Chip Berlet wrote:
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> The process is different.
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> Under Leninism, first you have to put society through an ideological Cuisinart.
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> :-)
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1. "Leninism" (as the theoretical foundation of third-international politics*) is of antiquarian interest only.
2. Open up "put[ting] society through an ideological Cuisinart."
a. In ordinary parlance, the word "society" also refers to the people who make up that society. So replace it with "social relations."
b. You use "ideological" here as it was used in the worst of the various 'Leninist' tendencies, i.e. as something existing apart from and superior to the social relations from which it emerged. A purely idealistic tendency. The term is not really relevant here in that sense. Replace it with, perhaps, "socialist thought" ("thought" here honoring the CPC's distinction between thought and theory).
c. But even so, it is not thought (in the first place) but practice that has to be put through (or, actually, go through) a Cuisinart, as in Marx's Third Thesis on Feuerbach.
3. And then your formulation is true for marxism aand serious anarchism (though not for Chuck0's playpen variety), for in serious anarchist theory and practice that Cuisinart does its work in the process of smashing the capitalist state, and there is no need for further revolutionising practice after that insurrection. That is a serious through profoundly wrong and contradictory theory, and the contradictions in it are probably responsible for the iron discipline (and potentially authoritarian tendency) of serious anarchism.
4. Lenin, of course, was not a "Leninist." We should rather, perhaps, speak of Lenin-Thought, and thereby see ther necessity of abstracting from it radically to find any guidance in it. But he does remain the single most useful revolutionary thinker in our tradition. (Zizek's Lenin only existed in the Third International after the death of the historical Lenin, and hence Zizek's commentary on Lenin is wholly useless.)
Carrol
*From this distance, Trotskyism was not an alternative to Third-International politics but a minority tendency within that politics.