When Lenin affirmed in 1899 that “We think that an independent elaboration of Marx’s theory is especially essential for Russian socialists” (IV, 213) he meant a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, not an innovation so much in tactics as in revolutionary theory. The article from which the quote is taken, “Our Programme”, lashes out precisely against the innovators like Bernstein (who was further “to the left” than the PCI leaders of the second post-war period), while defending himself, as we must continually do as well, from accusations of “dogmatism”. In that same article our Vladimir reminds us that “Marx’s theory … has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions”. This is the meaning of the “independent elaboration” of which Lenin speaks, and not that of dismantling Marxism, including cornerstones and foundations.
Other Stalinists have evoked an elusive “new Marxist theory of revolution” by Lenin. In this they are in good company, with trotskists: Mandel, for example, who writes of an alleged “original development” of the Marxist theory by Lenin, or others of the “far” left, for whom no parts of Marxism “can be dogmatically fixed, they require a continual re-elaboration and development”, and a hundred others, of greater or lesser political calibre, all however eager to find substantial innovations in what they call “Leninism”, to legitimise their discoveries, their innovations, their ideological filth. The technique of extrapolating sentences from the context and then using them to affirm the opposite of what the original work defends goes back to Stalin, but many students have gone beyond the master in the technique of falsification and have filled millions of pages of anti-communist and anti-proletarian trash. In reaffirming the foundations of Marxism in Lenin we are therefore forced to employ not very brief quotations, and to place them in the true historical and political context in which the texts of Lenin himself were expressed.
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