Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 22:21:43 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: Theory is grey ... was: Re: M-TH: PANIC LEFT-7


>At 09:32 11-04-97 +0200, Hugh Rodwell wrote:
>>Utica Rose wrote:
>>
>>>rhetorical overkill is to violence as theory is to life -- a very pale
>>>premonition. wasnt it lenin who said that theory is grey, life is green ?
>>
>>
>>	Grau, teurer Freund, ist all' Theorie, und nur das Business ist gruen.
>>	(Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and only business is green)
>>
>>This is a parody of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust:
>>
>>	Grau, teurer Freund ist alle Theorie
>>	Und gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.
>>	[Grey, dear friend, is all theory
>>	and green the golden tree of life.]
>>
>>
>>I'm pretty sure it was Marx in a letter to Engels complaining about his
>>constant shortage of funds, but I can't find the reference off-hand.
>>
>>Maybe Lenin was just quoting Goethe straight off ("life" not the ironic
>>"business"), but there's no reference to it (under Goethe) in his Collected
>>Works.
>
>
>
>See: _Letters on Tactics_, Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 24 p. 45 (Moscow
>1964).
>
>"Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life."
>(When he was fighting *for* permanent revolution, *against* "old bolshevism".
>
>>Cheers,
>
>Jorn

Quite right, Joern, and it's a shame you didn't develop the way in which
these letters actually argued for the living reality of the Russian
revolution having superseded the old formula of first the rule of the
bourgeoisie and only then the rule of the proletariat, and in fact
substantiated the theory of the permanent revolution in which the
transition from absolutist rule to proletarian rule by-passing the
bourgeoisie (which had become totally impotent in terms of leading any kind
of revolution -- anti-feudal, democratic or anything else remotely
progressive) is not only possible but in fact the only alternative if a
revolution is to succeed in overthrowing capitalism and bourgeois rule.

Goethe is mentioned in a note, but not in the Name Index.

Pity the bureaucrats dumped the workers' state and went all the way with
imperialism *before* they'd got the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to
produce the collected works of Lenin (and Marx and Engels) on CD-ROM!!

But maybe some US university'll do it for us. After all, Ann Arbour
published a lot of Trotsky's stuff. And if they can do it for Ancient
Greece, they can surely do it for what they might think of as nineteenth
century ideas and social movements!

God moves in mysterious ways ...

Cheers,

Hugh





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