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Vladimir Lenin - “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder: Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions? (www.marxists.org)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Yes this in relation to the Luigi struggle session. Use the developing class consciousness to your advantage, don't dismiss this moment out of hand because The Adjuster has median voter type beliefs. Don't be an active do-nothing internet leftist. Talk to your friends, neighbors, coworkers, family that may also have some incoherent beliefs but support The Adjuster and instead of dismissing them as a reactionary for not being your perfect type of socialist after a lifetime of American education you could try to educate them into other areas of leftist thought. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Don't be the type of communist Lenin talks about here that splinters into their own "perfect" union of only committed communists.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

It's quite funny to bring up Left Wing Communism in a debate about assassination, a text in which Lenin writes:

this party considered itself particularly “revolutionary”, or “Left”, because of its recognition of individual terrorism, assassination—something that we Marxists emphatically rejected. It was, of course, only on grounds of expediency that we rejected individual terrorism

Here is what Lenin though about terrorism in What is To Be Done?

On the other hand, calls for terror and calls to lend the economic struggle itself a political character are merely two different forms of evading the most pressing duty now resting upon Russian revolutionaries, namely, the organisation of comprehensive political agitation. Svoboda desires to substitute terror for agitation, openly admitting that “as soon as intensified and strenuous agitation is begun among the masses the excitative function of terror will be ended” (The Regeneration of Revolutionism, p. 68). This proves precisely that both the terrorists and the Economists underestimate the revolutionary activity of the masses, despite the striking evidence of the events that took place in the spring,[14] and whereas the one group goes out in search of artificial “excitants”, the other talks about “concrete demands”. But both fail to devote sufficient attention to the development of their own activity in political agitation and in the organisation of political exposures. And no other work can serve as a substitute for this task either at the present time or at any other.

As we can see, Lenin soundly rejects terrorism as a substitute for agitation - and rightfully points out that a reliance on terror underestimates the revolutionary activity of the masses. We see today that the vast majority of people have no love for the CEO of a health insurance company and that those same peopleare seeing that killing a CEO does not make a change.

If anything, when discussing this recent assassination with the masses we should be quite clear that it was not particularly meaningful and that, while it was a product of the exploitation of the lower class by the upper, that it is not a useful form of class struggle and his general political incoherence is a clear symptom of a lack of understanding of the Imperialist system that he sought to strike against.