By Max Lane

[This is a slightly edited transcript of a talk presented to the Leninism Today seminar, held in Melbourne in April this year]

I should say first of all that this talk I’m going to give, hasn’t been discussed through Red Ant formally as an organisation, so it’s not the position of Red Ant per se; it’s more my own views – although some aspects of what I’m going to say have been reflected in articles published on the Red Ant website.

For those here today who don’t know, I am a member of Red Ant and have been since it was founded. I became involved in far-left Party politics back in 1981 when I joined the Socialist Workers Party which then became, in 1990, the Democratic Socialist Party. I was on the National Committee, the National Executive and the Political Committee of that party for all of the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

Then in 2007 that party experienced internal conflict and I ended up in another group – the Revolutionary Socialist Party – which after a few years found itself stagnating and some members of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, including myself, joined Socialist Alternative for a while. But some of us left Socialist Alternative a few years later. Prior to joining the Socialist Workers Party, I had been active in the social movements and international solidarity politics since the 60s and 70s.

In this talk I will not attempt to explain through quoting Lenin, but try to apply his ideas direct to the situation faced today based on what I see as Leninist common sense.

Relevant to Australia?

The topic as you know for today’s seminar and tomorrow’s is “Leninism Today”. First, I’ll try to look at the contemporary situation of Australia by asking if the ideas that Lenin wrote about and that he implemented in practice can be applied today in Australia?” Because if you think back to when Lenin wrote, he was active in a period of considerable tumult to put it mildly. Russia itself was in considerable turbulence, if you think of the whole process of radical political and social movements in Russia from say, the 1890s onwards. Lenin’s own brother had been involved in an attempted assassination of the Tsar and was executed.

Of course, by 1905 there was the first revolutionary wave and the first Soviet. Even before the Russian Revolution the whole of Europe was in conflagration culminating in World War I. Then you had the 1917 Revolution itself and the civil war, which was the struggle to defend that Revolution against the counter revolution that was launched against it. Lenin wrote many things and did many things after the revolutionary taking of power.

We also must remember the convulsions that occurred during the several decades before Lenin wrote – a period when Russia and Europe were in tumult. Think of all that period for 100 years before: the scientific revolution, through to the enlightenment and then the first rise of Socialism and Marxism, the 1848 Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. In the arts and literature for example; that’s Tolstoy, Chekov and Dostoyevsky in Russia, all of whom Lenin read and wrote about.

Less powerful perhaps but from a point of view of political liberalism you had figures like Charles Dickens and others in England. If you want to look from the point of view of how a new way of thinking was seeping into popular culture, you even had Sherlock Holmes who brought to the ordinary person deduction, or at least a version of deductive science, and so on. In Russia there was an enourmous tumult of class and ideological struggle of both the bourgeoisie against the feudal classes and proletarian against bourgeois. Lenin wrote in this period of upheaval, of heightened struggle that pitched science against tradition.

So, how does Australia today compare to that period in Europe and Russia, in terms of level of class struggle, disorder, ideological struggle and so on? I think basically we’re looking at a situation in Australia which sometimes you might tend to think is politically and culturally dead. It’s flat; nothing’s happening; class struggle is minimal (if taking place at all). Ideological struggle is narrow and shallow.

So, how are the writings and the practice of somebody who wrote in the middle of tumultuous revolutionary times relevant to Australia today? And Australia I think is a particularly clear example of a flat political situation – certainly compared to South America and Latin America where there’s still big waves of struggle. Or even compared to the United States which, perhaps, has not manifested big waves yet, but has evolving left-wing currents. In the USA we see the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, which has 80,000 members and so on. Certainly, United States has a much higher level of political polarisation than in Australia.

Two ideas of Lenin’s

So how do we how do we apply Lenin’s ideas and the example of the Bolsheviks to this situation we face in Australia today? Well Lenin wrote many things further deepening and elaborating Marx and Engels’ ideas and he did many things as well, but there’s just two that I want to refer in this talk.

One of course is Lenin’s assessment or his analysis, the understanding he gave of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. That gave us a general picture of a world where a small number of oppressor nations have a stranglehold over most of the other countries, over the mass of humanity. A situation we at Red Ant argue still exists today, even if it has many changes in its particular manifestations. But, we say there is no fundamental change in that reality.

The second aspect is what Lenin wrote about the role of the revolutionary party, in particular what he set out in the most classic work on that question – “What is to be done”. We’re talking in Red Ant about how some of the ideas in that book are still relevant and can be applied today. The concept of the party as a party of professional revolutionaries is still relevant. Today, as in Lenin’s time, the concept of  a combat style of organisation is still relevant because of the nature of the class enemy with its great resources and repressive power. But also most particularly, we need a party that can intervene, counter, help or contribute to transforming the kinds of consciousness that arise spontaneously in the working-class and among the people.

In order to think about those aspects in the contemporary situation I think it’s necessary to look firstly and briefly at the question of imperialism (again this is dealt with a bit more detail in another article). I think that there are very significant ideological and even philosophical or moral imperatives that flow from understanding the exploitative nature of the relationship between the Global North and the Global South; the rich imperialist countries and the poor countries. It raises issues to what extent working classes in rich countries are susceptible to xenophobic and racist arguments which play on any sense of precariousness they have about the relative privileges that they enjoy.

Of course, this becomes very relevant in politics in a place like Australia when revolutionaries have to take a stance on foreign policy and defence policies of the Australian ruling class and its state. I think those issues are not so difficult to grasp in relation to the necessity of international solidarity with Global South national liberation movements and the question of opposition to Australian imperialist policies. You see at the moment in Australia, the necessity we have, and most of the left is doing, of attacking and opposing Australia’s policy on things like AUKUS. Also standing against the Australian government and ruling class defence of the Israeli state.

But what about this question of the party?

What is the role of a revolutionary cadre party in a situation where the class struggle is at such a low level as in Australia? How does a party of revolutionaries intervene in or contribute to transforming whatever consciousness arises spontaneously amongst the working class?

The way I think about this is to try and sum up the key (though not the only) contradiction that exists in the Australian context at the moment. As with all contradictions there are two sides. I think the first side of it relates to what the consequences have been of 40 years of Neo-Liberalism. Of course there are the economic consequences of this, in particular the widening gap between rich and poor as wealth is concentrated in an increasingly shrinking portion of the population. There is the even greater loss of control over the economic processes of the country to the so-called “1%”.

But I also think there is another extremely important consequence of these changes which I personally feel acutely having experienced involvement in politics for over half a century now. It is something which I am sure I feel more acutely than comrades from more recent generations. There’s been a massive change in how bourgeois politics is conducted. Because if you go back to the 1940s, especially 1950s and 1960s, both sides of bourgeois politics (Democrats, Labor Party & Liberal Party); both sides in their electoral campaigning promised they would improve the conditions of life for the population. Of course, their promises might have been false, or lies, or tricks, or half-truths, but both sides promised this. No one went to the electorate saying: vote for us because we will make your conditions worse. They all said “we will improve this, we will improve that” – both right and left, conservatives and social democrats. After the fall of the Whitlam government in Australia in 1975 and the rise of first Bill Hayden and then Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, for the first time you saw this new, qualitative change. The new refrain was “Vote for us because we are the party that you can rely upon to take the hard decisions. We are the party you can rely on to be the responsible economic managers; we are prepared to take the hard decisions”.

Those hard decisions are decisions that will be hard on us, hard on ordinary people. So: vote for us because we will implement austerity, we will restrain improvement in the your conditions of life and we’re the ones courageous enough to do this, because that’s what is needed.

That’s gone on now for 40 years. Of course, in the beginning the implication was that there will be restraint on improvements, or even declines in real wages, for a few years and then conditions will get better. But by now this ‘tighten your belts’ propaganda has gone on for 40 years. Even now the Labor Party’s treasurer Jim Chalmers is talking about “budget issues, budget emergency, budget crisis”. This is the constant refrain about the economy: “the economy is fragile; you have to continue even now to tighten your belts. Yes, people are doing it hard we know”. To the extent that we can make improvements, they will be very minor, basically symbolic and token; not substantial. Because this has gone on for 40 years, of course it’s had political consequences.

The working class, to the extent it was mobilised in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s through trade unions and through the Labor Party itself – left, centre and right wings – has now long been demobilised. Trade union membership has gone from 70 per cent in the 70s, down to 10-15 per cent. Strikes have gone right down. The Labor party has lost much of its membership. I was in the Labor party for a while because the Socialist Worker Party assigned me to do entry work in the Canberra branch. The left-wing caucus of the Labor party in Canberra would have 100 or 200 people at regular meetings. Within 12 months of Bob Hawke & Labor government, it had 10 people in it. It was demobilised and demoralised.

So, you had over this 40 years constant inculcation, “tighten your belts we can’t promise anything significant, except low expectations.” Parallel to that, alongside that, underpinning that, has been demobilisation of the traditional working-class organisations. These were never revolutionary; but they at least pretended to be pro-redistribution of wealth, and for some people active within them, they were a genuine vehicle for such struggles.

The contradiction of low expectations and democratic, humanist sentiment

So, you had in all fields an erosion of this social democratic organisation and mobilisation, a deepening and an inculcation of much lower horizons of what people can expect. It’s also why you get this new phenomenon in the last 10 years: populism. Populism is being used in a different way than it was in the 60s, 50s and 40s. Trump is a classic example, a populist.

Why do people use the term ‘populist’ for an elite figure like Trump? Because, unlike the Liberals, unlike the social democrats, he actually promises to ordinary people, “I will improve your situation. I will bring factories back to America. I know why your situation has got worse; the swamp needs to be drained. There are too many refugees. We are servicing too many shit-house countries outside of the US.”

Because for 40 years bourgeois political parties in general and politicians have vied away from making serious promises of improvement, promising improvements to ordinary people is described as populism, but now in a negative way, because it can be associated with fascism. Even the tone when people make their accusations against populism, it’s like as if you promise things to people it’s somehow negative. Well, any case you have these low horizons and demobilisation. I think that’s one side of the contradiction.

The other side of the contradiction is harder to grasp because it’s disguised; it’s not so crystallised and sharpened. In a few articles on the Red Ant website I have referred to the continuing widespread existence in Australian society of a democratic humanist sentiment in tension with the demobilising effects of neo-liberal lowered horizons.

The resilience of this sentiment is a consequence of the’ 60s radicalisation, but it actually existed before that. Don’t forget that Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party of Australia through a referendum in 1951 and a big majority of Australians voted against it. In the referendum to recognise the existence of Aboriginal people, a big percentage voted for it. During the 60s you had the anti-Vietnam war movement which had huge mobilisations and a big impact. The women’s liberation movement and the gay rights movement, they were all big and had a significant impact on Australian society. The anti-Apartheid movement, the number of people who came to see Nelson Mandela when he visited Sydney was huge.

Then there was the huge march across the Sydney Harbour bridge for Aboriginal reconciliation. None of this is revolutionary or even necessarily radical. To my mind it points to existence that within Australian society there is a significant segment of people who have this strong democratic humanist sentiment.

I think in recent times you can see it happen again. If someone kills a black person, a First Nation person killed in a cell, you often see quite a big spontaneous demonstration. The last one was 10,000 people in Perth. When there were bushfires in 2019, huge demonstrations on climate change issues resulted. There have been the student protests around global warming and climate change. There’s so much evidence that there is this significant presence of democratic humanist sentiment in Australian society. You can see it in all of the agitation in people’s consciousness and conscience that arises from issues to do with the global North versus the global South conflict. Polls say that 81 per cent of Australians support a ceasefire in Gaza, 60 per cent in a poll published by the Guardian said they “want the Australian government to do more.”

The existence of poverty in the global South, the imbalance between North and South, everyone knows now, everyone has heard about it, it has entered into popular consciousness. One percent to ten percent of the population controls 50-70 per cent of the wealth; it has entered into people’s consciousness.

Dissociation from ideology, organisation and tradition

One manifestation of the contradiction between low, neoliberal horizons on the one hand and a widespread democratic sentiment in the other – the latter being something that raises horizons – is that this sentiment has become disassociated from any ideology. It’s not associated with social democratic ideology, because over the last 45 social democratic ideology has withered away. It’s certainly not connected to socialist ideology, which has very little real presence in society.

When the Labor party had an actual socialist left, although not a revolutionary socialist left, it was fairly active and not afraid to use the word socialist. That’s gone now. So, not only does this democratic humanist sentiment have no present ideology to connect to, there’s no organisation to connect to either. Even after 40 years we can say there not even a tradition of class struggle. Maybe it has not totally disappeared – see the CMFEU and MUA – but the tradition of class struggle is very marginal now in Australian society. The far left, firstly the CPA and then from the 70s to the early 2000s the DSP – have also both vanished as serious political vehicles.

No ideology for this sentiment exists. It doesn’t connect with socialist ideology, it doesn’t connect with any organisation and it doesn’t connect even with tradition.

But it’s very important for us to note that the sentiment does exist, otherwise you can be distracted. You don’t need to be distracted by those who say the only things Australians are interested in are their mortgage payments, their interest rates or their material consumption. You can get into the Greens Party-style sanctimonious attitude towards working class people. Working people feel precarious and have to think about their material circumstances. Because they are feeling alienated and bored they may be sucked into consumerism or to fishing or hunting  as a means to ameliorate that alienation. We should observe that this democratic sentiment exists, it’s a consequence of historical processes over a long time.

What we have to note in particular, as I have said, is that it’s no longer connected to an ideology, it’s no longer connected to organisation and it’s no longer connected even to tradition. We should recognise here that it still exists and in fact the global north versus the global south situation, the situation of imperialism continually stirs up this sentiment as the attitudes to the Gaza/Palestine situation today indicates.

The fleeting nature of struggle and doing ongoing work

There’s a consequence of this dissociation of sentiment from ideology and most particularly ideologically based organisation, when protest does happen, when the sentiment does surface as protest: it’s, first of all, fleeting.

Demonstrations around the bush fires and global warming were huge. Was there momentum? Was there follow-up? No, it was fleeting. That’s a consequence of it not being attached to an ideology and not being attached to an organisation. It’s fleeting, but it’s also conceptually shallow. It’s only through continual involvement around an issue that people read, study, hear, discuss and gain depth of understanding. It’s fleeting and it’s shallow as a result of being fleeting and as a result of the dissociation between sentiment, ideology and organisation,

If we agree with this description of this contradiction being at the centre of political life, it also helps to define what the left should be doing. It should be campaigning against or intervening against and contributing to a transformation of this fleeting character into something ongoing and deepening. This fleeting character is reflected in attitudes of the existing organised far left. When an issue initially becomes hot, they protest around it, but when it’s no longer hot, move on to something else. There’s not the commitment to build, whether the issue is hot or not hot, you have to do ongoing work.

In the Australian context doing ongoing work is a key intervention against this fleeting character of protest sentiment, that’s a consequence of sentiment being disassociated from ideology. That means you need perseverance, with campaigning, with ongoing campaigning whether the issue is hot or cold because whether an issue is hot or cold that’s determined often by bigger events somewhere else that are out of our control. You need ongoing work deepening people’s understanding and facilitating the development and growth of campaigning infrastructure. So that when you do need to protest you can protest effectively but also build on it.

There’s also an implication here which relates to the question of imperialism, because the depth of understanding you have to help provide is based on the knowledge that all the injustices people protest against take place in a global context. In the slogan that arose 15 years ago, “another world is possible” the word WORLD is crucial. The ongoing campaigning also must relate to deepening people’s understanding and then carrying out appropriate campaigns that are within an anti-imperialist framework.

Persistence and perseverance are crucial to act against this fleeting character of manifestations of democratic humanist sentiment. It’s not only reflected in the on and off demonstrations that have taken place, also even in polls. You look at the latest Essential polls published by the Guardian on any issue you want to mention – housing, global warming, climate change, gay liberation – any issue shows that no more than 30 per cent of the population is satisfied, 70 per cent are dissatisfied. Where is this dissatisfaction politically manifested? Where is this dissatisfaction with these policies manifested? They can’t be manifested anywhere because there’s no pathway where they can be effectively manifested in an ongoing way.

This sentiment which I have called a “democratic humanist” it’s not revolutionary. It’s not even immediately potentially revolutionary because for that to happen you need a change in objective conditions such that people realise that the democratic humanist values they have are never going to be implemented until the system changes. Usually, people only realise it when it’s in their face, when the system begins to not work.

I think that there is the potential for that sentiment to be organised and mobilised to win those reforms that can be won under capitalism. Which every time they are won and even when there’s a big movement and they are not won, the contradictions of the system are sharpened. That’s going to open the eyes of more and more people. There’s potential for more effective and bigger campaigns around decarbonising Australia. There’s potential for movements around economic redistribution policies, increases in taxation or however the movements want it to be formulated.

With 81 per cent for ceasefire there’s surely potential for bigger and stronger mobilisations around Gaza. The basic contradiction still means that everything has this fleeting and shallow character to it. In this situation, what do we do? I’ve already said what needs to be done against fleetingness and shallowness is ongoing campaigning, ongoing building and for continuous orientation to the anti-imperialist struggle. Because that awakens also both the humanist sentiment, plus agitates people to think about why this situation exists.

The need for organisation

Of course, ongoing camping persistence in that giving depth to these things, who’s going to do that? Red Ant can’t, not unless it grows. Red Ant as an organisation can do this but only if it grows, if there’s more people involved. If when somebody gives a report like I’m given here, it’s not the work of one person but a team – let alone if you want to intervene and help build movements. We must have more members, so that’s another contradiction and the challenge for us in Red Ant.

To conduct those ongoing serious campaigns, perseverance, building this campaign, that campaign while propagandising for the need for full-blooded socialist change – if you want to be able to do all that you have to have a much bigger organisation than we have today. Which means in the short term, the main task we face is to grow Red Ant while not becoming an organisation that’s not simplistically oriented to its own growth, that wants to grow because growing will mean it can better relate. It wants to grow because growing means it can better intervene, it wants to grow because by growing it will have a bigger capacity to convince people, to explain things.

That’s going to be an especially big challenge to do that in relation to young people. Young people who can be active not for ten more years but for 20 years or 30 years and who are in a situation where they can imagine something better. They can see another world is possible and another world is necessary. That’s a harder change of consciousness to bring to older people than younger people. The immediate need for a stronger and bigger organisation that can contribute to strengthening ongoing campaigns, can contribute to deepening understanding and in the end can contribute to convincing people of the need not just for the reforms that can be won under capitalism, but to contribute to convince people that in the end if we don’t watch out even the reforms that are won under capitalism will be taken away at the first opportunity the capitalists have.

Over the last 100 years many reforms been won. Under neo-liberalism, some are being taken back. Rewin them, win them and if you want to hold on to the gains you make, then in the end you’re going to have to have a full-blown revolutionary change. Winning people to that understanding is also a part of the task. But none of this building campaigns, getting rid of the fleeting character of protest, getting rid of the shallow left crapping on about this issue or that issue without studying it properly – none of this will be truly possible unless we grow. We need a big organisation. So, if you haven’t joined, please consider joining or at least supporting, because that’s the only way any of these things can possibly be achieved.