V.I. Lenin

The National Liberation Movement in the East

Name: The National Liberation Movement in the East
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The National Liberation Movement in the East brings together Lenin’s central writings on the struggle against imperialism and colonial oppression, showing how the fight for national liberation in Asia and the colonial world was inseparable from the international struggle of the working class for socialism. Written across the years of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, these writings, which includes Lenin’s theses on the national and colonial question presented to the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, laid the theoretical foundation for the Bolsheviks’ insistence that the oppressed nations of the East were active participants in the world revolutionary process.

At the heart of this collection is Lenin’s insistence that support for the right of nations to self-determination must never be counterposed to, but must be organically bound up with, the fight for proletarian internationalism. Against both the social-chauvinism of the Second International, which subordinated colonial peoples to the interests of the “advanced” imperialist nations, and the bourgeois nationalism that sought to limit anti-colonial struggles to purely national aims, Lenin argued that the liberation of the East could only be achieved through the closest alliance between the workers of the imperialist countries and the oppressed masses of the colonial and semi-colonial world, united under the leadership of the international proletariat.

More than a century later, these writings remain indispensable for understanding the tasks facing the working class across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East today, as imperialism continues to generate national oppression on a mass scale. Lenin’s analysis cuts directly against the nationalist and reformist perspectives promoted by Stalinism and its heirs, which subordinated the colonial revolution to alliances with sections of the “progressive” bourgeoisie, with disastrous consequences for the working class.

Pages: 360

Author	V I Lenin
Format	Hardback
Publication Type	Books
Publisher	Progress Publishers

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.