Leninism

In this volume, Neil Harding presents the first comprehensive reinterpretation of Leninism to be produced in many years. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom regarding Leninism's effectiveness as a mobilizing body of ideas, its substance, and its origins and evolution, Harding offers both a controversial exposition of this ideology and a critical engagement with its consequences for the politics of contemporary communism. Rather than tracing the roots of Leninism to the details of Lenin's biography, Harding shows how it emerged as a revolutionary Marxist response to the First World War and to the perceived treachery-the support of that war-by social democratic leaders. The economics, politics, and philosophy of Leninism, he argues, were rapidly theorized between 1914 and 1918 and deeply imprinted with the peculiarities of the wartime experience. Its complementary metaphysics of history and science was as intrinsic to its confidence and sureness of purpose as it was to its contempt for democratic practice and tolerance. But, as Harding also shows, although Leninism articulated a complex and coherent critique of capitalist civilization and held a powerful appeal to a variety of constituencies, it was itself caught in a timewarp that fatally limited its capacity to adapt. This book will engage not only Russian and Soviet specialists, but also readers concerned with the varieties of twentieth-century socialism.

A winner of the Isaac Deutscher Prize Liebmann highlights democratic dimensions in Lenin's thinking as it developed over 25 years.

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.

Translated from the Russian in 1928, this and the second volume of the same title give an invaluable picture of what the Russian leader Joseph Stalin understood by Leninism. Building on the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, (which forms the first part of this book) the work presents a unified and complete work on the problems of Leninism and socialist construction as they were manifested in the 1920s, as well as discussion of the October Revolution and the relationship of the USSR and the West in the years following the First World War.

This intellectually discomfiting, disturbingly provocative, yet still thoroughly scholarly Handbook reproduces the intellectual ferment that accompanied the Russian Revolution including the wholly polarising effect at that time of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy does not settle for one safe interpretation of the thought of this world-historic figure but rather revels in a clash of viewpoints. Most interestingly it presents a contrast between the Western editors who emphasise pure democracy and Marxian humanism with many of the contributing scholars who take a more sanguine view of the Leninist political project. Perhaps reflecting the current Western political crisis, some of the volume’s other European and North American scholars more closely align with their colleagues from the Global South. Key Features: · Places particular emphasis on the key elements of Lenin’s thought – the dictatorship of the proletariat (which is trenchantly defended), the nature of the dialectic and the New Economic Policy · Additional comprehensive coverage includes the theory of the party, Bolshevism, imperialism, and the class struggle in the countryside · Examines the relation of Lenin’s thought to the ideas of his most influential contemporaries (including Luxemburg, Stalin and Trotsky) as well as the most eminent thinker to interpret Lenin since his death – György Lukács This Handbook is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in political philosophy, political theory, the history of political ideas, economics, international relations and world history. It is also ideal for the general reader who wishes to understand some of the most powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world and that may yet shake the world again.

Caricatured as a superhuman idol in the former Communist states, the Russian revolutionary socialist V. I. Lenin has long been reversely caricatured in the West as an authoritarian elitist. In this brilliant, carefully researched analysis, Neil Harding upends these traditional Cold War interpretations of Lenin's thought and activity. Harding shows how Lenin's flexible and continuously changing theoretical, strategic, and tactical insights were firmly grounded in the emancipatory potential for working-class revolution in Russia and around the world. Neil Harding is an internationally renowned scholar of Soviet history.