Vladimir Lenin

Founding of the Comintern - Then and Now

Submitted by Internationalis... on Mar 3 2019 12:46

A century ago, from 2nd — 6th March 1919, 52 delegates, more than 40 from various political organisations outside Russia, met in Moscow.

Revolutionary Bureaucracy – Solidarity

An article from Solidarity for Workers’ Power vol. 7, no. 11 on the nature of the bureaucratisation seen in the Russian Revolution.

Lenin on 'freedom of love' as a bourgeois demand

Letters from Lenin to Inessa Armand Written on 1915 where he describes 'freedom of love' as a bourgeois demand. Furthermore freedom of love is described as 'freedom from the serious element in love.. child birth... of adultery'.

Better Fewer, But Better

In Lenin's final document, he laments how much of the Bolshevik state apparatus has been left over from Tsarism.

How We Should Reorganise the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection

In one of Lenin's final works, he describes the Bolshevik state apparatus as "to a considerable extent a survival of the past [which] has undergone hardly any serious change. It has only been slightly touched up on the surface, but in all other respects it is a most typical relic of our old state machine."

Lenin orders the massacre of sex workers, 1918

Lenin's letter to G. F. Fyodorov ordering "mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like." in Nizhni, where the Czech white forces were amassing. Kaganovich implemented the terror although while there is some evidence of a sex industry operating in Nizhni (see comments) actual executions during the terror are estimated to be in the low hundreds and predominately men.

Clara Zetkin interviews Lenin on the women's question

Clara Zetkin's account of her 1920 discussions with Lenin on the Women's question. The interview is notable, for while Lenin supports women's involvement in the communist party, he also dismisses sex worker organising, and calls discussion of 'the sex question' bourgeois - an early example of the attempts to subsume specific concerns for party building.

Beyond the Party: The evolution of the concept of “the Party” since Marx – Junius Collective (Pour une Intervention Communiste)

An essay by Pour une Intervention Communiste on the origins and development of the concept of “the Party” in the Marxist tradition, with critical analyses of the contradictions of Marx’s and Engels’ vacillations on this issue, and their partial responsibility for the subsequent career of the Party concept in its permutations at the hands of Liebknecht, Bebel, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky and Bordiga (social democratic continuity, the dictatorship of the Party), and its radical yet insufficient reformulations by Luxemburg, the KAPD and others (“return to Marx”, “historic Party”, the “Marx Party”—or even the “Debord party”) as a revolutionary minority whose goal is to promote proletarian autonomy.