A revisionist Leninist dismantles Trotsky and Stalin’s Lenin-myth?
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In last week’s Weekly Worker, Lars T Lih claims:
‘Three books, all published in 1924, laid the ideological groundwork for a Lenin cult, which is still responsible for the confessional sects and academic historians alike getting the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution so wrong. Lars T Lih shows that there was no Hegel moment, no April theses break, no conversion to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks consistently upheld revolutionary social democracy’.
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1507/a-hundred-years-is-enough
(The three books being by Stalin, Lukács, and Trotsky respectively.)
See also the entry for Leninism in An A-Z of Marxism:
That entry that Lenin wrote in 1914 for a Swiss Encyclopaedia that Lih refers to is quite good and does back up his view that up until 1917 Lenin was a more or less orthodox leftwing Social Democrat and one who did understand what Marx was on about. It can be found here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/index.htm
After 1917 of course he went off in a different direction, repudiating political democracy and defending a one-party dictatorship and so ceasing to be a Social Democrat.
Ironically, just like some other pre-war Social Democrats, in the end he found himself the prime minister in a government that could not bring about socialism and so had to accept capitalism and its economic laws, in his case to actually encourage the development of capitalism. Which is what the Bolshevik government did when had to adopt a New Economic Policy in 1921 which he himself described as “state capitalism” in the sense of the development of capitalism under the control of a “proletarian state” (ie a Leftwing government).
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