The ghost of Vladimir Lenin would find much to admire in Anthony Albanese’s approach to Australian government. Both leaders, separated by a century and vastly different political systems, share a fundamental belief in the power of centralised planning to reshape society according to ideological imperatives.
Lenin’s concept of ‘democratic centralism’, where debate occurs within the party, but unanimous implementation follows once decisions are made, finds its contemporary echo in Albanese’s ‘progressive patriotism’. Both frameworks demand that complex economic and social transformations be driven from the centre, with dissent marginalised as either counter-revolutionary or unpatriotic.
Consider Australia’s commitment to 82 per cent renewables by 2030.
This is not merely an energy policy; it is central planning on a scale that would make Soviet commissars proud. The target emerged not from market forces or technological readiness, but from political decree. Like Lenin’s industrial plans, it represents the triumph of ideological conviction over economic reality.
The parallels run deeper than mere top-down planning.
Lenin’s democratic centralism required party members to suppress private doubts once the leadership had spoken. Similarly, Albanese’s progressive patriotism demands that questioning the renewables transition marks one as either a climate denier or, worse, unpatriotic.
The framing is brilliant: opposition becomes not just wrong, but morally suspect.
Both systems rely on what economists call ‘the knowledge problem’: the impossibility of central planners possessing the dispersed information needed for efficient resource allocation.
Lenin’s planners could not know the true costs and benefits of steel production in Magnitogorsk any more than Albanese’s bureaucrats can accurately predict the grid stability implications of replacing coal plants with wind farms across a continent-sized nation.
Yet both General Secretaries share an unshakeable faith that political will can overcome economic laws. Lenin believed revolutionary fervour could substitute for market mechanisms. Albanese appears convinced that moral urgency around climate change can overcome the technical and economic challenges of rebuilding an entire energy system in less than a decade.
The human costs of such ambitious central planning are predictably similar. Lenin’s industrialisation campaigns created shortages, inefficiencies, and social disruption that persisted for decades. Australia’s renewables transition is already producing its own casualties: soaring electricity prices, grid instability, deindustrialisation, and inflation.
Progressive patriotism, like democratic centralism, also serves to silence inconvenient voices. Questioning the feasibility of 82 per cent renewables by 2030 becomes tantamount to climate denial. The complexity of energy systems – the need for storage, transmission infrastructure, and backup power – gets swept aside by moral certainty.
Both ideologies share another crucial feature: they promise a transformed future that justifies present sacrifices. Lenin’s workers endured hardship for the promise of socialist abundance in utopia. Australian families are asked to accept higher energy costs and reduced reliability for the promise of a clean energy future in utopia. The timeline may be shorter, but the logic is identical.
Lenin’s democratic centralism ultimately failed because reality has a way of asserting itself against ideological conviction. The Soviet Union’s planned economy could not deliver the prosperity it promised, and the system eventually collapsed under its own contradictions. Not to mention corruption and starvation.
Australia’s renewables transition may not face such dramatic failure, but the warning signs are already visible. Grid instability, cost blowouts, and the growing gap between political promises and technical reality suggest that progressive patriotism, like democratic centralism before it, may discover that wish thinking cannot suspend the laws of economics and physics indefinitely.
This was first published on Substack
