Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > I had forgotten this passage from Lenin. It fits in with my sense of
> > > Lenin as someone who was _essentially_ an activist, not a theorist,
> > > driven constantly to theory because he _needed_ it and the damn fools
> > > around him wouldn't or couldn't provide it! This is why to appreciate
> > > what a greate figure he was one should read his letters,
>
> Any suggestions for collections of those?
I'm afraid not. My reading of them came from brosing in the volumes of the Collected edition. That was long ago, and at the time I didn't know that those letteers were more important than the "classics" in many ways, and the attitude one brings to reading affects one's memory!
You can get the the "flavor" of Lenin's focus on the concrete from one short article in Vol. 8. Trotsky has said that there would be no more Father Gapons. Lenin quoted this, then inquired: Why Does Trotsky say this? Trotsky says it because he is a blowhard!" (Quoted from memory) Then he goes on to argue that there will have to be hundreds of ffigures like eFather Gapon (am Iremembering that name correctly?). If I recall correctly, Trotsky's argument had been generated by rigid "Marxist" principle, and he had calimed that _Marxists_ in the future would have to do what Gapon had done for the `1905 uprising.
It really is a pity that for 90 years or so the "influence" of Lenin has been felt through the narrow filter of one sentence from WITBD: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary party." As ususally construed, that turns political thought into a 'Science' and thus makes it the province of "Scientists" (the Central Committee) who can understand it. That, I think, is also responsible for the commonmisconstrual of Lenin's discussion of spontaneity: He doesn't attack spontaneous; he attacks the _worship_ of sponataneity by political activists. His remarks on Father Gapon in the article mentioned above make it clear that he respected spontaneity as such. And it's quite true that Father Gapons (dozens, scores, hundreds of such figures generated the '60s) cannot and won't build and organize a movement, but there will be no movement to organize without them.
If you read materials put out by the SWO in the '60s on the anti-war movement you will see something like absolute terror of spontaneous thought (or any thought at all) unless guided and controlled by the SWP.
Carrol