AS LENIN left the world, Ramsay MacDonald entered Downing Street. The first workers’ state lost its leader, and Britain gained its first Labour government on the same day, a century gone Sunday last.

One could write the story of the 20th-century workers’ movement through that moment. A comrade sent me a picture of hundreds of workers standing in silent homage at the news of Lenin’s passing. In Poplar.

Ramsay MacDonald’s memorial was the ruin of the movement he had built, its dreams traded in for the friendship of Lady Londonderry and the applause of the bankers — the “greatest betrayal in the political history of the country,” in Clem Attlee’s words.

On his death, Poplar was unmoved. In the great cleavage of the international labour movement, the product of surrender to imperialism in 1914, only one side had a claim on the workers’ hearts.

Yet the balance sheet of history never yields tidy reckonings. MacDonaldism, with its deference to capital and embrace of the Establishment, breathes among us today, not in the lyrical rhetoric of the farm labourer’s son but in the clipped tones and dead eyes of the state prosecutor.

The gamble Stanley Baldwin and King George V made in 1924 — send for MacDonald, we need to make Labour safe for government — paid off. Thirty-three years of Labour government later, and a King remains on the throne, with the flint-faced bourgeoisie at the helm.

Lenin’s gamble, or rather his assumption that the working class of Europe was ready and able to follow the Russians in sweeping away capitalist power, did not likewise pay off. 

He observed that the coexistence of the Soviet republic with imperialism for any length of time was impossible, and would probably only be surprised that the denouement, in the absence of world revolution, took as long as it did.

The persistence of MacDonaldism is one reason it failed. It politically embedded the old world in the interstices of the fighting forces of the new, setting the labour movement on a course that led to the welfare state and colonial massacres, a minimum wage and nuclear missiles, equal pay and rule by the City.

There is no need here to expand on the commendable article by Carlos Martinez in the Star’s anniversary supplement on the material underpinning of the monster hybrid of social democracy, and Lenin’s challenge to it by placing anti-imperialism at the heart of socialism.

The problem has long been understood. MacDonald’s party is the political expression of the organised working-class movement. It is also, in the words of independent Ghana’s founder, Kwame Nkrumah, the labour arm of imperialism. Both are true.

Lenin’s shade proved more potent than MacDonald’s practice. His newly minted ghost harried the 1924 government into an early grave. 

The first Labour premier lost his Commons mandate over an article by Communist Johnnie Campbell, later editor of this newspaper, calling on soldiers not to fire on their fellow workers. 

The subsequent general election was in turn a rout largely on account of the “Zinoviev letter,” a secret service fabrication, which purportedly had the president of the Communist International urging all manner of unconstitutionalities on his British supporters.

But the attraction of MacDonald to the bourgeoisie of a century ago — that he and his kind were an effective barrier to the enduring menace of the man in the Moscow mausoleum — ensured that Labour would be back.

Is Leninism also capable of renewal? Not by paying pious homage to Lenin’s every utterance and by tormenting contemporary reality to squeeze within all his formulations.

The challenge is to read Leninism as Lenin himself would, critically. The rigid defence of the text, that ideological metier of medievalism, had small attraction for him.

From his powerful analysis of imperialism to the concept of the vanguard party, Lenin’s legacy can only live through refreshment, in turn depending on critical debate rather than on the implausible assertion that he pronounced the last word on everything.

Deploying analytical faculties is the least we owe to the millions who lived, fought and very often perished in the Leninist cause and profoundly moulded the world we live in today.

A serviceable essence of Lenin’s work endures. Three points spring to mind.

Firstly, Lenin always saw world politics as a whole, and never shrank into national perspectives or particularism. Acknowledge differences in conditions, yes, but elevate the part over the revolutionary whole — never.

That is why he was able to articulate the first comprehensive theory of world revolution, stretching  beyond the boundaries of Europe geographically and the working class socially, after 1914. 

Nothing less will do today for sure. For example, only British workers get to vote — or not — for the Labour Party. But the latter’s political role can only be assessed from the perspective of the Arab, Indian or African worker too, however uncomfortable their judgement may be.

Second, Lenin was very much opposed to opportunism, to the mortgaging of the future for a softer present. To understand Lenin is also necessarily to understand MacDonald and his more elevated peer, Karl Kautsky.

The enduring hold of reformism on the labour movements is not a refutation of Lenin, but an indication that he was onto something vital, given social democrats’ failure to translate repeated parliamentary majorities into socialism. 

On matters of war and class power, differences are not to be split, but fought through to a conclusion. That Leninist lesson, drawn as most socialists cheered on the slaughter of World War I, has not lost its potency.

Third, he always marched towards the sound of gunfire. Lenin surely did good work in the study and the library, but I do not think there was a day he was not above all exercised by his famous class-power interrogation: “Who? Whom?”

To the masses, with the masses. That is the only place theory is tested. And that is why his fellow Bolsheviks were always in a state of anticipatory surprise, wondering what tactical turn their leader would propose next. 

Yesterday’s formula had not a moment’s purchase with Lenin if the living movement demanded something new.

And what a contrast to Ramsay MacDonald. Politically, Labour’s first prime minister died years before he ceased walking and talking on Earth, indeed while still resident in Downing Street atop a Tory administration. 

Even while present he was a man of the past, clinging to a failing empire, relying on Victorian ethical platitudes as the storms of struggle broke over his head, embracing aristocracy as real power passed to the men of business.

Lenin’s physical departure, on the other hand, barely interrupted his political future. 

He is not to be found in that mausoleum, his mummification prefiguring the fate of a good deal of soi-disant Leninism.  

Find him instead on the huge movement for Palestine. Its love of common humanity, irreconcilability to the Labour opportunists and sustained immersion in political confrontation with imperialism is the nearest to the Leninist spirit abroad today.

Like Joe Hill, he lives on the picket lines and in the mass actions, standing at the decisive transitions in political life, when discontent becomes action, and when hopes become programmes. 

Lenin is at our shoulder and yet also in the distance, on the horizon of our ambitions — the greatest of all revolutionaries, one hundred years dead and still ahead of us.