Was Lenin even a Marxist? Or was he just a misguided Blanquist? An intentionally manipulative state capitalist...

It is really.

Based on the fact the Bolsheviks were too retarded to defeat Poland and push forward to Germany.

This book does a solid job detailing what Lenin's perspective on the future of the USSR was. Contrary to popular myth, his opinions were not at all in line with those of Uncle Joe. Lenin was certainly no fool, and very much aware that the failure of all European revolutions left Russia in an awkward position where realizing socialism would be near impossible. To him, it was primarily a matter of holding down the fort whilst awaiting further revolutions and uplifting Russia out of medieval primitiveness.
Lenin was supremely critical of the bureaucratic state apparatus of the USSR, calling it "deficient" and "deplorable." He called for a fundamental reorganization of the state, which should be much smaller and feature a tremendous extension of the power of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection so that it might serve as a true organ of the workers' power and serve as a check on the party elite. Instead of the centralization of the entire country under bureaucratic planning, Lenin envisioned a long period of essentially capitalist development in Russia, where the peasantry would be slowly lifted up out of feudalism through an extended NEP whilst society was to be reorganized into a collection of cooperatives as a means of inducing cooperation and worker's control under capitalist conditions. This would be accomplished by a sort of "cultural revolution" where the backwards, reactionary culture of Russia would be eradicated and replaced by a more enlightened culture based on socialist principles which should prepare it for a future transition out of capitalism.
Indeed, Lenin even advocated against promising socialism to the peasantry as he believed it would give them false expectations which the party had no ability to actually fulfill under the present material conditions. All that could be done was to slowly uplift them materially and culturally and leave all business of further development to the future, and the ideals to be spread through a sort of natural osmosis between the various soviets.
To Lenin, unlike Stalin, this was really all they could hope to achieve without reinforcements from either Western nations which could lead the way for Russia, or from Eastern nations which could take Russia’s struggle against the West as an inspiring example and join them on the road out of feudal poverty into a higher stage of development. Indeed, in one of Lenin’s last writings on the subject before his death he sounds more like Dr. Wolff than Stalin, as he argued that this capitalist system of development through well-educated workers’ cooperatives was the system through which Russia would head towards genuine socialist development.
If you're interested in hearing it straight from the man himself, consider reading these three texts which he wrote towards the end of his life for more information:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/23.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm

Land collectivisation was more than possible
Also why couldn't the workers have organised themselves and built up industry? Petrograd and Moscow were already developing rapidly

Marx defined "dictatorship" as basically any government where in one class dominates another. It doesn't mean actual tyranny as much as it is liberty defending itself from tyranny, i.e. what lolberts are too stupid to achieve.

Lenin was a Marxist that didn't fully understand Marx, but to be fair he was one of the first persons who tried to realize a socialist vision and we learned from his mistakes. His two biggest flaws were in how the organized the party and went about seizing the state and how he tried to consolidate his power. Also should've hanged Trotsky & Stalin at the soonest possible moment.

what's the difference between leninism and blanquism?

he was a pretty great Marxist tbh

I think it means a democracy that only proles get a say in. So basically it's just a way to take property rights away from porky.

Marxist yes, though admittedly somewhat of an unorthodox one for the time. His ideas were in large part a response to the unique conditions within Russia at the time and in condemnation of what was seen as lukewarm inaction/reformism by many of the traditional authorities on Marxism at the time (chief among them being the likes of Karl Kautsky and his followers).
has covered this better than I ever could though.

Lenin was aware of the strategies advocated by Blanqui, and in all likelihood they served as one of many influences that lead to the strategies employed by Lenin. There were some key differences between the two ideas though. Chief among them was the fact that, while both strategies employed a small group of seasoned/dedicated revolutionaries to lead their respective movements, Blanquism often relied on members of the bourgeois and other members of the ruling class who were already acting members of the existing state, while Leninism usually involved well educated middle class (well-off proletarians, petite bourgeoisie, landed gentry, etc) to serve as theoretical guides to the movement. While both advocated for seizing the state, Blanquists generally wanted to achieve this via coup (or similar overthrow from within the state itself) that would leave most of the actual structure and law of the previous state intact (at least to start), while Leninism generally sought to at least partially dismantle the existing state apparatus before replacing it. Also while both had the stated goal of socialism, Blanquism sought to achieve it through explicit dictatorship (in the modern understanding of single-person/group/party rule) that would gradually bring about socialism (but not communism), while Leninism wanted the vanguard party to act at least partially in tandem with more direct worker organizations (soviets, etc) to serve collectively as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (general domination of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie) with the intent of using this as a launchpad for both socialism and later communism. The latter point of intending to integrate workers participation ultimately fell to pieces in Russia before Lenin was even dead, and that was the point where the rule of Democratic Centralism (having been at least a nominal guiding policy for state structure) rapidly became absolute.

No, he'd been a revolutionary long before then. His chief theoretical conflicts had historically been against explicit social democrats (important to note that social democracy was a very different movement than what it is today; many parties espousing that position at the time were explicitly Marxist).

the greatest man to ever live

He was actually a literal social democrat (as in, that was the name of his platform and what he believed in) for decades before he fucked off for a few years to read Marx and Hegel in the early 10s.

Otherwise, some suggest that while he was definitely a Marxist communist, he was heavily influenced also by Kautsky and that it is in large part this influence that made him so distinct from the other European Marxist communists: www.prole.info/texts/kautsky_lenin.html.

Yeah this isn't the point of socialism

This is basically the "free market would have solved it anyway" of anarkiddies

Are you just pretending to be retarded? I genuinely can't tell

By his own interpretation of Marx at leasts. The rest is debatable.

He's both right and wrong. He was a social democrat in name only and privately a revolutionary Marxist and obviously read Marx before WW1.

...

On this notion manages to come close but is still so very far off.

We must remember that in the late 19th and early 20th century social democracy was the entirety of Marxism. There was debates within Social Democracy, between Kautsky, Bernstein, and Plekhanov - but Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Liebknecht, were all part of it. (Here we should note that Kautsky was the no.1 authority on Marx after the death of Engels, there was nothing at all "distinctive" in regards to Lenin on this point)

In this tradition a lot of Marxist concepts had been distorted, misinterpreted, or yet too be published - we must thus be aware that modern scholarship of Marx has reconstructed his actual theory much better than anything available in Lenin's time.

Thus: yes, Lenin was a Marxist - but today we can have a much better understanding of Marx than he ever could.

Before WW1 Marxists aligned with the Second International were known as Social-Democrats, you retard.

The divide between Social-Democrats and Communists that gave those terms the meaning we now associate them with happened during the war and the revolution. Before them it was just one big bloc of Social-Democrats.

So he wasn't a Social-Democrat "in name only" because that was the name for it, and he wasn't "privately" a Marxist but openly one. I also wonder, how the fuck is someone privately a revolutionary Marxist while producing hundreds of page of revolutionary marxist texts every year and publishing them throughout Europe?

I swear to you, this board can beat Holla Forums at stupidity some times. You retards want to have an opinion about everything before you even have a Wikipedia-depth understanding of it.

The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents, and for the realization of the measures which that domination implies . … Thus he necessarily finds himself in an insolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions, principles and immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done . … Whoever is put into this awkward position is irrevocably doomed.
-F. ENGELS, The Peasant War in Germany

The proletariat in "dictatorship of the proletariat" is the class-for-itself, a class's conscious of its revolutionary role and actively fulfilling it. In other words, it is indeed a "tyranny" of the communist programme embodied in the party, exerced onto other classes as well as onto proletarian individuals themselves. Democracy, including within the proletariat, doesn't have any intrinsic value as far as the dictatorship of the proletariat is concerned.

That being said, October also showed us the concrete form this dictatorship will take: the Soviets. And the Soviets are actually way more democratic than any bourgeois state, as, within it, the proletarians can exert a real, actual power (withing the limits of the communist programme).

As for the "real democracy" that is the theoretical foundation of every bourgeois "democracy", it cannot be obtained before the revolution is over. Only then can people really exert their will, freed from both the law of value and the imperatives of its dialectical counterpart, the communist movement.

and he did it anyway, what a legend

Had a revolution occurred in Germany, things would have been very different.

Lenin's Last Struggle is Trotskyist bunk

The Provisional Government was essentially rubber-stamping the Petrograd Soviet's resolutions, so it was just a matter of time until power was fully in the hands of the Soviets. By precipitating it, Lenin fucked up the whole process, and soon enough, he was betraying all his promises about freedom, democracy, soviet power and the Constituent Assembly. Even the one big promise he didn't go back on, the declaration of peace, would later be rendered obsolete anyway. He might have done everything with good intentions, but that doesn't mean he didn't fuck everything up in the first place.

Engels was absolutely right. The October Revolution was a mistake.

Oh don't remind me. Ditto for the Paris Commune. Truly we are in the bad timeline.

He followed the book to a T.

There's not one instance where Lenin contradicts Marx, in word or deed.

wew lad get real, the July Days weren't a Bolshevik conspiracy

How the hell not?

wtf I am a Leninist now

Please elaborate

Lenin was a Blanquist, but Blanquism is good.

Marxism is a proven pseudo science.

I wasn't even thinking of the July Days. The soviets were bound to come up the winner in the Dual Power dispute.

whatever you say fam

A revolution did occur. The socdems promptly ordered the Freikorps to put it down, predictably. Fucking socdems.

There's nothing in Marxism which argues that socialism /has/ to arrive from capitalism. In fact, late-life Marx wanted for Russia to immediately transition to communism by reviving the mir and reconstructing the larger economy on the basis of a grand association of artels, then making a rendezvous with the western world and sharing the best of both sides. This failed, however, when Lenin mechanistically misinterpreted his words and built state capitalism to war-machine his way to Germany and reunite with their revolution.

Marxism isn't a template for developing Western European societies alone, it's a form of analysis connected to revolutionary action at its core. Lenin was no Marxist. His developmental determinism bears far more in common with LaSalle than it does with Marx.

source comrade

It's actually the other way around: late-life Marx changed his mind about this possibility, considering Russia was now too far gone on the way to capitalism.

I know "historical inevitability" is an iffy excuse, but it seems clear in this case. But maybe it's just my natural tendency to play safe, while Lenin was banking everything on the German Revolution. His bet would have paid off in spades if the Germans succeeded, but alas, socdems ruined everything for everyone, and he ended up finding himself in Engels' nightmare scenario.

What was Engels's nightmare scenario?

You're mostly right but there are a few important points you're getting wrong afaik. Marx's view that Russian could skip the capitalist stage by reforming its agrarian communes wasn't really popular with Marxists for long. He shared that sentiment with the Narodniks, but seems to have suggested it's only possible if proletarian revolution happened in the west simultaneously:

After his death even Engels realised the communal life of the russian peasanty was doomed, and sided with the Marxists on the necessity of capitalist reform. Check vol 49 of the collected works:

And you're describing Lenin as someone who got Marxist theory wrong on that regard, and this is not right either. All russian Marxists from Plekhanov to Parvus agreed on the necessity of capitalism in Russia, and western marxists tended to agree with them. Russian Marxism grew as a rejection of the Narodnik idea that the peasant commune could mean a transition to Socialism.

Engels said from the start that socialism in Russia wasnt possible iirc

No he shared Marx's view for a while and only after his death became adherent of capitalist necessity as well

Preface to the russian version of the commiefesto, here , was written in '82. Marx died in '83, and I'm not aware of any writing on Russian he made after that. So idk if he himself changed views.

Being a successful revolutionary in unsuitable conditions

I think I've mistaken late-life Marx with late-life Engels. My bad.

ITT Socdems learn why killing Rosa wasnt just a small thing but doomed the socialist project as a whole.

New to the whole lefty thing. Don't know anything about rosa except for a few things she wrote. How did the socdems kill her?

By crushing the revolt and sending the Freikorps to kill her and Liebknecht, dooming the most promising attempt at socialism in a highly developed country ever.

thanks, famrade.

Oh boy, then we would've had a standard bourgeois dictatorship under Menshevik rule. Lovely. Fuck the soviets.

Theory is someone was helping Hitler to get in power by making sure Communists were divided, Rosa was probably killed off by a radical faction to make sure they stayed divided.
Reminder SPD is over 150yrs old.

Lenin was not a moron. Lenin = pragmatic analysis of concrete historical circumstances, thus NEP.
Trotksy = Taylorism with BDSM characteristics, full militarization of labour ('communism') NOW.
Stalin = Building Tanks and grabbing more clay for Russian Empire.
What is ironic here is that Lenin started with one-party 'totalitarian' state capitalism thing, and then Stalin put it on steroids with purges and state terror against everybody who disagrees with his understanding of economic necessity and needs of the production process. What was done in the countries of capitalist commodity production by the economic incentives was done in USSR directly by the state, and still there are Marxists who will defend this shit!

I've heard that people tend to place way too much importance on "what is to be done?" and don't really read it in the context as just a response to the "pure economism" he was responding to. I don't know enough about Lenin to really say one way or another whether he was a good commie. I want to go back to Marx before even bothering with Lenin. from what little I know about him though, he was a very good marxist given the very limited knowledge of marxists at the time of marx's writing. obviously he fucked up a lot, but I think the main reason why anarchists hate him is because they really want to hate him. he wasn't really a bad guy. just a very important figure who carried a lot of the flaws of orthodox marxism with him.

Nevermind dooming socialism, they might have doomed the entire fucking planet at the rate we're going.

Bukharin should have been the next supreme soviet.

He understood that a Socialist system depends on innovation, production and education. He was the brainchild of the NEP, but the bureaucrat wing of the party, including Molotov, Stalin, and Zinoviev realised that it would take too much economic power out of the bureaucratic apparatus and give more power to the workers.

Instead we got a litteral retard, Stalin, that thought more peasants working = greater production output.

Pretty much my position. Emphasis on I need to read more Marx.

This is one of those few gem threads that come up once in a while with great discussion.

Btw, if anybody's interested in the Russian Revolution, check out @RT_1917 twitter.com/rt_1917

hory shet that's amazing

Thank you for this explanation. It makes him seem a lot less like the tyrannical despot lots of Anarchists paint him as.

Bump

Obligatory

I don't get it, why is this wrong?