Vladimir Lenin

Chapter 4: Supplementary Explanations by Engels

The Housing Question Controversy with the Anarchists Letter to Bebel Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme The 1891 Preface to Marx's "The Civil War in France" Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy Prefaces Chapter 1: Class Society and the State> Chapter 2: The Experience of 1848-51 Chapter 3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis Chapter 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State Chapter 6: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists Postscript Contents: Lenin's State and Revolution Marx gave the fundamentals concerning the significance of the...

Chapter 3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis

What Made the Communards' Attempt Heroic? What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine? Abolition of Parliamentarism Organisation of National Unity Aboloition of the Parasite State Prefaces Chapter 1: Class Society and the State> Chapter 2: The Experience of 1848-51 Chapter 4: Supplementary Explanations by Engels Chapter 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State Chapter 6: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists Postscript Contents: Lenin's State and Revolution 1. What Made the Communards' Attempt Heroic? It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the...

Chapter 2: The experience of 1848-51

The Experience of 1848-51 The Eve of Revolution The Revolution Summed Up The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852 Prefaces Chapter 1: Class Society and the State> Chapter 3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis Chapter 4: Supplementary Explanations by Engels Chapter 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State Chapter 6: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists Postscript Contents: Lenin's State and Revolution 1. The Eve of Revolution The first works of mature Marxism — The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto — appeared just on the eve...

Chapter 1: The State: a Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms

Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc. The State: an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class The “Withering Away” of the State, and Violent Revolution Prefaces Chapter 2: The Experience of 1848-51 Chapter 3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis Chapter 4: Supplementary Explanations by Engels Chapter 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State Chapter 6: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists Postscript Contents: Lenin's State and Revolution What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the...

Lenin: the practical theoretician

Like everything else in nature, Lenin was born, has developed, has grown. 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! But I do not here intend to compare the shape of Lenin’s skull at the age of 10, 20 or 30 with the skull of that man who presided over the sessions of the Central Committee of the Party or the Council of Peoples’ Commissars. Here it is not a question of Lenin as...

The theory of Permanent Revolution and Ireland: is there a socialist quintessence in Irish nationalism?

[This is a copy-edited and slightly expanded version of the text in Solidarity replying to Lysaght .] A dozen years on from the “Good Friday Agreement” (GFA) things in Northern Ireland are far from settled. The Good Friday system is far from stable. The political system set up by the GFA is an intricate network of bureaucratised Catholic-Protestant sectarianism. Communal antagonism is still so strong that it takes 60 or so permanent walls to keep active communalism from erupting into violence across Belfast. Militarist republican activity is still a major factor in Northern Ireland. It is a...

What to do with 'What is to be done?'

Review of Lars T. Lih's Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be done? in context (2008 Haymarket).

Lenin’s What is to be done? (WITBD) ranks as one of his most famous books and it is a text that revolutionary socialists have long used to educate ourselves. However our understanding of the book will never...

Was the 1916 Rising a "Putsch"? Lenin, Radek, Trotsky.

[This is part of a polemic about the Stalinist PDP led army coup in Afghanistan, in April 1978, with "J-J" (Jack Conrad/John Bridge/John Chamberlain) of the Weekly Worker Group "CPGB"). J-J was for many years a fervent supporter of the Russian invaders and their Afghan Stalinist tools in Afghanistan. "Engin" is a Turkish Stalinist whose views on the Afghan coup J-J followed.] Like Engin, J-J "proves" that the Saur [April] coup was not a coup but a revolution by obliterating the distinction between a revolution and a coup. Being a karaoke Leninist and not a Marxist, he rests on quotations and...

Why Lenin got Ireland wrong, part 2

For decades Lenin’s small body of work on Ireland, filtered through a number of Stalinist pamphlets purporting to expound the ideas of “Marx, Engels and Lenin” on Ireland, has helped shape socialists’ views. In this, the second article in a series, Sean Matgamna argues that this “Marxist dogmatism” has meant, in fact, giving up on any serious attempt at Marxist analysis of Ireland. Click here for part 1 of the article. The attempt… to ‘fix’ for all time the point of view Marx held in a different epoch was an attempt to use the letter of Marxism against the spirit of Marxism. Lenin, The Right...

Marxism and the Irish revolution

The striking thing about this collection ("The Communists and the Irish Revolution", edited by Rayner Lysaght) is that one of the key documents reproduced here "The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination", 1915 — one of Lenin's most important texts on the national question — has been bowdlerised so that the meaning of what Lenin wrote is transformed into its very opposite. The words in square brackets below have been excised from Lysaght's text: Socialists of “the oppressing nations must demand the freedom of the oppressed nations to secede. for otherwise...

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