#Lenin150: The Man Who Theorized and Practiced Revolution
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- Published on Wednesday, 22 April 2020 09:38
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2068 ... April 22, 2020
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#Lenin150: The Man Who Theorized and Practiced Revolution
Ingar Solty
"You who are building, twenty meters high and on top the trade-union’s
palace, Ilyich’s statue, do not forget in his boot the hole,
testified by many, sign of poverty. Because I hear that it points
Westward, where many of those live who are going to recognize by this
boot Ilyich as one of their own." -- Bertolt Brecht
No one probably influenced world history more than he did: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, or more simply, Lenin. Only Karl Marx, Martin Luther, or Mohammed may dispute Lenin for this title. Lenin dedicated his whole life to revolution, a world revolution. He failed to go global, but the revolution which he led soon stretched across one sixth of the globe and inspired, sometimes ill-fatedly, revolutionary upheavals around the world, which would eventually turn his writings into doctrines in a third of the planet’s nation-states.
Lenin had no idea of his fate. "During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories... with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander," he wrote in 1917, the year of the "October Revolution," which was from the beginning conceived as a global project.
He went on in The State and Revolution to add, "After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it …"
What Lenin wrote applies to Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and, perhaps to Karl Marx and Che Guevara. And maybe it also applies to how state socialism dealt with Lenin and his oeuvre, but it certainly does not apply to how Lenin, the theorist and practitioner of revolution, is being perceived and portrayed today. Lenin’s name today stands for terror or failure in bourgeois historiography and frequently in left-wing historiography as well.