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. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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