The council communist approach, as I explain it, is that it’s okay to struggle within the organization on whatever issues you find essential or necessary for the victory of the revolution but then to fight to destroy the organization and to found a new one, one that is libertarian and communist.

To argue the right of an organization to do whatever it wants, as long as its members agree to it, is a fine thing to do but can never make a revolution in the first place.

As we go through the history of the Russian Revolution we find a class struggle going on within the revolutionary party which isn’t part of the plan from the beginning. Lenin initially objected to the first struggle in this way: “What sort of party is this? The party is the whole country. That is its capital. You are fighting over a capital that you have no idea where it is, it may be in one place or another, you are arguing about the precise place to build the centre of the party and that, indeed, is not correct.

The general line of the party is that it should comprise all the workers in the republic, outside of the capitals, this means all of the towns and villages and each of the trade unions, as all of these have a certain integral part.

The problem is not who will be in the headquarters of the party but that the headquarters should be at the centres of struggle. The communists should be at the centre of the struggle, not at the centre of the party. The party is only one means, one moment, of the revolution, the general line, the goal of the revolution is to take the state power, not to fight for the leadership of the party.”

Later in his life Lenin took the second and third step:

“In his first edition of What is To Be Done?, Lenin outlined the particular problems of the Russian state and its government and wrote that a majority of the masses did not want direct participation in government, they wanted participation in an organisational leadership.

In his second and third editions of What Is To Be Done?, he stated that in order to direct the masses toward the revolution, the party must either take the direct, objective interest of the masses, ie, the will of the masses, or it must create a leadership of the masses, ie, a leadership led by the workers and their party organisation.

He didn’t see how you could conduct a revolution without the political leadership of the masses but he recognized that without that there was no possibility of directing them towards the revolution.

This was the first step towards a dictatorship, to direct the masses.”

So, what happened to him? What happened to Comrade Lenin after the October Revolution? What happened to the First Five Year Plan? It was called off. It was put on hold. It was never implemented and it was all because Lenin disagreed with Trotsky’s proposal for revolutionary government.

During the Russian Civil War, where the new Soviet Union was fighting a counterrevolutionary front, Stalin began to build the new Soviet bureaucracy through Stalin’s tactics of using the bureaucracy as the leading force for state-building and central planning. This continued after Lenin died, and through the middle and the late 30’s and all of the way up to the final years of the Stalin era.

Lenin said it himself in 1925: “What we have hitherto accomplished has not been because of our organization but because of our opportunism.”

He was correct.

This is why Trotsky called Lenin “the political bankruptcy of world revolutionary politics.”

There is the myth that after Lenin’s death, Stalin consolidated state power, nationalized the means of production, raised workers’ salaries and protected the environment, etc.

These things did happen. This myth, however, is a myth because there was no radical, Marxist, egalitarian forces in the working class, the world wide working class. There were Leninists but not Marxists. Marxism can’t live with Leninism because Leninism is not Marxism.

We should remember that Lenin, in his notes on his “Power to the Soviets,” wrote that if there were a dictatorship of the proletariat, this dictatorship would be a dictatorship of the proletariat, not of a minority; a dictatorship of the international working class; a dictatorship with no contradictions and no antagonism; one government.

Nowadays we are witnessing the total bankruptcy of the official United States Marxists who call themselves Marxists but who lack a coherent class analysis, who do not understand why Marxism has the attraction and power that it does, that it is more than a theory, but that it is a movement, that it is revolutionary, that it will lead to a different society, a socialist society, a workers’ society, a society in which every person will be able to live a good life, on his/her own terms, in a free, democratic society. The United States Marxists in general make no attempt to build a Marxist movement, a movement that has a politics and a program that is not based upon good intentions and utopian thinking. They do not understand that there is a movement in the world that needs to be transformed by a Marxist politics.