bitch wrote:
>
> what does Lenin have to say that improves on anything Marx
> wrote? Trotsky? Others that supposedly aren't studied in grad school.
I'm not sure that there are any abstract propositions in Lenin that one can't learn elsewhere or even think out for oneself. The great glory of Lenin must be grasped by reading his works (any of them) in bulk, and then you can say what John Adams said of reading Cicero (as quoted by Pound):
Exercises my lungs, revives my spirits, opens my pores reading Tully on Cataline quickens my circulation.
Canto 63
You can't get that even from Marx as you can from Lenin. What you need from him is a sense of drive -- of a mind like a rock-drill. It makes nearly no difference whether he is right or wrong or irrelevant -- he makes you think as no other writer on politics does. (Providing, of course, that you read the text in front of you and not the text that exists 'in the air' as it were, filtered both through the Third International and the critics of the Third International.)
I've never read Trotsky so someone else will have to comment on him.
Carrol