Kieran Allen argues that Lenin’s pamphlet, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written a hundred years ago, provides valuable guidance for socialists today.
Many left wingers were put off this book because of the title. It sounds like a bad-tempered parent admonishing a bold child. The original title was far better: ‘An Attempt to Conduct a Popular Discussion on Marxist Strategy and Tactics’.
This gets to the heart of the matter. There are millions across the world who want the end of capitalism. There are many others who talk about ’revolution’. But there is often little understanding of how this minority can win the majority – or even a substantial number of working people – to enter this path.
So, an understanding of strategy and tactics is vital.
Moreover, this can only come about through training that equips socialists for how to lead people into struggle. Lenin puts it this way:
“Politics is a science and an art that does not fall from the skies. The proletariat must run its own proletarian ‘class politicians’, of a kind in no way inferior to bourgeois politicians.“
Science – because the movement needs an understanding of the terrain, the objective situation we are in. An art – because we need to know how to frame arguments in a way that will move people into action and undercut the bourgeois politicians who bend every effort to stymie action.
No wonder that Tony Cliff, in his biography of Lenin, noted that ‘rarely has a short work had such a powerful and lasting influence on the international labour movement’. He compared it to the influence of the Communist Manifesto.
What Did Lenin Argue
The book was written in April-May 1920 as part of an attempt to win left-wingers outside of the newly organised workers’ state in the Soviet Union to the strategies and tactics deployed by the Bolsheviks. The former were generally enthusiastic about how soviet democracy could replace bourgeois parliaments. However, their understanding of strategy and tactics was often extremely limited. They were correct in spotting the treachery of the old social democratic leaders such as Kautsky, who had once been regarded as the ‘pope of Marxism’. But they had little idea of how to win the mass of workers away from social democrats’ conservative influence.
Lenin had two specific targets.
The first of these was Anti-Parliamentarism. The various revolutionary forces of the international left wanted to turn their back on parliament, arguing that it had become obsolete. As a matter of principle, they did not want to stand in ‘bourgeois’ elections.
In response, Lenin argued that while parliament might be obsolete for revolutionaries, it was not for the mass of workers. He wrote that many on the revolutionary left “have mistaken their desire, their political ideological attitude for objective reality. That is the most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make.”
As the aim was to win the mass of people, without which there could be no revolution, you needed to create a revolutionary group inside the parliament who could use it as a platform to get their message across and expose the limitations of this form of democracy.
The second major argument centred on the relationship between revolutionaries and the Reactionary Trade Unions: Many lefts—understandably frustrated with the bureaucratic evolution of workers’ organisations that seemed to have made their peace with capitalism, wanted to abandon work in the reactionary trade unions and create their own independent ‘red’ unions. Lenin regarded this as an “unpardonable blunder”—not out of sympathy for the trade union bureaucrats or because he did not see the problems inherent in building stable unions under capitalism, but because abandoning these would leave non-revolutionary workers under the direct influence of reactionary leaders who were “the agents of the bourgeoisie”. His basic rule was that socialists “must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.“
Lenin recognised, of course, that socialists in these unions would face smears, insults and persecution from so-called leaders, but they needed to make these sacrifices to carry on agitation. He put it even stronger:
“We need to stand up to all this, agree to make any sacrifice and even – if need be – to resort to various stratagems, artifices, illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges, as long as we get into trade unions, remain in them and carry on communist work within them at all costs.”
Method
Generations of the revolutionary left in Ireland have grasped the points about parliament and trade unions. So on first glance, it might appear there is little to learn from this short pamphlet. This would be a grave mistake, however, as socialist organisers would miss out on the wider understanding of method at the heart of Lenin’s pamphlet.
Lenin’s starting point was that Marxism had to fuse with the working class – or more specifically, with the more advanced, politically conscious workers. He noted that “the theories of socialists, unfused with the workers struggle, remain nothing more than utopia, good wishes that had no effect on real life.”
For Lenin, in other words, the key measure of a radical party was not to be found in its rhetoric, but in the test of whether it has managed to fuse anti-capitalist rhetoric with a significant section of workers. Knowing how to do this requires a clear analysis of where working-class consciousness is, and how this developing class consciousness interacts with the state of the capitalist economy. Even armed with such an analysis, an effective party needs to recognise that it is “far more difficult – and far more precious – to be a revolutionary when conditions of direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist.”
Historical memory tends to focus on revolutionary organisations at the height of their influence—at revolutionary high tide, when the barricades are being erected and workers wield broad influence across a society on the cusp of revolution, but we often ignore the long, patient, often inglorious work that brought on the rupture in the first place.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that Lenin published this pamphlet in 1920, when hopes of a world revolution were more immediate, and when the aspiration for a new world order based on equality and the end of class rule fired tens and hundreds of thousands with a determination to achieve it. Today in 2025, with a system in obvious decay but with a much weaker international left, it is even more difficult to affect the fusion Lenin pushed for. But the urgency is perhaps more obvious than ever. Hence the importance of training in strategy and tactics.
One alternative might be to ignore the difficulty of this project. In an era where social media can create its own communities which affirm non-offensive leftist views, this can be tempting. It can feel like the most effective strategy is to define oneself against a host of online reactionary ideas, and to prove oneself to be the most radical Marxist by being closest to the purity of a set of Marxist theoretical positions.
However, Lenin argues firmly against the “instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another.”
Divorced from a project to win over the mass of working people, verbal radicalism can dissolve into apathy when it confronts a wider reality. Lenin points to a truth that confronts revolutionaries everywhere: any serious politics has to be grounded in struggle against the real conditions confronting humanity:
“We can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared for us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism”.
Potential
There are two main sources of optimism for the project of fusing Marxism with politically conscious workers and thus carrying through a revolution.
The first is that working class consciousness is contradictory. Despite every effort by the mainstream media, the schools, the authority that comes with respectability, working people contain, within their thinking, nuggets of rebellion. How big those nuggets are or whether they come to dominate their outlook depends on the degree of struggle they are engaged in. In periods of passivity, the instinct for rebellion decreases, sinks into cynicism or even despair. In periods of great struggle, the instincts for rebellion magnify.
Second, the capitalist system is crisis-ridden and subject to many contradictions. It contains within it the seeds of economic crisis and war that arise from inter-imperialist rivalries. It forces working people to organise collectively and resist.
From this objective reality flows the possibility of deploying strategy and tactics whereby Marxists win over a significant section of workers. There is no recipe book, no manual which socialists can study to learn these skills. As Lenin put it, there are no “stereotyped, mechanically equated, and identical tactical rules of struggle”. Instead, there are fundamental principles – such as ending the dictatorship of capital and replacing it with working class power – which needs to be framed according to the concrete conditions under which we operate.
Compromises?
To do so, certain basic approaches are necessary. This starts with a rejection of the ‘no compromises position’ which finds its expression in a form of heresy hunting designed to protect revolutionary purity.
Lenin used the metaphor of someone being held up by bandits and told to hand over their wallet. In order to be rid of them, the wallet is handed over and so ‘compromise’ is reached. Your life for the money transferred. This he argues is different from the compromises of opportunist leaders who become accomplices of the bandits. Every worker knows that when you end a strike, sometimes, on unfavourable terms, you have been forced to compromise. But there is a difference between those forced to compromise because they have run out of strike funds—and those leaders who, sometimes under the guise of claimed objective conditions, always wanted to end the struggle.
The key is not to rule out compromises in principle but rather to judge whether different settlements help develop or hinder the fighting spirit of workers. As he points out, “there is no general rule” but “one must use one’s own brains and be able to find one’s bearings in each particular instance”.
The aim here is to use every contradiction within society to raise awareness. In practice, this will mean forming united fronts on a limited basis with opportunists if it helps advance struggle. Or it could mean exploiting the divisions that arise among conservatives and the softer left to support one against the other – but only as a hangman supports his victim with a rope.
If this is not learnt from books, how is this skill developed? First, by challenging the idea that a real revolutionary is one who engages in the purest of rhetoric, divorced from any effort to fuse Marxism with advanced workers. Secondly, by combatting a moralism that judges individual behaviour without taking account of how this is formed with existing capitalist society. Thirdly, within a party that is able to learn from its own experience of seeking to lead working people and transmit that experience throughout its ranks.
Today’s Working Class
Let’s add a caveat. When Lenin talks of ‘the proletariat’, we sometimes have an image of factory workers in the great Putilov works of Petrograd. The ‘advanced workers’ are, therefore, the more conscious, politically aware among them. But that was over one hundred years ago. Today the working class is composed of workers in factories, agriculture, mining, construction, transport, hospitality, retail and maintenance – referred to traditionally as ‘blue collar’ workers – and teachers, nurses, civil servants, administrators, office and information workers – ‘white collar’ workers. Today, unlike the past, there are more trade union members among the latter than the former.
And after fifty years of social partnership, there is not one set vanguard of advanced workers. There are thousands of people who hold a weakened labour movement together but the number with worked out revolutionary views are tiny. On the other hand, there are huge numbers of young radicalised working people who episodically join social movements and are increasingly aware of the injustices of capitalism. Creating a fusion between this layer of organised workers and a party of experienced organisers guided by revolutionary Marxism is the key to change. Hence the importance of an ongoing discussion on strategy and tactics.
