Staunch anti-liberal blackshirt
This will be the century of authority, a century of Right, a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (liberalism always signifying individualism), it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the state.
—BENITO MUSSOLINI
In January 1912 Lenin managed to convene a conference of his supporters in Prague that has gone down in history as the Prague conference of the RSDRP.
In fact, it consisted of twelve Leninists and two Mensheviks. They promptly elected a new RSDRP central committee composed of one Menshevik, Lenin, and four Leninists: Ordzhonikidze, Zinoviev, S. S. Spandarian, and F. I. Goloshchekin. The other member was a loyal Leninist and an agent of the Okhrana, R. V. Malinovsky.
Within a year of the conference Lenin was arbitrarily to “coopt” six more supporters, including Stalin. I merely note this to highlight the hard limits to any pro determinist theories of political economy.
Addendum - Lenin’s closest companion was the Okhrana agent Roman Malinovsky, with whom he traveled through Europe in January 1914. By this time Malinovsky was on a retainer of one hundred rubles a month from the police, to whom he reported on a regular basis. In May 1914 Malinovsky was revealed to be a police spy. He promptly resigned from the RSDRP Duma delegation and left for Poland to visit Lenin. Aside from Krupskaya and Malinovsky, Lenin was now quite alone.
Privacy for the plebs - transparency for the powerful
Old cypherpunk proverb
https://www.ontvtonight.com/au/guide/listings/programme?cid=1801&sid=324424&dt=2025-12-25+09%3A32%3A00
Gorky was determined not to help Lenin. “With regard to publishing Lenin’s book,” he wrote K. P. Piatnitsky, “I am against it because I know the author. He is a clever fellow, a wonderful man, but he is a fighter who scoffs at gentlemanly conduct. Let Znanie edit his book and he will say: what fools, meaning Bogdanov, myself, Bazarov, Lunacharsky.
The argument between Lenin and Plekhanov on one side and Bogdanov, Bazarov, and Co. on the other is very important and deep. The first two, differing on tactical questions, both believe in and advocate historical fatalism; the opposing side teaches philosophical activity. For me it is clear on whose side truth lies.”
Neither parliamentary reformists nor syndicalists understood Marxism, and any revision of Marxism resembled the very modernist heresies condemned so recently by Pius X. “Until now,” wrote Plekhanov, “there were no attempts to ‘supplement’ Marx by a Thomas Aquinas. But there is nothing impossible about the fact that, despite the recent papal encyclical against the modernists, the Catholic world at one time pulled from its midst a thinker capable of this theoretical heroic act.”
Having equated revisionism with heresy, Plekhanov went on to attack Bogdanov directly in an article entitled “Militant Materialism.” In it Plekhanov excommunicated Bogdanov as a lapsed comrade, an empiriomonist who, with Labriola and Lunacharsky, had tried to smuggle syndicalism into Russia “in the guise of a weapon ‘suitable for orthodox Marxists.’ “
Plekhanov following his masters voice after his Pope denounced indifferentism
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/01/indifferentism.htm
My visit to the Kremlin
" . . . in the spring of 1908, Lenin wrote an article entitled “Marxism and Revisionism” in which he made it plain that the enemy was not only philosophical idealism and “neo-Humeian, neo-Berkeleyan revisionism” but also political syndicalism.
“Even that ‘revisionism of the left,’ which has appeared now in the Latin countries as ‘revolutionary syndicalism,’ is also attracted to Marxism, ‘correcting’ it; Labriola in Italy and Lagardelle in France label themselves in Marx’s ranks, falsely interpreting what Marx really meant.”35 The key to attacking Bogdanov, however, was not to confront the syndicalist politics he shared with so many other Bolsheviks, but to criticize his philosophy . . "
Goes well with the communist water ministry
https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39839
false confessions obtained by torture or plea bargaining is, as we know, characteristic of capitalist regimes and would have been considered a violation of socialist legality in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In fact, Stalin replaced both Yagoda and Yezhov as respective heads of the NKVD when he learned each had abused their authority.
