Peter van Heusden wrote:
>
>
>
> Rather than directly stating an alternative (Yoshie, I think you
> know at least something about my ideas on that), let me turn
> the question round. Since you're (still) a Leninist, let me re-iterate
> the question I posed in the initial email - since there has been a
> century of work on trying to understand what went wrong with the
> Russion Revolution,
It seems to me this search is misdirected. It wouldn't have mattered in the least what the revolutionaries did or didn't do, what theory they followed. And looking for 'what went wrong' will not contribute in the least to our contemporary thinking. I've been intgermittently arguing a point against both Doug Henwood and Lou Proyect (among others) for nearly five years now: the assumption that we can learn from past _mistakes_ is profoundly wrong, since it denies history, treating social action as though 'experiments' were being carried out in a laboratory. We will never have a chance to repeat mistakes even if we wanted to. (All the counter examples that can or will be or have been produced in response to this will be trivial: i.e. the 'mistakes' identified will be _either_ mistakes that always occur anyhow and have to be lived with _or_ mistakes that can be avoided without appealing to any 'lesson from history.')
what do you think needs to change in Lenin
> this time around, specifically on the question of guaranteeing
> freedom in collectivity?
There can be no guarantee -- there can't even be a reasonable assurance. Attempts to achieve such assurance depend on the assumption that marxists possess a crystal ball to let us see the precise circumstances that will accompany a future struggle. They guarantee only that we will be blindsided by events.
Carrol