>>2692984I've been reading a book, "Armed Insurrection", put out by the soviet union/comintern (mostly written by Tukhachevsky), and it seems to draw the totally wrong conclusions from their recent history. Like the bolsheviks spent a long time building up the Red Guards, and that's ultimately what saved the soviets and won them the popularity to lead them and thus win over the soldiers, the rest being history. The book, which tries to be a guide for other communists to follow, focuses heavily on slogans and showcases the comintern-pushed totally unprepared insurrection in germany in 1921 or something where they literally armed union workers with clubs and then tried to start a country-wide insurrection that would lead to them taking power by simply declaring it in one city where they didn't even know if they had any armed (with clubs!) and supportive workers. The literally fired the guy in charge when he started training people with guns. Then put him back in charge and told him "insurrection by tomorrow, glhf". And it failed, obviously. They seemed to have no clue what Lenin's method actually was.
This fact seems super relevant to the question of tactics among revolutionary communists, especially maoists, who contrast the "leninist insurrectionary" method with mao's ppw. Even the comintern didn't know what lenin's methods were and how to successfully replicate urban insurrection! Plus there was no contest of governments in germany at the time, huge L. Imagine if the bolsheviks simply declared an insurrection before the soviets even existed and without the militia that stood down Kornilov. In September 1917 lenin writes about how it would have been wrong to begin insurrection even a few months earlier, in July!
So my point is… the words of our past revolutionaries might be worse than worthless, actually dangerous, if we don't analyze them in context of the actual history of what happened and base our understanding on that.