Andrew Taylor: On post leninist CP's and their captivity to dominant cultural values, 22 Oct 2009

Communist parties without some inflection by Lenin's thought remind me of the liberal bourgeoise Christian sects that are embarrassed by the otherness of Jesus...Often such groups become little more than acculturated pieces of the American domestic furniture.

In their zeal to be accepted, these political and religious sects often shed their justification for being along with their humiliating vestiges of continuity with the 'otherness' of a founding thinker from another time and place.

In forsaking the synthetic dialectical task of interpreting and translating the strange world of Lenin's October to a very different new context, they lose their ethos: they no longer 'brush history against the grain'(Ernst Bloch)...