>
>--- Shane Taylor <s-t-t at juno.com> wrote:
>>his from the man who polemicizes on the
>> need
>> > to return to Leninism, as Leninism's "total
>> project"
>> > is indispensable to the revolutionary pose.
>>
>> No, he spoke of "repeating Lenin," not the same
>> thing as a literally
>> revival of Leninism.
>>
>Yes, Shane is right. He has called for a re-reading
>of Lenin, meaning we should pluck the good and leave
>the rest. Mostly, I believe, he thinks there are
>organizational lessons to learn from Lenin.
What he said at his Lenin conference (Essen, Feb 2001) was that what should be learned from Lenin is his willingness to rethink everything from the start. The example he gave was Lenin's shock at the social dem parties' support for their governments in WW I, which prompted him to re-evaluate everything he'd thought up until then. The parallel for Western Marxists, SZ said, is the collapse of actually existing Communism, which should prompt an equally thorough rethink. SZ liked my contribution to the conference, which he pronounced the most "Leninist" of all the sixteen or so papers, because it was relentlessly focused on the present. I criticized Lenin's Imperialism as hopelessly outdated, and the Bolshevik party model as completely inappropriate to the present and hopelessly unpopular.
Doug