@0x4d6165@wanderingwires.net on thing when trying to make sense of Lenin is that he had a major break in the early 1910's when he was exiled, after reading Hegel's logic and other stuff, where he broke with 2nd International Marxism completely, and the idea of the 2 stage revolution, first of the bourgeoisie, then of the proletariate, this is very Kautsky or Plekenov, the 'necessary succession of historical stages' Lenin in exile realizes comes closer or Trotsky and in some ways to Bakunin, in that in undeveloped capitalism you can just go directly to socialism, you don't need to go thru the parliamentary gains

He came close to this in 2 Tactics of Social Democracy, but here he was like 'well the proletarian party much force the bourgeoisie to fullfill it's historic task" but when he gets back to Russia in 1917 all the old Bolsheviks thought he'd lost his mind, he had to fight them on doing the October Revolution, and ruffled feathers bringing Trotsky into the Party. The Old Bolsh wanted to wait for the bourgeois revolution to carry itself out.

Gramsci wrote about this quite a bit and uses this to develop a lot of his theories like how the revolution in Russia succeeded because of the absense of 'civil society' whereas Civil Society helps hold up the state within Europe, these days with the non-profit industrial complex, easy to see how civil society is an active arm of counter revolution www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1917/12/revolution-against-capital.htm