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Abstract
In early 1915, Lenin engaged in a polemic with former comrade and by then longtime foe Aleksandr Potresov over the best way to account for the failure of the Second International’s response to the outbreak of European war. Potresov presented a unitary portrait of the Second International as nonrevolutionary, whereas Lenin countered this portrait with a bipartite model of fundamental conflict existing within the Second International, between “Opportunism” and “Revolutionary Social Democracy”. A decade later, Stalin adopted Potresov’s unitary model of the Second International—a major cause of the dominance of this model today. Rather than a conflict within the Second International between over-all Opportunism and Revolutionary Social Democracy, Stalin instead portrayed a conflict between the Second International’s opportunism and what he called Leninism. Realizing that Stalin’s portrait of Leninism is actually Revolutionary Social Democracy in disguise can introduce us to a forgotten historical reality.
Notes
1 For a gallery of such photos, see King (Citation1997).
2 I capitalize Revolutionary Social Democracy and Opportunism to bring out their quality as titles of a concrete political movement with “its own leaders, its own press organs, its own political outlook, and its own … method of influencing the masses of the population” (taken from Lenin’s description of Opportunism quoted below). I will mostly eschew quote marks around “Leninism” even though I use this term to refer to Stalin’s creation and not to Lenin’s actual outlook.
3 I have discussed this dispute in earlier essays (e.g., Lih Citation2019). For the present, much more extended discussion, I use the full text in Russian of Potresov’s essay found in Nenarokov (Citation2014, 112–28), from which all references here are taken. Translations of Potresov’s text are my own.
4 “Opportunism” as a label reflects both Lenin’s and Stalin’s outlooks, not my own personal judgment.
5 “Modern democracy that sets itself world tasks” is a useful Aesopian paraphrase for “Social Democracy.”
6 Both “catastrophe” and “disequilibrium” are Aesopian language for “revolution.”
7 Translations of Lenin’s text are my own. See Lenin (Citation2002) for a full English version of this text.
8 Trotsky also came under Lenin’s fire in this essay for a similar characterization of the Second International; space does not permit any further elaboration of this side polemic. The Trotsky text to which Lenin was responding can be found in Riddell (Citation1984, 150–6). For background on Trotsky’s views at the outbreak of the war, see Thatcher (Citation2000, 1–10).
9 In another essay from early 1915, Lenin (Citation1956–Citation62, 26:164) identified the key features of Opportunism as follows: “A tendency that denies the existence of the class struggle and preaching of class peace, that denies socialist revolution, that puts forward principled objections to illegal organizations, that accepts bourgeois patriotism and so forth.”
10 Translations of Stalin’s text are my own. For a full English version, see Stalin (Citation2008).
11 Compare Stalin’s claim about the “undivided domination” of Opportunism to Lenin’s comment from 1915 quoted earlier: all-pervading gradualism was “in no way the predominant sentiment” of Social Democracy as a whole.
12 On Stalin’s prewar familiarity with and respect for Kautsky’s writings, see Parker (Citation2020) and Roberts (Citation2022).
13 The Stuttgart debates are documented in Riddell (Citation1984, 1–54). In a blog post on the topic, Riddell (Citation2007) quotes Lenin’s comment from 1907: the Stuttgart congress as a whole “brought into sharp contrast the opportunist and revolutionary wings within the International.”
14 See Kautsky (Citation2020) and Day and Gaido (Citation2009).
15 Riddell’s (Citation1984) pioneering study conveys a sense of the conflict between Revolutionary Social Democracy and Opportunism within the Second International. See also more recent writings by Blanc (Citation2022) and Ducange (Citation2020).
16 I do not overlook the role of Western Marxists, particularly Georg Lukács, whose short book Lenin came out at almost the same moment as Foundations of Leninism. Lukács’s works had great influence on Marxist intellectuals, but, in the grand scheme of things, Stalin’s intervention must be counted as decisive.