I think what Lenin and Trotsky saw as a post-capitalist society is very different to what Marx saw, for example. As i've shown, Lenin thought socialism was state-capitalism meant to serve the whole people. Trotsky thought the USSR was a workers state with the wrong leadership.
Personally I don't like this type of stuff - what were their intentions. Their intentions were very clear when they shut down soviets almost immediately, when they removed democracy from the army, when they declared martial law in many places in early 1918, when the banned opposition, when they reintroduced capitalist relations in factories etc etc.
This is a typical Bolshevik, Leninist and elitist view though. It's claiming that the workers could not possibly organise things themselves. The Bolsheviks couldn't let the majority have power, because they wouldn't know what to do with it.
Well, all of this is fine if you believe the Russia revo degenerated purely because of external circumstances. I don't. I think blame should be placed on the feet of the Bolsheviks as well as the imperialists, the size of the peasantry, the backwardness of Russia etc etc.
So no, Leninism has failed once. Why try to keep it alive?
