This remarkable compilation brings together Lenin’s most penetrating writings on the United States, spanning decades of analysis and correspondence. From his early studies of capitalist development in American agriculture to his incisive assessments of American democracy as a political form suited to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, Lenin demonstrates that the United States carries the most advanced and ruthless expression of the laws of capitalist society. These writings constitute an indispensable Marxist foundation for understanding the country that emerged from the twentieth century as the dominant imperialist power.
Central to this collection is Lenin’s analysis of the American working class, its immense revolutionary potential, the specific obstacles posed by the labour aristocracy and the entrenched two-party system, and the lessons to be drawn from the struggles of the most exploited layers of American society, including Black workers and immigrant labour. Lenin’s writings on the United States are inseparable from his broader theory of imperialism: the concentration of finance capital, the export of capital, and the division of the world among corporate monopoly’s all found their clearest expression in the rise of US imperialism, which Lenin recognised as a decisive factor in world politics long before Washington assumed its dominant role after World War 2.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and a central figure within the Marxist movement from the end of the 19th century until his death in 1924. In October 1917 he, along with Leon Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and established the first workers’ state.
In 1902 Lenin published What is to be Done?, a major theoretical work which critiqued the trade unionist perspective that sought to limit the struggles of workers to economic questions. He insisted on the necessity of a political solution to capitalist exploitation and outlined a theory of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class.
Lenin led the split with the Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, maintaining that the forthcoming revolution in Russia could not be of a solely bourgeois-democratic character. Over the course of the next 14 years he fought a long struggle against Menshevism. This ultimately culminated in his issuing in April 1917 of a set of political theses that unequivocally called for a proletarian socialist revolution in Russia.
Lenin was an ardent defender of internationalism. In 1914, when the German Social Democratic Party, the leading section of the Second International, abandoned Marxism by supporting German imperialism in World War I, Lenin fought against this national chauvinist perspective. In defense of the outlook of world revolution, he advocated the founding of the Third International. His Imperialism, published in 1917, identified the origins of the bloodbath engulfing Europe at the time in the inner workings of capitalism.
Lenin made major contributions to the development of Marxist philosophy, leaving behind a voluminous body of writings. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was his defense of dialectical materialism and a withering critique of efforts by figures with ties to the Bolshevik Party to substitute idealist forms of thinking for materialist philosophy.
Lenin died in January 1924 after a series of strokes, which had left him incapacitated for many months prior. In his Last Testament, suppressed for many years by the rising Soviet bureaucracy, he called for the removal of Joseph Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
