"Le Blanc considers that the general argument of "What is to be Done? despite polemical exaggerations-remains reasonable and valuable for later periods, including our own. " (pp. 62-63) I would say that, in spite of some important insights, this book was basically one-sided (by its emphasis on centralism against democratism) and therefore dangerous for the future."
Full: <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n8_v42/ai_9334134/>
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:20 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> btw, thanks for interpretive/contextual help with WITBD. Ruthless Critic
> emailed me offlist with this very interesting review of a book by Lars T
> Lih. I thought it was worth sending along. The review is long, and the book
> is apparently huge, but this was a pretty good overview that supplemented
> what carrol, james, charles wrote me.
>
> 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>
>
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