Labour’s messaging difficulties in context: State and Revolution a Hundred Years on

With the Labour Party beginning to self-assess and the split between Corbynites and Starmerites threatening to escalate, I’ve decided to take a look at Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917), a written embodiment of the divide between the far and centre left. By reading it we can learn something about what Labour can do to tackle our crisis of confidence and revitalise our message. 

Lenin’s contemporary centre-left succeeded democratically but failed politically and the anti-democratic extremes seized the moment. This is exactly what is happening in America where Lenin’s anti-establishment, anti-bureaucracy messaging has been adopted by the likes of Elon Musk. It is now for Labour to prevent this in Britain, yet Labour’s approval ratings have sunk below David Cameron’s Etonian austerity or Boris Johnson’s covid lies, so a critical self-reflection is necessary to course-correct in the remaining four years. 

The takeaways from State and Revolution I see are to differentiate yourself from your opponents, align morality and strategy, and develop a vision for what kind of country you’re creating. These will enable us to build a positive populist narrative that reminds people what a Labour government can achieve in power. If the government fails to form its own narrative, they will find that one has been written for them.

Before exploring these three we should recognise our movement’s history of delivering change for people in a gradual but meaningful sense. 

While Lenin was advocating for violent revolution, suppression of opposition, dismantling the civil service and total control of government, the Fabians and the Labour movement which he so derided achieved lasting improvements for workers including democratic rights, civil liberties, council housing, and a minimum wage. Lenin attacks the Fabians as stooges for a bourgeois bureaucratic state holding back the workers, but this attack is totally undermined by the post-Revolution collapse of his own ideology. Lenin fell short of his dreams of Communist utopia later that very year when he overturned the results of the 1917 election, and much worse was to come. Gradualism may never reach the utopia that Marxism dreams of, but it displays a vastly better picture than the oppression enabled by revolution. 

What the left has discarded has been adopted by the far right. It is now the faux-populist oligarchs that have acquired Lenin’s passion for militarism, dismantling bureaucracy, removing opposition, and controlling every level of government. This is precisely the outcome that the modern left must prevent, it must take the spirit of workers liberation and use it to break the appeal of the far right.

First, State and Revolution identifies its political adversaries. Rather than waste time covering the capitalists as you might expect, Lenin sets his movement apart from its two closest neighbours. In his view, the anarchists to the left failed to understand the necessity of a workers’ monopoly on violence to suppress bourgeois resistance, while the Social Democrats to the right had betrayed the workers by going soft on their governments and capitulating on the issue of the First World War. 

The equivalent opponents of the Labour Party would be the Greens and the Libdems, both of whom self-identify as morally superior. Our response has been to accuse them of making unfunded pledges. This accusation is true but fails to build a narrative or recognise that people don’t vote Libdem or Green because of costings. People vote Green for an optimistic vision, and Libdem for centre-ground pragmatism. If we were to directly emulate State and Revolution, Labour must somehow show Green’s policies to be self-defeating, and the Libdems pragmatism to be a betrayal of the popular desire for institutional reform.

Most disappointingly, when a Reform MP called for a ban of the Burqa at PMQs, an astounded Starmer defaulted to the ‘unfunded policies’ line, when he could have passionately disposed of their racist rhetoric. The ‘unfunded policies' line can suggest we would adopt their policies if we had the funds, which may be true in relation to Libdems and Greens but does little to inspire voters. 

Secondly, Lenin argues for a kind of moral necessity of his own ideas. State and Revolution advocates for a dictatorship of the proletariat as the only way to put workers in the driving seat, in doing so intertwining ethics and realpolitik. There is a total alignment between what was necessary and desirable.

The sense one gets of Labour in government is of an entity repeatedly finding itself trapped in positions it’d rather not be in, consider winter fuel, disability benefits, the winter fuel u-turn, Israel-Palestine, friendly handshakes with Trump. With each of these there is a sense of a reluctance and disconnect between the necessary and desirable. Come the next election we will need to proudly stand by our policy decisions. 

Lastly we need a vision of what the country could be, that directly connects with our policies. Lenin’s lofty visions of the First and Higher stages of Communism through abolition of bureaucracy, freedom from capitalist, and de-centralised government. This level of Utopianism is outdated in modern leftism and has become the domain of the American right, as Lenin’s ambition to cut back the salaries and responsibilities of government is now mirrored by the DOGE phenomenon. 

Meanwhile the liberal slogan for the past 20 years now has been ‘change’: the 2024 Labour slogan was ‘Change’, 2019 was ‘It’s time for real change’, the most successful was the 2008 Obama slogan ‘Change (we can believe in)’. An optimistic voter can fill in the blanks for what change will bring, whether it be public services reform, ending conflicts, or tackling social issues, but the post-Obama political hangover from rich optimism lacking delivery should tell the current Labour party that just Change™ is not enough, there has to be a central vision of where change will take us. 

The introduction of VAT on private school fees, a sign of potentially transformative change, has been presented as a strictly fiscal measure, rather than part of moving towards a more meritocratic education system. This is despite the ongoing healthy debate about private schools and this being the most state-schooled cabinet in the post-war era. Let’s be proud of our desire to tackle unequal education and presenting a vision for Britain as becoming more meritocratic would show the public where Labour policies are designed to take us. 

The Labour movement has a good story to tell. Founding the NHS, housebuilding, and the minimum wage show what democratic socialism can achieve. Continuing this tradition of transformation we’ve introduced VAT on private schools, reformed inheritance tax, introduced age requirements for online pornography and extended suffrage to 16 and 17-year olds. These successes need to be knitted together in a narrative that sets us apart from other parties, combines the moral and political, and paints the kind of society Labour is creating. 

Despite the philosophical bravado that Lenin showcased in State and Revolution, his Bolsheviks would place second in the first elections later that year behind the Chernov’s Democratic Socialists, yet by Chernov failed to be a decisive and practical politician. Labour has the policy platform to win elections but must pair this with a crystallised vision of what country our platform will create if we are to win the fight for social democracy.

Link to State and Revolution: https://lenin.public-archive.net/en/L2605en.html