Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Oct 7, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > 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 .
>
> But most of his writing was for the moment, wasn't it? Very specific
> to time and place. Seems a lot of people want to pluck it out of
> context and turn it into timeless truth.
I think Doug is correct here -- and for a fundamental reason, that I tried to develop a bit in the thread on Theory some months ago. The Chinese distinction between theory and thought is one way to get at it-- Mao-thought as opposed to Marxist-Leninist theory. (I'm not arguing for their conception of the lastter, which is not relevant here.) M-L Theory ("ism") was assumed to be a general theory of capitalism in the epoch of socialist revolution, but it did _not_ specify the program/thought/'theory' governing a particular revolution at a particular time and place, with its unique conditions. Now English does not make the verbal distinction Chinese does, so we will still have to use the _word_ theory both in its more rigorous sense and in reference to what in Chinese we could call "thought." Hence we can (in fact must) use the prhase, "revolutionary theory," but what we will mean is the thought and program appropriate to our own conditions under our own concrete conditions at a particular time. Any "theory" that pretends to be a general theory of revolution will be _either_ merely a collection of banalities or something close to nonsense.
Lenin was a great revolutionary. As Doug points out, his thought was pretty focused on the immediate conditions of his time. (As was, incidentally, his 'theory' of imperialism, which is still illuminating for the world 1870-1920 but then rapidly loses its grip.) And as I have asserted in another recent post: I think we can learn a great deal just by 'contact' with Lenin's mind through reading his works, but what we learn is not a set of directions or a recipe for making a revolution in the u.s. but rather a mind-set with which we approach the task of developing the necessary theory[thought] to illuminate our present practice.
Carrol