interesting, since this is another in a long line of ways of saying, 'don't talk about lenin anymore'. dishonest, since it characterises the passage of the discussion of lenin's _wtbd_ here as something driven by criticism, when in fact, the entire course of the discussion has been driven by either a defense of lenin -- whether the iconic lenin where no discussion of lenin's writings should be entered into lest the icon fall (yoshie and carrol) or lenin as strategist (which, despite the heat, was not censorious) -- or a defense of my original posting, against the determination by those either defending _wtbd_ or the iconic lenin to mischaracterise that post every step of the way. interesting tactics, but dishonest, since whether there are leninists in australia is of less relevance to the ways in which the debate here has unfolded than the presense of leninists on this list. the discussion came neither out of thin air, but as a response to the posting from chaz, nor did it proceed by my own inclination to exorcise lenin (see below*).
what's interesting is the extent to which there are leninists in australia who have their own critique of lenin's _wtbd_, similar to the critique offered here: that lenin's _wtbd_ is not commensurate with marxism -- neither here nor there as an issue finally -- and that the lenin changes his position quite dramatically after 1905, for reasons which can be found in marx's understanding of the relationship between theory and class struggle.
in any event, on the organised left in aust, leninists constitute a significant presence, as rob notes. and the question here, has never been whether leninism should be exorcised (see note below*) from the left or marxism, but whether the adherence of most (but not all) leninists to _wtbd_ (to the exclusion of works such as _state and revolution_, for instance) prompts them to follow a manual of organisation and an approach to the question of the relationship between party and masses which is both historically myopic and sectarian. after all, any attempt at offering either an organisational form or analysis which is appropriate to the current forms of class composition, etc gets substituted by the claim to be a vanguard by epistemic right, or rather, the very distance between these organisations and any ongoing mass work is explained (or explained away) by the notions derived from _wtbd_. self-reproducing sects rather than parties, which are more paranoid about other sects than interested in what's happening around them, whose determinate terrain is not the shape and movement of the class struggle, since that is already 'solved' by the autonomous development of intellectuals, by the apparent 'solution' of joining the party and by its recruiting.
and, the right do condescend to attack marxism, or rather what they see it as, and this in particular over recent debates on australian history (notably, manning clarke, land rights, CIA funding of literary journals, not to mention a quite lengthy tussle over who was an anti-communist and an anti-anti-communist or just a communist. i kid not on the latter. that these debates have been conduced over _history_ is of course the preamble to eradicating marxism as a viable, imaginable politics today, not least because it sets in place variations on capitalist politics as the only conceivable set of 'alternatives'.
and, in terms of the reference to may 68, there was nothing spectral about the PCF's position on those events; as there was nothing spectral about the relation of the PCI to the autonomist movements in italy. whether here at this moment we would opt for council communism, the situationists or the autonomists is not the issue, and nor would i embrace any of these without serious reservations. but in each case, what becomes apparent, is that the orthodox parties found themselves either opposing the emergence of such movements or ruling them out as 'spontaneist', with the lexicon and theories bequeathed by kautsky and lenin.
to the extent to which there are leninists who do not regard _wtbd_ as the manual for politics, and indeed are more inclined to the approach of _state and revolution_, suggests that this debate is as much internal to leninism as marxism. but that subtlety seems to evaporate in the middle of list polemic.
Angela _________
* i must be claiming lenin is "evil" or leninism something to be "exorcised", if i'd written this! more excerpts from previous posts that some determine not to have read:
[on _state and revolution_ ]> yes, it's an excellent work isn't it? but saying both _wtbd_ and _state and revolution_ discuss the party is not any way to answer the question of whether they discuss it in the same way.<
> what happened is that by virtue of lenin's early position, the
councils were ruled out as revolutionary. after the bolsheviks
involvement (up to 1919), there is no question of accusing anyone of a
'take-over' precisely because lenin subordinated the party to the
councils. i don't doubt the sincerity of this position at all. nor do
i doubt that he would have been unable to become a leader in the
movement had he not taken that position. what happens after 1919 is not
down to lenin, but his response is, and his response was a reversion to
the theses of _wtbd_.<
> until lenin's _state and revolution_, until that is the workers'
councils show lenin that he was wrong in _what is to be done?_, his
version of the relation between the party and the masses is not a
marxist position (and it reverts to his kautskyism later). <
> _What is to be done?_ is seen as the text of the Russian revolution,
when in fact, everything about those events contradicts it. if Lenin
were to have insisted on the theses of that work, as he for a brief
moment did not, there would have been no involvement of Lenin in the
revolution, and certainly no involvement by the Russian social democrats
or bolsheviks.<
> so by 1917, Lenin discovers the marxism he had polemicised against,
realising that the workers' councils are not an arm of the party, that
they had arisen _without_ the intervention and organising (let alone
clarifications) of the party ad socialist intellectuals, and that they
were revolutionary. when it comes to writing _State and Revolution_,
Lenin is more or less adopting the position of a council communist,
insisting on the continual and inalienable power of workers to
constitute and reconstitute the state, on a need to democratize the
party, on the right of recall, etc which reverses his previous
weightings of state/society, party/masses, theory/practice, etc. but,
unfortunately, under conditions which are not necessarily of the
bolsheviks own making, but which the response of the bolsheviks already
has a basis in their own previous positions, this moment of class
struggle marxism does not last very long.<