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Does Lenin have anything useful to say

"One must be as radical as reality itself."

He was the most important political figure of the 20th C. so, of course, he had many useful and insightful things to say.
 
likesfish said:
Somebody told me to read some Lenin .
Is their anything actually useful to learn from him?
Once your committing Torture and massacre your ideas are pretty worthless. Be like reading Churchill's views on how to run the middle East.
Posion gas might be effective but only a monster would go along with it.
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iirc Lenin was claimed to ask 'Who? Whom?' as a kind of general question like 'What's going on?' but with the more precise meaning of 'Who's doing what to whom?'

It seems a cold-eyed way of viewing the world, cynical or realistic depending on your POV.
 
Kevbad the Bad said:
There's little point paying too much attention to what Lenin or any of the Bolshevik leaders said. What counts is what they did, which often was completely at odds with what they said. And much bloodier.
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There is a requirement to study and understand what it is you think you know you're against, and not just with that narrow aim, either. Unless you want only a vague, general and inadequately moralistic understanding of something. Particularly when that something, in varying forms, has had a huge, widespread influence on societies across the world.
 
seventh bullet said:
There is a requirement to study and understand what it is you think you know you're against, and not just with that narrow aim, either. Unless you want only a vague, general and inadequately moralistic understanding of something. Particularly when that something, in varying forms, has had a huge, widespread influence on societies across the world.
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True enough. If you want to do that, fine. I just think you will learn more from looking at what actually occurred rather than what a bunch of people pretended happened. What needs to be explained is how so many people around the world were fooled by it all, and how so many continue to be fooled.
 
That's the problem too. Something horrifies you so they had to be pretenders, dishonest in their aims. People weren't mere fools and dupes either. Unless you want to call those Communists who before even picking up a gun or bomb had terror unleashed upon them, fools. That's fair enough, but you're missing out so much.
 
The Bolshevik leaders didn't have to be dishonest in their aims initially. They just ended up being more than dishonest with time. Force by events, ideology and 'pragmatism' to take decisions which proved disastrous for those on the receiving end. Very few nowadays would raise a flag for uncle Joe Stalin, but back in the day almost the entire Communist international did just that, even the apparently honest and intelligent. They were not only wrong, but also gullible and apparently unaware of how they were being used. Or they had some ever-so-clever dialectical understanding which was over the heads of us inadequately moralistic mortals. And it all goes way back to before Stalin was in the ascendancy, back to our mate Vladimir Lenin (and his mate Trotsky).
 
We have never created a free society anywhere, at any time in recorded history, under any economic system. We just have varying degrees of servitude. When we avoid having gulags and death camps we pat ourselves on the back. Marx's big mistake (and Lenin's) was to believe we had reached a moment in history when we could move beyond this.
 
Kevbad the Bad said:
The Bolshevik leaders didn't have to be dishonest in their aims initially. They just ended up being more than dishonest with time. Force by events, ideology and 'pragmatism' to take decisions which proved disastrous for those on the receiving end. Very few nowadays would raise a flag for uncle Joe Stalin, but back in the day almost the entire Communist international did just that, even the apparently honest and intelligent. They were not only wrong, but also gullible and apparently unaware of how they were being used. Or they had some ever-so-clever dialectical understanding which was over the heads of us inadequately moralistic mortals. And it all goes way back to before Stalin was in the ascendancy, back to our mate Vladimir Lenin (and his mate Trotsky).
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Yes I know, I know, Communism is bad or something.

To put it another way for the OPs sake, how will you begin to understand, using this one example, the Communist-led national liberation movements and how they organised themselves against colonial governments in the global south? They used an analytical and political framework developed by Lenin and later codified and simplified by the Stalinists. But you don't need to know what they thought and wrote... Was there anything useful in the above?

The societies they literally fought to bring about offered the promise of an alternative form of modernity, in contrast to the plunder, brutality and deliberate underdevelopment of their own societies by other exemplars of modernity from western Europe. That was to be achieved by looking to developmental models from Soviet and Chinese experience. The former under the political leadership of the Stalinists. Stalin was a Marxist and a Leninist, and despite his detractors achieved a crude synthesis of varying strands of the hard intellectual work of others (say broadly Marx, importantly Lenin, Plekhanov, Kautsky via Lenin, Renner and Bauer, even in a limited way his BFF Trotsky*), but if you don't need to know what he thought or wrote then how can you understand what the national liberation movements got from it? What they agreed and disagreed with, what they adapted or innovated themselves? Notwithstanding the Stalinisation of the international Communist movement and its changing orthodoxies.

That's just one aspect of the Communist experience in the last century. I could talk about British Communists organising trips for factory workers from polluted towns and cities to go rambling in the Lake District, but then warm, squashed sandwiches aren't as tasty an example of Communist horror as say, Stanislav Kosior being forced to watch his teenage daughter being raped by NKVD thugs because he won't do the expected thing and break under extensive torture. You really aren't teaching me anything about just how depraved people can be towards other people, no matter the political colouration of such deeds.

I think what I am also trying to gently suggest is that while Communist violence or repression or atrocity is seen as ideological, perhaps a natural outgrowth of it in your opinion, your railing against Communism is not ideology-free, and maybe that needs examining too?

* Sorry for the name dropping, and I don't claim in-depth knowledge of it all by any means, but if you want to be confident in arrogantly dismissing something or to declare there's a best way to understand something then put in the fucking work first.
 
Marx makes clear that proletarian revolution was to happen in either England or Germany, so why, during a war between these two countries that had already started to move into social revolution in places (and war always tending to end in revolution), did Lenin get on a train, sanctioned by the German state, and head to Russia to piggy back on a revolution in a country that was far removed from having the conditions Marx outlined, mainly due to its huge peasant population? Capital tells you everything you needed to know about what misery and suffering would await that country as Lenin accelerated it to some 'new historical position'. He effectively gazumped the European proletarian revolution, and inaugurated the epoch we now find ourselves in, that of the fomenting of a universal state capitalism.
 
seventh bullet said:
Yes I know, I know, Communism is bad or something.

To put it another way for the OPs sake, how will you begin to understand, using this one example, the Communist-led national liberation movements and how they organised themselves against colonial governments in the global south? They used an analytical and political framework developed by Lenin and later codified and simplified by the Stalinists. But you don't need to know what they thought and wrote... Was there anything useful in the above?

The societies they literally fought to bring about offered the promise of an alternative form of modernity, in contrast to the plunder, brutality and deliberate underdevelopment of their own societies by other exemplars of modernity from western Europe. That was to be achieved by looking to developmental models from Soviet and Chinese experience. The former under the political leadership of the Stalinists. Stalin was a Marxist and a Leninist, and despite his detractors achieved a crude synthesis of varying strands of the hard intellectual work of others (say broadly Marx, importantly Lenin, Plekhanov, Kautsky via Lenin, Renner and Bauer, even in a limited way his BFF Trotsky*), but if you don't need to know what he thought or wrote then how can you understand what the national liberation movements got from it? What they agreed and disagreed with, what they adapted or innovated themselves? Notwithstanding the Stalinisation of the international Communist movement and its changing orthodoxies.

That's just one aspect of the Communist experience in the last century. I could talk about British Communists organising trips for factory workers from polluted towns and cities to go rambling in the Lake District, but then warm, squashed sandwiches aren't as tasty an example of Communist horror as say, Stanislav Kosior being forced to watch his teenage daughter being raped by NKVD thugs because he won't do the expected thing and break under extensive torture. You really aren't teaching me anything about just how depraved people can be towards other people, no matter the political colouration of such deeds.

I think what I am also trying to gently suggest is that while Communist violence or repression or atrocity is seen as ideological, perhaps a natural outgrowth of it in your opinion, your railing against Communism is not ideology-free, and maybe that needs examining too?

* Sorry for the name dropping, and I don't claim in-depth knowledge of it all by any means, but if you want to be confident in arrogantly dismissing something or to declare there's a best way to understand something then put in the fucking work first.
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I thought this discussion started off with Lenin and his successor Stalin, not with sandwiches in the Lake District. The tragedy of this whole historical experience is precisely that good people all over the world were led up the garden path by an authoritarian version of Communism whose main features included an obsession with control, inerrancy, power, corruption and doublethink. So the world experienced the murderous dictatorships of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the North Korean dynasty. Some Third World liberation movements copied this approach, others paid lip service and took the money.
Fwiw, I'm not against Communism, just against Marxist authoritarianism. That's not ideology-free.
 
seventh bullet said:
Communism is bad. Got it.
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If by that you mean the Russian experience of terror, firing squads, the gulag, suppression of free speech, genocidal treatment of minorities, environmental degradation, state-sponsored famine, corruption, inefficiency, dictatorship and war, then yes, bad. If you mean a libertarian communism promoted by the likes of Kropotkin, then good.
 
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