I think the validity of Leninism in its historical context is a separate question from whether Lenin's theory has held valid since then. Everyone believed some pretty funky stuff about science and progress back then. I can't think seriously about the world today if I think industry is the heart of socialism -- the thing we know is driving us to extinction?
We can always insert Capitalism as an abstraction, tautologically the same as everything killing the planet and driving human suffering, but it's simply not. Communist industrialist states destroy their environments the same way Capitalist states do, they have the same self-conditional need to destructively pull resources from outlying colonies where conditions must be worse. The contradictions in reality stack up to a point where directional truth can no longer overcome the empirically evident nature of a large Communist state.
The underlying problem is not about the sort of science and fact that serious thinkers conceived of in the 1910s. That conception of natural law and human flourishing isn't weird because it's Communist, and while social sciences, ecology, systems sciences, et al. should now compel any sensible person to find the root of Leninism and pull it based on empirical contradictions, it's not even really bad theory "because" it's dated. It's bad because it's bad. Wrong ideas are wrong because they're wrong it doesn't simplify any more than that. Take off the Mitins and touch the world a little bit. Ideological germaphobia isn't healthy it just means cultivating a habit where anything you think about seriously sinks inexorably into your identity, like if you touch the icky anarchism or humanism or idealism, your conscience will fall forever with no anchor to guide correct view or actions. That's refutable by being conscious, breathing, and experiencing thirst; I don't need the kind of class consciousness or material analysis Leninism offers to know good from bad organizations of society. None of us do, but the false view that we are incapable of telling of right from wrong persists across the political spectrum.
We don't need *additional* knowledge or contrivance to have a just and humane social organization of the world: the premise of revolution is not to end but to allow the destruction, the erasure of old ideas and structures. It's not the *additions* of radically new conceptions or visions that's really helpful in the process of revolution, it's their property of being able to CHANGE in response to necessity and conditions. The same way sentient beings are said to wander from lifetime to lifetime, experiencing suffering in every rebirth, humanity wanders between different identities of nationality, faith, race, culture, gender, sexuality, even class -- and we suffer, because we instinctively try to treat these ideas as though they never arose and will never cease.
This is why one of the few direct insults I'll use is to call someone a tool. That's as close as I can get verbally to an objective description of what's happening when people are, colloquially, being tools: some idea of unexamined efficacy is swinging your ass around like a stick.
