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Where (if anywhere) did Lenin actually write: "the worse, the better"?
Brad DeLong
It's hard to slander Lenin, because there is so much to deprecate in him before you actually get to the slander. In the early twentieth century version of soundbites, he did come up with the famous, "Better Fewer, But Better," which every loony Trot and Stalinist has taken as justification for the umpteenth organizational split, but I am unaware of a "the worse, the better" quotation on his part.
As for heightening contradictions, well that definitely has the Maoist touch [remember that Mao had such advanced philosophical notions as the idea that dialectics was like playing a piano with all ten fingers], although the notion itself was not foreign to Lenin. It is an error, however, to see the notion of heightening contradictions solely in terms of a "the worse, the better" formula.
The criticism of Nader was really of an ultra-left, sectarian approach, where the greatest enemy is he who is closer to you on the left, rather than the forces of the right. This is not an exclusively Leninist error, and the invocation of Lenin was clearly designed to rhetorically connect Nader with the Communist tradition in a larger, illegitimate way. The article should have stuck to the criticism of the sectarian "no friends on the left" approach of Nader.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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