Debate: Did Lenin Distort Marx?

[jondwhite]

Anyone who's listened to Monty Johnstones unusual interpretation of Lenin, might find his interpretation of Trotsky interesting here;https://archive.org/details/CPGBYoungCommunistLeagueCogito1968Issue5

[PJShannon]

Following is a discussion on the page titled: Debate: Did Lenin Distort Marx?.
Below is the discussion so far. Feel free to add your own comments!

[ALB]

What, did Trotsky distort Lenin?

[LBird]

Another way of looking at this, is to say that Lenin didn't so much 'distort Marx' as 'follow Engels'.Whatever Lenin claimed he was doing, he wasn't following Marx in any way at all.

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

Another way of looking at this, is to say that Lenin didn't so much 'distort Marx' as 'follow Engels'.Whatever Lenin claimed he was doing, he wasn't following Marx in any way at all.

So, The dictatorship of the Proletariat distorted by Lenin in the State and the Revolution was taken from Engels?  Lenin wrote that the center idea of Marxism was the dictatorship of the proletariat. Was that idea developed by Engels? No, It was a wrong conception developed by Marx, and still Leninists are supporting the same wrong conceptionLenin Vanguard Party to lead was taken from Engels? That conception comes from the Jacobin, and Ferdinand Lasalle, one of the opponents of Marx, and then Kautsky continued with the same idea. Did they take it from Engels? The concept of the permanent revolution developed by Marx and distorted by Trotsky and Lenin was taken from Engels?    Those are the three fundamental bases of Leninism. I think you have a pathological obsession with Engels

[Anonymous]

Everything about Lenin vs Marx was discussed on this threadhttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/lenin-and-marx-contrastedIn this thread, L Bird tried to ride on his favorite little horse, but instead, he received several knockouts. 

[LBird]

mcolome1 wrote:

 I think you have a pathological obsession with Engels

And I think you have a pathological obsession with defending Engels' 'Materialism', mcolome1.As did Lenin.

[Anonymous]

LBird distorts Marx. LBird is opposed to local communities making decisions which affect them. He  subscribes to an ultra-centralised Leninist model of complete society-wide decision making on everything. He is clearly a Leninist elitist,  who does not support local and regional forms of decision making.He avoids defending this position and jumps from thread to thread with his boring repetitive and unsubstantiated accusations against the SPGB 

[Young Master Smeet]

On this issue, I thought the detractors of Engels were the ones who noted his adherence to Social Democrats, and Marx was the more rrrrevolutionary of the two, and that Lenin rediscovered the true Marx, past the social democrat turns of Engels.

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

mcolome1 wrote:

 I think you have a pathological obsession with Engels

And I think you have a pathological obsession with defending Engels' 'Materialism', mcolome1.As did Lenin.

Pathology comes from suffering, you are the one that is suffering from Engels obsession, it is like a love-hate relationship,  I am happy and content with the ideas that I have in my head. I am open in my thoughts, and I am not afraid in recognizing when I am wrong.  I do not defend blindly anyone of them, I do not worship any one of them as you do, even more, I do recognize that both were mistaken in certain aspects of their body of ideas, but that will not stop to recognize that both made contributions to the arsenal of socialist idea. What you are defending now, I defended it many years ago, your new ideas, are old to me The only thing that I know is that you are a Leninist in disguise, like the International Communist Current, or the Marxist-Humanist who have rejected Engels, but they kept Leninism or CLR James who rejected certain aspects of Lenin but kept Leninism. As I told you before, I have traveled too many roads

[Anonymous]

By the way. Why you only show up when there is a thread about Engels?  Don't you care about others social issues, like hunger, wars, class struggle, etc, etc, etc,?  Is Engels your class struggle? 

[moderator1]

Reminder: 1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

On this issue, I thought the detractors of Engels were the ones who noted his adherence to Social Democrats, and Marx was the more rrrrevolutionary of the two, and that Lenin rediscovered the true Marx, past the social democrat turns of Engels.

You'll have to identify for yourself 'the detractors of Engels', YMS, if you think there is a single 'the'.As to the separate issue of the relationship between Lenin and Marx, the supporters of Lenin of course argue that 'Lenin rediscovered the true Marx'.There is, however, a strand of thought that argues that Lenin has nothing whatsoever to do with Marx, but that Lenin took his elitist 'materialism' from Engels. 'Materialism' is the perfect ideology for elitists, like Lenin, because it posits a 'special consciousness', not available to all and so not democratic, by which the elite 'know matter'. The similarities between such an ideology and the political concept of 'party consciousness' should be obvious.Marx warned against 'materialism' and its divisive effects within society, in his Theses on Feuerbach.

[Anonymous]

LBird wrote:

Young Master Smeet wrote:

On this issue, I thought the detractors of Engels were the ones who noted his adherence to Social Democrats, and Marx was the more revolutionary of the two, and that Lenin rediscovered the true Marx, past the social democrat turns of Engels.

You'll have to identify for yourself 'the detractors of Engels', YMS, if you think there is a single 'the'.As to the separate issue of the relationship between Lenin and Marx, the supporters of Lenin, of course, argue that 'Lenin rediscovered the true Marx'.There is, however, a strand of thought that argues that Lenin has nothing whatsoever to do with Marx, but that Lenin took his elitist 'materialism' from Engels. 'Materialism' is the perfect ideology for elitists, like Lenin, because it posits a 'special consciousness', not available to all and so not democratic, by which the elite 'know matter'. The similarities between such an ideology and the political concept of 'party consciousness' should be obvious.Marx warned against 'materialism' and its divisive effects within society, in his Theses on Feuerbach.

It looks like you are not too versed on Leninism. The concept of elitism is in the Vanguard Party to LEAD, and that conception does not come from Marx or from Engels. The vanguard party to lead indicates that workers by themselves are only able to fight for economism and that socialist ideas must come from the Intelligentsia. Where is Engels' so-called materialism in this conception? .Engels so-called  materialism was used by Lenin on Materialism and Empirocriticism, and it  was also a distortion, and the  Marxist-Humanists have indicated that Lenin distorted Marx philosophical viewIf you read Stalin books named as Foundations of  Leninism, and the On the Opposition,  you will see that he said that Lenin ideas come from Marx and that Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism, therefore, Lenin is the distorter of Marx, and Engels always considered himself as a student of Marx, he was more humble than you. PS Young Master, Both were revolutionary. they were not reformists. At the beginning, Engels was the Economists and Marx was the philosopher, and then Marx studied economics. As Dave wrote in this forum both had a division of labor. Some biographer has said that Engels did not know about the mountain of works that Marx was working at the same time, he discovered that after Marx death. It was too much work for one man

[robbo203]

There is, of course, also this famous circular of 1879 to the German Party signed by both Marx AND Engels (which moreover was actually written by Engels himself) which gives the lie  to LBird's, as usual, groundless speculations.   Leninist vanguardism had its orgins in part in the emergent trend towards vanguardism and elitism within the broader Social Democratic movement as a whole , to which trend both Marx AND Engels defiantly expressed their uncompromising opposition. This passage in particular is worth noting for its clear oppostion to political elitism:  As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one path open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is therefore impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new Party organ adopts a line corresponding to the views of these gentlemen, and is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains for us, much though we should regret it, but publicly to declare our opposition to it and to dissolve the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German Party abroad. But it is to be hoped that things will not come to that. .  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm

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