Vladimir Lenin

The road to Bolshevism: the Narodnik labour movement

Third in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924 Franco Venturi (in his book Roots of Revolution ) quotes a police report on the state of things in the St Petersburg working class after the impact of the populists (Narodniks. “The gross, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers. They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour... Without workers [the employers] can do nothing. “A realisation of this has now given rise to that spirit of solidarity among the workers which has...

The road to Bolshevism: Narodniks and workers

Second in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924. In the first instalment of this series ( Solidarity 697 ) I traced in broad outline the populist revolutionary environment in and from which Russian Marxism emerged. In the mid 19th century a great wave of radical, leftist, rebellion developed among the educated youth of Russia. It was “populist” in the sense of oriented to the working people as a whole, in the first place the mass of peasants and only secondarily the wage-workers. In 1874-6 the populists “went to the people” in the countryside with...

The road to Bolshevism

First of a series of articles around the 100th anniversary around the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), on 21 January 1924 The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to many observers to be an attempt to stand Marxism on its head. Those who said that included George Valentinovich Plekhanov and Pavel Borisovich Axelrod, the founders of the Russian Marxist movement, and Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative Marxist of the Second International (1889-1914). To others, who supported it, it seemed to have succeeded in turning on its head the Marxism long dominant in some labour movements. Antonio Gramsci...

The Communist Women’s Movement – high point of first wave feminism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Queer life in the Soviet Union

In May 1934, Joseph Stalin received a letter from a Scottish communist called Harry Whyte. Whyte was a journalist, working for the USSR ’s English-language paper in Moscow. He was also a gay man whose boyfriend had recently gone missing. His letter opened with a question, whose answer would shape the future of the Soviet gay community: “can a homosexual be considered a worthy member of the Communist Party?” Whyte’s decision to move to the Soviet Union in 1932 had partly been an attempt to escape Scotland’s anti-sodomy laws. The world’s first socialist state had removed all homophobic laws...

National struggles and inter-imperialist struggles: Lenin answers Stop the War

In defiance of the facts, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers' Party, Counterfire, etc, claim the war in Ukraine is primarily an inter-imperialist conflict between Russia and NATO, not a war of Ukrainian self-defence. (Some of Stop the War's supporters are straightforwardly pro-Russia, as was on display at its 25 February demo .) Couldn't the Ukraine conflict be transformed into an inter-imperialist war? Of course. That doesn't mean it is one now. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg's 1916 Junius Pamphlet , excerpts below, Vladimir Lenin addressed precisely this kind of issue. (At...

The valuable, critical Marxism of Paul Le Blanc

Paul Le Blanc has been one of the most prolific revolutionary socialist authors in recent decades, publishing scores of books, articles and reviews, in large part devoted to the early twentieth century Marxist tradition. Le Blanc’s work has numerous virtues. He writes clean and readable prose, makes theoretical issues accessible, represents various points of view objectively, puts the historical material in context and explains its relevance to present-day activism. He is honest about his own mistakes and the evolution of his views. And Le Blanc takes an ecumenical approach, willing to engage...

Use the coming weeks to study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

Studying Lenin's What Is To Be Done?

We'll be studying Lenin's What Is To Be Done? in the context of Lars Lih's commentary in Lenin Rediscovered , Thursdays 8pm (UTC+1) from 15 April to 27 May inclusive. Sign up on Eventbrite Zoomlink https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81679399952?pwd=WW9lRzF1M1l4VVVsWTZVOFdyTS84dz09 Study guide : click here to download as docx , and here to download as pdf . Please read the texts indicated as reading for the first session before you join the course. Schedule Session 1: Models and adversaries Reading: Extracts – German SPD model, Bernstein’s revisionism and Russian socialism before WITBD. Click here to...

How the Bolsheviks governed

The 1917 October Russian revolution produced the world’s first workers’ state. But how did the Bolsheviks govern? Historian Lara Douds has mined state and party archives in Moscow to produce an excellent book, Inside Lenin's Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State (2018) on how the central apparatus operated. In the early period of Soviet power, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) rather than party bodies governed. Douds argues that “in no way could the party central committee be viewed as the effective government of the nascent Soviet regime. Instead, it...

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