Workers' Liberty

By Sacha Ismail

In "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed up", written in July 1916, Lenin wrote as follows:

By Max Shachtman
The organisation of the party will take the place of the party; the Central Committee will take the place of the organisation; and finally the dictator will take the place of the Central Committee.
Leon Trotsky, 1904

Predictions like this, Trotsky's, in a polemic written in 1904, have often been used to “explain” Stalinism as a logical continuation of Bolshevism.

Lenin called for the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a great expansion of democracy.

In this small article Lenin discusses the role of Russia and other European powers in China Lenin – “The War in China”. Changing what has to be changed, for example, bringing democracy rather than bringing Christianity, fighting insurgents and terrorists rather than rebels Lenin's article could today have been written by him about the involvement of the US and Uk in Iraq. His article also discusses the effect such actions have on the working classes of the countries involved in ways that are again familiar today. For example, he discusses the restrictions placed on workers similar to the way the "War on Terror" has been used to restrict Civil Liberties etc., he talks of the use of press stories attacking Chinese people, in the same way that the press today attack Muslims.

This leaflet was written by Vladimir Lenin after November 7(19) 1895, in connection with a strike of about 500 weavers against bad conditions and new measures introduced by the factory management.

Vladimir Lenin (1869-1924) was one of many thousands of young
students in Russia who joined revolutionary movements there in the
later years of the 19th century.

The history of capitalism is filled with examples
of nations conquering nations, taking control of
territories, plundering economies, downgrading
language and culture and treating the conquered
peoples as less than equal. Russia under the Tsar
was a "prison-house of nations": the ethnic
Russian majority oppressed other nationalities
within that country mercilessly.

"Under Jacobin-Bolshevik tactics, the whole international proletarian movement would be accused of moderatism before the revolutionary tribunal, and the lion head of Marx would be the first to fall under the knife of the guillotine." Predictions like this, in a polemic written by Trotsky in 1904, have often been used to “explain” Stalinism as a logical continuation of Bolshevism.

Lenin’s 1902 book, What Is To Be Done, is one of the most important of all the great texts of revolutionary Marxism. Its importance is especially great in the period we are now going through, when as a result of Stalinism and the defeats of the labour movement which it inflicted or precipitated, everywhere Marxism has come to be separated from the working class and its movement. The great task we face is once more to combine Marxism with the working class movements.

Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, written in late 1901 and early 1902, is one of the most important books ever written. Certainly it is one of the most important socialist texts in existence.

For agenda and reading click here

Leeds AWL meeting

A day school organised by London AWL which will examine Lenin's ideas and their relevance for revolutionaries today on a number of issues:

• How socialists relate to capitalist progress

  Reading;

• What sort of revolutionary party we need

  Reading - especially chapters 3 and 4;

• The state and revolution

  Reading - especially chapter 5/2;

• Revolutionaries and reformist mass labour movements

  Reading - especially sections 6 to 9

.

London AWL forum, with Simon Pirani

By John O'Mahony

This and subsequent articles are part of the series on 'The Roots of Bolshevism', but they are out of sequence. The articles printed so far in Solidarity have dealt mainly with the populist pre-history of the Russian revolutionary movement.

After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation

The revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern... A check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits the confident statement: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the programme, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin.

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!”’