>At 4:01 PM -0500 3/26/03, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>And one of the things that I and many other non-Leninists learned
>>from it is that there's great danger in having secretive,
>>hierarchical organizations lead revolutions in the name of a whole
>>class (which in Russia's case, barely existed - and even less so in
>>China's).
>
>Lenin's idea was not to have a revolutionary movement composed
>solely of wage workers, and you would know that if you actually were
>familiar with his thought and practice as you claim:
You know, I've heard of that. Hammer and *sickle* and all. But you're evading a couple of points - e.g., the idea of vanguardism itself, and the relevance of theory and practice devised for a lightly industrialized society to a very advanced "postindustrial" one. (I put that in quotes because it's not accurate, but it does evoke the fact that few of us work in factories, and many in offices, which nurtures the illusion that we're not workers.)
>As for secrecy, it was not what Lenin and Russian revolutionaries
>desired -- it was what was imposed upon them as a condition of
>physical and political survival under an extremely repressive state,
>with no political rights and freedoms to speak of:
Yeah, I know that too. Which only reinforces the point I made above - while there are many aspects of U.S. life that are repressive, there are many that aren't, and we still have lots of freedoms, and not only in forms. So I'm still not seeing a good answer to what it means to be a Leninist in the here and now.
Doug