Lenin's organized core of professional revolutionaries, who bring class consciousness to workers he thought too slow to reach it unaided.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Leninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside.
Put simply Lenin: history's destination is fixed, but it can be sped up. Workers are slow to grasp their situation as a class on their own, so that understanding must be brought to them from outside.
Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.
Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Put simply Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Those who actually grasp Marx and Hegel are bourgeois intellectuals, tainted by class origin; Lenin's fix is a vanguard of them, professional revolutionaries carrying class consciousness to the workers.
Put simply Lenin's problem: the people who actually understand Marx and Hegel are middle-class intellectuals, tainted by their background. His fix: a "vanguard" of them, full-time revolutionaries who carry that understanding to the workers.
Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.
Under Lenin, Party membership means giving it your whole life: readiness to die, devotion bordering on worship, and the secrecy and conspiracy that the threat of prison or Siberia demands.
Lenin's centralism smells of Jacobinism, the centralizing zeal that produced the Terror of 1793-94, and it drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent.
Put simply Luxemburg: Lenin's centralized party resembles the Jacobins, the centralizers behind the French Revolution's Terror of 1793-94. It drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent.
Lenin's ultra-centralism, Luxemburg writes, bears "the sterile spirit of the overseer": his concern is less a fruitful party than a controlled one, narrowing and binding the movement, not developing it.
The Party understands the workers' true class consciousness, perhaps before they do; what proletarians empirically happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."
Put simply Lukács: the Party knows the workers' true understanding of their place as a class, perhaps before they do. What workers actually happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."
Much as he admires Luxemburg, Lukács thinks she underplays the Party, which embodies class consciousness, unites theory with practice, and supplies the iron discipline a revolution needs.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
LeninLeninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside. L8 · 18:14
LuxemburgLenin's centralism smells of Jacobinism, the centralizing zeal that produced the Terror of 1793-94, and it drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent. L8 · 30:14
Luxemburg attacks the vanguard's ultra-centralism as Jacobin, severing party leadership from the workers it represents.
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.