File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9712, message 39


Date: Wed, 03 Dec 1997 22:44:25 -0800
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: New nomenclatures


Lou Godena wrote:

> The Bolsheviks were largely a hodge-podge of
> *lumpen* intellectuals whose real strength lay not in the support of "the
> workers", but rather in Lenin's single-minded lust for power.  ...
>The Bolshevik tactic, a few months later, was to goad the
>   government, by all kinds of provocative actions, into taking deliberate
>   measures against them.   

 According to Steven Smith "Red Petrograd", and other unimpeachable
sources, 80% of Bolsheviks in 1917-18 were aged 18 yrs or less.
Lenin was universally known as 'the Old Man' (Starushka). He was not yet
50. The Bolsheviks, rather than being lumpen-intellectuals, were
worker-soldiers straight from the front (or members of the Peter
garrison). This was essenially a YOUNG party, worker not intellectual.
Lenin identified with these young tyros, they with him. They were
thirsting for the Comunist utopia he offered them. Therevwas no
gamesmanship in any of this. Lenin was in deadly earnest, and so were
they. It was not Lenin's 'single-minded luist for power' but the single
minded lust of the mothers in the barrios, the fathers in the grim
factories, and the expression of this 'lust' was the rude, utterly
honest energy of young women and men workers and their makeshift,
heroic, romantic, foolish but heart-stoppingly-real plans to change the
world. Who can gainsay with weasel words that surpassingly-heroic moment in human
history?




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