Gary Saul Morson Ph.D.
Thinking Like Lenin
Gary Saul Morson
In this episode I speak with Professor Gary Saul Morson about the thought of Vladimir Lenin, and how Lenin’s ideas and way of seeing the world influences us today. We discuss his New Criterion essay “Leninthink” and some of the key aspects of Lenin’s thought including Who-Whom: adherence to all politics and life as a win-lose, zero-sum game, the rejection of truth, Party-ness and ideological commitment over all, affirmation of violence, and philosophical materialism. We discuss moral relativism and the adherence to lying that many Western intellectuals failed to understand. Morson gives examples from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Richard Wright’s American Hunger, and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.
If “Leninthink” sounds a bit like the situation we are in today, it is because Lenin’s ideas are alive and well. As Morson writes: “As we approach the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, understanding him grows ever more important. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Leninist ways of thinking continue to spread, especially among Western radicals who have never read a word of Lenin.”
Gary Saul Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Before coming to Northwestern, he was Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist in Russian literature and culture. He has written a number of books including Anna Karenina in Our Time, And Quiet Flows the Vodka on Russian Literature, Prosaics and other Provocations; Empathy, open time, and the novel, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics can learn from the Humanities with Morton Shapiro on economics, and soon to be released, Minds Wide Shut, also with Morton Shapiro. He attended Bronx High School, did his undergraduate at Yale University, graduate work at Oxford University, and his Ph.D at Yale. He is currently working on a book on Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
Resources
Leninthink at the New Criterion
Richard Wright, American Hunger
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
G.K. Chesterton Father Brown Stories
Lenin on Morality:
“We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say it is a deception, a fraud in the interests of landlords and capitalists. We say that morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. . . . That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle.
When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.
We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old…We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
Mussolini on Relativism
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an external objective truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes and activity. The modern relativist deduces that everyone is free to create for himself his own ideology and attempt to carry it out with all possible energy”
Some quotes from Lenin from Morson’s essay:
When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. —Lenin
Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.
—Lenin’s instructions to authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918
“The only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”
Lenin, Italics original
Note from Lenin:
“The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people