Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 15:48:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Scott McLemee <mclemee-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-I: Lenin on Cooperatives: comments


Reading this late document by Lenin again, I am reminded of how emphatic 
C. L. R. James became, by 1964, about its importance.  Its ideas "cannot 
be said to be forgotten," he wrote that year, "because they have never 
been noticed."  James's article "Lenin and the Problem" originally 
appeared in an African newspaper, was reprinted in his collection 
NKRUMAH AND THE GHANA REVOLUTION, and can be found most readily now in 
THE C.L.R. JAMES READER.

As a kind of footnote to Chris's remarks, let me quote some more.  James 
notes that, in the late 1930s, he wrote a book on the Russian revolution 
and its aftermath, WORLD REVOLUTION (1937).  "I am certain that in 
preperation for the work, I read the relevant passages [that he's just 
indicated, from "On Cooperation"].  But today I can find no concern with 
them on the numerous sympathetic pages I devoted to Lenin's ideas.  I 
must simply have read them and passed them by.  And my experience is that 
all other students of the period and writers on it have done the same.  I 
was for years active among the leading Trotskyists:  no Trotskyist that I 
knew ever even spoke, far less wrote of them.  I translated from the 
French nearly a thousand pages of the life of Stalin by Boris Souvarine, 
a book based on personal acquaintance with the Russian leaders and the 
Russian scene of Lenin's day, and [on] a mastery of all available 
material.  These ideas of Lenin's are barely mentioned.  In a wide 
acquaintance with Trotsky's voluminous writings on Lenin and 
revolutionary Russia, I have found no treatment of them.  In 
authoritative and extensive examinations of the whole Russian revolution 
by Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr, you find the same blank 
incomprehension.  None of us says that Lenin was wrong, that these ideas 
marked a decline in his mental powers due to the illness which killed 
him.  Simply the modern world is so constituted that it cannot take 
seriously such political recommendations as the construction of an honest 
and efficient government, and the education of an illiterate peasant 
population.  These were not accidental, or psychological utopias.  They 
were, in Lenin's view at least, the summation of his life's experience 
and studies, and his six years' experience as leader of the Russian 
revolution."

Hope this provokes anyone interested in the Lenin text to dig up 
this article by James, which is quite a gem itself.

Scott McLemee				mclemee-AT-igc.apc.org


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