I have no preconceived notions about the council communists, nor am I a Lenin-basher. I'm generally hostile to the ultraleft, at least of recent vintage.  But I find Chris Cutrone's point of departure fundamentally mistaken. Ultimately, the question of the greatest star in the firmament of Marxism is irrelevant.  Suggesting that the left has degenerated since Lenin and the Bolsheviks is a non sequitur in my estimation. Furthermore, it is fundamentally wrong to take as a point of departure the self-understanding of Lenin or any of his contemporaries. Whatever the intentions of the leading theoretician-practitioners of Bolshevism, their perspective and orientation, in spite of the reproduction of their works in millions of copies, were never shared by their followers or even other leaders, not to mention the masses of peasants and the relative handful of proletarians, and their subjective conceptions of their projects were necessarily swallowed up by the circumstances in which they were forced to act and by the perspectives of millions of less sophisticated people and functionaries. One wise man ends up in effect no wiser than the millions of people who drag him down to their level, to which he has to stoop to be effective.  Lenin had more self-consciousness about what he was up against than most, but the fact is his consciousness had to be limited as well as his scope of action, or he could not have functioned as the leader of a party, mass movement, revolution, or head of state.

To give a penetrating example of a whole different kind of analysis, see this old essay I recently uploaded onto my web site:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/gouldner7.html

. . . which leads into the text itself:

Gouldner, Alvin W. " Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism," Telos #34, Winter 1977-78, pp. 5-48.

In fact, all of Marxist political practice and the self-conceptions of its theoreticians crashed on the rocks of circumstance. And since that happened, it is obvious that their self-conceptions were not adequate to the concreteness of the situations they faced and to the problems of social transformation.


At 10:54 AM 7/6/2009, Angelus Novus wrote:

--- Chris Cutrone <schwartzweiss@... > schrieb am Mo, 6.7.2009:

> These characters can't hold a candle to Lenin or Trotsky -- or the hero
> they mistakenly try to appropriate, Luxemburg, who worked with Lenin but > would have had nothing to do with them.

Um, considering that Luxemburg was murdered in 1919, whereas the KAPD was founded in 1920, it would have been really difficult for her to "have something to do with them", unless:

1. a time machine had been invented,

or,

2. a cure for death had been discovered.

Pannekoek was in the SPD in the pre-war period, and in fact both Pannekoek and Luxemburg engaged in polemics against the Kautskyite center. Lenin, at the time, shamefully supported Kautsky against Luxemburg.

And "libertarian" would never have been used as a label by these tendencies. That's just a label anarchists like to tack on in their mistaken belief that these tendencies are somewhat compatible with anarchism.

Furthermore, it's a bit of a myth that the KAPD wasn't oriented towards party-building. And the Italian left-communists are Bordiga were quite Leninist.

Sometimes it's a good idea to conduct independent research on something, rather than rely on whatever potted history the Sparts spoon-fed you as a cadre-whelp.

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