/lit/ - Literature

>>14104213
Lenin was the greatest revolutionary in human history, and should be a role model for all would be Communists seeking to make the world a better place.

This is not to say Lenin himself or the legacy he leaves behind are without fault. In fact, it would be a disservice not just to Lenin, but the whole history of humanity, to simply take Lenin at face value. Just as how Lenin saw himself in the tradition of the Populists, and saw the Neo-Populists, through their dogmatic adherence to the old doctrine, had forgotten its spirit, so that the true inheritors of this legacy would be the Marxist critics of Populism - and so it is with Lenin and "Lenin"-ism. For spirit of Lenin to live we must bury his reanimated corpse!

>Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with all alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.