NEIL FAULKNER—Lenin was right

Neil Faulkner

Lenin was right. The revolutionaries were a minority swimming against the current. Confronting them was the whole power of official society, which, by force and by fraud, was deployed to contain the class struggle. When the workers came onto the streets, they faced force—the batons and bullets of the police. The rest of the time, they were sold a fraud –that God had ordained the social order, that the Tsar was their ‘Little Father’, that the Jews were the enemy. Most workers, in consequence, had a mixed consciousness. Because they were victims of the system, they were open to the arguments of revolutionaries, especially in moments when they gained confidence through collective struggle. But because they were also ground down by the system, they were rarely wholly free of what Marx called the ‘Muck of Ages –the piety, deference, and racism that conspire to keep people in their place by their own decision. If this were not the case –if the working class was instinctively and spontaneously revolutionary –there would be no need for a party.

Source: Neil Faulkner, A People's History of the Russian Revolution (Pluto Press, 2017)