LENIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: A STUDY ON THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT AND PLEBEIAN SOCIAL MOBILIZATION

Lenin's political thought is usually dismissed in the scholarly literature as the truncated logic of a lumpendemagogue. This dissertation will situate Lenins Marxism in its multiple historical contexts as a secular rationalist ideology which was singularly sophisticated by the Positivist standards of his day. Lenin's political thought evolved in a fecund dialectic with the graduating social mobilization of the Russian Nizy from the fin-de-siecle scattered insurgencies and the annus mirabilis of 1905 through to the false dawn of 1912-1914 and the plebeian revolution of 1917. Lenin was the first Second International Marxist to attempt an investigation of the dynamics of social change in a peripheral capitalism. He was also the first to grasp the import of a seismic shift in twentieth century politics whereby the lower classes replaced the bourgeoisie as the epicenter of democratic revolutions in lands beyond the European metropole. Bolshevism cannot be comprehended at a level above caricature without a critical inquiry into Lenin's Marxism.; The conventional interpretation of Lenin as an elitist Jacobin viewing the party as the sole source of legitimate proletarian initiative cannot stand the weight of the overwhelming mass of evidence against it. The evolution of Lenin's political thought from his concept of the unmediated vanguard to the adumbrations of a commune state, was driven by a constant search for new forms of political articulation to give a voice to the Disinherited in novel and forbidding historical circumstances. Lenin's ultimate failure should not be judged in isolation from the difficulty and urgency of this undertaking. The main object of this dissertation is to uncover the reasons why Bolshevism succeeded in coming to the head of a plebeian revolutionary insurrection in 1917, but proved unable to sustain this popular impetus through into the construction of a revolutionary democratic polity.; Chapter one treats Lenin's Marxism, the major formative influences and methodology. Chapter two considers Lenin's anatomy of the Old Regime into a Bonapartist autocracy and Brumairean bourgeoisie. Chapter three discusses Lenin's concept of Plebeian Permanent Revolution. Chapter four critiques Lenin's concept of the party. Chapter five examines Bolshevism and the 1917 Revolution of the Nizy.