Right-Wing Leninism

An antidote to populism

Right-wing Leninism? Is that not a little contradictory? Yes, it is my dear reader. But only if you look at the purpose of Leninism as establishing Communism in Russia, and we, at the Court’s Sense, are not really into that. But if you look at Leninism as a strategic doctrine that can be used to achieve political success for a specific ideology there is much that we can Learn from the old Bolshevik.

Especially because it simply is a reality that today the strongest support base of the right wing is to be found in the working class, which was once the socialist support base. Therefore, the problem that the socialist movement faced is the same one that the right-wing populist movements are facing, namely, that the average person is docile and disinterested in political action.

Despite the relative indifference of the Russian people to his movement, Lenin ended up succeeding against all odds and got his revolution by organizing what he called a “Vanguard party“. So, I do believe that there is much that the modern right wing can learn from the most successful revolutionary of the 20th century.

(Disclaimer: We, at the Court’s Sense, do not condone nor recommend requisitioning grain at gunpoint, shooting one’s political opponents in the back of the head, or giving them a tenner in Solovki, neither are we communists for that matter.)

(Disclaimer 2: By coincidence, while this essay was being written Lavader made a similar agument in his video, however, these two projects are not related. But I do recommend you check his channel out.)

The historical context of Leninism

But the first thing that this essay has to do is to define what Leninism is. So, we will begin by looking at the historical context of the socialist movement in the late 19th century and how Leninism developed in practice during the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war.

It is important to understand that Leninism is not your classical orthodox Marxism, instead it is a revisionist movement that challenges many of the main tenants and beliefs of orthodox Marxism to much controversy at the time. Indeed, it led to a major split in the RSDLP between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

Leninism and its mirror movement, Democratic Socialism, both rose as a result of a deep crisis in the Communist movement that happened during the 1890s and bitterly divided the Second Internationale (An international conference of socialist parties). This crisis was the result of the failure of Marx’ predictions about how the revolution would take place, and where it would take place. Marx died in 1873 and his ideas had already become the mainstream in the socialist movement.

A crisis of Marxism

To understand this crisis, we need to talk about Marxist theory. The simplified version is that Marx argues that the politics of a society are an expression of its inner contradictions which eventually lead to a synthesis; to a new political system. He claims that capitalism arises from feudalism and that the contradictions of capitalism will inevitably give rise to socialism and to a classless communist society.

The main contradiction of capitalism according to Marx was the struggle between the capitalists and the workers. As capitalism advanced, Marx predicted that the wealth would be concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people while the rest of society would live under worse and worse conditions. Therefore, at a certain point, there would be so few capitalists and so many miserable proletarians with nothing to lose, that capitalism would collapse under its own weight.

So, by extension, Marx predicted that socialism would arise first in the countries that have advanced industrial capitalism such as France, England, and Germany. This put Russian socialists in a difficult position because their country was still feudal, agrarian and capitalism was barely beginning to take root. According to Marx, since socialism can only arise as a result of capitalism, Russia was not ready for revolution.

The problem is that by the 1890s the Marxist prediction that capitalism would crumble under its own weight was not happening. Instead, the opposite was the case, working conditions were improving¹. This created a fundamental split in the socialist movement, between those who believed that the worker’s interests could be best achieved by reforming the system from within and those who still believed that revolution was necessary even if conditions improved.²

Within the revolutionary side of the internationale there was still another crisis which Lenin addresses in “What is there to be done?“. The crisis was that since the workers’ material conditions were improving, they were becoming less and less interested in violent revolution, contradicting Marx’s prediction that the revolution was inevitable and would be carried out by the workers themselves.

A Vanguard Party

To summarize, Vladimir Lenin had two major problems. First, that Russia was not yet capitalist and therefore was not ready for socialism, and second, that the revolution was not even happening by itself in the places where Marx predicted. Leninism is the ideology that arises to solve these two problems within Russian socialism. The Bolsheviks were going to solve these two problems by establishing a “Vanguard party“ made up of professional revolutionaries that would sieze power to establish a socialist workers’ state since the workers would not do it by themselves.

It is important to note Lenin’s rationale why the revolution was not being carried out by the workers themselves. According to him, socialism was simply too complicated for the average worker to understand and therefore class consciousness could only come from the educated intelligentsia. To quote him:

We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

(“What is there to be done?”, P. 18, 1902)

Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic [I.e. Communist] point of view and no other.

(“What is there to be done?”, P. 42, 1902)

Lenin’s vanguard party would be made up of socialist intellectuals that would bring on the revolution even if the workers did not want it and if Russia was not ready for it according to orthodox Marxism. I would argue that it was this centralization that allowed them to keep ideological cohesion and act decisively in the chaotic years between the February revolution and the end of the civil war, when their opponents were divided and unsure what to do.

Of course, there was a military component to the Reds’ victory in the Russian civil war, but in my opinion the factors that led to a Bolshevik victory all have their sources in their efficient political efforts. Their low degree of popularity in the election of 1917 (23%) at the beginning of the Revolution was not a limiting factor because they were able to attract millions to their cause through propaganda and conscription.

The result of this is that they were able to field an army many times the size³ of their rivals and they managed to purge all other political parties despite being outnumbered in both the worker’s councils (soviets) and in the Constituent Assembly that was elected in the previously mentioned election. Indeed, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Assembly within a day and declared one-party rule and all the other parties just had to take it, and indeed, they did.

The reason that their opponents were not able to even defend themselves, is that they had no political unity or coordination. On one hand you have the other leftist factions which were fragmented around different dysfunctional parties such as the Mensheviks and the SRs. These political parties held great popular support as seen in the election of 1917, but since they were fragmented into many small factions, they were politically paralyzed by infighting. Some wanted to oppose the Bolsheviks by force, others within their own parties opted for peaceful resistance and working with the Bolsheviks. Both of their efforts were rewarded with eventually getting shot.

On the other hand, the white movement was never truly unified, either politically or militarily. Some fought for the Tsar, others for the republic and others for themselves, this crippled their political efforts and sabotaged any chance that they had victory, after all their armies are known (with the exception of Wrangel’s army) known for corruption and desertion. Thus, the Russian civil war ended with a red victory.

Before anyone accuses me of being a fervent Communist, I still do think that the triumph of the Bolsheviks was a great tragedy that broke Russia in more ways than one, and she still has not recovered. In my opinion, Lenin should be regarded with respect, the same type of respect that one might give to Genghis Khan. You do not have to think that Genghis was a nice guy to appreciate his mastery as a general. The same thing should apply to Lenin because he was THE professional revolutionary.

Populism and Vanguardism

But the most important thing to take from the history of Bolshevism is that there were the two separate strategies used by the different socialist movements. The Orthodox Marxists were expecting that the triumph of the revolution would come from a spontaneous rising of the masses. The Leninist strategy was based on having professional revolutionaries that would organize the revolution.

For the purposes of this essay, we will call these two strategies Populism and Vanguardism respectively. Indeed, I believe that it is possible to categorize every single political movement in history into one of these two strategies; either a movement is made up of an organized minority and is administered in a top-down style, or relies on the popularity of the masses and is run in a bottom-down style.

We already discussed Lenin’s version of the vanguard party, but we can see that there have been many other movements with a vanguardist strategy. Vanguardism is only the principle that organization, not popularity, is the way to political power. Vanguardist movements have a party line that does not change according to what the crowd wants and instead comes from the leadership, not the people.

One can easily spot a Vanguardist movement by 2 characteristics; organization and a defined ideology. Essentially most political movements throughout history have been vanguardist. Some examples, besides the Bolsheviks, are the sons of liberty in the American Revolution, the Bonapartists in the French one, the SPD in the early Weimar Republic and the NSDAP in the late, and finally modern Progressivism is also a Vanguardist movement.

The populist strategy believes that it can achieve power by riding the waves of discontent in the masses to the point that these masses will desire change and will either bring change by the ballot box or by a general uprising. This strategy has been used by many other groups other than the Orthodox Marxists, for example, this is also the strategy of people like Bernie Sanders, Mélenchon or Sahra Wagenknecht on the left and by Nixon, Reagan, Le Pen and Donald Trump on the right.

Populist movements can be easily recognized because they are the opposite of Vanguardist ones; they are decentralized and do not have a well-defined ideology because the crowd does not have a defined ideology, but instead have issues that they care about, and symbols that they love or hate.

The populist political strategy relies on there being a moment where public dissatisfaction reaches critical mass, where the common people have had enough, and they turn against the current system, be that capitalism, “the swamp”, or whatever.

So, in that sense, the populist right wing does find itself in the same position as the socialist parties in 1890, attempting to secure power by waiting for the moment when the people have had enough and riding this wave into political power. The socialists relied on the workers who have had enough of capitalism, while Trump, the AfD, the FN, etc. Relies on millions of voters coming out to vote because they have had enough of inflation, immigration, and “wokeness“. The ideologies of these two movements are completely different, but they share the same strategy.

Powerless Populism

The issue is that one is hard pressed to mention a single bottom-up populist movement that has been successful in the long run. The great weakness of the Populist strategy is that it is difficult to translate the waves of popular support into actual political power or policy changes.

For example, in the case of immigration one can observe stable majorities of people in western countries who express the desire to take in less immigrants. But yet, this majority opinion is not reflected in the actual policies in these Western countries.

In fact, the anti-immigration sentiment was even more pronounced when Enoch Powell pronounced his opposition to immigration in 1968, according to the polling, as much as 75% of the public agreed with him. And what was Enoch Powell able to achieve with this amazing wave of popularity? Ummm… He got fired the next day.

The public is docile precisely because they get easily bored and are by nature disorganized. Vanguardism succeeds because is that it is by nature active while populism is inherently reactive. Populist energy comes from popular dissatisfaction, it reacts to the problems that a population faces. In a society where there are no pressing issues, populist movements have a hard time getting traction, while in times of crisis they grow exponentially.

A reactive movement is just “anti-” something (Anti-captialist, anti-immigration, anti-communist, etc.), therefore its strength and popularity depends on the thing it is opposing, not in the movement itself. While a Vanguardist movement does not rely on the changing currents of popular opinion because it does have a positive vision. Without this positive vision, organization is impossible because no one will be willing to dedicate their lives to the mission of their political movement.

In order to have a positive vision, to have political initiative, a movement must have a defined and persuasive ideology. However, different ideologies will attract different types of people. A populist ideology is made to attract millions of average people, this means that their ideas must be no more complex than the plot of a marvel movie.

The cost of this popularity is that, without a complex ideology, the movement will only attract naïve commoners who are genuinely devoted to the cause, and clever opportunist politicians and grifters who see an opportunity, but do not believe in the movement. Many such cases.

What is there to be done?

Modern right-wing movements are nowhere near having 75% popular support for their policies, but even if they did, would things really turn out differently than they did for Enoch Powell? I don’t think so. There is no solution to the problem of mobilizing the public, it simply is not possible.⁴

This is the reason that I am writing this essay; I simply do not believe that populism can win against vanguardism. In other words, I do not think that the right wing, as it stands today, can win.

Some might call me a “Doomer“, but I think that my pessimism is justified when you see the track record of the political right wing in the last 150 years and of populist movements in general. I believe that the person that is not negative when faced with overwhelming odds is an idiot, but that the person that gives way to despair, who becomes a doomer, is a coward.

Therefore, I propose the application of Vanguardist principles, of Leninist principles, to the modern right wing. Lenin gave up on the idea of populism, on the idea that the common people would topple capitalism by themselves and instead focused on creating a movement made up of committed intellectuals to carry out the revolution. Right wing Leninism must do this exact same thing; this means giving up on the idea of populism and embracing their idea that political change can only come from a group of professional reactionaries.

An effective Vanguardist movement needs to be made up of people who are ambitious, intelligent, and who actually believe in their own ideology. This clearly requires a complex ideology that promises to solve society’s problems. An ideology like this is nothing less than crack for intellectuals and a movement like that will be made up of some of the most talented people in a society.

This was certainly the case with Marxism-Leninism, one can say many things about the results of communism, but one cannot argue that it was not a seductive ideology that managed to capture the sympathy of some of the smartest minds of the early 20th century.⁵ The biggest problem of the modern right wing is that it does not have such an ideology; its different factions are unorganized and agree on very few things.

In my opinion, there is only one solution to this; that is, to create such an ideology. The idea of reviving a dead one is not realistic; an ideology is the expression of the world-feeling or the Zeitgeist of a specific time. This means that we cannot pretend that we belong to another time and culture. I cannot become a bronze-age Scythian, I was born in post-modernity, and cannot become pre-modern and neither can you!

But I cannot say what this new ideology will be, since I am no prophet and I do not get to decide how history will be made, that is someone else’s job. So, to end this essay I will make a short list of characteristics that an effective vanguardist ideology would need to embody.

1. This ideology must be intellectually challenging. There can be no future for the slop that makes up most of the RW discourse on twitter, sure, it can be funny sometimes, but at the end of the day it is entertainment that will fade away in a week. Who will remember Sneako or Fuentes in 20 years? How many remember Anita Bryant today?

   Nobody intelligent will dedicate their life to an ideology that is retarded, therefore this ideology must be something robust. For comparison, the collected works of Lenin make up around 20,000 pages of theory.

2. It must be a philosophical movement. As I have written in other essays, I believe that to only focus on politics is to focus on the means and not the ends. Therefore, any successful movement must base all its ethical judgements on philosophical foundations, or it will have no depth and will not be able to create a positive vision of how society should work. Any ideology that does not incorporate philosophy and lacks a defined ethical system is, by definition, slop. Furthermore, one of the biggest problems that Millennials and Zoomers face is a crisis of meaning, any ideology that can give people meaning must have depth.

3. This ideology cannot be a religious movement. Such a new ideology can incorporate and respect religious traditions, it can even provide an important part of its philosophy, but I believe that any future ideology cannot be an explicit religious movement. Everywhere you see, established religion is a state of crisis; to embrace one specific religion means burdening the movement with the dogmas and problems that this religion currently has. Furthermore, that will alienate the members of all other religions and denominations, as well as the increasing percentage of people who are secular.

4. An ideology cannot be created by a single person. The development of the major ideologies of the 20th century rest on the shoulders of dozens of people who dedicated their lives to their development. Again, socialism offers a good example; many people will say that communism was created by Marx. But what is Marx without Babeauf, Fourier, and Hegel? And as we saw in the first part of the essay socialism certainly did not end with Marx, or with Lenin for that matter. If right-wing Vanguardism will one day become reality, it will be the result of dozens of people working together to create it. My hope with this project is to one day be a part of that process, no matter how small my contribution might be.

1. Edouard Bernstein’s (Major figure of the Reformist wing of the Internationale) main work “Evolutionary Socialism“ was about proving this betterment

2. This split was reflected primarily in the split between the SPD and the USPD (later KPD) in Germany, and importantly for us, in Russia between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks.

3. They mobilized around 5 million soldiers at their peak while the whites only mobilized around one million. The accounts that we have of generals like Yudenich, Wrangel and of the Freikorps in the baltic all describe that they were constantly outnumbered by the reds.

4. Outside of a severe crisis like a war or a famine, the majority of the public will simply not care, but by then you will have bigger fish to fry.

5. Anybody doubting this claim is free to ask their LLM of preference to list the 50 most important writers, directors, novelists, scientists, etc. of the 20th century and their political affiliation. A good percentage will be red, if you dig for sympathies, you can get an easy majority.