v.i. lenin - c or d?

Tumescence.

surely no one could quibble w/ v i lenin's corpse as a solid ws of shame

I was a teenager and found the whole thing bewildering

what feelings did you guys have while gazing at his corpse?

― ogmor, Monday, August 4, 2014 8:43 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading about lenin -- a guy with boundless intellectual energy and no personal vanity, who subordinated everything he had to the movement for something like thirty-five years before gaining power -- he sounds kind of mythical, more like socrates or something than any political figure i can think of. maybe intention doesn't matter, but i do think he felt that everything he did was "historically necessary" and in the long term interests of mankind. the fact that what was actually accomplished was a society that embodied the absolute opposite of all of his ideals is probably the great historical irony of all time.

i mean, it's his own fault. there were organic socialist developments at the time he took over -- going by chomsky via rosa luxemburg -- that he brutally crushed, due to his believe that the conditions weren't yet right for that kind of thing.

otoh there was one development he did believe in, the one opportunity he drove his party to take...which did result in, well, just the rest of the century.

when i saw him he was wearing a suit that looked very contemporary, like something you could get off the rack at men's wearhouse.

― Treeship

first line of your memoir

yup this is very good.

I once read that when McDonalds opened in Moscow (this was the eighties probably) it already attracted lots more visitors than Lenin's mausoleum.

thanks.

i'm thinking about my post yesterday and i'm not sure i even agree with it. was it possible to give "all power to the soviets" during an emerging civil war or would this have just ensured the defeat of the nascent revolution? i don't know much about the atrocities he is said to have committed during this period, but from what i know of the history things were going to be bad in russia no matter who was in charge. i guess to evaluate lenin you have to decide what things would have been like under the provisional government, or even if they would have been able to exist for too long without being overthrown by some other kind of coup, possibly a right wing anti-semitic one.

i would like to hear difficult listening hour's take.

reading lenin, it's easy to be disgusted with his ruthless pursuit of class warfare by any means necessary from our standpoint, but the class divisions in russia at that time were very extreme and i'm sure they seemed insurmountable except by radical means at that time, especially in the wake of the nightmare that was the eastern front of wwi.

Yes, I wonder if Kerensky would have held the dissolving autocracy together. I tend to think not.

main thing that impresses me abt lenin is his timing: until he takes power at least, he is always right, never wrong. his strategic calls during the climactic summer of 1917 especially, between the revolutions, come down to choices between wednesday and friday that are also choices between victory and setback; and no one around him, not even trotsky, is as perceptive. stalin later executes another impeccable rise, but it's through the cloistered ranks of an incumbent bureaucracy, and his strategy is mostly to sit quietly in the back while cleverer people outreach themselves; lenin is dealing with the chaos of a country simultaneously at war and in revolution, and his decisions, even if you think he is a self-serving psychopath, which he pretty clearly isn't, are by necessity driven by actual popular desires. (even of course as they reshape popular desire.) "mythical" is the right word because this man happened to embody and for a time apparently resolve the spooky marxist irreconcilability between the inevitable will of history and the free will of the free actor: it was impossible to tell the difference between his pushing and being pushed. his personality cult (especially after his death) was very different from stalin's. stalin was the father-genius-godhead-phallus; soviet folktales (an inseparable syncresis of "authenticity"+propaganda) talk about lenin almost like anansi. the trickster, the uncatchable, the god of the story. even his death is a trick, a tactic: "he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!" underneath this stuff is an unsayable uncertainty: even when you respect and love the trickster for his stories you won't know if they're true until it's too late.

so meanwhile: he recrafted his party into a ruthless hierarchical gang that was probably structurally incompatible with its own ideals even before the civil war taught it that when it came to getting control of people "political education" didn't work nearly as well as mercilessness. in doing so he opened the door, knowingly and slowly, to stalin and his ism. it is hard to tell what he thought would keep stalin from power after his death, unless the answer is just trotsky; but really all of lenin's last-years scrambling to install trotsky in some firmly counterbalancing position (like herding a single, suicidally arrogant cat), his much-ballyhooed too-little-too-late last testament where he calls stalin "crude" or whatever, his grappling with the growth of the bureaucracy blah blah: none of this ever had any chance of coming to anything, because the soul of bolshevism had been a stalinist soul at core since at least kronstadt if not the menshevik split. if he had killed stalin (which he wouldn't have done, because he never stopped needing him) another gangster would have found the ladder. (i actually don't know much about kirov, whom stalin probably killed and who otherwise might have had quite a career, but i bet he was an asshole.) so it is Lenin's Fault. stalin reveals either the falseness of the idea of lenin as historical avatar or something worse: that history is even crueller than you thought. that lenin really was taking us where we were going, and this is it. otm: i do think he felt that everything he did was "historically necessary" ... the fact that what was actually accomplished was a society that embodied the absolute opposite of all of his ideals is probably the great historical irony of all time. that is the magic thing about him for me, that he must have made terrible mistake after terrible mistake, but he is never a man whose reasons are not compelling. the choice always seems really to be between lenin's plan and autocracy: and then at the end of lenin's plan we find autocracy. if you are an orthodox marxist (like, more of one than marx) i guess his original sin is trying to leapfrog russia's bourgeois phase, to drag the whole feudal mass of russia into The Future behind the tiny specks of its industrialized cities--after that he is out of sync with the universe, doomed to mere tyranny--but that isn't it i think, or not all of it. nor is it just some liberal sanctimony about ruthlessness and coercion: listing deaths while a highminded disgust occludes all description of the place and time they happened. it's some deeper failure to do the most important thing he had promised to do: to cut the knot intrinsicate of power. a failure he sinks into slowly, eyes open, along with the rest of his hopeful country. it's very sad. "a people's tragedy" like the figes book i haven't read calls it.

rereading that everything looks like a vague cliche. (this is a problem for me in general these days.) idk. my thoughts are evolving or whatever.

that is a gorgeous post, dlh

his personality cult (especially after his death) was very different from stalin's. stalin was the father-genius-godhead-phallus; soviet folktales (an inseparable syncresis of "authenticity"+propaganda) talk about lenin almost like anansi. the trickster, the uncatchable, the god of the story. even his death is a trick, a tactic: "he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!" underneath this stuff is an unsayable uncertainty: even when you respect and love the trickster for his stories you won't know if they're true until it's too late.

goddamn, man. i would totally read an entire book by you about this. can we start a kickstarter for that?

srsly some of the more pynchonian prose i've read of late

daphne carr bought me a drink once xp

Lenin's mistake was dragging Russia into communism before it was historically ready. And that mistake made communism in the west nearly impossible to achive, seeing as communism was now an autocratic boogeyman to the east. And of course, since communism in Russia wasn't historically inevitable yet, when Lenin made it happen, we will have to blame the development on Lenin's reading of Marx. And it therefore follows that the worldwide failure of marxism is first and foremost atributable to Karl Marx writing his books way too early.

this consideration of idealism, moment and pragmatism is all very relevant to my interests - whether the british left is to have a moment in any way comparable to lenin's is highly doubtful but fostering a commonality of purpose is surely central to the mission

is any country historically ready for Communism? srs question

socialism however

that mistake made communism in the west nearly impossible to achive

If Marx is to be believed, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an historical necessity, and therefore not just possible to achieve, but inevitable. I tend to think he was a bit too presumptuous. Analysis of the past is easier than prophecy.

"he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!"

realized on checking my source for this that i omitted the key fucking word: it's "he will probably awaken soon." chills!

Yes I thought there was a book on this.

poll with following options: (1) "is any country historically ready for Communism?", (2) "is (x) African country/'failed state' ready for democracy?", (3) "none of your fucking business".

some ruthless quotes from a secret letter to the Politburo 19th March 1922, when Lenin was sensing the famine was a good opportunity to break the power of the Orthodox Church.

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

... a very large number of local clergyman and bourgeois must be arrested and put on trail. The trail must end in no other way than execution by firing squad of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds in Shuya, and to the extent possible, not only in that city but also in Moscow and several other clerical centers.... the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.

I was thinking of that Giles Fraser piece in the Graun the other week and cheering every bit of Lenin's murderous intent here. I'm probably not right in the head, but that is what a Catholic upbringing does to one!

Jesus

I think it was in Richard Pipes' The Unknown Lenin, first published in 1996, that the quote above first appeared in English.

I quoted it (with my typo) from the excellent Sheila Fitzpatrick Russian Revolution book. I'm guessing it was probably added to it on the last couple of revisions.

None of this young revolutionary claptrap. This is less than two years before he died. Real lesson for us all.

This guy changed his mind about the proper strategy for the Bolsheviks like 4 times between April and October 1917, startling the Central Committee with calls for direct action and then frustrating them with orders to cool off "adventurism" on the part of workers and soldiers.... then swinging left again. Through it all he denounced in the strongest possible terms every idiot who dared read the situation differently from him, though they were actually in Petersburg and he spent much of that year hiding in Finland.

Classic infuriating pedant.

Lenin is out-polling the president of the United States among Millennials. I'm gonna try and log off for the day now. pic.twitter.com/puehAYQ4r6

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) August 16, 2017

It will go higher.

I'm literally reading State and Revolution rn

have you got to the bit where the state withers away yet? that's the best part

that's my shit right there

the idea that even 25% of millennials actually know enough about lenin to make any kind of judgment is pretty funny

maybe we should poll the kids on whether trump is more popular than hammurabi

John Lenin maybe?

Oh yes and if they only knew enough about him they'd go back to Hilary. That's funny too.

Obv its an iffy poll, but its totally in line with younger ppl's enthusiasm for socialism in general.

how do i shot getting young folks to read polanyi ?

can't wait to see the kids lining up to volunteer for the cheka so they can execute some kulaks of their own

Fabisnism? Dude get yourself a copy of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks (no.38 in the Complete works set iirc), that's all the philosophy you will need. xp = the body count will go higher, too.

wonder what millennials think of pol pot, i bet he would agree w/ their stance that hipsters are annoying

J.D. and hipster pals at the riot

Condemning Lenin might be appropriate and necessary but I don't think comparing him to Pol Pot is very edifying xp.

There was a massive power vaccuum in 1917 and the Bolsheviks were one of the few groups that had enough support on the ground to plausibly seize power. The provisional government wasn't going to hold on, and the soviets would have been crushed if they waited until the military took power -- crushed by monstrous, genocidal right wing forces.

It was only in this context that Lenin's radical proposal to leap across history to redistribute land and give the working class and peasantry direct power made sense. The nation had lost its taste for moderation during the war.

Obviously, the end result of this audacity was a disaster. The country became like one massive gulag. And the repression and murder Lenin authorized during the civil war is certainly not something I'm interested in excusing. BUT it was quite clearly never his intent to establish a dictatorship. He's a tragic figure imo more than a monster. (He was also, personally, a huge jerk as I mentioned above.)

In any case difficult listening hour to the thread. He knows a million times more about this than me.

There were also earlier atrocities he was involved with like the Tiflis bank robbery. I don't think he was a good guy who had a positive impact on history, but the "meaning" of his life is more than just its outcome, Stalinist repression.

Anyone read China Mieville's _October_ yet?

No, but I'm very glad you mentioned it tho.

Oh yes and if they only knew enough about him they'd go back to Hilary. That's funny too.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, August 16, 2017 9:38 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lenin never had any trouble with his e-mails iirc, so this is probably wishful thinking.

his letter caused stalin some issues tho

it was honestly just a joke treeship, i don't think that lenin was in the same league as pol pot. though tbh even a non-joke version of that line strikes me as far less offensive than xyzzzz's half-comprehensible pro-soviet apologist shit on this and other threads.