bolshevism

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin. A couple months ago we had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Le Blanc, the author of a new book entitled Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. 

Paul Le Blanc is an activist dating all the way back to Students for a Democratic Society or SDS in the 1960’s. He is also an acclaimed historian who teaches at La Roche University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of too many books to name, but several on Lenin, Trotsky, CLR James, Rosa Luxemburg and other revolutionaries and movements.

We talk to Le Blanc about Lenin’s flexibility, his understanding of Marxism as not a dogma, but a guide to action, his belief that ordinary people could and must change the world, and his childhood. We also get into the concept of the United Front, Lenin’s experiences working with individuals who did not share his ideology, his understanding of dialectics, and his fierce commitment to struggle and to constant learning from struggle. Paul shares some thoughts on Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, his concept of revolutionary defeatism, and the question of authoritarianism, bureaucratization, and democracy through examples in Lenin’s life and leadership as well as what he advocated on these issues at the end of his life.

We close with some thoughts from Le Blanc on today and the type of approach he thinks organizations and parties need to undertake in today’s world in order to change it once again before it’s too late.

We deeply appreciate Paul Le Blanc for taking the time to talk to us about his book which is available now from Pluto Press. 

We would like to thank Aidan Elias who did the lion’s share of the production work on this episode. 

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For this conversation we welcome Winston James to the podcast. Winston James is the author of A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer 1799-1851, and Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twenty Century America. James has held a number of teaching positions, most recently as a professor of history at UC Irvine.

James joins us to talk about his latest work, Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik. The book examines McKay’s life from his early years in Jamaica to his years at Tuskegee and Kansas State University and his time in Harlem, to his life in London. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him. The work also locates McKay’s closest interlocutors, and those he debated with, as well as McKay’s experiences as a worker and within communist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations like the Worker’s Socialist Federation and the IWW. 

In part 1 of the conversation, we focus on McKay’s early years in Jamaica up through the Red Summer of 1919. James begins with a discussion of McKay’s family, his life in Jamaica, his brief stint as a constable in Kingston, his early poetry and his influence on the Negritude movement. James also discusses the appeal of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International to Black people in this era, and contextualizes the terror of white vigilante violence in the post war period in the US and how Black people fought back against it. As a content notice some of this discussion is a brief but explicit examination of the abhorrent character of anti-black violence of the period. We close part 1 of the conversation with a discussion of McKay’s “If We Must Die,” the context of armed self-defense, the context of fighting back, from which it emerged and its global resonance with the emerging Black radicalism of the period and with radical movements decades after its release.

In part two - which will come out in the next couple of days - we will focus on McKay’s debates, positions, and activism within the spaces of revolutionary Black Nationalism and the Communist left of the period.

We will include a link to the book in the show notes. We both highly recommend it.

If you would like to purchase Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James consider picking it up from the good folks at Massive Bookshop.

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The British Government looked around in 1919 and saw a growing menace in the Soviet Union, a land led by Lenin, a land of Bolsheviks intent on spreading the fire of revolution across the world. More importantly they believed that the most powerful unions in Britain had been infected by this new disease.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George called the bluff of the `Triple Alliance' of Coal, Transport and Rail. Making it clear to them that if there was a general strike the Government would collapse and the unions would have to run the country. Clearly he knew that although the rank and file union members might be militant their leaders were not.
The problem for Black people is that this meant that they could be used as a smokescreen to deflect bad times onto, and they were.

An issue that caused significant worries for the British Government in 1918 and 1919. After they realised that the promise made by Prime Minister David Lloyd George that they would be demobilised extremely quickly after the war. This was one of the critical promises made in the 1918 General Election.  In 1919 there were over 50 soldiers mutinies and 100,000 soldiers refused to obey orders.

Turns out, getting involved in a land war in Asia really is one of the classic blunders.

This week, how did it all pan out?