[PEN-L:7629] Leninism

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Terrence Mc Donough wrote:

>To partially address Doug's question above, Lenin's crucial
>contributions to Marxism and revolutionary strategy are three fold:
>
>1. The advent of monopoly capitalism represents a new stage of
>capitalism whose dynamics are in some ways qualitatively different
>than the preceding competitive stage.
>
>2. The bourgeois character of the capitalist state is structurally
>embedded and the revolutionary appropriation of the state involves a
>root and branch restructuring beyond changing who is at the helm or
>even which class's representatives are at the helm.
>
>3. In a revolutionary situation, only a vanguard party will have the
>theoretical and organizational resources to provide the needed
>leadership.
>
>Of these three propositions it seems to me only the last is seriously
>debatable, though it is hard to see how a purely mass based
>organization would survive a capitalist counterrevolution.  The
>record of vanguard parties has not been good, but then where has
>social democracy ever led to socialism.

On point (1) - we're a long way from the Hilferdingesque world that Lenin
wrote and thought about. Competition has intensified, finance and industry
haven't joined into a single unit (bank-supervised cartels), etc. So while
1917 was different from 1817, 1999 is pretty different from 1917, too. On
point (2) - I think Soviet history confirmed that changing the folks at the
helm is not without its problems, and that there was substantial continuity
between Tsarist and Soviet Russia. If anything, that's an argument against
Leninism's relevance today. And (3), well, any nominees for the vanugard
party today? The Spartacist League? Again, I think you've got to confront
the fact that organizations and strategies appropriate for a Tsarist police
state don't have much relevance to an OECD country today.

Doug