I've always been attracted to the Chinese CP's distinction between "theory" and "thought." When they spoke of "Mao Ze Dong Thought" rather than "Maoism" they meant that Mao thought was applicable only within the circumstances in which it had developed. Mao thought was the continual summing up and internal critique of the practice of the Chinese Revolution -- that thought being guided but not determined by "Marxism-Leninism," regarded as a theory of universal applicability. (Current Western "Maoists" claim that the CPC at some point did pronounce "Mao Thought" a theory -- but according to an article by a University of Chicago physicist who visited China shortly after the Nixon trip and talked to Mao, one of the first things Mao asked him was whether western physicists made that distinction. So at least as late as 1974 or so Mao himself was still adhering to it. I believe the article was in an issue of the magazine, the name of which If forget, of the China-American Friendship Society.)
Now for over 20 years now I have increasingly read Lenin in terms of this distinction, and see his work as being in fact not an elaboration of "Leninism" (which does not exist) but a manifestation of "Lenin Thought." An important exception would be the theory (I think of universal application within the workers' movement) implicit in Lenin and in Justin's statement above: When a workers' movement _can_ take power, it _must_, no matter how contrary the conditions may be. More strongly: When it appears that a movement _might_ be able to take power, it must attempt to do so. So far as I know, this is never elaborated in Lenin's works, the closest he comes, perhaps, being in the Postscript to the First Edition _State and Revolution_: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it."
This will of course lead to countless disasters -- but the opposite leads nowhere (except, perhaps to a government of Rosa Luxemberg's former comrades that presided over her murder).
One can learn much from Lenin (as from Mao), but not in the sense of abstracting a set of universal principles which one can then defend or attack as it suits one -- as Stalin did in the _Foundations of Leninism_, and as anti-Leninists do nearly everyday in spinning a doctrine which they can then blow over.
Lenin certainly had no "theory" (as in theory of gravity or theory of spandrels) that revolution X would trigger revolutions Y & Z. He knew at a practical level that he and is comrades would be in deep shit if there were no revolutions in the west, but it is silly to dress that up as a 'scientific' theory to be demonstrated by experiment or something. He did, I think, know at a level of principle that whether those revolutions came or not it was incumbent upon the bolsheviks to seize power and go about the best they knew how under the given circumstances trying to build socialism, regardless of the odds against it.
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