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Praise for Paul Le Blanc's Lenin and the Revolutionary Party: "A work of unusual strength and coherence, inspired not by academic neutrality but by the deep conviction that there is much to learn from the actual ideas and experiences of Lenin." —Michael Löwy As a leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin was perhaps the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century. These clearly written essays offer an account of his life and times, a lively view of his personality, and a stimulating engagement with his ideas. Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche College and has written widely on radical movements.
There are few more divisive names in history than the Soviet communist Leon Trotsky. To some, he was a betrayer, a hypocrite, and a totalitarian, and yet to many others he was a revolutionary of high esteem, who battled an outdated, oppressive dynasty and helped to usher in a new political era, and whose name became a political moniker: trotskyist. Whether colored by disdain or admiration, one thing is certain: Trotsky was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. In Leon Trotsky, Paul Le Blanc delves deep into Trotsky’s life and relationships to reveal and make sense of his complex character and decisive actions. Interweaving dramatic historical events with examinations of Trotsky’s multi-faceted personality, he offers incisive views of the key facets of Trotsky’s life: his involvement with Soviet bureaucracy, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler in the years before World War II. Illuminating Trotsky’s personal and political struggles and achievements, this balanced portrait will be invaluable to history students or anyone interested in the extraordinary lives that made up the twentieth century.
Author : V. I. Lenin Publisher : Verso Books Page : 209 pages File Size : 45,6 Mb Release : 2024-01-30 Category : Political Science ISBN : 9781804292877
Lenin's most important and controversial theoretical text Lenin’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional socialist concept of the state on its head, arguing for the need to smash the organs of the bourgeois state to create a ‘semi-state’ of soviets, or workers’ councils, in which ordinary people would take on the functions of the state machine in a new and radically democratic manner. This new edition includes a substantial introduction by renowned theorist Antonio Negri, who argues for the continued relevance of these ideas.
Marxism has been the most pervasive and widespread ideological phenomenon of our times, but seldom, if ever, has it been found in its form. Whenever the Marxist ideology has been historically significant, it has been so as a beneficiary and associate of another set of political beliefs and passions. As a contender for power it seeks to express the dreams and yearnings of societies caught in the painful process of modernization and industrialization. In power it tends to pay lip service to its lofty goals, but associates them with old-fashioned nationalism. Practice does not reflect theory. Ruling elites and parties surpass traditional capitalism in their dedication to political centralization and industrialism at all costs. This revised edition of Adam Ulam's standard work retains the author's summary and critique of Marx's historical, economic, and political arguments. Ulam then examines the relationship of Marxism to other schools of contemporary socialism and to other radical and revolutionary theories. He traces the development of Marxian thought, explains why it has been the potent force in certain societies–while in other societies its influence has been insignificant–and analyzes how Marxism and Leninism have affected the shaping of Russian Communism. Finally Ulam looks at Marxism in the future: the role it will play in the development of the Soviet Union, and how it will affect the contemporary crisis of liberal institutions in the West.
Lenin and the Revolutionary Party by Paul Le Blanc Pdf
For generations, historians of the right, left, and center have all debated the best way to understand V. I. Lenin’s role in shaping the Bolshevik party in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. At their worst, these studies locate his influence in the forcefulness of his personality. At their best, they show how Lenin moved other Bolsheviks through patient argument and political debate. Yet remarkably few have attempted to document the ways his ideas changed, or how they were in turn shaped by the party he played such a central role in building. In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.
Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. Beginning with a broad and informative survey of scholarship on V.I. Lenin and “Leninism,” Le Blanc goes on to explore the multifaceted “collective” qualities of the Russian Bolshevik organization. He then turns his attention to several of its central figures as well as a rich variety of activist-intellectuals who in one way or another continued to engage with Lenin’s perspectives after his death, including Leon Trotsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, and Daniel Bensaïd. The volume concludes by considering related questions which have more recently posed problems within left-wing organizations, gesturing toward the dynamics and needs of future struggles.
Published in the centenary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, No Less Than Mystic is a fresh and iconoclastic history of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for a generation uninterested in Cold War ideologies and stereotypes. Although it offers a full and complete history of Leninism, 1917, the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, the book devotes more time than usual to the policies and actions of the socialist alternatives to Bolshevism – to the Menshevik Internationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Jewish Bundists and the anarchists. It prioritises Factory Committees, local Soviets, the Womens’ Zhenotdel movement, Proletkult and the Kronstadt sailors as much as the statements and actions of Lenin and Trotsky. Using the neglected writings and memoirs of Mensheviks like Julius Martov, SRs like Victor Chernov, Bolshevik oppositionists like Alexandra Kollontai and anarchists like Nestor Makhno, it traces a revolution gone wrong and suggests how it might have produced a more libertarian, emancipatory socialism than that created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Although the book broadly covers the period from 1903 (the formation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) to 1921 (the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion) and explains why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, it continually examines the Leninist experiment through the lens of a 21st century, de-centralised, ecological, anti-productivist and feminist socialism. Throughout its narrative it interweaves and draws parallels with contemporary anti-capitalist struggles such as those of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinean “Recovered Factories”, Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Intersectional feminists, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. We do not need another standard history of the Russian Revolution. This is not one.