this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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I think a lot of Marxists take sympathy with Lenin, and Lenin's vision, they don't necessarily like what the USSR became under Stalin. The principles of Soviet Democracy, for example, are appealing to many Lefitsts. "All power to the Soviets!"
That being said, ultimately the USSR serves as a great example of why Vanguardism can be good in overthrowing a bad system, but must be held far more accountable, or even dissolve after revolution. I know many MLs would probably shit on me for saying that, citing the CIA paper saying Stalin wasn't a dictator, but I still think ultimately the form of government under Stalin and those who came after him is very dependent on who is in power. A more decentralized system would have checks against such issues.
My 2 cents as a leftist that isn't an ML, but has spent time reading about the various leftist tendencies.
I'll conclude it by saying I would have loved it if Lenin continued to live and stay in power, I wonder what the USSR would have looked like, maybe even today.
Lenin's State and Revolution is great and set the foundations for the Bolshevik discourse that led to them being capable of leading a movement large enough to gain power over Russia, the problem is that not even Lenin himself was consistent with the principles he proposed. The idea that you can legitimately sustain some sort of pretension of achieving worker democracy when the Bolsheviks consistently ended up repressing all other leftist factions wasn't coherent, to the point that Stalin wasn't a sad degeneration of Leninist practice, but a necessary consequence.
We unfortunately see the same result in almost all countries that followed the ML model, where a party elite ends up monopolizing power and divorcing itself from the rest of society, ultimately instituting themselves as a separate class that sees no ideological issue with bringing back capitalism, as they find it to be more consistent with the really existent power dynamics in the country.
Literally most of the work people cite from Lenin is just him defending his own hypocrisy. It really says a lot that people will be all "dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't mean dictatorship" and then go on to cite Lenin glibly saying that civil war is good because it teaches the peasants how to shoot. It's simply not a well thought out framework for statecraft.
And all of this is summarized quite nicely in Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It's so vague and allegorical that you can't really critique it. The message is basically "if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you." Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It's a very "American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that" kind of book.
It's not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed "anti-white."
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I'll also throw in Asimov's review of 1984 while I'm ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It's sort of an "I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls" shibboleth.
I liked Homage to Catalonia
you mean his complaining about having to do something besides being a colonial cop?
Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis
Anyone who has actually studied political science has nothing but contempt for what Lenin did with his opportunity. At this point if you are ignoring all the hindsight of the 20th century, you are campist, not a communist. Which is what describes most of the lemmy communists.