard to articulate to people what that actually means for Lenin. And I find it so hard to articulate to people what that actually means for Lenin and I find it so hard that I actually question that. I know what Lenin means by that, so what so far does he mean by autonomy? And I'm guessing we're going to discover that that gets worked out more and more as World War I starts really amping up out more and more as World War I starts really amping up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what Lennon is actually advocating for, and there's a reason why you have a hard time understanding it. It's because I don't think that he has it so clearly articulated yet. Sorry, this is a cat food dish, uh, I think the the argument for it is simply that any oppressed nationality, uh, should be recognized as fully autonomous. Um, any oppressed nationality under the russian empire should be recognized as fully autonomous. And what that means is that, yes, the Russian social democrats are willing to pay lip service to different nationalities by saying oh, Ukraine, yes, you are your own nationality and you're autonomous and you're free to make your own decision now that the revolution has happened. And you're free to make your own decision now that the revolution has happened. And the assumption is that the working class in those nationalities will ultimately choose the socialist path. Right, because that's what the working class does. And the reason why I think that that is kind of weak is precisely because of that, because what they see when World War One begins is that the working class Democratic Party, about voting for war credits, I mean it fractured the Russian party just as much, because there were people that were saying if we don't vote to give the Kaiser war credits, we're going to lose the majority of the working class vote. Who are prepared to go to war, of the working class vote? Who are prepared to go to war? Even if you are Rosa Luxembourg and you're saying you're yelling at the top of your lungs in front of people, you're saying you know it's just going to be you, working class, who does the fighting for the bourgeoisie in the Kaiser and you shouldn't be doing this, yada, yada, they're not going to listen to you. Because from an industrial economic perspective, war means more production. More production means more jobs. More jobs means potentially higher wages, longer hours, more money, and so the workers are actually nationalistic, and the same is true in Russia as well. And so Lenin has not really fully confronted that yet, and he will.
Speaker 2:During the Civil War, right when there's a whole bunch of different national movements that happen let's take Georgia, for example. When the revolution happens, there's a Menshevik revolution that happens in Georgia and a Menshevik republic is declared in Georgia. Stalin turns to Lenin and says we need to send the Red Army there to take it over, otherwise we won't retain Georgia. And Lenin says no, absolutely not, don't, don't do that. If that's the path that Georgia wants to go down, they will eventually find their way back to us. Path that Georgia wants to go down, they will eventually find their way back to us, but let them have that path. Right now, stalin actually goes behind Lenin's back and sends the Red Army into Georgia to take it over.
Speaker 2:But Lenin's policy was consistently let these nationalities, let the proletariat of these countries, let them make their own decision. They'll eventually find their way back to us if that's what they want to do. Stalin has a different view than it. But again, what I think Lenin had not fully considered and it's not a fault of his is just that the working class is very nationalistic. Is just that the working class is very nationalistic, and I'm talking about labor unions, stuff like that, not the party I mean the party is all trained in theory but labor unions, for example, there's a reason why, when the war starts, what the German social democrats are really worried about is losing the support of labor unions, because it's the labor unions that are very nationalistic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is actually a key point because it's something that kind don't know a war. Or, in our case, like what's probably the second largest union in the AFL-CIO, one of the police unions. You know, these are hard things for us to deal with. We can demand all day that the AFL-CIO kick the cops out, but that they would lose, like what? Something like 20 percent of their membership if they did that. It's, it would be like asking to kick the teachers out. It's not going to happen. And so how do you respond to that? And I do think Lennon's trying in a real way.
Speaker 1:There are other interesting implications of that. I mean, this is beyond the purview of what you're reading, but like during the before the civil war, you have like Bolsheviks going in to like help develop languages and writing systems for groups that don't have them, so that they would meet the criterion of a national subject, so that they didn't organize them into autonomous regional national zones, and I find that both simultaneously impressive, but also that's going to cause problems for you in 40 years. I think people overstate the whole Stalin Russification thing. That's really more of a cruise ship thing, but like with the kind of like Russian chauvinism slash, also trying to put a good face forward on other nationalities within the soviet space. So I mean, like ukrainians actually have almost a privileged position in and soviet leadership for a while at different times, and I find that all fascinating.
Speaker 1:And it does seem to be kind of based in trying to continuously thread that needle that Lennon first set up. But it's a needle, I mean to be fair to Lennon. I don't think there's an obvious answer to it, because the Marx answer that, like the proletariat has no country, it's not just optimistic in a like ideological sense, as you pointed out. It's optimistic in a material sense, like there are material incentives to be invested in national development and war policy, et cetera for most workers, particularly if you're in a, if you're in heavy industry, and I don't know that we've always had a great. I don't know that we, even today, have a great answer to that problem.
Speaker 2:Um, the good, the arguments, to the extent that they became tied to industrial processes and labor unions and stuff like that. It was outside of his time, right for him. What he's seeing in 1848 is just the kind of nucleus of nationalism as an idea. I mean, nationalism at that time is such a in 1848, is such a kind of new. I mean, all right, I'm trying to paint an image for you and your listeners. Let's assume that nationalism is a human being and Napoleon Bonaparte's expansion is the birth. Well, by the time we get to 1848, nationalism is a toddler still and what that means is that it's not fully developed.
Speaker 2:A lot of nationalities are kind of still struggling to figure out even what their nationality is. I'll give you an example of Poland. So Poland in 1848 and in the 1830s, when there is actual revolt in Poland, polish officers and nobility, they get the national idea in their heads because you know, they have nationalism as an idea and they say oh, you know what? Let's try to gain independence from the Tsar and lead a national movement and we're going to go out to the countryside and recruit all of the peasants that we possibly can to join in our cause. They go out to the countryside and they start telling the peasants like, yeah, let's rebel against the Russian czar. And the peasants are like, what the hell are you talking about? We don't care about the czar. The czar lives far away. You know and we're here. Who are you? And aren't you the people that take land from us and own land that we want, and so the nobility that tries to lead a revolution in poland. They actually end up getting lynched by the peasants in poland because the national idea just doesn't work yet, and this is 1830s, 1840s. It doesn't work yet.
Speaker 2:So for marx to have the foresight to, to envision the way that nationalism was going to become such an adult, such an empowering adult, an extroverted adult, I don't think he could have seen that it meant that the heirs of Marx, lenin, rosa Luxemburg who was Polish, et cetera, had to figure out what is. You know, what is to be our position on nationalities. And you know, as you said, they think they have it figured out, but 40 years after they think they have it figured out, it all blows up in their face. So they don't really have it figured out, neither Stalin or Khrushchev, nor Lenin. As far as labor unions, because you tried to relate it to today.
Speaker 2:I think that labor and environmentalism are the two places where the modern socialist movement really hasn't confronted the issues there yet. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the working class in the United States are not socialistic at all, and I think that modern socialists in the United States have a very romanticized and almost archaic understanding of what the working class is Used to be. Back in the day, you know, these were industrial workers who would go to factories to work. It would also be manual laborers that would be part of this proletariat. Manual laborers I don't know if you know this, but union electricians today make over $100 an hour.
Speaker 2:That's not really the same as somebody that works at Dunkin' Donuts or at Burger King or something like that. That to me, in my view, is a different class. It's a different skill level. Does that mean that manual laborers are now part of a bourgeoisie? Well, not really, because their material interest, their worldview, is probably closer to the person that works at Burger King than it is to Jeff Bezos. But does that mean that the parameters of what constitutes a bourgeoisie has become so much wider as to make a sort of neo-aristocracy out of the billionaire class? I'm not sure, I don't want to make that argument, but it's something worth thinking about. That I don't think modern socialists have really figured out. And the other problem is environmentalism. Modern socialists say that they're environmentalists, but the truth is that if you talk, I have a friend who's a union organizer in europe.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna say what country, because I don't want to give them away but um, a union organizer in Europe, and they recently went to a conference where there was a delegation of an environmental activist group that was there, and they had an interesting point. They said, in my capacity as a union steward, as a union organizer, what we want and what the workers want is more money, more production, more hours, benefits and maybe, you know, an expansion of our I don't know let's say, auto industry or something like that. Environmentalists don't want that. That's bad for the environment. More work is bad for the environment. And yet workers want more work, they want more money, they want home production, for example.
Speaker 2:You know, you know, bring industries back to the United States. That's not good for that's, that is good for the working class, but that's not good for environmentalists. And so it's another one of these areas where I think contemporary socialists in the United States haven't really dived into and figured out what is a socialist response to environmentalism in the 21st century, in our time. Because, you know, climate change has sort of changed the rules of the game, I think, in many ways. And so America first industry. Come back to the US isn't good for the environment, but it's good for labor. You know, you remember, recently Sean Fain said that the Trump tariffs were good because it was going to bring industry back to the US.
Speaker 1:Environmentalists don't want that, but Sean Fain, the leader of one of the biggest unions in the country, thinks it's a good thing of one of the biggest unions in the country thinks it's a good thing, and a lot of yeah, I know, yeah, I know, I know, I know, um, I have been at odds with how to even point out that america's already a productivist economy and this one actually lead to jobs for the working class either, since automation and organic capital is what it is. But, but trying to explain that to the average person, hell, trying to explain that the socialists, who are fairly well educated, is quite hard. As is the point that you made about electricians. I have pointed out that there's all this discussion about the pmc, but you're arguing about baristas and you're not asking about guild. Unionized, effectively petite, bourgeois electricians are, um, are carpenters, are whatever, who make more than most college educated people. But do not make, you know, but are not jobs that that, uh, the vast majority of the working class could get? And if they did get it, um, they wouldn't make that much money. And so, like, there's actually incentives, uh, in those fields to push back, um, you know, mass proletarian involvement in them.
Speaker 1:And uh, I'm glad you bring it up, because these kind of questions are things that, like, we should be at least struggling with, and I I find that what we actually do is pretend that it's like 1955.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's some kind of large scale first world industrial working class and, and I've been pointing out, there's not even a large scale industrial working class in the developing world in the same way anymore. Like automation has fundamentally changed that, with the, with the sole exception of china, and that is by government policy, and so like it is very um, but even there, I mean even in china, there are dark factories, you know, that have maybe like 20 workers, for where things used to be used to employ like like a thousand. And on environmentalism, I completely agree with you. I would love to know, I mean, you know this is not an active, you know we can talk about marxist writing on metabolism. I actually don't know if lennon deals with the environment that much um, but what lennon would do with that today, mean, given his critiques of trade union consciousness about other issues you know, 100 years ago Environment.
Speaker 2:Oh, am I breaking up? No, I can hear you. It doesn't really talk about environment that much, but you know it does talk about rent, and rent, in a way, is the idea of exacting profit from the land, no matter what big, big or small, and that that can be understood as a, as a kind of environmentalist concern, because, as in in so long as profit can be exacted from the land, it means that the land will be exploited, right? So Lennin does talk about that, and so he does recognize what he calls and this is another one of the kind of debates that he finds himself in a lot the um, the expansion of a kind of peasant capitalist economy, and that is that you have big landowners that are coming in, wealthy, wealthy people that are coming in buying up large tracts of land and essentially renting it out to peasants. And he says that's no different than serfdom, right?
Speaker 2:He says that the czar, symbolically and serfdom in 1860 was it 65 or 63 um, or the americans did, uh, 63, I think um symbolically did so because, a the capitalists needed a labor force, so they needed some mobility between the rural and the urban settings, and b what it allowed for effectively was the development of capitalism in the countryside, in the sense that now you have people paying rent for land rather than working for it in kind or whatever. And and you know he's right. Uh, so he doesn't talk about environment, but it's always there that you know, marxists are, have always been environmentalists insofar as rent implies the exploitation of the natural world, and that they understand that land is a fictitious commodity. It's not a real commodity, right? It's one that doesn't belong to anybody, it's not produced, it is there. You know what I mean, right, and turned into a commodity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think we have both the metabolism sections and capital, and then also, in the critique of the Goth of program, um, the stuff about natural wealth as opposed to wealth from labor and the hoarding of natural wealth is implicit in that. Um. So there, there is a nascent environmentalism in there, and I think, uh, you know, john bellamy foster and, um, even someone who I don't totally always agree with, like Kohei Sato or Jason Moore, they're good on this. I was going to ask you, though, what are the things that you found in these early volumes that really, truly surprised you, alex? What did you not expect to find in these first 20 volumes that you found? You are Marxist-Leninist. You were fairly familiar with Lenin beforehand, but what was actually surprising?
Speaker 2:What was actually surprising for me, on the one hand, is how much Lenin's opinion changes about certain things. Um, there's small things that that surprised me, how I'm going to say reactionary, but I don't mean reactionary in the political sense, but I mean how sharp he is, how he is with what's going on. He's not living for the majority of the time but he's still on top of what's going on. He's responding to it all in real time and keeping up with the periodicals, the dailies, the weeklies, the oneslies that are coming out and responding to them all. So it's impressive how much he was committed. Other things that surprised me changing kind of positions on things, how on top of things he seems to be. I think that would be the most surprising things for me. A lot of the smaller things that I already mentioned were surprising, like his position on electoralism and how he wasn't against it. Surprise, surprise, even though people misquote him all the time. How much the canonical works like what is to be done or, uh, imperialism or state and revolution, how much you don't. There are smaller articles that articulate the views that are encapsulated in those bigger works just as sufficiently. They're much smaller, they're sharper. It's like he's working out his ideas before he publishes the big work. So that's sort of surprising for me.
Speaker 2:I'm always consistently surprised by how much foresight he seems to have. I guess I'm not, because, as materialists, we tend to understand what's seems to have. I guess I'm not right Because you know, as materialists, we tend to understand what's going to happen, right, I think you know I like to brag about how much I can kind of call the future just based on a materialist understanding of geopolitics and what's happening. Who's you know, when the war between Russia and Ukraine started, I knew that there was a mineral deal that was going to come out of it. There's no other way that Ukraine could pay back the United States other than a mineral deal. But I am still I am still consistently surprised by how much Lenin is like sees, how much, how, how foresighted he is about certain things that are happening, that are going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you did. I mean I find Lenin interesting, like I read Marx and Engels' journalism and I've read Lenin's, a lot of Lenin's papers I have not done what you've done and I definitely don't read them in Russian, but and I find Marx's Lenin journalism to be often Marx and Engels excuse me journalism to be often insightful, very insightful, but also sometimes like wildly of the moment, like, for example, trying to deduce beyond that one quote by uh um about the proletarian has no nation, like what marks, that, like where marks thinks we should side on any like geopolitical issue. When what he's writing for the New York tribune in German is, you know, I actually often I'm like, okay, so he goes on something about something in China. That's some weird Hegelian rant and there's some interesting stuff in there. But I often don't find it particularly useful in the same way that I do some of Lenin's writings. I mean there are exceptions, I think he's, I think I mean, if you've ever, one of the things that really surprised me was Marx's writings on Simone Boulevard and how much he hated Simone Boulevard and stuff like that. Like that stuff is interesting and often actually quite insightful. But there's other things where I'm just like, like when he's writing about the Taiping Rebellion, and I'm hesitant to call a conflict that killed 20 million people in the 19th century just a rebellion. But whatever, I mean you have what like 20 times the death rate of the US Civil War. But you know, I find that stuff to be not as useful.
Speaker 1:But lenin's stuff on on where things were going, like his eye on the development of capitalism and the, the shift of the capitalist involvement in these nascent nation states, I mean, and you know bakaran's really working that out theoretically, a little bit more elaborately than Lenin is, but, um, his ability to see that when it is by no means obvious to most people, including most other socialists, is kind of amazing.
Speaker 1:Are, like, I mean, I think, uh, like what he does in imperialism, the highest age of capitalism, with, like, dealing with implications from Hilferding and the liberal anti-imperialist Hobson and Bukharin Bukharin's a major influence on that text too, to be just kind of brilliant, because people think it's just about geopolitics. But he's also working out seeming contradictions and marks and Engels about the development of social production and what monopolies might mean, et cetera, et cetera that other people aren't picking up on, and so it is both like his ability to both be in the moment as a practical thinker and still be highly theoretical about it, and yet also, can you imagine trying to convince relatively uneducated workers of these positions, which he could do? You've read Jacobin articles. You know what they're like. When they try to do that, it's usually not very convincing. I'm super impressed by that.
Speaker 2:Two things. Lenin actually writes about the Chinese Revolution in 1911, and so for people who want a clear example of, I think, what you're talking about and what I was talking about, his foresight, read his response to the Chinese Revolution in 1911, because he says essentially that China is the future. Something is awakening in China right now. It's got the largest population in the world, the largest colonized population in the world, and it's and it's beginning, as he says, its path towards revolutionary liberation. The other thing that surprises me about Lenin and this is something that I think a lot of people get wrong and they try to a theoretical dispute that they have.
Speaker 2:Yes, he'll use these like kind of quirky insults to renegade, you know, kautsky or something like that. It doesn't mean that he hates these people. He still sees them as comrades in a common workers party because ultimately, he, he all the people that he beefs with in the pre world war, the pre-revolutionary period, they ultimately take positions in the soviet government. Luna charsky is a great example. So in in the pre-world war one period, lenin gets into a big debate with Lunacharski, maxim Gorky and some others over what's the, what's the? I forget the trend that they call it, I'm blanking on it right now.
Speaker 1:But essentially what's that? Is it the monism debate, or I don't remember what luna charcey's debate particularly was.
Speaker 2:Okay anyway but, but, it's, it's over it's. It's the text that he writes uh, imperial criticism as a response to um, and, and the nature of the debate is over. Well, it's over imperial criticism, so it's. It doesn't actually exist, but it's what we think. Reality is Right, it's all in our minds. And Lenin writes imperial criticism as a response to that, where he goes after Lunacharsky and Gorky like pretty hard, and what he essentially says is that if you don't believe that the world exists outside of your consciousness, then that means you are ignoring the plight of oppressed people everywhere, you're denying that there are actually oppressed people everywhere and that is categorically un-Marxist people everywhere and that is categorically un-Marxist Right. So he calls them out and I think a pretty important way, and he doesn't hate these people because ultimately, after the revolution, lunacharsky takes a leading role in the revolutionary government. Maxim Gorky becomes kind of the first major literary figure of Soviet literature.
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of people don't understand that. They read Lenin kind of poking at these people and they think that oh, he's the master polemic that like insulted people and, you know, went for their throats all the time. It's true, but just like his nationalities policy. You know it, it doesn't. It's not a full severance. You know it's right now we're disagreeing, but at the end of the day we're still comrades, right. We have disagreements on certain things and so I think people miss that about lenin. They, they kind of want to read this kind of dictatorial, my way or nothing view and that's just not what I'm seeing in in how the history runs.
Speaker 2:Stalin is different, but yeah stalin stalin, you might be able to say, is like the first guy who interpreted lenin's polemics as like serious beef and not just theoretical dispute, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, stalin is different. And also Stalin it weirdly is not as likely to insult you but is more likely to have your shot. And you know, I just think we can't deny that I also. I mean, I think about. I mean an example of this actually is Lenin's response to Martov and when Martov was dying. You know, people go all the way back to, I forget when the first Martov Lenin debate was. Was it like 1904 or something?
Speaker 1:For those of you who don't know, and I'm sure a lot of my people don't, martov was a key member of the Mensheviks, but in the Civil War he sides with the Bolsheviks. Lenin wants him to have, like you know, like actually orders, I think, like a funeral and honors for him, you know, despite the fact that they fought a whole lot. And I think Lenin's really mad when kind of Stalin doesn't do that. And I thought, if I'm remembering that correctly and I found that story like really illustrative, that's what I picked up on like oh, just because Lenin like insulted you doesn't mean he thought you needed to be out of the party. That really wasn't.
Speaker 1:Because if you go back and read Lenin, he insults everybody, he's on Stalin, he's so Trotsky, he's Joe Trotsky many different times. He insults Kotsky, although you know that created this liberal illusion that everything Lenin came up with, that you know, was somehow completely outside of the Second International, and then that's clearly not true. Like he develops it in different ways, a whole lot of linen's ideas are out of kotsky straight up, like um, and I just find that. I find that really important to understand and really easy to miss. You know, um at any given time.
Speaker 2:Um trotsky is the best example of it too.
Speaker 2:You know, there's a lot of debating with trotsky in the lead up to revolution. But at the end of the day, trotsky becomes second only to lenin in in the revolutionary moment, um, and is put in charge of the fucking army. Like you can't have a higher, more trusted position than being in charge of the army in any government, you know? I mean that means that Lenin trusted Trotsky to not Stage a counterrevolution or something like that. So right, you know people miss that, but it's. But it's generally true and there's a reason why it's. It is true that Lenin considered Stalin to be a hothead. It's because, as and I think he writes about it many times, not just in the so-called Last Testament, but he writes about it many times that, like Stalin, doesn't know how to let a beef go, to just let let it go and move on, to just let it go and move on, it becomes personal for him. That history, that position, proves true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you look at all the major old Bolsheviks and who's left by even as early as 1942, it's like Molotov Kind of. And who's left by even as early as 42, it's like Molotov. That's about it. There's a few more, but there's not a ton. Alex, where can people find more of your work if they're interested in this? I think everyone who has any interest in communism should be interested. Even if you don't like Lenin, you they're interested in this. I think everyone who has any interest in communism should be interested in it. Even if you don't like Lenin, you should be interested in understanding him the way he understood himself. But where can people find your work on Lenin and any other work that you want to put out there?
Speaker 2:Lenin in 45 volumes has its own social media pages. It's Lenin underscore in underscore 45 underscore volumes. That's on Instagram and TikTok. I don't have X, I don't use X, it was just too much for me, I had to get off of it. That's where you can find Lennon stuff. It's also on YouTube. In the same app I have a sub stack. It's called Alex's sub stack. It's that very creative.
Speaker 2:But, um, I publish articles here and there on there, but what I've really been focusing on right now is I do online classes for the public it does. There is a fee to to enroll. Um, that's mostly because it takes a lot of my time to do it and I teach full time on two college campuses. But I do think that education should be as accessible as possible and I also do think that the way that I teach something like modern European history is very different than what a lot of people have probably been exposed to. So I just got done.
Speaker 2:I just finished a class on political economy that the history of political economy. That ran five weeks. It was very successful. There's reviews on the Patreon page for it and the next one I'm doing is Modern Europe. So to sign up for that you can go to the Patreon page Courses with Dr Herbert and when you're on that page you can go to shop and in the shop you pay and then it gives you a Word doc and the Word doc has the link to what will be the Zoom meetings. It has a link to the Telegram channel. Because we like to, like we do at Political Economy, we have a kind of vibrant community. We share memes with each other that are relevant, or we communicate with each other if we have to, if someone's not going to be in the meeting, or something like that.
Speaker 2:The political economy class had consistently about 20 people in it, and so I'm hoping to get those same numbers for modern Europe and I think that your listeners will really enjoy it. There are assigned readings, but there's no assigned assignments, so you don't have to write anything unless you want to. Somebody in the course evaluations did tell me that I should have assignments, but you're not getting university credit for it, unfortunately. You're just getting intellectual credit for it. So if you're interested in that, in learning from me, you can sign up for that. And um, those meetings are through zoom, so they're in person, but I record each zoom meeting and then I upload it. So if you're in a different time zone and you can't make the meeting, you can watch the recording and we all agree as a group in the Telegram channel when and what time to meet. So I try to make it as easily accessible for everybody as I can.
Speaker 1:When is this modern European class starting?
Speaker 2:So the plan is to start it in the middle of July middle of July I don't know what day of the week yet, because that's something that we agree with, agree upon as a class once people are all enrolled, but it will begin in the middle of July and end in the middle of August. It will be five weeks. We'll meet once a week for two hours. The first half will be lecture, second half will be discussion on shared readings. The discussions tend to be really good. Um, it's because the readings are good.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, awesome. Thank you so much and I'll put some links in the show notes for you, um, so people can find your material. Uh and uh, thank you for coming on. I think this is really important topic and I really enjoyed talking to you. Maybe we'll see you again.
Speaker 2:Hell yeah, thanks for having me on, I enjoyed it.
