"The Worse, the Better"

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Tue Jun 2 05:19:45 PDT 1998


At 07:31 AM 6/2/98 EDT, you wrote:
>In a message dated 98-06-01 20:10:34 EDT, you write:
>
><<
> Or as Vladimir Lenin used to say, "the worse, the better."
>
> Never struck me as one of Lenin's brighter lights on humanity's tree of
> good ideas...
>
> Brad DeLong
>
> >>
>Do you have a source handy?
>Dan Lazare
>
>

Although I can't be sure, this sounds like the sort of thing that came out of Stalin's "Third Period." It is in line with a phrase that is more easy to track down: "After Hitler, us." The German CP was on an ultraleft binge in the 1920s. It regarded attacks on the German working-class as something almost to be welcomed, since it would wake it from its reformist slumber. The German CP also viewed the SP as "social fascists" and joined with the Nazis in a referendum to unseat the SP government in the state of Saxony.

Lenin's true views have nothing to do with this. He used to study Czarist legal codes late at night in order to discover some loophole that might aid workers struggles. He believed deeply in the need for reforms. Unlike the reformists, he thought that militant, working-class action was the only way to achieve reforms.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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