====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
On Oct 13, 2010, at 11:40 AM, Nestor Gorojovsky wrote: > > This answer must always be an, er, one-sided single answer in a > particular sense. Vladimir Lenin...did not question himself > whether the German people would rise, as he expected. He did what he > had > to do. First things first: revolt Russia and then hope the Germans > revolt as forecasted. On the contrary--the dispute over Brest-Litovsk between Lenin and Trotsky centered on whether the German people would rise and so whether or not to sign the diktat. Lenin was right. Then two and a half years later The same sort of issue came back between Lenin and Trotsky. This time Lenin thought that the Polish people would rise if the Red Army marched on Warsaw and so it was wrong to sigh the favorable peace then on offer. Trotsky disagreed and he was right (if Stalin had not deliberately sabotaged the campaign the defeat would still have occurred but it would have been less of a disaster than it was). In neither case was it a matter of "first things first'--it was a matter of dealing with a complex situation in its full complexity and no simplistic solutions were apparent at the time. Which, in revolution, is always the case (Bukharin, who Lenin said "never understood the dialectic," had a simple approach--"toujours l'audace!"). Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64 ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
