[Marxism] Marxism Digest, Vol 57, Issue 92, Re: What did Lenin learn from Hegel?

[Chris Araujo]

RC wrote:
 > "This is very interesting as it seems to open up to a> spontaneist/voluntarist reading of Leninism -- while remaining rooted> in dialectics."
 
I don't think that Leninism does lend itself to spontaniety and voluntarist
revolutuonary praxis given the ideology's episto-ontological understanding 
of the nature of human beings, historical development, and especially in light 
of the basic principles of Bolshevism, Leninism and the vanguardism which 
bankrupted the Soviet experiment. Voluntarism suggests a certain libertarian
set of social relations during the revolutionary process. And, as the revolutionaries
at Kronstadt will tell us, this wasn't exactly the case in the Soviet Union. 
 
However, while I can't see much that Lenin did appropriate from Hegel's works--- 
and there is so much worthy of appropriation therein--- I do think that one 
unfortunate tendency which Lenin picked up from Hegel was a misguided 
overglorification of the State (completely congruent, of course, with his 
state-centralized view and Party autocracy). I would fault Hegel for thinking 
up such absurdities, but I would condemn Lenin for brutally practicing them.
 
Ultimately, If Leninism and Hegelian thought can be reconciled at points, the 
confluences can only be found in some of the more the unfortunate and regressive 
tendencies of Hegel.
 
Chris
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