Brad, what is Kagarlitsky saying here that is not simply an attempt to recycle Lenin? He trots out Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Thermidor, placing the onus for the failure of the Russian Revolution on the growth of the beaurocracy - in other words, a phenomenon rooted in the post-1920 period, which accelerated after Lenin's death.
He then counterposes left 'collectivism' to capitalism as an ideology for development, and takes the framework for left activity from Lenin's 'What is to be done?', particular the bit about importing a new consciousness into the proletarian masses.
So basically Kagarlitsky's programme is Lenin re-hashed. And the lessons of post-1917? Well, there don't seem to be many...
Kagarlitsky totally skirts a huge number of problems. For instance, what of the evidence that the Soviet beaurocracy was a result not of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, but a natural result of Bolshevik policies? Maurice Brinton's 'The Bolsheviks and Workers Control' documents in quite a bit of detail how the Bolsheviks consciously organised against workers control of the means of production, in favour of control through a state beaurocracy. Go read it, its on the Net.
Then the question of the relation between 'collectivism' and freedom - well, the fact that 'collectivism does not always guarantee freedom' doesn't seem to be worth a second thought. This is despite the fact that a big chunk of 20th Century leftist thought - e.g. the left currents in (and then outside) the Comintern in the 1920s (e.g. Karl Korsch, and to some extent Lukacs), ex-Trotskyists like Dunayevskaya, James, Lefort and Castoriadis, the whole structuralist / post-structuralist debate - all these contain in them the tension created by the question 'how does the free development of each and the free development of all interrelate' (this question, of course, plays itself out across discussions of culture, workplace organisation, philosophy, mental asylums, parties, classes, etc.).
And now Kagarlitsky, and you, come back at the start of the 21st C. and dismiss this legacy of concerns with nothing but disdainful silence. Somehow it looks a bit inadaquate...
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 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B