/lit/ - Literature

>>13897730
Also, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Lenin was a polemicist who’s writings are extremely historically specified. More often than not, programmatic readings end up failing to grasp his underlying dialectic precisely because they take an abstract approach to Lenin’s counter-arguments and proposals. They look at his “system” and not his “method”, so to speak. Lenin’s arguments are all historical and are based on contingent conditions which are not universally true; and in fact, Lenin’s genius lay in the way he was capable of drawing from the conditions on the ground the strategy possible that could cohere the tactics of the revolutionaries into driving the unfolding of a contradiction towards its self-overcoming.

If you want Lenin’s writings condensed, MIA has his selected works:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/sw/index.htm
I recommend starting with Vol2 however, since Lenin’s earlier work is obscuringly polemical. Unless you know where Lenin is arguing from, its harder to fully grasp.

For me, Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered and companion biography clarified a lot about Lenin’s relationship to Kautsky, and how to properly read What is to Be Done? The problem with Lih though is that he overemphasizes continuity to the extent that you might as well just be reading Kautsky instead, and forget that 2nd International Marxism goes into crisis.

Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, and Concerning Questions of Leninism (which are the first three selections from Problems of Leninism) together can cohere Lenin’s different writings into a vision of Lenin-ism that defines the course of the USSR after Lenin.

The Sparticist League’s Lenin and the Vanguard Party is an interesting read if you want to see how Leninism is interpreted by the New Left in the terms of a rupture into a party of a new type.

History and Class Consciousness really transformed my understanding of Lenin, given how the book uses the debates in 2nd and 3rd International Marxism as expressing the semi-conscious unfolding of the bourgeois dialectic of modernity by the political subject that seeks the self-overcoming of bourgeois society. It’s also instrumental for grasping Lenin’s inheritance into Western Marxism, especially the Frankfurt School. Korsch wrote Marxism and Philosophy while he was still a Leninist, and thats another Western Marxist classic.

Soon Comrade. Soon.

>>12347130
agreed comrade

>>12319064