Arise Festival Events: Grace Blakeley on Imperialism and Today’s Crisis + Lenin at 100.

This came yesterday from the Arise Festival of Leftwing Ideas and the Labour Assembly Against Austerity

‘EVENT: Grace Blakeley on theories of imperialism & the crisis today

Online, Sunday August 4. 15.00. Register here // Share on FB here // RT here

Grace Blakeley, acclaimed author of ‘Vulture Capitalism,’ will join Matt Willgress of Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas to discuss “How can theories of imperialism & state-monopoly capitalism help us understand the crisis today?”

In today’s world – riven by crisis, inequality & war – is it worth returning to the classic theories of Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Hilferding & others about imperialism to help us understand, & transform, society?

Hosted by Arise – a Festival of Left Ideas as part of the Lenin 100 series. Lenin 100 is a series of events ran by volunteers taking place in 2024 to commemorate Lenin’s life & legacy. Free event but solidarity donations essential to streaming & hosting costs. Full details of the series are copied below for information – please contact the organisers directly with any queries etc.

EVENT SERIES: Lenin 100

Online, once a month, starting Sunday July 7.
Get tickets for the whole series here // Follow on FB here // Follow on X here
 

With participants to include Paul Le Blanc, author, ‘Lenin. Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution;’ Grace Blakeley, author, ‘Vulture Capitalism;’ Steve Howell, former advisor to Jeremy Corbyn; Michael Roberts, Marxist economist & more tba.

Lenin lies in a tomb in Moscow, yet his teachings are still reviled by ‘mainstream’ politics 100 years since his death. Yet in today’s world, riven by inequality & war, is it worth returning to his demands of ‘Peace, Land and Bread’?

This series of events will seek to understand what Lenin really thought- & what we can learn from him today as we seek to transform a world in crises.

The first event takes place online with Paul Le Blanc on July 7 on Lenin Lives! The Struggle for Socialism – 100 Years On.

Hosted by Lenin 100. Lenin 100 is a series of events ran by volunteers taking place in 2024 to commemorate Lenin’s life. Each event will be free event but the organisers are selling tickets here for the series as a whole to cover essential streaming & hosting costs.‘

I’ve a lot of respect for Grace Blakeley. She’s young, very intelligent with proper socialist ideas and a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. So it probably won’t surprised you to learn that her last book was given a rotten review by the anonymous neoliberal who does the book reviews in Private Eye. Part of their argument against her was that she’s a very middle class young woman, and so presumably she shouldn’t go around with the horny-handed sons of toil and is some kind of class traitor or hypocrite. It’s the kind of things Thatcherites have been saying for decades, even when they have true blue toffs like Boris Johnson claiming to speak for the working class. Or Nigel Farage, who was a financier making squillions, for heaven’s sake.

The reviewer also claimed that she was wrong because the British people had firmly rejected Corbyn’s policies at two elections. More lies. Corbyn wasn’t brought down by his policies – most people agree with them, at least the economic policies of the nationalisation of public utilities, the health service, a proper welfare state and so on. When the right-wing rags from the Times to the Torygraph and below tried smearing him as a Trot and Commie, it just washed off him. Which is why they made so much of the smear campaign by the Israel lobby that he and his followers were all terrible anti-Semites who would reopen the concentration camps and start hanging Jews from the lampposts if they weren’t stopped.

I don’t doubt that the modern imperialism we see today behind the overthrow of Gadaffy in Libya, and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, is all about expanding western commercial interests in the developing world. But I’m not sure this theory of imperialism, which Lenin took from the writing of the English liberal journalist Hobson and described in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, quite works for all of 19th century imperialism. Yes, Britain took over Egypt and overthrew the Qajar shahs in Persia because they weren’t paying back the debts they owed British investors to modernise their countries. But I’ve also seen arguments by Thomas Sowell and the African political philosopher Olufemi Taiwo that it doesn’t explain it in Black Africa. Sowell says in one of his books that several of the plantations in Africa did not make a profit. Certainly by the period of high imperialism the Empire was actually a drain on British resources, not a source of profit. There’s even an argument that says that the protection and government of the slave colonies in the Caribbean set Britain back £500,000. Which, as Tale from the Mausoleum Club would say, was a lot of money then. Taiwo in the book I’m currently reading, Against Declonisation, and is the author of the book African Political Thought, states several times that imperialism served to stifle indigenous capitalism in Africa. He is impressed by the way South Africa built up a strong, capitalist economy. Considering the history of apartheid, I would have thought it made the opposite point : that in Africa capitalism was linked to one poisonous aspect of imperialism, if not imperialism itself.

I also have very strong qualms about any celebration of Lenin, and not because I believe that the socialists in the Labour party who are impressed with his ideas and policies are all closet Commie entryists, who, once, in power, will set up ‘socialist dictatorship’. The Depress was screaming that Starmer was going to do this with their frontpage headline on Wednesday. Nah, never. Starmer’s an authgoritarian, but not a socialist. He’s a Thatcherite, just like his molten idol Tony Blair. Peter Hitchens was making similar claims in an online interview as well. He also claimed that Starmer was really a Trotskyite. I’m sure you could argue this using his genuinely socialist past and selective quotations from some of the things he’s said, but no.

My problem with the Lenin is that is that he founded the Soviet one-party state and began the persecution of political opponents and religion. When I was studying the Russian Revolution at college back in the 1980s, Lenin was seen as a relatively good guy contrasted with Stalin, who murdered 30 million Soviet citizens, was responsible for the forced relocation of entire Soviet ethnic minorities, such as the Chechens to Siberia, an artificial famine that took away 8 million people in Ukraine and who industrialised the country with slave labour in forced labour camps. Oh yes, and he really was a vile anti-Semite who hated the Jews. The victims in the ‘Doctors’ Plot’, in which he accused a group of doctors of plotting to murder him, were all Jewish. I don’t think this was any kind of coincidence.

Lenin set up a secret police to hunt down counterrevolutionaries under Felix Dzhersinsky. This wouldn’t have been seen as a problem at the time, but it laid the foundations for the Soviet police state. He also closed down the rival, democratic parties in the Bolshevik coup of 1917. The largest group of these were the liberal Kadets. He also shut down rival left-wing parties, such as the Trudoviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, the heirs to the Russian agrarian anarchist revolutionary tradition. The woman who tried to assassinate him was one of the SRs. During the Civil War he requisitioned food from hoarders. I’ve read different interpretations of this. One view says that they were indeed hoarders, and by depriving the Soviet people of needed food they deserved what they got. Other accounts simply accuse the Bolsheviks of going into villages and shooting people at random as a lesson pour encourager les autres.

And Lenin was very clear that one of the fundamental tenets of Communist was philosophical materialism, which means atheism. He wanted it spread in Communist propaganda and in the youth movements. Churches, synagogues, mosques and Buddhist lamasaries were closed, and shamans also persecuted. Some of the former churches were turned into museums of atheism and there were aggressively anti-religious groups such as the League of the Militant Godless. When I was doing Christian apologetics on this blog, many atheists argued that the Communists did not persecute religion simply because they were atheists. They argued that it was because religion, and especially the Russian Orthodox Church, strongly supported the monarchy. There’s truth in this, as Soviet propaganda posters during the Civil War showed Orthodox priests alongside evil capitalists as the enemies of Communism. However, this does not justify the millions of people of faith who were viciously persecuted. They were principally Russian Orthodox Christians, but also other faiths, as I mentioned above. As for the chaos of the Civil War, many states took the opportunity to break away from the Russian Empire, including Ukraine. Can Lenin be seriously considered an enemy of imperialism when he was keen to force these nations back into a political connection dominated by Russia, although dressed up a voluntary and democratic?

And Lenin was opposed by some of Europe’s leading Marxist. One of these was the Austrian, Karl Kautsky. Karl Kautsky was a centrist in Marxist thought. He wasn’t a Reformist, but he did believe in the democratic path to socialism. He hated Lenin’s persecution of the upper classes, which included depriving them of the vote and then throwing them onto the streets or forcing them to do the lowest, dirtiest jobs, as well as the other institutions of oppression Lenin set up. When Lenin met Kautsky after the Revolution, he asked him why he didn’t try it in Germany. Kautsky replied that they didn’t do that there. Lenin went berserk and called him a ‘prostitute’.

I’ve read the argument that Lenin’s authoritarian ‘democratic centrism’ was imposed to keep order in the party and prevent it splitting into factions like the Socialist Revolutionaries. I’ve also read the argument that the one-party state was forced on Lenin as the only way of maintaining order in the chaos after the Revolution. I’m also aware that some of the events I’ve described may have occurred after Lenin’s death by later Soviet leaders. But I’ve also read arguments by historians and political scientists from the former Soviet Union that state very clearly that the distinction between Lenin as the good guy and Stalin as the villain really can’t be sustained.

Now Lenin’s theory of imperialism is valid when it comes to Oswald Mosley’s plans for Africa. Mosley had independently reached a similar idea to Marx’s theory of the crisis of overproduction. For British capitalism to keep going, Britain had to open up new foreign markets, or in his crude, racist words ‘find enough N***ers to sell bicycles to’. He wanted the indigenous peoples of east Africa forcibly removed and for it to be developed as a White colony. But I think it would be a mistake to see the entirety of 19th century imperialism through this lens.

Despite my reservations, I’m sure this will be an interesting event and that those arguing for Lenin will be able to do well.

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