Many "Leninists" are as innocent of Lenin's actual thought as Chris Doss provesd himself to be every so often. Lenin of course wasn't talking about wars in general but a very specific war, being waged right then and there, and slaughtering millions. Debs. The Irish socialists. Luxemberg. The IWW all agreed with him.
But the crucial point for _us_, I think, is that Lenin was NOT a theorist; that is, he did not promulgate any abstract theory supposedly applicable to all revolutions everyplace. Revolution can't be abstractly theorized. The "theory" changinges for each revolutionary struggle, each mass struggle for reform. (Some of the Trotskyists, not all of them, over on the marxism list still cling to the silly concept that Trotsky laid down the laws of revolution for all time and places. That's how they assume they can 'judge' the Bolivian struggle from afar by whether it fits that abstract formula.)
Read Lenin for the "tone" -- i.e., for the relationslhip establsihed between Lenin and his subject matter and/or audience. It's that tone, not specific theoretical principles, that remains his great contribution to following generations. I didn't know this when I was reading Lenin back in the early '70s, and the result was I didn't read enough in his letters and his run-of-the-mill articles. At that time I was still looking for transportable theory.
Carrol
^^^^ CB: This is not quite correct. Although , Lenin was famous for "concrete analysis of the concrete situation", he did contribute to general socialist revolutionary theory .
For example, _The State and Revolution_ presents many substantive principles on the relationship between the state and revolution _in general_ with respect to socialist revolution (thus the title). The book is not just about the revolution in Russia. There are other general principles of socialist revolution/anti-capitalist revolution throughout Lenin's writing. For example, issues of class consciousness and socialist consciousness among the workers. Lenin is always talking about class conscious workers. Lenin is also famous for the theory of a Party of professional revolutionaries.
And of course, the 20th Century and early 21st Century are filled with imperialist wars demonstrating the validity of Lenin's ideas on capitalist imperialist war, contra Chris.
In _What is To Be Done ?_ , Lenin famously said, "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement ." It's not quite true that Lenin thought that every revolution has a wholly different revolutionary theory.
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