No.413904
My read is that he was working for the Germans, but hoped that their defeat in the war would trigger a revolution and that Germany would turn communist. Lenin for sure talked up German culture and philosophy, over Russian culture and Russian nationalism. He was an internationalist who saw the future of communism as a global movement and a world federation, if it could happen. The Germans wanted the war on the Eastern front to end with concessions, and hoped they could force the British and French to make those concessions permanent. That's what the Germans wanted, and Lenin was the only one with any sort of support in Russia who would have made peace.
The German high command knew they could suppress the communist movement in Germany, whereas Lenin was banking on the communist movement succeeding in Germany if he wanted communism to win in the long term. In the 20s, the capitalist powers knew they needed something big to secure their domination, and that's when fascism went on the offensive and the oligarchs of capitalism took on the appearance that they take today. There has been throughout the communist movement's history an inability to admit just how much the deck was stacked against communist victory from the outset, though how clear that was is only available to us through hindsight. There was this pernicious myth that the capitalists could be beaten and cajoled like animals, but the capitalists were perfectly aware of what they were doing and why they did it. It's infected leftist thinking for the past 150 years, and the philosophies of the left render them incapable of grasping where the failure rests. Those on the left who could overcome this failing would, in the following decades, diminish. Communism was failed first and foremost by its intellectuals, and by the intellectual class as a whole. The people were willing to accept communism, even if they didn't really like it or get it, but the communist movement came to be conflated with its intelligentsia rather than its people. The intelligentsia claimed that they could not fail, but they could only be failed, and pawned this responsibility off to the common people. The people in the communist countries were aware of this trap, including many of the intellectuals who saw this wasn't going well, but the bulk of the intelligentsia were invested in their status and philosophy more than actually winning, and by the 1970s the backsliding was ready to take place. The intellectuals didn't want to fight capitalism, but wanted to join in the fun, having long ago decided that the commoners didn't deserve communism. All that remained was the savaging of any memory of what communism would have meant as a mass, solidaristic politics, and replacing it with some Zizek ops and cardboard cut-outs of the old greats. Again, the intellectuals today calling themselves communists bear responsibility for facilitating this backsliding. They are assisted by a global world order in which the positions of eugenics have been enshrined, and therefore, even if the commoners don't like the liberal capitalist system, they are not permitted in any serious way to question eugenics. To question eugenics meaningfully is to declare oneself in rebellion to the transnational state of affairs.