You Must Understand Vladimir Lenin Like Steve Bannon Does
Lenin predicted war — Bannon will start one
by ANDREW DOBBS
Steve Bannon’s background reads like someone historians will ponder deep into the future — if there are historians or such a thing as history to be had after he’s done with us.
A working-class kid turned Wall Street banker who made millions off the T.V. show Seinfeld, a filmmaker in his own right and propagandist who served as a midwife to the radicalization of the U.S. right, he is both wretched and fascinating.
One of the more thought-provoking facts about Bannon — his description of his politics to the conservative ex-Marxist historian and writer Ronald Radosh in 2013.
“‘I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed, according to Radosh’s 2016 piece in The Daily Beast. “Lenin,” Bannon said, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
“Bannon was employing Lenin’s strategy for Tea Party populist goals,” Radosh commented. “He included in that group the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as the traditional conservative press.”
This story has been told a lot now, but few that relate it note that Radosh was raised in the Communist Party and would — conceivably — know if Bannon were just talking out of his ass. His response and Bannon’s subsequent actions in Donald Trump’s White House indicate that Bannon wasn’t speaking lightly.
No single individual thought and wrote more about the practical principles of revolution with greater success than Vladimir Lenin did. The death of liberalism before our very eyes needs a guide from outside that collapsing tradition, one prepared to maneuver strategically to seize the advantage for a new era. This is a task only Lenin and his successors can fulfill, and Bannon has hacked their lessons for the very elements they sought to destroy.
Lenin was, of course, the most notable leader of the Russian Revolution and head of the Soviet government until his death in 1924. Lenin got into this position by carrying out a tireless ideological struggle within the international and Russian socialist movements for decades.
Over time, the lines of debate shifted as the demands of the moment changed, and some of the major points along the way are very instructive for understanding Bannon and his efforts in the White House right now.
The context for these debates was the Second International, the global alliance of socialist parties founded by Marxists from 20 countries in Paris in 1889. The most prominent figure in the International in the late 19th and early 20th century was the Czech-Austrian Marxist and founder of the German Social Democratic Party Karl Kautsky.
To read much of Lenin’s writing over the years is to read explicit attacks against Kautsky and his brand of social democracy.
The basic differences between Lenin and Kautsky were over the questions of how to take power for the working class and what the revolutionaries should do when they got there. Kautsky and the mainstream of the Second International believed that socialists should form political parties that would organize to elections, organize socialist governments and push a political program through typical, constitutional means.
Even when revolution came to Germany in 1919 the SPD sought to establish a new parliament that would still include parties from the former ruling class. Lenin, on the other hand, believed that the goal for the workers’ party should be to seize power through a violent revolution that would then destroy the parliamentary, liberal state altogether and replace these institutions with ones built by workers — namely shop-based worker councils, called soviets in Russian.
The state organized by these soviets would then both build a socialist economy and crush the former ruling class.
“This course of events compels the revolution ‘to concentrate all its forces of destruction’ against the state power and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it,” Lenin wrote in his most important work on the topic The State and Revolution, published just three months before his Bolshevik faction seized the Russian government in 1917.
“All previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed,” he added.
Bannon himself said to Radosh that this sentiment of Lenin’s is what inspired him to call himself a Leninist. It’s a sentiment he himself expressed in his February 2017 interview at the CPAC conference. “I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it up into three verticals of three buckets … The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state.”
The Lenin reference provides a powerful analogy here. Bannon is to past GOP leaders what Lenin was to Kautsky and the Second International.
Past Republicans shared Bannon’s rhetoric, but the difference is that while they limited their sights to the contexts set by the established order of things, tinkering some aspects of the government when it was convenient to do so, Bannon is blowing context away and obliterating elements of the state even Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and perhaps even Ted Cruz or Scott Walker would all have considered politically impossible to hurt.
They would cut the National Endowment for the Arts or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Bannon, through the vehicle of Trump’s regime, has proposed eliminating them altogether.
This drive for political comfort and expediency is also important and relevant to Lenin. The debates between Lenin and Kautsky reached a point of no return with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Despite the fact that socialism had been an international movement parties across Europe were caught up in war fever and supported the conflict.
“‘Radical’ words are needed for the masses to believe in,” Lenin wrote in his 1915 article “Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International.” “The opportunists are prepared to reiterate them hypocritically. Such parties as the … parties of the Second International used to be are useful and necessary to the opportunists because they engendered the socialists’ defense of the [ruling class],” at the beginning of the war.
Lenin’s disdain for socialists quick to abandon their stated principles in return for approval by the very classes they once fought is very reminiscent of Bannon’s anti-establishment passion. His remarks to a 2013 conservative gathering in Washington, D.C. sound pretty much what Lenin would sound like if he were a reactionary alive today.
“We don’t believe there is a functional conservative party in this country and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that … It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to continue to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”
The result of this purity in the face of widespread opportunism was that Russia essentially surrendered in World War I shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power, and the Trump White House’s profoundly reactionary executive orders, cabinet appointments and proposed federal budget — demands that establishment Republicans have balked at.
Lenin really did smash the state as it had been, and the Soviet Union and subsequent Leninist governments really did crush their previous ruling classes. Bannon really will push the arch nationalist agenda he has been demanding for years in his movies, websites and wherever else people will listen.
This should disturb us deeply because the other thing that ties Lenin and Bannon together is that they aren’t just inspired by some temporary political agenda, but rather by deep-seated theories of history. Lenin’s, of course, was Marxism.
Speaking of Marxist analysis of history, Lenin wrote that “the chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops — how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.”
Marx’s first question for understanding a society’s politics, religion, culture or why it did the things it did is how does that society produce its basic needs and how does it distribute the surplus the system generates? Because this process is a material process — it involves real people using actual, physical machines on material resources — the idea is known as historical materialism.
Bannon’s theory of history is the opposite of materialist. His view is expounded in his last film, Generation Zero, released not long before he joined Trump’s campaign. In it he promotes the views of William Strauss and Neil Howe, who rather than rooting their theory in something material like the system of production or, you know, any empirical evidence whatsoever they based it on “generations.”
They even coined the term “millennials.”
“Every four generations constitutes a ‘saeculum’ that passes through four predictable stages of development, each lasting approximately 20 years,” Cornell University professor Alexander Livingston wrote in Jacobin in February 2017.
“A saeculum begins in the wake of a great crisis. Conformity and self-denial reign, and energy is channeled into building and protecting stable institutions. This first generation, or ‘turning,’ eventually gives way to a subsequent generation where the social order begins to erode. Stultifying conformity is thrown off in pursuit of spiritual discovery and individual freedom.
“The second turning leads to a third, where corroding skepticism unravels stable institutions and social trust breaks down … This cycle of unraveling is followed by a cataclysmic ‘fourth turning’ into the new saeculum. The complete collapse of social institutions plunges society into chaos, and individuals are forced to embrace a common purpose in order to rebuild society.”
Bannon believes that we are in the “fourth turning” of the fourth saeculum of U.S. history and that a massive war against the Islamic world is imminent. He is using his position in the White House to make this happen. The Muslim ban sought to close down travel — and by extension cultural, economic and political exchange — between the United States and much of the Muslim world.
The federal budget “deconstructs” the liberal state that has emerged from the eras of weakness and heedless individualism that came before this moment of national glory. It removes support for the weak, eradicates subsidies for liberal culture and drives those resources instead towards a massive new military build up.
They have dismantled the architecture of diplomacy, gutting the State Department, and are gearing up for a generation-defining world war because this is what his theory of history dictates.
Bannon’s revolutionary purity against the opportunism of weak-willed fake conservatives has emboldened him and shocked his enemies and allies alike, freezing everyone as they desperately hope for things to go back to normal. Folks did the same thing in Russia 1917, and folks here in 2017 will be waiting as long as they have for the old way to come back.
The other bad news is that Lenin’s theory of history predicts a big war right now, too. His other significant contribution to revolutionary thought was his analysis of imperialism.
Going back to that historical materialism mentioned above, advanced capitalist economies — Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism” — produce their goods by combining all their financial powers into large multinational corporations and huge banks that then collude with big military powers to overpower weaker countries, extract their resources and establish occupations or client states that can force their work forces to make goods cheaply.
This system has worked well for the ruling class for a generations now, but now the resources available for extraction are close to no longer meeting our ever-increasing needs for economic expansion. At the same time the cost of overpowering the periphery has grown, and major blunders have demonstrated key, irreparable weaknesses in the U.S. imperial order.
Furthermore, manufacturing outsourcing and the suppression of domestic labor have restricted demand for the very products we are producing and created a political hostility to the global imperialist order among the U.S. masses.
They have been socialized to embrace the benefits of this system, however, so rather than seeking a revolutionary way out through international working class struggle they instead demand economic nationalism and a greater exertion of military power.
This, by the way, is Bannon’s entire program. Above he called his deconstruction of the administrative state the “third bucket” of Trump’s basic agenda. “I kind of break it up into three verticals of three buckets. The first is kind of national security and sovereignty and that’s your intelligence, the Defense Department, Homeland Security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism.”
Bannon probably really believes the dumb bullshit he spouts about saeculums and turnings, but in the end he is pushing for a war because that’s what serves his basic interests — the perpetuation of a doomed way of life.
Ultimately as much as reading Lenin through Bannon’s eyes is instructive for understanding the threats at hand, reading them through real revolutionary eyes — not to mention the words of others who have confronted seemingly invincible oppressors with few resources besides insight, tenacity and discipline — are what we need for bringing those threats to an end. Bannon found a way to the top, we need to find a way to send him away.
Stay defiant.
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