but 3 points
1) anyone who wishes to identify themselves explicitly as Leninist surely will have read State and Revolution. I do not notice any mention of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the list of features of Leninism. That is unfortunate because the term "Leninism" may be used ambigously in contrast to Stalinism or in contrast to broader Marxism. Yes you cannot have a precise definition of any general polical category but "Leninism" is ambiguous about the important concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
2) the sense of discipline that Lenin argued for in a vanguard party, one per state, is surely now being achieved by the transparency of networks. His famous argument in What is to Be Done 4.5 about what is not possible under an autocracy, is achieved even more effectively on the internet -
>Since the entire political arena is as open to the public view as is a
>theatre stage to the audience, this acceptance or non-acceptance, support
>or opposition, is known to all from the press and from public meetings.
>Everyone knows that a certain political figure began in such and such a
>way, passed through such and such an evolution, behaved in a trying moment
>in such and such a manner, and possesses such and such qualities;
>consequently, all party members, knowing all the facts, can elect or
>refuse to elect this person to a particular party office. The general
>control (in the literal sense of the term) exercised over every act of a
>party man in the political field brings into existence an automatically
>operating mechanism which produces what in biology is called the "survival
>of the fittest". "Natural selection" by full publicity, election, and
>general control provides the assurance that, in the last analysis, every
>political figure will be "in his proper place", do the work for which lie
>is best fitted by his powers and abilities, feel the effects of his
>mistakes on himself, and prove before all the world his ability to
>recognise mistakes and to avoid them.
Numerous people know the history of Doug, of Lou, of Lou, or Michael, of .....even without defined party membership and perhaps because of overlapping lists. As the months and years slip by the network creates an incredibly strong culture in which people learn to discipline themselves, even better than in a disciplined vanguard party.
So even Mensheviks who like the intellectual freedom of the internet (and I rather agree with JKS about Leninists who put a lot of time into it for reasons which they would no doubt consciously defend) learn to discipline themselves.
But there is a third characteristic of Lenin - his polemical style - which does not translate well to the internet. The purist anti-revisionists lists do not take up a lot of bandwidth.
Lenin was meticulous about material reality, and the conditions for organising. I would have thought it is quite possible for people to subscribe to some of the aims of Lenin but believe that his organisational aims can and should now be achieved by different methods.
Chris Burford London -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030327/d5d0f82f/attachment.htm>