File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-05.184, message 41


Date: 05 Jan 97 04:28:40 EST
From: Chris Burford <100423.2040-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: Re: Lenin as centraliser


re

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
From: Michael Hoover <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 97 10:30:24 18000
Subject: Re: M-I: Lenin as centraliser?

Louis P:
> (Neil Harding is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Russian Studies at
> University College, Swansea, Great Britain. "Lenin's Political Thought"

more recently, Harding has published "Leninism" (Duke: 1996)...he
argues that Leninism emerged as a revolutionary Marxist response to
WW1 and the betrayal by social democratic leaders...Leninism -
according to Harding - emerged as a public ideology with Lenin's
"April Theses" speech...he suggests that Leninism's wartime origins
- - together with the "absolute surety of Lenin's convictions" that
resulted in veneration from his comrades - was a trap from which it
could not escape...Michael
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

No doubt Leninism can be redefined in many ways but IMO there
is little doubt that Lenin pursued single mindedly a strategy
over more than 20 years to establish a vanguard Bolshevik party
capable of winning and retaining state power.

Lectures however given by Monty Johnstone in England last year
after his return from the Moscow archives also emphasised the importance
of betrayal of social chauvinism in World War 1. He argued that it was
relatively late in the war that Lenin became convinced that 
the balance of forces not only happened to make a socialist revolution
possible earlier than the Bolsheviks had been expecting, but 
that a socialist revolution was necessary to end the war.

Thus although Lenin calculated the balance of forces accurately 
about the timing of the revolution, it took place in a country
the majority of whose population were peasants, and were not 
really ready for it, resulting in civil war, and the necessity of 
war communism and a more centralised machinery than had been 
envisaged.

Once the die was cast, certain patterns followed. 

I would be interested in comments.

Chris Burford
London.


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