Lenin. Photo: Artwork by Miguel Ángel Nin.
By Ernesto Estévez Rams – Apr 22, 2024
Lenin rethought himself many times, more than those who wanted to reduce his thought to commandments, published in rehashes that, using his words, denied him, want to admit. In Lenin there are many Lenins, all communists, all necessary
As knowledge, there are also ignorances. All knowledge must be validated, whether we call it science or whatever we want. The rest is to deceive ourselves in a subjective idealism, disguised as novelty, or as a millenary arcane recently rediscovered as a philosopher’s stone.
Perhaps the most recurrent sin of Marxism, after Marx, was to assimilate it within the Judeo-Christian cultural tradition as a historical derivation of this, unconfessable, but, nevertheless, referent. Perhaps it was inevitable, but in the process it was made to succumb to the too strong temptation of dogma. There is, in the ease of denying the necessity of the exercise of thinking, an instrument too effective from the exercise of the political powers to be rejected by them.
Lenin insisted on the need to rethink Marxism at every step. His recurrent criticism to the other comrades of the Party was not to understand that dialectical quality of Marxism, which was the only way to assume it as science. Science, not in the infallibility of its results, but in the irreplaceable usefulness of its methods. Everything in Lenin was anti-dogmatic and, therefore, Marxist. He did not quote the old man as one quotes the gods, or tries to reduce scientific knowledge to more or less fortunate aphorisms.
After Lenin the fault was repeated. To justify it, he invented the idea of calling revisionism to any act of thinking about it. Lenin would have called the same exercise science. There is no revisionism, there is counter-revolution disguised as re-reading but counter-revolution at the end; and there is, from the communist point of view, dialectical appropriation of his thought.
Lenin rethought himself many times, more than those who want to admit who wanted to reduce his thought to commandments, published in rehashes that, using his words, denied him. In Lenin there are many Lenins, all communists, all necessary.
On April 22, 1870, Lenin was born in Simbirsk. A month after his 17th birthday, his brother was executed for fighting against the Tsar. Lenin discovered Marx in Kazan that same year and transformed the pain of losing his brother into the conviction that a different world was necessary. To achieve that necessary world for all, it is necessary to think it, fight for it and build it.
(Granma)
