To take a practical example: I'm politically affiliated with a group that mixes Leninists and non-Leninists. By and large, the Leninists join the Fourth International Caucus within the organization, and the non-Leninists don't. So, in practice, to be in this organization is to adopt a practical stance on Lenin.
But to seriously engage Leninism one would either have to engage the literature on the Russian Revolution at a deeper level than I ever have or am likely to, or do what Lih appears to be doing, which is more or less doing for (or to) Lenin what Quentin Skinner did for (or to) Hobbes, that is, evaluating the work against a discursive framework set not by some mythical great conversation of great minds across the ages, but the ongoing debates among lesser lights in which, for example, WITBD and Lenin's other works inserted itself. So, if I ever want to have an opinion about Lenin that would be worth inflicting on someone else as a matter of serious discussion, then it sounds like I damned well ought to read Lih. Until I'm willing to do that work, anyone here who hears me spout off about Lenin as if I have an opinion worth taking seriously has permission to smack me down hard.
Dissenting Wren "MoS"
PS - Doug, this may be four for me today, so I'll shut up now.
----- Original Message ---- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 3:40:48 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] vaca reading
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
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