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On 09.08.2015 21:14, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
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Ken Hiebert located what I was looking for it is probably apocryphal.
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where
decades happen" -- attributed to V.I. Lenin.
While this quote doesn't seem to appear in the collected works, a Google
search of MIA's Lenin archive throws up a couple of hits for a likely
source for the paraphrase:
In the space of a few months we passed through a number of stages of
collaboration with the bourgeoisie and of shaking off petty-bourgeois
illusions, for which other countries have required decades. In the
course of a few weeks, having overthrown the bourgeoisie, we crushed its
open resistance in civil war.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/11.htm
Months of revolution sometimes educate citizens more quickly and fully
than decades of political stagnation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/jul/10.htm
Inthe history of revolutions there come to light contradictions that
have ripened for decades and centuries. Life becomes unusually eventful.
The masses, which have always stood in the shade and have therefore
often been ignored and even despised by superficial observers, enter the
political arena as active combatants. These masses are learning in
practice, and before the eyes. of the world are taking their first
tentative steps, feeling their way, defining their objectives, testing
themselves and the theories of all their ideologists. These masses are
making heroic efforts to rise to the occasion and cope with the gigantic
tasks of world significance imposed upon them by history; and however
great individual defeats may be, however shattering to us the rivers of
blood and the thousands of victims, nothing will ever compare in
importance with this direct training that the masses and the classes
receive in the course of the revolutionary struggle itself. The history
of this struggle is measured in days.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/rd/1.htm
Fordecades they did not become tired of waiting, but now they have
become tired after a few weeks; they were not tired of waiting while
they were asleep or vegetating, while the external circumstances of
their lives contained nothing directly changing their existence beyond
recognition, their mood, their consciousness, their will. They have
become tired of waiting after a few weeks, now that the thirst for
action has awakened in them with incredible rapidity, and the most
eloquent and sympathetic words, even from such a lofty platform as the
Duma, have begun to seem dreary, boring and uninteresting. The workers
have become tired of waiting—the wave of strikes has begun to mount
higher and higher. The peasants have become tired of waiting; no
persecutions and tortures, exceeding the horrors of the medieval
Inquisition, can stop their struggle for the land, for freedom. The
sailors in Kronstadt and Sevastopol have become tired of waiting, as
well as the infantrymen in Kursk, Poltava, Tula and Moscow, the
guardsmen in Krasnoye Selo, and even the Cossacks.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/jun/08.htm
A similar search of the Trotsky Archive produces the following hits:
The economic change of society is very slow and is measured by centuries
and decades. But when the economic conditions are radically changed, a
transformation of the retarded psychological factors can be produced
very quickly. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/11/revsit.htm
Political democracy is an essential phase in the development of the
working masses – with the important proviso that in some cases the
working masses may remain in this phase for several decades, whereas in
another case the revolutionary situation may enable the masses to
liberate themselves from the prejudices of political democracy even
before its institutions have come into being.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/pre.htm
At the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks remained within the Soviets as
an insignificant minority. For months – and in a period when months
counted for years, if not for decades – they tolerated a conciliationist
majority in the Soviets, even though they already represented an
overwhelming majority in the factory committees.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/xx/tuunity.htm
The revolution has its own system of chronology, where months are
decades and years are whole centuries.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch13.htm
This last statement by Trotsky, actually seems to be closer to the
phrase being looked for than any other - except perhaps from the second
quote from Lenin above.
Einde O'Callaghan
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