[lbo-talk] vaca reading

[Carrol Cox]

If posters on this list really believe that one cannot criticize a book 
without reading it (and I think they are fooling themselves:d they don't 
believe it in practice), then until they have read Lars Lih, Lenin 
Rediscovered, they should disavow everything they have ever said aboaut 
Lenin -- or at least read the symposium on the book in Historical 
Materialism 18-3. Lih demonstrates with almost endless quotes from 
Russian language texts that almost everything anyone has thought about 
WITBD is false. Lenin was the defender not the opponent of democracy in 
the party. He was a staunch follower of the pre-1914 Kautsky EVEN AFTER 
1914. He had over 80 books by Kautsky in his personal library when he 
died, and over half of these had been published in revolutionary Russia 
after 1917. When he called Kautsky a renegade he meant a renegade to his 
(Kautsky's) _own_ pre-1914 principles. He always thought of himself as 
an orthodox follower of Kautsky, and said so in many letters written 
after 1914. It was the Mensheviks not the Bolsheviks who thought the 
intellectuals should govern the party. He wanted to overthrow Czarist 
autocracy so the RSDLP could become an exact replica of the SPD. He 
wanted as much demcoracy in the Russian was possible for an underground 
party.

I'm haviaving Lih's reponse to critics in the symposium read to me. It 
is long, dense, with many many footnotes to original Russian sources 
both pro- and anti-Lenin as well as Lenin's own articles and letters. 
Lenin DID NOT mean by "bend the stick" going to farr; he meant 
straightening the stick that others had bent. I can only remember 
fragments from listening to it being read, but there is no doubt that 
any statement about Lenin from anyone who has not read Lih is a 
criticism of a book they have not read.

I'm going to have the symposium scanned -- and then I canhave it read 
over and over again by ZoomText, but Lih's response is, as I said, 
incredibly dense. And I think of great importance. Lih doesn't say this, 
but I would say taht what he has demonstrated is that instead of 
speaking of LeninISM (a theory) we should, on the Chinese model, speak 
of Lenin-Thought. The theory came from Kautsky; Lenin implemented it in 
the concrete conditions of Czarist Russia.

Carrol