Non-Leninists

[RedSunsZenith]

I've been reading a lot of Lenin lately, and I have begun to refer to myself as a "Leninist." However, being in a place with virtually no socialist community, I haven't been able to engage in any debates, so I've really not been exposed to any alternative opinions (aside from the typically bourgeois). So, to all non-Leninists, why do you oppose Leninist theory and what do you propose in the place of it?

[Susurrus]

We anarchists oppose it due to its authoritarian state capitalist nature. In place of it we recommend decentralized direct or consensus democracy(similar to the Russian soviets and worker's councils before the bolsheviks seized control of them)(anarcho-syndicalists also have democratic unions in there to organize production) and the abolition of currency/market and private property.

Also, if you are only reading Lenin's works, I would recommend researching his actions during the Russian Revolution as well to compare his practice to his theory. State and Revolution in particular is quite a bit different from his actions during the revolution from what I've heard(haven't read yet it myself.)

[Agent Equality]

Because he has a wierd goatee :D but all joking aside. 2 words: Vanguard party

[Geiseric]

Trotskyists are actually different from orthodox leninists, if you like the 1905 soviet model than Trotsky and the Mensheviks are the ones who designed it. I admit though the war wouldn't have been won without authoritarian state power. I believe that as long as the state is an actual workers state, it should go to any measure to protect the revolution. Conservatives have said to me that "trotsky lacked fundamental human qualities such as humanism" after reading what happened to their ideological cousins, the whites, during the war. That is the state power I support, oppression of the bourgeois and imperialists.

[Susurrus]

That is no excuse, as the bolsheviks made no attempt to relinquish their power after the civil war and used it to crush leftists such as the Kronstadt sailors and the Black Army, not to mention internal dissent and strikes.

[Leo]

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2

[Manic Impressive]

Marx: the working class must emancipate themselves

Lenin: the working class must be emancipated by a conspiratorial group of professional revolutionaries.

[manic expression]

Marx: the working class must emancipate themselves

Lenin: the working class must emancipate themselves through the effective organization of the most militant workers
Fixed your post.

PS, Marx wrote the Manifesto of the COMMUNIST PARTY, so the vanguard party is perfectly in line with Marx's views.

[Susurrus]

Fixed your post.

PS, Marx wrote the Manifesto of the COMMUNIST PARTY, so the vanguard party is perfectly in line with Marx's views.

Communist Party =/ Cabal of wannabe dictators orchestrating a coup to replace the bourgeoisie.

[manic expression]

Cabal of wannabe dictators orchestrating a coup to replace the bourgeoisie.
Interestingly enough, that's what the capitalists said of Marx and his allies.

[Thirsty Crow]

Fixed your post.

PS, Marx wrote the Manifesto of the COMMUNIST PARTY, so the vanguard party is perfectly in line with Marx's views.
You don't seem to notice the difference between the use of the term "party" in Marx's Manifesto and the whole of the revolutionary political discourse since the establishment of workers' organiaztions like SPD in Germany.

In other words, no, this lame attempt of yours does not prove anything with regard to the continuity of revolutionary organization up to the Bolsheviks. Try harder.

To OP, it actually depends on what we take as the dominant characteristics of Leninism. In my opinion, the notion that workers' may only reach trade union consciousness, making it necessary that an alien social group brings consciousness to them, is something which cannot be supported because of implied politics.
This politics entails the formation of the vanguard party which takes power in the name of workers, upon which the institutions of the party-state ae formed and political power is effectively monopolized. I don't support that, though I see, to paraphrase Victor Serge, that Leninism contained many "seeds", out of which there was also an autthoritarian one.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

We anarchists oppose it due to its authoritarian state capitalist nature. In place of it we recommend decentralized direct or consensus democracy(similar to the Russian soviets and worker's councils before the bolsheviks seized control of them)(anarcho-syndicalists also have democratic unions in there to organize production) and the abolition of currency/market and private property.

Also, if you are only reading Lenin's works, I would recommend researching his actions during the Russian Revolution as well to compare his practice to his theory. State and Revolution in particular is quite a bit different from his actions during the revolution from what I've heard(haven't read yet it myself.)

I'm not an anarchist but I oppose Leninism for similar reasons.

I'd just digress by saying I don't oppose the authoritarianism of Leninism. I more oppose the confinement of authoritarian power to an un-democratic few in the 'vanguard' party. Revolutions are not tea parties, they are always going to be authoritarian. The key is that they are authoritarian in the sense that economic and political power are embodied within the entire working class, not within the state apparatus controlled by a small clique.

On State Capitalism I certainly agree, and again the quote is correct, that Lenin's actions certainly diverge from his theory and in office, he was nothing more than dictatorial, State Capitalist and corrupted by power. As i've recommended several times, Chapter 8 of Rosa Luxemburg's The Russian Revolution is an excellent expose on the problems of early Bolshevism in action.

[manic expression]

@ Menocchio: Split hairs all you like, but if your problem with Leninism is the vanguard party, you have nowhere in Marxism to stand on principle. Lenin's was a specific application of what Marx laid out as necessary in the epoch of imperialism.

[Tjis]

There is no such thing as Leninist theory. Lenin believed different things at different times and never bothered to write down an authoritative 'Leninist canon', such as Marx did with Capital. This is understandable of course. Lenin's time of glory was in the middle of a revolution, and then a counterrevolution. Such things leave little time to write a magnum opus.

'Leninism' is actually Lenin as presented by anti-revisionists, or Lenin as presented by one of the many kinds of trotskyists. Both use Lenin to provide their ideas and actions with a kind of legitimacy. Even today 'Lenin said so' is a valid argument in some circles. The underlying belief is that it was Lenin's theoretical works and the actions of the Bolsheviks that built the revolution and made it a success.

As I understand it, there are essentially two important Leninist books. They are 'What is to be done?' (written in 1902) and 'State and Revolution' (written in 1917). In the 15 years between those books Lenin's views didn't remain static. More importantly, for many of these years Lenin was not even a very important figure, his influence limited to writing censored articles for Pravda while in exile. Nevertheless, in the canonization of Lenin he is portrayed as the architect of a well-planned 'Leninist' revolution lead by a Bolshevik vanguard. It's a serious distortion of the facts with many unfortunate results.

To be fair, the Bolsheviks played an important role in the October revolution, but the October revolution was merely the culmination of decades of struggle, much of it outside of their influence. By treating the entirety of the revolution as being planned, organized and executed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks we set ourselves up for failure.
Instead of looking at what actually happened, Leninist organizations look at the writings of a man in exile. Lenin wrote polemics against organizations and events far away from him at the time, not because he agreed with them but because he disagreed with them. Once again: Lenin disagreed with many of the things that were happening in the Russian worker's movement at the time of his exile, and didn't think they'd lead to a revolution. But then, they did.
Do you see the contradiction? What Lenin wrote and what actually happened are two different things, but in canonical Leninism they are the same. The success of the Russian revolution is ascribed to a theory and organization which had very little influence. Because of that, we now have many Leninist groups who think that the way to build a revolution is to start a democratic centralist party and a newspaper, a ridiculous cargo cult imitation of the idealized bolshevik party.

[Thirsty Crow]

@ Menocchio: Split hairs all you like, but if your problem with Leninism is the vanguard party, you have nowhere in Marxism to stand on principle. Lenin's was a specific application of what Marx laid out as necessary in the epoch of imperialism.
Where is that what Marx laid out as necessary in the epoch of imperialism? Which of the texts?

EDIT: oh fuck, I misinterpreted the sentence. Still, I don't see any evidence, just baseless claims. I don't think that people who engage in merciless criticism of everything that exists (I hope most of the people here do at least) should pronounce eternal truths as if from a pulpit.
At least not if they do not wish to become the "new priesthood".

[manic expression]

Yeah, I should've been more clear, thanks for catching that.

But what I mean is that Marx supported the idea of a Communist Party (a party of and for the workers) involved in the liberation of the workers. Lenin simply applied that to the age of imperialism, when greater discipline and unity of voice and all-around strength was needed. The experience of the Russian Revolution shows us that he was right: say what you will about the Bolsheviks, but they were more organized and more ready for revolution than anyone else. That's what the vanguard party, the efficient organization of the most militant workers, gets you.

Also, Tjis has a point in his first sentence. "Leninism" is merely an application of the principles and methods of Marx...it is a continuation of Marxism.

[caramelpence]

Yeah, I should've been more clear, thanks for catching that.

But what I mean is that Marx supported the idea of a Communist Party (a party of and for the workers) involved in the liberation of the workers.

Marx didn't identify an epoch of imperialism in the same way that Lenin did, so that's a problematic assumption to begin with, but more importantly, when Marx and Engels used the term "party", as in the expression "the Communist Party", they generally used it in the broad sense, to refer to all who identified as Communists, with all the ambiguities that term involved, rather than in the more modern sense of a highly disciplined organization based around a canon of texts. I would also argue that the term "Leninism" carries the false impression that Lenin's views on the party were novel in the Russian context, when, in reality, and as recognized by recent scholars of Lenin like Neil Harding, Lenin's arguments in WITBD were broadly representative of the mainstream in Russian social democracy, so that Lenin was able to command the support of individuals like Plekhanov during the controversy with the economists, for example, even though Plekhanov ultimately ended up on the opposite side during the Menshevik-Bolshevik split due to him having a different set of views on the immediate tasks facing the Russian Revolution. The term "Leninism" is also misleading because it suggests that Lenin had a stable set of views on the party, whereas actually his thought changed over the course of his political development, particularly when it came to his precise views on party organization, in that he called for changes to internal organization and the relationship between the party and the broader movement when faced with changes in political conditions in Russia, such as in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution.

Really, the emergence and acceptance of the concept of "Leninism", with all the simplification and distortion that involved, needs to be put in the context of the triumph of Stalinism in the USSR, the same being true of attempts to find the origins of "Leninism" in Marx, and revolutionaries today need to be more willing to reject that legacy and accept the nuances and changes within Lenin's thought.

[manic expression]

Marx didn't identify an epoch of imperialism in the same way that Lenin did,
Yes, because Marx passed in 1883, more than a decade before imperialism began in earnest.


so that's a problematic assumption to begin with, but more importantly, when Marx and Engels used the term "party", as in the expression "the Communist Party", they generally used it in the broad sense, to refer to all who identified as Communists, with all the ambiguities that term involved, rather than in the more modern sense of a highly disciplined organization based around a canon of texts.
Because Marx and Engels weren't agitating in the time and place that Lenin was. It's only natural that they'd refer to the party in such a way when the movement was truly in its infancy in 1848. That doesn't mean we should take that as gospel and not develop the principle of the party to something stronger, more disciplined, more effective.

[Aurora]

In my opinion, the notion that workers' may only reach trade union consciousness, making it necessary that an alien social group brings consciousness to them, is something which cannot be supported because of implied politics.
Lenin later admitted he was wrong and abandoned this position. With the experience of the october revolution Lenin and other Bolsheviks openly stated the party had lagged behind the revolutionary masses.

[Dogs On Acid]

But what I mean is that Marx supported the idea of a Communist Party

And Marx wrote that around 150 years ago when the People didn't have access to the information and knowledge we have today, at a time when decentralization would be incredibly difficult to achieve.

Marx said this, Marx said that, Marx is a prophet and Marx's words will be timeless steps.

Marx's works should be a guide, not a Bible. Marxist fanatism is anti-Materialist and unproductive.

The technological developments since the 19th century will enable the Workers to emancipate themselves and study Marxism at a click away, without a central vanguard teaching them The Way of Marx and Lenin.

[Binh]

"Leninism" is actually not based on the experience of the Bolshevik party:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/bolshevik-experience-and-t158847/index.html

[Geiseric]

The way I understand it, alot of Lenin's contribution is in party formation, composition, and also many people forget that the Bolsheviks were a mass party themselves. There was no other way to deal with the civil war, which they ended up winning, from statist measures. They were meant to raise world class consiousness and russia was only a way to show that workers could gain power. Everybody except trotsky didn't even think that the first workers revolution could happen in russia. Everybody, including trotsky, except Stalin and Bukharin, knew that socialism couldn't be achieved without the world revolution. With the country worn out, it was only a matter of time before degeneration happened, nothing short of a dictatorship can keep a country togather that was in as bad shape as russia, the only thing that could have secured socialism in russia was a revolution in germany, britain, france, or any other industrialised country. it didn't happen, so the issue was to continue aiding and waiting, or not to.

[gendoikari]

Interestingly enough, that's what the capitalists said of Marx and his allies.

:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:: laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh: While planning the business plot at that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Susurrus]

The way I understand it, alot of Lenin's contribution is in party formation, composition, and also many people forget that the Bolsheviks were a mass party themselves. There was no other way to deal with the civil war, which they ended up winning, from statist measures. They were meant to raise world class consiousness and russia was only a way to show that workers could gain power. Everybody except trotsky didn't even think that the first workers revolution could happen in russia. Everybody, including trotsky, except Stalin and Bukharin, knew that socialism couldn't be achieved without the world revolution. With the country worn out, it was only a matter of time before degeneration happened, nothing short of a dictatorship can keep a country togather that was in as bad shape as russia, the only thing that could have secured socialism in russia was a revolution in germany, britain, france, or any other industrialised country. it didn't happen, so the issue was to continue aiding and waiting, or not to.

The whole "it was necessary to have a government to keep the country together" argument falls apart when one considers that the soviets and workers councils were more efficient and egalitarian than the bolsheviks, and that the conditions that were of the most threat to the "leftist" government were the ones they themselves had created ie labor strikes, starvation due to bungled appropriation of grain, etc.

Also, here's another way to consider it: Trotsky once said "to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs." To which Voline replied "I see the broken eggs; now where is this omelet?"