Tag: Bolshevism

Letter to the Socialists, Old and New

Socialism is making a comeback but it is important to see that the older brand is played out and that a new generation will be done a disservice if they fall into old grooves. Time is short but no work is being done to recast the old legacy into something new and practical and the result will be a kind of sluggish inaction stuck in a dated version of marxism. We have critiqued marxism, after praising its historical moment and the way it created a way station to the future. But after the legacy of Bolshevism, the subject must start over and become a new framework. Continue reading “Letter to the Socialists, Old and New “ →

Praise Lenin all you want, in the end he failed…

The anniversary of Lenin is a moment to reflect on history, the history of marxism, and its failures.

But the day after the birthday we need to move on from Leninism. The fascination with Lenin can forestall the need, necessity, of a new left with a new framework. A close look shows that Lenin’s moment was very distant from ours and the marxism he espoused should be upgraded to something better. In the final analysis his cadre despised liberalism and democracy, grew in the shadow of tsarism and gave that a kind of rebirth in the false view of communism that came to the fore.
Lenin must be seen in the context of the infamous Civil War that ended up spoiling everything and injected a terrifying and unreasonable violence by all parties, a factor suppressed from sentimental readings of history, and which cursed the whole of bolshevism throughout.
We need to be thinking in a different, which is the reformism versus revolution debate: we can take the revolutionary question in a different way, and in any case the issue of revolution is more to do with historical circumstance than the deliberate intention of revolutionaries. If the revolution comes a new system is going to be a difficult and tricky passage and needs to quite forget leninism….

Speaking a revolutionary socialist one can criticize Lenin and the bolsheviks if only because time has moved on and we are out of time to defend the failures of the marxist past. We confront a very…

Source: The marxist obsession with Lenin and a failed legacy… – 1848+: The End(s) of History

The marxist obsession with Lenin and a failed legacy…

Speaking a revolutionary socialist one can criticize Lenin and the bolsheviks if only because time has moved on and we are out of time to defend the failures of the marxist past. We confront a very different situation than that of Tsarist Russia the world of Lenin had to deal with.
That context is misleading to the left now and will lead to false conclusions.
We confront a stage of mature capitalism (mature to rotten, some might say), and not an industrializing monarchic armed with a hopeless muddle of theory about the need to industrialize first followed by Lenin’s (intelligent) refusal of such nonsense. The whole context of the early socialist world will mislead us now.
It is a mistake to constantly defend the past here. Drop the past and start over, time is short and Lenin is not our model.

150 years ago on 22 April, Vladimir Lenin, the great Marxist and leader of the Russian Revolution, was born. For over a century, there has been a sustained campaign to slander his name and distort his ideas, ranging from bourgeois historians and apologists to various reformists, liberals and assorted anarchists. Their task has been to discredit Lenin, Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the interests of the “democratic” rule of bankers and capitalists.

Source: In Defence of Lenin with Rob Sewell: LIVE 22 April (BST)