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Lenin was stuck in a bad place at a bad time - my reservations are not to
do with his personal make-up - but I reckon we'd do well to learn from the
story of Lenin that (a) where there's a will there's a way, and (b)
planting the seeds of bureaucratic centralism is not the way to approach
any future. It can never compensate for 'a mutually-reinforcing leadership
and rank-and-file'.
That way will inevitably be signposted by Kronstadts, and will ultimately
take you to (not necessarily socialist) revolutionary pressures anew. I
apologise for my smug 20/20 hindsight here, but it's all I've got.
Cheers,
Rob. >>
But who isn't stuck in a bad place at a bad time? Lenin was quite aware of the disadvantages of revolutionizing backward, semi-developed country like Russia, but hoped that it would be the trigger for a broader revolution beginning in Germany and extending throughout the Continent. Democratic centralism only became bureaucratic centralism after those hopes were proven false, the USSR became more and more isolated, and certain rather unpleasant elements opted to take advantage of all that backwardness and isolation to feather their own nests. This is a well-known story. But one should not equate democratic centralism with bureaucratic centralism since the former implies just the sort of "mutually-reinforcing leadership and rank-and-file" was talking about.
Dan Lazare