“Leninism” is widely identified across the political spectrum, either positively or negatively, as a form of “vanguardism” in which a self-selected minority leads the masses—themselves incapable of achieving socialist consciousness—to a new society. Others, on the other hand, deny that Lenin was anything but an “orthodox” Marxist who merely applied Marxism to the specific conditions of Russian society, whose ideas on organization, let alone theory and politics, have little to offer us today. Who, if anyone, is right? Is there anything in the theory and practice of Lenin and the Bolshevik party that socialists can learn from and use today?