This invaluable book contains a selection of Lenin’s writings on critical issues of socialist theory and the historical and political experience of the working class and revolutionary movement.
The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism is a short but incisive explanation of the roots of Marxism. Lenin points to Marx’s dialectical materialist philosophy, the source of capitalist exploitation in the extraction of “surplus value” from the working class and the “class struggle with the working class as the historically formed subject,” which can—and, owing to its social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating a new society.
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is Lenin’s assessment of the characteristics and contradictions that had built up within global capitalism leading to the outbreak of World War I. It was critical in his approach to the Russian Revolution and his theoretical and political unification with Leon Trotsky.
The State and Revolution was written while Lenin was in hiding from the persecution of the Kerensky government in 1917, in the heat of preparation for the October Revolution. In July he wrote to Lev Kamenev: “If they bump me off, I ask you to publish my little notebook Marxism on the State”. The work is Lenin’s attempt to clarify the party and the advanced layers of workers about the nature of the state and as preparation for the seizure of power by the working class.
This volume also includes Two tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution; Party Organisation and Party Literature; On the Slogan for a United States of Europe; and Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder.
Pages: 781
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.