“The keynote of Lenin’s outlook was not worry about workers but exhilaration about workers. The formulations about spontaneity are not the heart of WITBD [What is to be Done?] but a tacked-on polemical sally…These formulations are confusing, unedifying and should be bracketed until all other evidence about Lenin’s outlook is considered. WITBD was not a gloomy response to a crisis (however defined) but an exuberant response to an opportunity. WITBD did not reject the Western model of a Social Democratic party but invoked this model at every turn. Lenin certainly advocated a ‘vanguard party, for this was the common understanding of what Social Democracy was all about. Lenin thus did not revert to the populist tradition in any way. WITBD did not advocate hyper-centralism or an elite, conspiratorial party restricted to professional revolutionaries from the intelligentsia. The positions advanced in WITBD were not the cause of the party split in 1904. The centrality of political freedom in Lenin’s platform makes it impossible to draw a direct link between WITBD and Stalinism.” (Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered – page 20)
Lih's book is expensive and hard to find, but is a landmark work. He has a series of articles published in the Weekly Worker: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/783/vileninandtheinfluence.php
On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:16 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> what the hell is that book all about? i was trying to read it this weekend and it was a chore. is there a cliffnotes for this thing?
>
> shag
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
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