2 February 2008

Comrades,

I finally got a chance to read Joe Craig's review of Lih's book on Lenin's What is to be Done.  I hope that Lenin continues to be rediscovered.  While I agree that the public perception of Lenin's book as well as the academic understandings of it are shaded not just by the Stalinist abomination but by the reality in which the Bolsheviks were forced to take and hold power in.  That said, the tradition I come from, the Trotskyist tradition, while infected with a good deal of Zinoviest Leninism, fundamentally saw Lenin's proposals in What is to be Done as the extension of democracy to the working class, not its denial.  I hope future "rediscoveries" of genuine Marxism will be seen not just in the light of their historic denial, but in there historic defense as well.  I have passed on Joe's article to a number of comrades in the hope that we might rediscover the emancipatory logic of the real Lenin together.  Thanks for the good work. 

Matt S. 

Detroit, Michigan USA