"In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders -- exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to 'vigilant control from above,' so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest. Before seizing State power, the Bolshevik leadership adopted much of the rhetoric of people who were engaged in the revolutionary struggle from below, but their true commitments were quite different..." <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm>
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 24, 2009, at 9:30 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> Just because someone's a jerk doesn't mean they're not worth reading.
>> Apart from the historical interest, though, I don't really see what's
>> to be gained from reading Lenin today, unless you take capitalism to
>> be some kind of timeless object trapped in amber since 1917.
>
> Lenin wasn't like that at all, though modern Leninists often are. He was
> extremely flexible.
>
>> There's something both tragic and comic about Lenin. He ended his days
>> despairing over the catastrophe that was his revolution but he never
>> once seemed to grasp that it was the logical consequence of his
>> lifelong worldview,
>
> Easy to say that now. Not so easy in 1912 or 1917. You just never know.
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