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*/Lenin Rediscovered: /What Is To Be Done?/ In Context/*
By Lars T. Lih, Haymarket Books, Chicago 2008, 840 pages
Review by *Barry Healy*
If a spectre haunted 19th century Europe, as Marx said of the embryonic
communist movement, then the name of Lenin was no ghost for the 20th
century bourgeoisie, it was a terrifying reality.
For the capitalists, with Leninism the communist phantom came howling
out of the underworld, beginning with the 1917 Russian Revolution,
sweeping whole continents clean of capitalist rule. Millions of human
beings found their life's purpose in learning from and extending into
their own national contexts the ideas of Lenin.
Epic intellectual -- and sometimes bitter, physical -- conflicts have
been waged over the meaning of Lenin's ideas. Among leftists, the
Trotskyists in particular, to their ever-lasting credit, argued for a
revolutionary, liberationist reading of Lenin, in defiance of Stalin's
bureaucratic evisceration, often at the cost of their lives.
On the right, a whole industry of conservative, Cold War warrior
intellectuals has made an easy living proving that Lenin really opposed
the independence of the working class and that his ideas led straight to
Stalinism. Their logic is that no matter how unhappy workers may feel
under capitalism, they dare not tamper with the world as it is; anything
is better than the dread Leninism/Stalinism.
Full article at http://links.org.au/node/1510
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