: : I guess I owe Mark Bednarz an explanation, since he was decent enough to recognize that the sort of socialism I was discussing was not the variety once promoted by that ugliest of historical villains, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin.: "ugliest of historical villains"? Are you not going a little bit over the top here? Or have you conveniently forgotten the Stalinist characters who followed him? Or perhaps you think there is no difference between Lenin and Stalin in their approach to "socialism"? Lenin was a theorist and a social activist. Unlike the armchair philisophers who don't have to account for the long term consequences of what they advocate, Lenin had to think about the real life situation and respond to the political environment which confronted him at the time. Sure, he made mistakes and nobody can deny that. But even the most ardent critics of Lenin have refrained from insulting his integrity in the way you have done. Obviously "flaming" is not necessarily wrong depending on who is doing it and who is being flamed!
: I suggest you Paul Mattick1s work who desoite criticising the Bolshevik leaders in general including Lenin, does not deny that Lenin was one of the most consistent Marxist thinkers of his time.
There's an adjective of "praise" for you, "consistent." Consistent of WHAT?
One of the major mistakes Lenin commited was to advocate the idea of centralisation of the communist party which led the party towards eliticism and ultimately imposition of an undemocratic political system.
According to Julius Braunthal, the Third International and its requirement that all Communist Parties sign on to the Thirty-One Theses, or be purged from the ranks, resulted in the defection of 75% of the Movement in Europe and the conversion of the rump 25% into a tourist agency for the Soviet Union. Isn't this the man's main contribution to the movement, just as we could talk about my chopping off the leaves of a tree and rubbing herbicide on the stump as my "contribution" to that tree? And then we have the thing about the Kronstadt Rebellion, the insistence that everyone adhere to the correct party line that shines throughout all of Lenin's written work and that anyone who didn't agree 100% was scum (please feel free to quote the stuff at length if you want to respond), and just the general attitude of resentment he carried throughout his life, stemming from the murder of his brother by Czarist troops. As for this buck-passing to Stalin, even Lenin dimly recognized that he had created Stalin as he lay on his deathbed. And Stalin, as we should remember, was Hitler's role model.
Centralization? Sorry, I'm working in the exact opposite direction. Maybe that's one reason I tend to ignore apologists for Lenin.
:But this, by no means, invalidates Lenin1s contribution to the socialist movement. It is easy to, with the benefit of the hindsight, criticise everything that Lenin stood for. And it is even easier to remain solely within the realm of ideas and not promote any plan of action lest you make mistakes. But remember we are looking to a social system that, as you say yourself, has never happened before in all of human history. So inevitably, we will make mistakes in trying to achieve it. And we can do nothing else but learn from them.
"Mistakes were made." -Ronald Reagan.
: : My tentative offer to Habermasians, in favor of reviving the discussion about Marx, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, utopia etc., is that a movement to make capitalism "less capitalist" would have to be a decentralist movement, would have to shift power downward, away from elites on Wall Street, DC, Hollywood, Geneva, Frankfurt, Tokyo etc. and toward individuals with merely "local" power. This might make money and power less important as steering systems.
: And how do you propose to restrict the forces of capitalism which work towards profit accumulation and centralisation of capital. If we don1t somehow control these natural tendencies of capital, won1t your "less capitalist" system soon get back to where we are now?
Did I say I or Habermas or anyone else who cares was NOT interested in controlling the "centralization of capital"? The point is to empower individuals at the local level to discover for themselves alternatives to being hooked into the system. But I'm repeating myself here, whereas as a teacher I should merely remind you this opinion of mine has been available in several of my previous posts, which you are still free to read, and that I have little time to repeat myself endlessly for the convenience of individual readers.
If anything, it's apologists for Lenin and Leninism who are interested in defending the "centralization of capital" that created the state-capitalist regime that was the Soviet Union.
