Lenin - was he just a man wanting to get to power?

[RedRevolutionary87]

as we all kno russia during the time of the revolution was a mainly agricultural country, that had not had a any sort of bourgois revolution, yet lenin insisted that revolution could still be carried out.

revolution of corse was successfull, but one problem was that russia was not industrialized enough for for the large amount of capital needed in the beging of a communist state. so our good friend lenin decides on slave labour, all people who were against the revolution must now do slave labout to acumilate capital quickly. this paved the roads for stalins "works of art". did the russian revolution bring a bad name to communism? is lenin the one to blame?

[peaccenicked]

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...um=13&topic=129 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=13&topic=129)

[STALINSOLDIERS]

no lenin was not for power he actually done it for the people.......he gave them work,food,and equality to everyone .....many still like him in russia even today 2002 .........you can see that the czar really didnt care about the people.....but when his death came he probaly would of done better for the country.....so many also thinks that trotsky would of done better then stalin...stalin really didnt like the people he just wanted power he liked to kill and so he did....and some say stalin didnt even like lenin...so that you go is more then what to say but just to make some sense

[RedRevolutionary87]

fact, trotskey was supposed to be the heir, stalin hated lenin and lenin hated stalin, but what im saying is that maybe since the proleteriate in russia was almost non existent and so lenin brought about a premature revolution, could this have turned the ussr into the "evil communist country", do you suppose that maybe if revolutuion had taken place in an industrialized country like germany, with a large proleteriat then communism would have been in a better light and would maybe even be global?

[Michael De Panama]

I don't think our little Lenin really knew what he wanted.

Yes, the Russian revolution brought a bad name to communism.
Yes, Lenin is to blame.

As previously mentioned, Russia was not capitalistic enough to have a communist revolution really work. It was more along the lines of leaping from fuedalism to communism. It had almost no proletariat. It was not industrialized. Hell, it had to industrialize once communism started. It was doomed from the start.

See, and since it just turned into another system of classes under the rule of Stalin, capitalists understand communism to be equivalent to any totalitarian system. No totalitarian system exists alongside a system of equality. The government just took the place of the bourgeoisie. The civilian just took the place of the proletariat. Same game, new names.

[RedRevolutionary87]

well said comrade

[Revolution Hero]

Lenin was a great thinler, ideologist and true communist. By the way, Lenin and Stalin didn't hate each other.
Starting the revolution Lenin was thinking only about people , about proletariat. He desired to build real socialistic state.
After his death everything had changed. Stalin stopped NEP reforms and start making own politic.

USSR never had been " evil empire". It wasn't even empire. That is all reagan's bullshit!

[peaccenicked]

Here is Lenin on the development of capitalism in Russia
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel

[The Rapparee]

Lenin was a man who did it for the people unfortunatly the west didn't see it that way. Stalin was the one who took it to far and broght it to a a one person state rather than a one party state.

[RedRevolutionary87]

it wasnt a communist revolution tho, russia hardly had a proleteriat. and on his death bed some1 asked him who the next leader was to be, and he said any1 but stalin

[Revolution Hero]

There were 2 revolutions in Russia, during 1917. The one which started in October was a communist revolution. Proletariat masses were strong enough, if they had not been strong the revolution would not be victorious.
If you know history well ( and I suppose that you don't), there were a civil war in Russia between reds ( communist revolutionaries) and whites ( anti- revolutionaries). Reds were mostly from proletariat, it was even more than proletariat, it was organized proletariat.And Lenin was the leader of the whole movement, he was the most humanistic leader ever,he put the interests of the masses above his own interests, AND YOU HAVE TO RESPECT HIM, ALSO for the reason that he was COMMUNIST!!!!

[RedRevolutionary87]

one problem, none of those previose revolutions were bourgoise, capitalism hardly existed in russia at the time, communism isnt about being humanistic, it is about freeing the PROLETERIAT

[Michael De Panama]

Quote: from Revolution Hero on 9:51 am on Mar. 6, 2002
Starting the revolution Lenin was thinking only about people , about proletariat. He desired to build real socialistic state.


WHAT proletariat did he care about? The nation was not even capitalistic enough to have a proletariat. Maybe you're refering to the serfs.


Quote: from Revolution Hero on 9:51 am on Mar. 6, 2002
After his death everything had changed. Stalin stopped NEP reforms and start making own politic.

USSR never had been " evil empire". It wasn't even empire. That is all reagan's bullshit!


The only reason Stalin came into power was because Lenin established a system of people who believed talked about equality, yet still were led by an authority. The fact that this socialism was actually established with a class system was unnoticable by the people of the USSR, mainly because these people never experienced life under capitalist class antagonization. They were not aware that they were being exploited because the proletariat was not developed enough to understand what exploitation is. I mean come on...Lenin created Pravda!
The birth of socialism in the USSR was a miscarriage. And Lenin was the cause of this.

Oh yeah, Revolution Hero: I don't have to fucking respect him. He's not my authority and neither are you. Stalin claimed to be a communist too. You said it yourself: "Lenin was the leader". Yeah? Well so is the bourgeoisie. That right there is my point.

Attempting to have a communist revolution without an actual capitalist system to rebel against is like attemping to hook up a stereo in a house with no electricity. Of course, you could always just hum a tune to yourself and make believe it's playing just fine.

[The Iron Heel]

In other words, Che should never have come to Cuba, he should have went to the U.S. or Canada.

You, sir, do not seem to have read Lenin's explanation as to why Russia was ready for a revolution, why the era of monpoly capitalism is not the same as that of industrial capitalism, and that there are new dynamics at play.

[Michael De Panama]

No. I do not believe Che should have attempted revolution in the US or Canada. I also do not believe he should have attempted revolution in Cuba. To be quite honest, I can't see how anyone could possibly believe that revolution in one country would work. This world does not have it's indivisual economies. This is a world market. One world capitalism. Revolution in one country would be utterly useless. Nowadays we don't look in the slums of the country for the low class workers, we look in the slums of the world. The USA, essentially, is the bourgeoisie of the world. And American corporations sent to exploit the working class of Indonesia or Columbia is our oppressed proletariat.
"Workers of the world, unite!", stated Marx in the concluding sentence of the Communist Manifesto. The "world", not the "nation".

The working class has no nation.

(And yes I have read Lenin's justifications. And you know as well as I know that his theories were proved to be false. He was just wrong. Plain and simple. If they were right, the USSR would have never collapsed.)

[The Iron Heel]

That's simplistic. The failyre of the USSR in the 1980s is no indication to the Leninist ideal, since the USSR long strayed from that at that time.

And also, failing telepathy, revolutions tend to happen locally. If revolutionaries merely wait until every single-nation is ready to uprise, there will probably not be anymore revolutions since such grand synchornization seems utopian and unrealistic..

[Bakunjin]

About the revolution... Was it Marx's mistake when he said that revolution will take place in progressive capitalist country? i didn't see revolution in England, USA, etc.
The revolution in Russia was fight against powerty, against Tsars apsolutism.
Or, lets say this way...If revolution didn't take place in Russia, where would it?

[peaccenicked]

This might shed light on the issue.
''Engels to Zasulich

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Written: London, 23 April, 1885
Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942
Transcribed: Sally Ryan
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan


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You asked for my judgment of Plekhanov's book, Nashi Raznoglassiya [Our Differences]. To deliver this I should have to read the book, and I can read Russian fairly easily when I have occupied myself with it for a week. But there are full half-years in which this is impossible for me; then I lose practice and am obliged to learn it over again, so to speak. This has been the case with me over Our Differences. Marx's manuscripts, which I am dictating to a secretary, keep me busy the whole day; in the evening come visitors whom one cannot after all turn out; there are proofs to be read and much correspondence to be dealt with, and finally there are the translations of my Origin, etc. (Italian, Danish, etc.) which I am asked to revise and the revision of which is at times neither superfluous nor easy. Well, all these interruptions have prevented me from getting further than to page 60 of Our Differences. If I had three days to myself the thing would be finished with and I should have refreshed my knowledge of Russian as well.

Meanwhile the piece of the book which I have read is enough, I think, to acquaint me more or less with the differences in question.

First of all I repeat to you that I am proud to know that there is a party among the youth of Russia which frankly and without ambiguity accepts the great economic and historic theories of Marx and which has decisively broken with all the anarchist and slightly Slavophil traditions of its predecessors. And Marx himself would have been equally proud of this had he lived a little longer. It is an advance which will be of great importance for the revolutionary development of Russia. To me the historic theory of Marx is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics; to discover these tactics one has only to apply the theory to the economic and political conditions of the country in question.

But to do this one must know these conditions; and so far as I am concerned I know too little about the actual situation in Russia to presume myself competent to judge the details of the tactics demanded by this situation at a given moment. Moreover, the internal and intimate history of the Russian revolutionary party, especially that of the last years, is almost entirely unknown to me. My friends among the Narodovoltsy have never spoken to me about it. And this is an indispensable element towards forming one's opinion.

What I know or believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the opinion that the Russians are approaching their 1789. The revolution must break out there in a given time; it may break out there any day. In these circumstances the country is like a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it. Especially since March 13. This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i.e., with one small push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov's) is in more than labile equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by one action, in itself insignificaat, to release uncontrollable explosive forces. Well now, if ever Blanquism--the phantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy--had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic energy (another favourite image of Plekhanov's and a very good one)--the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, according as the economic forces and resistances determine.

Supposing these people imagine they can seize power, what does it matter? Provided they make, the hole which will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. Look at Bismarck, the revolutionary against his will, and Gladstone who has ended in quarrelling with his adored Tsar.

To me the most important thing is that the impulse should be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out. Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal, whether it happens under this flag or that flag matters little to me. If it were a palace conspiracy it would be swept away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained, where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every stage of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are united--there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will not be long in following.""