Vladimir Lenin

Marx and Lenin on press freedom

Marx analysed the problem of a free press thoroughly in two long essays which are to be found in the first volume of the collected edition of his works. For Marx “the right to think and speak the truth” was an elementary human right and freedom of the press — as he said — merely “human freedom in practice”. Marx recognized that human freedom is made up of a complex of interdependent freedoms. “Each form of freedom”, he said, “postulates the other in the same way as one limb of the body postulates another. Whenever one particular freedom is threatened, freedom itself is threatened. Freedom is...

Lenin Rediscovered

A reading group in Brisbane is currently studying Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done In Context . These are some notes from its discussions. Lih's book has formidable documentation (867 pages). Its basic idea is simple. Lenin's argument in What Is To Be Done? is for urgency and decisiveness in the creation of a working-class socialist party in Russia on the model that the German Social Democratic Party had mapped out at its Erfurt Congress of 1891. His charge against other socialists is not that they over-estimating workers' political awareness, but that they under-estimate...

Yakov Sverdlov: “The best type of Bolshevik”

Yakov Mikhaylovich Sverdlov (1885-1919) was a leading Bolshevik organiser and, as chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, was the first de facto president of the Russian Soviet Republic. It would only be a small exaggeration to say that a biography of Sverdlov is in large measure a history of the birth, development and eventual triumph of the Bolsheviks, so involved was he in every crucial stage in the party's life until 1919. From allying with Lenin at the 1903 Second Congress of the Russia Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) over organisation questions (which led to...

Are Marxists pro-liberty?

Normally I wouldn’t dream of grassing up the publishers of this newspaper to the Labour Party bureaucracy. But after nearly 20 years, even the dimmest witchhunter has probably by now twigged the subterfuge that saw evil clandestine Trot entrists the Socialist Organiser Alliance rebrand themselves as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The name is that bit at odds from the usual unimaginative titles deployed by far-left outfits. What’s more, it has a subtly different political flavour. That much was apparent to me the first time I saw a somewhat shy and retiring young AWLer — yeah, I know...

Lenin the dreamer

Lars T Lih’s excellent short biography of Lenin is a welcome addition to the serious socialist literature on classical Marxist history. The book’s chief merits are its strongly contextual interpretation of Lenin’s life and its readable style. Lih comments that most recent studies of Lenin seem to be based on the methodology of “nothing but warts”. We’ve all seen the stereotypical image of Lenin: the bloodthirsty monster of the liberal, anarchist and conservative imagination. Pessimistic, voluntaristic, elitist, conspiratorial. Lenin who like Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov was sure to have slept on...

Lenin the dreamer

“The dreamer himself sees in his dream a great and sacred truth; and he works, works conscientiously and with full strength, for his dream to stop being just a dream. His whole life is arranged according to one guiding idea and it is filled with the most strenuous activity. He is happy, despite...

Forum - March 1995

Robin Blick, author of The Seeds of Evil: Lenin and the origins of Bolshevik elitism , replies to Al Richardson's review of his book in Socialist Organiser no. 615, and Martin Thomas replies to Alan Johnson on the issue of Marxists, parliamentary democracy and workers' councils. Click here to download article as pdf .

Reviews: John Palmer; SWP; Foley; Wates and Knevvit; Pauline Kael; Davis and Huttenback; Liebman; Marquand

Martin Thomas reviews "Europe without America", by John Palmer. Clive Bradley reviews "Revolutionary Rehearsals", published by the SWP's Bookmarks. Stan Crooke reviews "Ireland, the case for British disengagement", by Conor Foley. Neil Stonelake reviews "Community Architecture", by Nick Wates and Charles Knevvit. Belinda Weaver reviews "State of the Art", by Pauline Kael. Rhodri Evans reviews "Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: the Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912", by Lance Davis, Robert Huttenback, and Susan Gray Davis. Gerry Bates reviews "Leninism Under Lenin", by Marcel...

Forging the weapon, part 1

An account of the history of the Marxist movement in Russia, first published at the beginning of 1960 in the journal Labour Review . This first part takes the story up to 1906. Click here to download pdf. Click here for 'Forging the Weapon' part 2 .

B is for Bolshevism

A complete account of Bolshevism would require many shelves-worth of books. But the term “Bolshevism” and its variants are thrown about with such a mix of enthusiastic and antagonistic abandon that some form of straightforward understanding is very important. One widely-held version of “Bolshevism” claims that the Russian Marxist movement split into two factions (the other being the “Mensheviks”) over the question of “what sort of party” at the 1903 congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party (RDSLP). The split is posed as between the Bolsheviks who advocated building a revolutionary...

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