[Marxism] Class, Party, and Organization

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists]

On Dec 30, 2007 11:18 AM, Joaquin Bustelo <jbustelo at gmail.com> wrote:

> That is not so. Lenin did not sit down to write an organization plan for a
> Russian Communist Party in 1895. He wrote What Is to be Done about how to
> organize an RSDLP that was already in existence in the form of scattered
> local groups. That's got nothing to do with creating a party structure today
> in places like the U.S. in a totally voluntaristic way.

Indeed.

Recent research, in fact, seems to have shown that Lenin's ideas about
the Party question were actually quite different from what we
traditionally have come to understand as the Leninist "vanguard"
party. Lars Lih, for example, has written a book about this. Here's a
description of the book:

Lenin Rediscovered: 'What Is to Be Done?' in Context
(Historical Materialism Book Series)
by Lars T. Lih
Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
(December 30, 2005)
<http://www.amazon.com/Lenin-Rediscovered-Context-Historical-Materialism/dp/9004131205>

"Lenin's What is to Be Done? (1902) has long been seen as the founding
document of a 'party of a new type'. For some, it provided a model of
'vanguard party' that was the essence of Bolshevism, for others it
manifested Lenin's élitist and manipulatory attitude towards the
workers.

"This substantial new commentary, based on contemporary Russian- and
German-language sources, provides hitherto unavailable contextual
information that undermines these views and shows how Lenin's argument
rests squarely on an optimistic confidence in the workers'
revolutionary inclinations and on his admiration of German Social
Democracy in particular. Lenin's outlook cannot be understood, Lih
claims here, outside the context of international Social Democracy,
the disputes within Russian Social Democracy and the institutions of
the revolutionary underground.

"The new translation focuses attention on hard-to-translate key terms.
This study raises new and unsettling questions about the legacy of
Marx, Bolshevism as a historical force, and the course of Soviet
history, but, most of all, it will revolutionize the conventional
interpretations of Lenin."



Here is a review of the book (published in the journal "International
Socialism"):

by Paul Blackledge
"What was Done"

<http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=218&issue=111 >