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This duck gets it This duck reads Lars Lih https://twitter.com/RussianMemesLtd/status/1297906223627620355?s=20

#lars lih #lenin rediscovered #obtain the vlast #uphold marxism-kautskyism-vladimir-ulyanov-thought

Tired: Lenin was a Kautskyist (until he wasn't) Wired: Kautsky was a Leninist (until he wasn't)

The case of the disappearing Lenin

What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all but dead and traditional reformist parties offering little beyond doing austerity in a fairer manner, revolution from below would seem to be an idea whose time has at long last returned. Yet the working class seems “slow” to fulfil the role allotted it by classical Marxism. It has, perhaps, even “accepted” neoliberalism. Many activists do not believe that class or political parties define anti-systemic movements. The idea of working class revolution led by a revolutionary party to smash the state seems the quaint property of irrelevant groups unable to break out of the far-left ghetto.

This mood has affected the revolutionary left. For some the problem is the kind of party they used to believe in. Perhaps it is wrong to insist on a rigid distinction between “revolutionary” and “reformist”. Perhaps “mixing” the two can reconstruct a radical left able to fill the gap between a declining parliamentary reformism and a “Leninist” left that cannot grow. This seems to be what lies behind moves to create broad left parties that have the kind of appeal that, for example, Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France enjoy. A rapprochement with and re-evaluation of what the revolutionary left termed “left reformism” is therefore required.

This, then, is the context for taking seriously the intellectual debate initiated by the outstanding Canadian Marxist scholar, Lars Lih. Lih has shown that there is nothing in the real Lenin that can be made to justify the ideology of “Leninism” that was fabricated after Lenin’s death to justify the growing power of the Soviet bureaucracy. But his defence of Lenin has led him to interpret Lenin as making no fundamental contribution to Marxism—at least nothing that goes beyond the Marxism of the Second International (the International that united all Social Democratic1 parties before the First World War), as embodied in its most important representative thinker, Karl Kautsky.

What started as a debate primarily about the real meaning of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (hereafter WITBD) has become a much broader debate about whether it is possible to deduce from his ideas and practice a distinct theory of revolutionary organisation—whether, in other words, it is possible to rescue a genuine Leninism from its Stalinist caricature. Lih has come to assert that, contrary to appearances, Lenin never broke fundamentally from Kautskyan Marxism. This claim, if true, poses a fundamental challenge to the revolutionary left’s view of Lenin as renewing a Marxist tradition that the Second International’s greatest theorist had emptied of revolutionary content.

This article argues against the “Kautskyanisation” of Lenin.

Article continued at source:- http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=1008&issue=144

#lenin #the revolutionary party #Leninism #lars lih