Conversation with Comrade Lenin

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin-
a photograph
on the whiteness of wall.

The stubble slides upward
above his lip
as his mouth
jerks open in speech.
The  tense
creases of brow
hold thought
in their grip,
immense brow
matched by thought immense.
A forest of flags,
raised-up hands thick as grass…
Thousands are marching
beneath him…
Transported,
alight with joy,
I rise from my place,
eager to see him,
hail him,
report to him!
“Comrade  Lenin,
I report to you –
(not a dictate of office,
the heart’s prompting alone)

This hellish work
that we’re out to do

will be done
and  is already being done.
We  feed and we clothe
and give light to the needy,

the quotas
for coal
and for iron
fulfill,
but there is
any amount
of bleeding
muck
and  rubbish
around  us still.

Without you,
there’s many
have got out of hand,

all the sparring
and  squabbling
does one in.
There’s scum
in plenty
hounding our land,

outside the borders
and  also
within.

Try to
count ’em
and
tab ’em –
it’s no go,

there’s all kinds,
and  they’re
thick as nettles:
kulaks,
red tapists,
and,
down the row,
drunkards,
sectarians,
lickspittles.
They strut around
proudly
as peacocks,
badges and fountain pens
studding their chests.
We’ll lick the lot of ’em-
but
to lick ’em
is no easy job
at the very best.
On snow-covered lands
and on stubbly fields,
in smoky plants
and on factory sites,
with you in our hearts,
Comrade  Lenin,
we  build,
we  think,
we breathe,
we  live,
and we fight!”
Awhirl with events,
packed with jobs one too many,
the day slowly sinks
as the night shadows fall.
There are two in the room:
I
and Lenin –
a photograph
on the whiteness of wall.

The Theoretical Significance of Lenin’s Imperialism

Prabhat Patnaik

People’s Democracy | January 21, 2024

THE significance of Lenin’s Imperialism lay in the fact that it totally revolutionised the perception of the revolution. Marx and Engels had already visualised the possibility of colonial and dependent countries having revolutions of their own even before the proletarian revolution in the metropolis, but these two sets of revolutions were seen to be disjoint; and both the trajectory of the revolution in the periphery and its relation to the socialist revolution in the metropolis remained unclear. Lenin’s Imperialism not only linked the two sets of revolutions, but also made the revolution in the peripheral countries a part of the process of mankind’s moving towards socialism.

It therefore saw the revolutionary process as an integrated whole; it visualised one single world revolutionary process, which, starting from a break at the weakest link in the chain, no matter where that link may be located, would overthrow the entire system. And it also affirmed that the time for such a world revolution had arrived as capitalism had reached a stage where it would thenceforth embroil mankind in catastrophic wars: it had “covered” the entire world leaving no “empty spaces”, completely partitioning it into spheres of influence of different metropolitan powers, so that only a repartitioning of the world could now occur; and such re-partitioning could occur only through inter-imperialist wars of which the first world war was a classic example.

Lenin, state and revolution: an introduction

Dragan Plavšić

Counterfire | January 15, 2024

Portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Source: MirekT – Wikicommon / cropped from original / shared under license CC BY 3.0

As part of our series commemorating 100 years since Lenin’s death, we repost Dragan Plavšić’s take on a classic text

One of the defining moments of Lenin’s political life was the day in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, when news reached him that the German Social Democratic Party (as socialist parties were then called) had voted in the Reichstag to support the German imperial state in a war between plundering empires. 

The shock of this betrayal was so great that Lenin initially thought news of it was fake. After all, the German Party was, and had been since the days of Marx and Engels, the largest, indeed the leading, socialist party in the world, and its leaders had repeatedly voted for anti-war resolutions at international congresses, vowing to do all in their power to stop war from breaking out.

Reflections on Lenin’s Dialectics

Pyotr Kondrashov

Monthly Review | 2023, Volume 74, Number 08 (January 2023)

Lenin (Petrov-Vodkin). Public Domain, Link.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin made an enormous contribution to the development of virtually all the elements of Marxism. But of particular importance, in our opinion, is his development of materialistic dialectics, carried out in all directions: from methodology, dialectic logic, and dialectics of the objective material world to the dialectics of the revolutionary process and of building a socialist society.

Dialectics can be understood, in Lenin’s terms, in at least three scientific senses, namely, how:

1. the property of living and nonliving nature, mind, and society of developing through contradictions and removing them (“objective dialectics,” as Lenin understood this after Frederick Engels);
2. the doctrine of this property of being and the manifestation of this in a particular sphere as well as a system of categories and laws by which the objective dialectics of the world are grasped and reflected in thinking (“subjective dialectics“);
3. the method by which the objective and subjective world is investigated.

An anniversary West would rather forget

M. K. Bhadrakumar

Indian Punchline | January 16, 2024

On the 75th anniversary of the battle that lifted the Siege of Leningrad in World War 2, people walk in snowfall to the Motherland monument to place flowers at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery where the victims were buried, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 26, 2019

An epochal anniversary from the annals of modern history is coming up in another ten days that remains a living memory for the Russian people. The Siege of Leningrad, arguably the most gruesome episode of the Second World War, which lasted for 900 days, was finally broken by the Soviet Red Army on 27th January 1944, eighty years ago to be exact. 

The siege endured by more than three million people, of whom nearly one half died, most of them in the first six months when the temperature fell to 30° below zero. It was an apocalyptic event. Civilians died from starvation, disease and cold. Yet it was a heroic victory. Leningraders never tried to surrender even though food rations were reduced to a few slices of bread mixed with sawdust, and the inhabitants ate glue, rats — and even each other — while the city went without water, electricity, fuel or transportation and was being shelled daily. 

“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One

Edward J. Curtin, Jr

The Greanville Post | January 19, 2024

The Biden and Sunak Show. Pomp and circumstance, and the constant flattery of the kept media cannot erase the fact these two men are imperial butchers. They belong before a Nuremberg tribunal.

You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness.  In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo.  The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.

To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded.  Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war.  These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.

While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:

Thousands marched in honor of heroic communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin

In Defense of Communism | January 15, 2024

More than 3,000 people of all ages, workers, men and women, participated in a large rally in Berlin, commemorating the 105th anniversary of the murder of heroic communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht were brutally murdered on January 15th, 1919 by  paramilitary troops of the social democratic government and the German bourgeoisie shortly after the violent suppression of the Berlin workers’ revolution. 

Davos and the melting world economy

Davos and the melting world economy

‘A Minimum-Wage Increase Can Benefit the Whole Economy’

Janine Jackson interviewed EPI’s Sebastian Martinez Hickey about the minimum wage for the January 12, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson

Fair | January 17, 2024

Janine Jackson: It is partly due to corporate news media’s misleading, invidious presentation of the minimum wage as about individuals—“Who’s working these jobs, why don’t they get skills to move up to something better?”—that we have trouble seeing and asking societal questions instead.

Like, why should a country have jobs whose full-time workers don’t earn enough to not be impoverished? Why is a company whose waged employees require public assistance to keep their heads above water deemed a “successful” company? Why is it a fight to get wages higher than they were generations ago, when profits are not likewise constrained?

The story today is that despite the misinformation, many people do know what the minimum wage means—to individuals and families, certainly, but also to society as a whole. And they’re fighting through that often-skewed public debate to get, most recently, a raise in the minimum wage in some 22 states.

Sebastian Martinez Hickey has been tracking wage issues as a researcher for the Economic Analysis and Research Network team at the Economic Policy Institute. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sebastian Martinez Hickey.

UN projects food inflation to go up in 2024 due to El Nino, rising geopolitical tensions

May impact food insecurity, poverty; scaling up climate financing critical to help developing countries cope with climate impact

Kiran Pandey

Down To Earth | January 10, 2024

 Photo: iStock_

Global inflation is estimated to have dropped to 5.7 per cent in 2023 and a continued decrease in inflation to 3.9 per cent has been projected for 2024, according to a recent United Nations report. However, food inflation is expected to go up this year too, which may leave many poorer and food insecure. 

While core inflation has been moderating since early 2023, particularly in several Latin American and East Asian economies, food inflation remains elevated. Food inflation increased in the second half of 2023, especially in Africa, South Asia and Western Asia.

The decline in inflation was attributed to ongoing moderation in international commodity prices and a decrease in demand due to monetary tightening by the UN. However,  food insecurity in developing nations has been significantly exacerbated by high food prices, the report said.

At least 238 million people experienced acute food insecurity in 2023 — an increase of 21.6 million people from the previous year, as per estimates in the UN’ World Economic Situation and Prospects 2024, launched January 4, 2024.