/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2920506
>Freedom to trade in grain is a return to capitalism, to the full power of the landowners and capitalists, to a savage struggle between people for profit, to the "free" enrichment of the few, to the poverty of the masses, to the eternal bondage we see in all bourgeois states, including the freest and most democratic republics.

Lenin, Freedom to Trade in Grain, August 1919

http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/FTG19.html

>[…]we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus-food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution […] The New Economic Policy means substituting a tax for the requisitioning of food; it means reverting to capitalism to a considerable extent […] for the abolition of the surplus-food appropriation system means allowing the peasants to trade freely in their surplus agricultural produce, in whatever is left over after the tax is collected—and the tax takes only a small share of that produce. The peasants constitute a huge section of our population and of our entire economy, and that is why capitalism must grow out of this soil of free trading.

Lenin, The New Economic Policy, October 1921

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm

I don't draw the comparison between these two quotes to say that Lenin was wrong or bad or stupid, on the contrary, I think the contradictions of actually seizing and wielding power are more complex than what revolutionary theory can prepare you for. This does not mean that every last bit of revisionism and opportunism are justified, but it also means you shouldn't dismiss every hard decision that someone makes in real life as revisionism or opportunism, no?