TODAY is 150 years since the birth of Lenin, arguably the greatest single figure in the most significant event in recent human history. Why might we say this? 

Marxists do not celebrate history as a succession of great men but as the history of class struggles that emerge from the contradictions of development within the forces and relations of production. In what sense then might we celebrate Lenin’s greatness?

For Marxists, the greatness of humans and indeed of classes lies in the extent to which they are able to analyse and understand the forces at work in their historical moment, their potentials and limits and then to use this in self-conscious practical action that enables the further development of progressive forces that work independently of their will. 

Lenin’s greatness lies in his ability to reflect in Marxist theory the great tendencies and movements at work within his time and to translate this into revolutionary action that made sense of reality for masses of people at critical moments and that enabled them to make a great leap forward that shaped subsequent history and which continues to shape our turbulent present.

Lenin grew to political consciousness as part of a world in which great monopolies were fusing with state power to drive the formation of an unevenly developed capitalist world market, generating great world crises and imperialist wars, throwing together also great concentrations of working people into formations of social labour, who formed in turn labour movements and socialist parties in the aspiration to build a better world.

It’s easy to forget how many people called themselves, to some degree or other, Marxists in Lenin’s day. 

Lenin himself was among relatively few who saw that the development of the capitalist mode of production had reached a point where revolutionary outbreaks were an imminent possibility across the capitalist world. 

For Lenin and his followers, crucial questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics had to be addressed by Marxists as urgent needs of the hour rather than being deferred to some remote period of future human history.

Lenin’s greatness lies, fundamentally, in the fact that his theory adapted to and expressed in the form of thought the movements of great masses of people in 1917, providing them with leadership at key moments and enabling them to forge a great revolutionary movement in society.

Lenin’s leadership and theory enabled him to grasp the weakness of Russian capitalism within the uneven development of world capitalism and recognise the possibility that it could determine events elsewhere. 

Yet at the same time, Lenin’s writing is also punctuated, constantly, with the recognition that the germinal forms of the socialist mode of production were being forged by capitalism itself. 

In its construction of large enterprises based on the organisation of thousands of workers across time and space, in the state’s growing role in reproducing the capitalist order and in its creation of new forms of social infrastructure and communications, Lenin saw the future emerging out of the present. 

In a memorable phrase he claimed: “Socialism is gazing at us from all the windows of modern capitalism.”

Famously, of course, Lenin restored the Marxist theory of the state to its rightful place in the heart of revolutionary theory and practice. 

The essence of a revolution, he argued, is the passage of state power from one class to another. 

Governments alone cannot introduce socialism without controlling the state apparatus and using it against capitalist-class resistance, deploying its force to expropriate the expropriators and, crucially, to set free the socialist relations and forces of production growing up within capitalism.

Yet neither could socialism be brought about by the capitalist state machine. 

The transitional phase of a revolution had to have a political form: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the phase where the working class has put itself in a position to dictate the direction and pace of change, where it starts to unlock and build the elements of a new mode of production. 

This political form must begin the process of breaking apart the bourgeois state apparatus, democratising its components by subjecting them to the will of the people and building a new state that is in the process of ceasing to be a state altogether.

Lenin’s theoretical insights were able to translate into practical action and “grip the masses” through his position within the Bolshevik party, guiding Bolshevik strategy as it attempted to reflect and express the spontaneous movements of the masses of Russian people — workers and peasants — in 1917.

The European revolutionary outbreak, of which the Russian revolution formed part, was weaker than Lenin had hoped and was rolled back in Germany, Hungary and Italy. 

And yet Russia’s revolution survived. The dictatorship of the proletariat did expropriate the capitalist class, and it built socialist relations of production. 

Forces of production were unleashed that were capable of extraordinary feats, and mobilisations were enabled that defeated world fascism in 1945. 

Greater equality was created, mass literacy, healthcare and tremendous scientific advances were made. 

After the second world war, socialist relations of production were spread to other countries in the people’s democracies. 

Even within imperialist states, these developments led to the creation of a state monopoly capitalism in which working-class forces, led by socialist forces inspired by the October revolution, were able to win some concessions for their peoples from a watchful and frightened ruling class.

So the historical significance of Lenin and his work are not in doubt. Yet even today, after the retreat of world socialist forces, Lenin’s example and to a great extent his theory, remain of the utmost importance to us.

We live in a world where monopolies and multinationals still use state power to divide up the world between themselves and deploy it to attack the living standards of their peoples.

Capitalism is a necrotic mode of production that poses an existential threat to the peoples of the world. 

It is economically stagnant, prone to financial shocks that drive it into recession and throw millions of people into destitution and starvation. 

Capitalism cannot control its environmental degradation, nor can it respond to a global pandemic that threatens to collapse social infrastructure and shatter fragile economies.

Working classes and social production are still being created by the capitalist system — both are bigger than ever before; peasantries still populate many of the states of the Third World, ground down by capitalist agriculture and finance capital.

For all the flaws and failures of actually existing socialism, no alternative road to socialism has been discovered that can replace the need for some form of democratising dictatorship of the proletariat: some reckoning with the control and form of state power as a whole.

Marxism, including the huge historical legacy of Lenin’s life and work, will remain relevant for as long as capitalism exists. 

We must study and understand that legacy and apply it to our own terrible time. 

Jonathan White will be live streaming two lectures as part of the Marx Memorial Library’s Lenin 150 programme on April 23 and 30. To register, go to: www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/events.