Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23

By Vladimir Lenin

Book Overview

As capitalism in the twenty-first century enters its deepest economic and social crisis since the decades spanning the first and second imperialist world wars, programmatic and strategic matters in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604880279
• ISBN13: 9781604880274
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Pathfinder
• Length: 379 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

The Real Lenin

The ignorant (including some college professors) have worked hard to convince us that Stalin's reactionary rule was a continuation of the policies of Lenin. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book shows that Lenin began a fight against Stalin in the last months of his political activity, before a stroke completely incapacitated him in 1923. The main areas in dispute were relations with oppressed nations, worker-peasant alliance, and the state monopoly of foreign trade. Lenin planned to join forces with Trotsky in this struggle within the communist movement and threatened to break off relations with Stalin. Lenin also argued for effective education so that the working class could truly hold the reins of power, without having to rely on bureaucratic misinformers. Today, when Stalin's heirs have disowned Lenin, a new generation can read Lenin's writings without Stalinist distortions and misinterpretations. This book is a great place to begin an appreciation of the real Lenin. It is a very readable volume, including useful chronology, glossary, and index.

The truth speaks, Lenin battled Stalin

The documents in this book are not some attempt to change history, but the documents of the last political struggle of Lenin's Life, a political struggle that was continued in the struggle of Trotsky, a political struggle that was joined eventually by most of Lenin's actual political collaborations, a struggle to defend the revolutionary conquests of the October Revolution against the middle-class oriented conservative caste led by Joseph Stalin.\ This battle had a number of fronts. Its great spark was over the question of Georgia and the Great Russian nationalist approach Stalin and his henchmen took against the heroic communists and people of Georgia. This is quite important as in this discussion Lenin developed a policy similar to affirmative action in the accompanying works by Lenin on that national question. The other front was over the encroaching bureaucracy who aimed at smothering the revolution, and against the idea that this was simply an administrative task involving better organization rather than the social struggle Lenin saw this as, to bring "workers from the bench" as he said into the struggle. Finally, this became a struggle to remove Stalin from command of the party to block his crude bureaucratic threats against Lenin himself. These documents were suppressed in the Soviet Union during the Stalin decades, but published by Trotsky and other supporters of real Leninism in the 1920s and 1930s. The introduction and glossary and notes make the issues understandable. With the former Soviet Union and China still ruled by the old Stalinist clique of bureaucrats, now mixed with naked profiteers and gangsters (not that the bureaucrats were anything other than profiteers and gangsters themselves back to the days Lenin and Trotsky battled them), the origins of their struggle, and the direction needed to preserve the goals of working people are clear. Stalinism didn't grow out of a life and death struggle against Leninism. It was not for nothing that Stalin murdered almost every member of the Lenin's central committee. It was not for nothing that the big business governments of the US, Britain, and France favored Stalin's victory in this struggle. They wanted to kill the great October revolution that Lenin and Trotsky presided over. We should read this to understand the struggles of another revolution, still following Lenin's example to try to lead workers and oppressed nations to freedom, the Cuban Revolution. The discussions here and in Lenin and Trotsky's work (see the struggle of the Left Opposition series of Trotsky's writings) are almost identical to the discussion that Che Guevara raised against Stalinist models in Cuba, and that Fidel and other Cuban leaders have raised to fight bureaucracy and procapitalist forces in Cuba over the past 20 years. This struggle lives.

A NECESSARY BOOK FOR ANY REVOLUTIONARY!!!

"Five years after the victory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, V.I. Lenin waged his final political struggle."He was fighting to maintain the communist course with which the Bolshevik Party had led the workers and peasants to power over the landlords and capitalists of the former tsarist empire and defeated the invading armies of fourteen nations."At issue were the burning questions of the day:***How to forge a union of workers and peasants republics and defend the rights of historically oppressed nationalites***The basis for the New Economic Policy and its place in the world struggle for socialism***Strengthening the alliance between the working class and the peasantry***Defending the state monopoly of foreign trade"This book compiles the speeches, articles, letters, and memos in which Lenin took up the battle inside the Bolshevik Party. Many of these documents were suppressed for more than three decades by the murderous regime, headed by Joseph Stalin, that represented the bureaucratic ruling caste. Some appear here for the first time in English, including one never before published in any language" (from the back cover).

A thourough denouncement of Stalinism

Vladimir Lenin, perhaps the most important historical figure in the twentieth century, not only fought against the tyranny of the capitalist class, but he also tried to fight against the growing bureaucratism in the Soviet Union that eventually led to Stalin's takeover of power. We see here his fight to spread the revolution and make it a truly a world revolution, not confined to a backwards country in Europe. He wanted to free mankind from subservience to a ruling class. The new biography of Lenin, written by a former Stalinist-turned-capitalist, is completely rebuked here. The biographer Volkoganov is a typical bourgeous seeking to denounce anything that smacks of true revolution and is quick to make friends with his new masters by writing his attack on Lenin. I suggest that anyone truly interested in Lenin read Lenin's works, and for a biography, read Trotsky's book on Lenin.