Unfinished Leninism: The Rise and Return of a Revolutionary Doctrine by Le Blanc Paul

Author:Le Blanc, Paul [Le Blanc, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science
ISBN: 9781608464265
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

There is much more to be said about this period, and about what Lenin and his comrades did and failed to do, and about the mistakes and blindspots one can find in the earlier period (up through 1917) that may have contributed to the catastrophe that followed.19

Here too, there are lessons to be learned. For some the appropriate lesson is the injunction that we must reject Lenin and all that he stood for. Given the historical realities and our present-day realities, and the outstanding achievement that preceded the catastrophe, I don’t think we can afford to do that. It is, however, especially important for us not only to critically sift through Lenin’s thought and actions during these tragically violent and authoritarian developments but also to consider the positive ways that he himself sought to overcome and transcend and move beyond the horrors in this final period of his life.

We cannot afford to settle for the superficiality or the morality tales or the dogmatic certainties of sectarianism as we wrestle with the question of what happened in history and with the question of what is to be done. We need to take Lenin more seriously than that, because what the sociologist C. Wright Mills said of Marx is also true of Lenin: “To study his work today, and then come back to our own concerns is to increase our chances of confronting them with useful ideas and solutions.”20

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