> Might have been Mao. It's Weisberg's phrase.
> Yet another slander on Lenin.
>
> mbs
>
>
> 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.
I did a search (using Google) of marxists.org, and only found a reference to this being a position of Weitling (in Riazanov's book, 'Karl Marx and Fred Engels). Its circumstantial evidence, but since it was being heavily criticized there, and Riazanov was pretty much a Leninist, I assume it wasn't a position of Lenin's.
On the heightening contradictions thing - its a standard part of post-WWI orthodox Marxism (all strands, as far as I can tell - Lenin, Trotsky, even Pannekoek), with its theory of an almost perpetual capitalist crisis. Its interpretation, however, varies widely, with e.g. the British SWP seeing as vote for Labour as heightening contradictions (between the promise and the reality of the bourgeois workers party).
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844