Comments on: Lars Lih responds to: ‘Did Kautsky advocate ‘Leninism’’? https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/28/lars-lih-responds-to-did-kautsky-advocate-leninism/ MARXIST ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:57:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.10 By: Jacob Richter https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/28/lars-lih-responds-to-did-kautsky-advocate-leninism/#comment-6485 Sun, 26 Jun 2016 03:33:16 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=2649#comment-6485 I appreciate this response on Kautsky’s article from someone who has shed a lot of light on German Social Democracy’s merger formula. I would like to throw a wind of caution, however, about the value of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism pamphlet.

I would argue that the “Comintern Lenin” was a different political beast from the “Old Bolshevik Lenin,” the latter being the one most relevant about doubling down on the SPD model to particular conditions. When he stated “merging with the masses” or something to that effect, “Comintern Lenin” had a woefully corrupted version of the original merger formula in mind.

The independent party-movement of the working class, if with an adequate socialist program, would already be the merger of socialism and the worker-class movement.

]]>