1. Socialism, understood as the movement of the direct producers worldwide, from the onset of modernity to the present, against the alienated social conditions that we ourselves reproduce -- i.e. the movement of, by, and for producers, seeking to own and consciously organize these conditions, and hence the ensuing processes and outcomes -- offers a tremendous welt of historical experience that, by the very conditions in which we live and work, we must continuously (or recurrently) re-appropriate at the risk of having to relearn the old lessons the hard way.
2. This process of digestion of the historical experience begins, necessarily, by drawing naive analogies, historical parallels. If the French revolution had its terror, its Thermidor, its Directory, and its Napoleon, the upcoming movements will necessarily see themselves in the mirror of that process and the sequence will suggest itself as a framework to sort out the experience. It is not bad beginning. But, of course, it shouldn't be the end. Each generation is going to have to go through that process. At first, I thought that the youth involved in the Occupy movement in the U.S. was uninterested in this historical experience, but over time I've had to revise my belief. There's a tremendous excitement and interest in re-examining all this, even if -- sometimes -- it seems to me as people rush to emphasize the differences at the expense of missing the commonalities (that do exist and are, often, fundamental).
3. On the issue of state vs. self-organization of society (absorption of the state by "civil society", etc.), leadership/masses dichotomy vs. horizontalism, prefiguration vs. economic/political struggle, the nature of the vertical division of labor (which underpins wealth ownership inequality and, hence, capitalism, markets, and the state), the Occupy movement has much to add but also much to learn from the old debates among socialists (not only Marxists, of course). And those discussions have, obviously, a theoretical and a historical aspect, which requires immersion in the historical experience referred above.
4. The diversity of this historical experience is a big asset. Not that we don't need to have a good sense of the differences involved, but I am in principle against counterposing -- say -- C L R James and Lenin, etc. Just to make this point clearer, historically speaking, Mao's imprint on human history may prove to be -- by far -- much larger than Lenin's and even Marx's. And for good reason. If, to think like a "Leninist," the practical punch of Marxism (with or without quotation marks) lies in people's ability to use it as a method to "analyze concretely the concrete conditions," then judging by practical results Mao and his comrades ace that test like few others in history. Most readers of this note will, I'm sure, argue that Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro are supremely inferior, intellectually and politically, to a Gramsci or a Lenin. People who hold these views have a rather thin, highly ideologized, perception of what's going on in Cuba or South America, so I could easily get on the other side of this argument. But that would miss the whole point. Socialism (and Marxism as a subset in it) gets substantially enriched by the experience of a Ho Chi Minh or a Fidel Castro, and counter-posing them to Marx or Engels or Lenin does a disservice to Marxism and socialism. Learning from that experience, even drawing naive parallels from such different contexts, would be a first step in the direction of owning all that experience. It is a testimonial to the historical universal character of Marxism that people in countries where capitalism had not developed in the "classical" form adopted it and, necessarily, transfigured it to the point of making it hard to recognize by some.
5. Re. Krupskaya's reminiscences and Gerard Walter's bio of Lenin, one of the things I was most fascinated about as a young man was their descriptions of Lenin's method of study and work, his systematic workaholism, his focus on understanding very concretely the living and working conditions of people, and then using that understanding to calibrate agitation and propaganda. Recently, I was reading online stories about how Bill Clinton's wonky speech at the DNC had been deemed effective among certain undecided audiences to move them to vote for Obama. I know that some people here will get upset by my daring to even to compare the sublime to the ridiculous, but the Clinton thing made me think immediately of what Krupskaya wrote on Lenin's long and detailed factual arguments (e.g. in his polemic against the Narodniki on the nature of the dominant social structures of Russia at the time and, consequently, of the upcoming revolutions), how some people thought that so much factual detail was unnecessary or hard for the workers to assimilate, yet he rejected such opinions arguing that the propaganda had to respect the intellect of workers sufficiently to presuppose that they were willing to learn and that all political arguments had to be based on facts. Given my strong predilection for math and the abstract economic reasoning, I had never lived up to Lenin's standards on empirical matters. Fortunately, we have on our side people like Doug Henwood, who are capable and willing to do that kind of work with the seriousness required.
As is.