Melanchon has been scarred by his unhappy experience with Leninist sects “injecting consciousness, slogans, and objectives from sources other than the social movement itself”.
True of Leninism in theory and Lenin's own practice.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gregory-petrovich-maximoff-the-guillotine-at-work-vol-1#toc1
Lenin, according to Maximoff, “followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobins.” He believed in the necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme, in himself and the legitimacy of his authority.
Capitalism was, to both Lenin and Marx, an inevitable stage of historical evolution. It was not possible to move from a fundamentally feudal system to a socialism of abundance without an intervening period of capital accumulation and centralisation. Lenin’s understanding of history and economic development convinced him that a transitional stage of state capitalism (he did allow that the period of private capitalism could be omitted) was an historical necessity. Lenin recommended we “learn about state capitalism from the Germans, to assimilate their methods, not to spare any dictatorial methods in order to accelerate the westernisation of barbarous Russia, not to recoil from using barbarous methods of struggle against barbarism … govern with greater firmness than the capitalists did. Otherwise, you will not win. You must remember: your administration must be more stringent and firm than the old administration … This discipline included harsh, stringent measures, going as far as shootings, methods which even the old government did not visualise."
Maximoff following in the footsteps of Bakunin, traces the Leninist policy to “political Marxism” itself. Russian socialism had always been “distinguished by its libertarian and progressive character,” writes Maximoff in opening his book. “Political Marxism,” though, “Is an anachronism, a vestige of the dying past and is altogether reactionary in its essence.
The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels is a reactionary manifesto and is in striking contradiction to science, to progress in general, and humanism in particular. The demands of dictatorship, of absolute centralisation, of political and economic life in the hands of the state, of ‘forming industrial armies, especially for agriculture,’ of a regimented agriculture in accordance with a single plan, of raising the state to the position of an Absolute and the resulting stultification of the individual, its rights and interest — all that is nothing but the programme of reaction which is incompatible with human progress, with freedom, equality and humanism. The realisation of these demands carries with it state slavery.”
