The greatest flaw of Mitchell Cohen’s “What Lenin’s Critics Got Right” in the most recent Dissent is that it repeats what Lars T. Lih, independent researcher and author of Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is To Be Done” In Context (Haymarket, 2008) and a biography of Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2011), calls the “standard textbook interpretation” of Lenin’s thought and, by extension, Bolshevism as a movement.

Cohen reprises the usual claim that through the publication of What Is To Be Done? (hereafter WITBD?) in 1902 and the 1904 split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RDSLP), Lenin and his “Bolsheviks” (the 1904 majority faction) created a “party of a new type” — a despotically centralized “vanguard” party of “professional revolutionaries” (supposedly ex-student intellectuals, not “real workers”) dominated by an all-powerful central committee.

Cohen contrasts this “Leninist” vision of the Marxist party to that of a democratic Marxist party to which the Bolsheviks’ rivals in the Menshevik (minority) faction of the RSDLP, like Julius Martov, purportedly held. Lih calls this the “worry about the workers” reading, based on Lenin’s supposed view that workers, through their daily political struggles, would never achieve “revolutionary consciousness.”