No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

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The aim of this book is to present a history of Lenin and the Russian Revolution that is relevant to today’s democratic, libertarian left, especially those born since the fall of the Soviet Union. Although it broadly covers the period 1903 to 1921 and seeks to explain why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, it is not simply a work of history. It continually examines the Russian Revolution through the lens of a 21st-century, non-Marxist, participatory socialism, and draws parallels with recent anti-capitalist struggles, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. It suggests that corporate capitalism should be opposed not with a set of revolutionary formulations which were questionable one hundred years ago and have even less relevance now, but with popular social movements built on people’s needs and experience.

As a result, it is kinder to Russia’s non-Leninist socialists than are most histories. Although not blind to the many faults of the Russian Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and Jewish Bundists, I seek to rescue them from a century of disrespect. In doing so I do not assume the knowledge of the subject that many Russian Revolution hobbyists take for granted, nor show much deference to those icons of Bolshevism, Lenin and Trotsky, still common today on the left. In the end I suggest that anti-capitalist writers and campaigners such as Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Lowy and Paul Mason have more constructive options to offer the left today than do the sages of Bolshevism.

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