Present-day (twentieth-century) imperialism has given a few advanced countries an exceptionally privileged position, which, everywhere in the Second International, has produced a certain type of traitor, opportunist, and social-chauvinist leaders, who champion the interests of their own craft, their own section of the labour aristocracy.
Vladimir Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile DisorderRead More »
Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.
What Is To Be Done
Describing the October Revolution in Russia, John Reed, in the prologue of his extraordinary book Ten Days that Shook the World, describes the forces vying for power, in the midst of a Revolution that had not yet managed to define its destiny.
On the one hand, what he calls the possessing classes who aspired to remove the Czar and replace him with a bourgeois power, in the style of the Western democracies of the United States and France; on the other, the Bolsheviks, who saw the Revolution as based on the class struggle and insisted on the necessity of the Soviets taking power.Read More »
The question of the attitude of the Social-Democrats, or working-class democrats, to the bourgeois democrats is an old and yet ever new question. It is old because it has been an issue ever since the inception of Social-Democracy. Its theoretical principles were elucidated in the earliest Marxist literature, in the Communist Manifesto and in Capital. It is ever new because every step in the development of every capitalist country produces a peculiar, original blending of different shades of bourgeois democracy and different trends within the socialist movement.Read More »
Lenin lives again in the western German city of Gelsenkirchen, which saw a new statue of the revolutionary Communist leader erected on Saturday in the face of opposition from city authorities.
The statue is the first monument to Lenin ever in the territory that used to be West Germany and the first to rise anywhere on German soil since the fall of socialist East Germany (officially the German Democratic Republic) in 1989.
It came after a lengthy legal battle which found in favor of the small Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD). The court issued a ruling allowing the party to erect the statue on private property. The monument was originally made in Czechoslovakia in 1957.
He did not cease to investigate, to study, and to work on charting the revolution’s course.
There has been no gladiator who fought more ideological battles than Lenin. It is surprising how many he fought in the ideological arena. His history cannot be compared to that of other men who accomplished extraordinary feats, in terms of personal merit.
Some time ago, on another April 22, when we remember Lenin on his birthday, one of those people who devote their time to chasing every voice that expresses disagreement with the dominant discourse on the digital social media, questioned my thinking with the “argument” that the Russian revolutionary was old and outdated.
Shortly thereafter, the “Arab springs” and mobilizations of the “indignant” in the Western world led more than one shrewd publisher to re-publish Lenin’s “What is to be done?” and the very influential Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who had already published his Repeat Lenin, spoke openly of the cursed “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
On Havana’s Lenin Hill, a small group of trade union leaders, headed by Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, Party Political Bureau member and general secretary of the Cuban Workers Federation (CTC), dedicated a floral tribute to the legendary Bolshevik, who played a key role in the Russian Revolution, the greatest lesson in the annals of history of what the emancipated working class can achieve in unity of thought and action, guided by socialist principles.
We have created a Soviet type of state and by that we have ushered in a new era in world history, the era of the political rule of the proletariat, which is to supersede the era of bourgeois rule. (Notes of a Publicist)
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement .
This thought cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity. (What is to be done?)
Journal of People 