“On Britain” brings together Lenin’s writings, articles, letters, and speeches on Britain, from his earliest analyses of British capitalism in the 1890s through to his final assessments of the post-war revolutionary crisis. Compiled from across his collected works, it traces the development of British imperialism as the classic model of an advanced capitalist power: the workshop of the world transformed into a parasitic, rentier, colonial empire, while following the parallel evolution of the British working class and its organisations.
At the heart of the book is Lenin’s explanation of how the immense super-profits of the British empire allowed the bourgeoisie to bribe a section of the working class, creating a “labour aristocracy” and cultivating an opportunist trade union bureaucracy and a Labour Party leadership wedded to gradualism, parliamentary cretinism, and class collaboration. His polemics against Hyndman, the Fabians, and the leaders of the Second International demonstrate that this opportunism was in no way accidental: it had its roots deep in the imperialist system and functioned to subordinate the workers’ movement to the interests of British capital, at home and across the empire, including in Ireland and India. Lenin shows how these misleaders’ betrayal culminated in their support for the imperialist slaughter of 1914–18.
Pages: 541
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.
