i started reading WITBD again b/c i was looking for something Lenin said about war I read years ago. But I think it must have been in another essay he wrote about war. Not sure.
anyway, enjoy this book review.
At 04:43 AM 4/20/2010, Ruthless Critic of All that Exists wrote:
> Lenin Rediscovered: "What Is To Be Done?" In Context
> By Lars T. Lih, Haymarket Books, Chicago (2008)
>
>Review by Barry Healy
>
><http://links.org.au/node/1510>
>
>On the right, a whole industry of conservative, Cold War warrior
>intellectuals has made an easy living proving that Lenin really
>opposed the independence of the working class and that his ideas led
>straight to Stalinism. Their logic is that no matter how unhappy
>workers may feel under capitalism, they dare not tamper with the world
>as it is; anything is better than the dread Leninism/Stalinism.
>
>Better that we trudge to work each day with our eyes downcast than
>dream of utopias, these dreary bourgeois ideologues intone. Their
>reactionary accounts almost invariably focus on one book by Lenin (but
>not its entirety): "What Is to Be Done?"
>
>Just three words plucked from two famous paragraphs are the source of
>all Leninism's supposed faults: "spontaneity", "divert" and "from
>without". Upon this rickety scaffold it is claimed that Lenin feared
>workers' spontaneous development, wanted to divert it from its natural
>course by the arrogant intervention of non-workers and hoped to create
>a new, undemocratic, centralised "vanguard" party operating
>conspiratorially.
>
>Essentially, he is depicted as dishonestly pretending to uphold
>Marxist orthodoxy.
>
>What Is to Be Done?
>
>So, a fundamental starting point for all readings of Lenin, be they
>revolutionary, Stalinist or bourgeois reactionary, is this short 1902
>booklet. Subtitled "Burning Questions of Our Movement", it was a
>contribution to a debate within the Russian Social Democratic Labour
>Party (RSDLP) that culminated in the famous split in the movement at
>its 1903 congress, where the words Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik
>(minority) first entered history.
>
>Lenin was arguing for a new type of party organisation for the RSDLP,
>which came to be known as the "Leninist vanguard" party. Between
>Trotskyists and Stalinists there developed, especially after WWII, a
>struggle to best exemplify this Bolshevik principle, leading to all
>kinds of distortions.
>
>Stalinists, infamously, self-ordained as the working-class leadership,
>believed that they could dispense with such niceties as, for example,
>democracy in trade union elections, or freedom of thought within their
>organisations or the workers' movement as a whole. Trotskyists, vying
>to outshine the Stalinists with their ardour, often displayed
>voluntarism (the practice, seen as a virtue, of demanding unrealistic
>levels of commitment) that was personally and organisationally
>destructive.
>
>As the Bolivarian Revolution emanating from Latin America forges a new
>tradition of socialism of the 21st century, Lars Lih, without stating
>it, has made an important contribution towards creating a "Leninism of
>the 21st century". He has brought penetrating linguistic expertise
>and an ability to forensically dig deep in the archives to bring
>Lenin's original conceptions to light.
>
>Lih's project
>
>In "What Is to Be Done?", Lenin refers to a small number of people on
>nearly every page, Lih points out: Elena Kuskova and Sergei
>Prokopovich of the Credo group, K.M. Taktarev of Rabochaia mysl, Boris
>Krichevskii and Alexandr Martynov and "b-v" (pseudonym for Boris
>Savinkov) of Rabochee delo, L. Nadezhdin of Svoboda and the Joint
>Letter (which was sent to Iskra by a group of Siberian exiles).[1]
>Most of these barely even rate as historical footnotes anymore.
>
>Lih's project is to trawl through all the Russian-language original
>texts that Lenin mentions (even in passing), extract their meaning
>(often through methodical examination of Russian grammar and tracing
>problems of translation), compare them to the overall thinking of the
>international socialist movement of the time, dominated as it was by
>the German Social Democratic Party, and explain how the debates played
>out within the RSDLP.
>
>All that, plus argue a case against what he calls the "textbook"
>interpretation of What Is to Be Done? The "textbook interpretation" is
>that long held by both academics (usually anti-Leninists) and those
>Lih calls "activists": Paul Le Blanc, Tony Cliff and other socialist
>leaders. (Lih does not distinguish Stalinist "activists" from
>anti-Stalinists; Stalinism simply does not enter into his scheme of
>things.)
>
>This is all topped off with his own translation of What Is to Be Done?
>
>No wonder it's a door-stopper of a book and no wonder seemingly
>endless pages argue for a fine definition of, say, a particular
>Russian word or why an translation from 1929, which has been carried
>through later editions, is inaccurate.
>
>This is an academic tome, but only such a work could do service to
>Lih's project, which is to completely renew our understanding of Lenin
>and Leninism. It is to Lih's credit that he successfully steers the
>reader through this hall of mirrors.
<...>
><http://links.org.au/node/1510>