By Brendan Duncan-Shah

This article is part of a series of articles by Red Ant in the lead up to Red Books Day 2025.

In 2025 the capitalist system continues its assault on the conditions of life, work and social existence the world over. For more and more working class and oppressed people, the prospects of a dignified standard of living are worsening—a fact that is increasingly coming to consciousness, in some way or another, for the majority of people on the planet.

For those of us in the rich countries of the Global North, the crisis might seem more protracted and less acute. But we nevertheless have an understanding that things are getting worse, as evidenced, at least, by the steady rollback of welfare and other social programs in our countries (if they even existed in the first place). In every aspect of life, politics is increasingly difficult to ignore.

In such a context, the prevailing question is no longer “what is to be done?” The answer to that, for an ever-increasing number of people, is clear: the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and its attendant forms of racial and gendered oppression, and the bringing about of a new social order based on egalitarian principles. No: instead of asking “what is to be done?” the most pertinent question of our conjuncture is instead “how are we going to do it?”

No wonder that in such a context people are turning to someone like Lenin, who not only theorised the radical transformation of society, but actually participated in it. Today, Lenin’s thought is experiencing something of a revival, even in the imperialist countries. I’m old enough to remember a time when claiming the legacy of Lenin was seen as outdated—a symptom of the defeatism of the left in the 1990-2010 period. Today, more and more people are coming to agree with a sentiment expressed by Jodi Dean, who said in an interview that she was ‘sceptical that anyone today who cautions against the return to Lenin is actually on the Left.’¹

In this article, published as part of our series for Red Books Day 2025, we take a look at five books on Lenin and Leninism for 2025. “Leninism,” which makes up the second leg of “Marxist-Leninism,” is normally understood to include a number of ideas: the idea of a vanguard party, an emphasis on concrete analyses of concrete situations, the critique of ultra-leftism, the theory of imperialism, the affirmation of national liberation struggles and the right to self-determination, and the worker-peasant alliance. But the relative importance of this or that element of “Leninism” has always been disputed, and some of these ideas may or may not be operative in certain contexts, e.g. a worker-peasant alliance in today’s Australia?

This article focuses on recent books on Lenin and Leninism. Three of the five books listed here were published in the last three years, and all were published after 2010. This is not to say the classic books on Lenin should not be read—everyone should read Lukacs’s Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought and Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of Lenin.² Rather, the focus on newer books is to bring into view how the constellation of ideas that make up Leninism, and how Lenin’s life and practice itself, continue to be grappled with, made use of, refined, reshaped and developed. Leninism is Leninism only when it is living.

1: If We Burn, Vincent Bevins

Is this a book on Lenin? It is, in maybe the most important sense, in that it makes clear the relevance of a Leninist approach to social change in the twenty-first century. It is in the spirit of Lenin to begin with an analysis of our current conjuncture; this, as Lenin put it himself, is ‘the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism—a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.’³ Bevins’ book is in essence a series of such analyses in narrative form. It takes us from Brazil to Chile to Tunisia to Egypt and more over the course of what Bevins calls the “mass protest decade,” 2010-2020, named so because it was ‘a decade that surpassed any other in the history of human civilisation in its number of mass street demonstrations.’⁴

But far from successfully advancing positive change, these social movements, writes Bevins, in many cases ‘experienced something even worse than failure. Things went backward.’⁵ In Latin America and the Middle-East in particular, the decade’s mass activity not only failed to achieve any recognisable economic or social progress, but in fact resulted in precisely its opposite: the consolidation of the far-right. The so-called Arab Spring—hailed at the time by Alain Badiou as the beginning of the “rebirth of history” after the interregnum that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union—ended, in Egypt, with a comprador dictatorship that was arguably even worse than its predecessor.

This contradiction—between the high level of mass activity and the minimal degree of social progress—compels Bevins to interrogate not only the fact of mass activity in the 2010s, but also its form. Bevins argues that mass activity in the 2010s primarily took the shape of ‘apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated, horizontally organised, leaderless mass protests.’⁶ This form of resistance is, as Bevins puts it, very good at ‘blowing holes in social structures’ (although in the Global North it hasn’t even gotten this far), but has so far failed, on its own, to bring into existence an alternative state of affairs.⁷ More than this, the organised forces of reaction are only too happy to slip into the “gap” opened up by spontaneous mass activity—according to Bevins, this is precisely what happened in Brazil following 2013’s Free Fare Movement, leading eventually to the ascendance of Bolsonaro.

But the decentralised street demonstration is, Bevins points out, historically indexed—it emerged at a particular point in time, in the second half of the twentieth century.⁸ More than that, the emergence of the decentralised street demonstration came coupled with a host of equally decentralised, “horizontal,” anti-hierarchical forms of organisation. Assemblages and networks replaced parties and structures (an approach those of us in the Global North will be familiar with, if we have been involved in social activism since the Occupy movement!). In some cases, like with the New Left, these organisational forms were self-consciously opposed to the disciplined and highly organised “Leninist” cadre organisations that were so common in 20^th century revolutions and national liberation struggles, in Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso and elsewhere.⁹

The question, then, is this: why did these forms of demonstration and organisation become so dominant in the 2010s? Bevins’ answer, which turns around a combination of objective and subjective factors, is worth quoting at length:

I believe that a pre-existing set of ideological currents, developed in moments of anti-Soviet and neo-anarchist thinking, gained particular momentum in the era of the “end of history” (the 1990s) and then found elective affinity with technological and corporate developments made in the 2000s. Social media firms made it much easier to scale up the size of horizontal mass gatherings, and their services also made it very likely that citizens would see disturbing imagery of states abusing their power. Given that representative government and perhaps even representation itself is in crisis, and that many human beings appear to be more individualistic than we have ever been, all of this proved to be a dynamite combination.¹⁰

The backbone of Bevins’ book consists in the dozens of original interviews with participants in this history of mass activity, with those who practiced (or tried to practice) the horizontal or disarticulated forms of organisation characteristic of the period. And what are the conclusions reached by taking stock of this practical experience? What are the lessons of mass action in the 2010s? Again, Bevins book deserves quoting:

Not everyone I met came out of the decade adopting positions in favour of formal structures, in support of “verticalism” and hierarchy … But everyone moved in the same direction. I spent years doing interviews, and not one person told me they had become more horizontalist or more anarchist, or more in favour of spontaneity and structurelessness. Some people stayed in the same place. But everyone that changed their views on the question of organisation moved closer to classically “Leninist” ones.¹¹

We shouldn’t view these reflections as a licence to adopt any specific form of organisation uncritically. But we should take it as the beginning of an inquiry into those Leninist forms of organisation that proved so effective at changing society in the twentieth century.

If all of the cases discussed in the book don’t quite fit the mould, that is to be expected—as Mao put it, ‘Any kind of world, and of course class society in particular, teems with contradictions,’ some of which may be less prominent here, acute there, may fade into the background there, may come on the scene abruptly here.¹² The value of Bevins’ book is the through-line it constructs, the way in which it forms the period into something familiar from the Marxist tradition: a usable history.

2: Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, Alan Shandro

For a theoretical elaboration of Lenin’s political thought and practice, Alan Shandro’s magnificent book is the way to go. Shandro’s book, the oldest book on this list (2014), benefits from the studies on Lenin published before it—foremost among which is probably Lars Lih’s 2006 Lenin Rediscovered, whatever one thinks of its conclusions (Shandro certainly does not think very highly of them). But Shandro’s book goes beyond the existing literature in several important ways.

The orienting claim of Shandro’s book is that Lenin’s central political concept is that of “hegemony.” But Lenin’s concept of hegemony, Shandro argues, is not to be understood in the way the term is used in contemporary academic political theory. Instead, hegemony is to be understood in terms of a “politico-strategic logic,” in terms of the struggle for the dominance of the class interests of working people over society and over the movement to transform society.

All of this may sound unhelpfully abstract, but what it amounts to in Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is a theoretical and historical account of Lenin’s approach to the class struggle. The theoretical aspect of the book brings into view—in a way superior to the vast majority of the existing work on Lenin—such core Leninist concepts as: consciousness and spontaneity, vanguard and mass movement, theory and practice, and party and class. The historical component demonstrates how these ideas played out in Lenin’s practice, in his debate with the “economists” in 1902 and with the future Mensheviks in 1903, in his approach to the 1905 revolution, in his response to the split in socialism over the First World War, and in the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

In many ways, the heart of Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is the fourth chapter, which discusses What Is To Be Done?, Lenin’s theorisation of socialist consciousness, his criticism of “spontaneity,” and his infamous formulation (which really goes back to Kautsky) that consciousness must be brought to the working class “from without.” In the minds of Lenin’s critics (and some of his less-than-careful adherents), this set of ideas supposedly licences a concept of the vanguard party as a small minority of intellectual elites, who do nothing but impose their preformed ideology on the working class, and who realise the dictatorship of the proletariat by simply installing themselves in power. As Shandro points out, on this line of interpretation, Lenin becomes the theoretical forefather of the “Stalinist” “Totalitarian” bugbear.¹³ It is arguments like these which typically end up buttressing horizontalist conclusions.

Shandro does a good job of disentangling Lenin’s actual thought from its straw-man doubles, and of identifying the errors which underlie such interpretations. It is an egregious misreading of Lenin, for example—one that is sadly still too common even among Leninists—to identify socialist consciousness with ready-made socialist theory, even with the theory of class struggle itself. The theory of class struggle is a necessary condition of socialist consciousness for Lenin, but it is not in itself sufficient. This is because, for Lenin, socialist consciousness is understood in a conjunctural sense; it requires the application of the theory of class struggle to the current concrete situation.

As Lenin puts it in What Is To Be Done?, socialist consciousness is consciousness ‘of the irreconcilable antagonism of their [the worker’s] interests to the whole of the modern political and social system.’¹⁴ It should be clear from this formulation that an understanding of class conflict in the abstract will not do. For consciousness to be genuinely socialist consciousness, what is needed is not only a theoretical understanding of the antagonism between the interests of hypothetical workers and a hypothetical bourgeoisie, but an understanding, in a concrete sense, of the way in which the actual society in which you live as a worker is set up to guarantee your exploitation. That is why, for Lenin, ‘genuine class-consciousness’ is a matter of applying ‘in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.’¹⁵ Theoretical knowledge, which is of course absolutely essential, is not “pure”, but refers directly to the concrete reality that we wish to intervene in and transform. As Shandro puts it, ‘Socialist consciousness is to be understood … not as a set of propositions that could be claimed as the property or the brand of a certain group, but more basically as a capacity to reconfigure the socialist project to the changing circumstances of the class struggle.’¹⁶

It is one of the great merits of Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony to bring into view this idea: that theoretical knowledge, and thereby socialist consciousness, is a matter of seeing the current conjuncture from the perspective of the theory of class struggle. But equally important is the way Shandro explains how this is precisely what makes it possible for Marxist theory to develop. ‘Lenin’s position,’ writes Shandro ‘implies a distinctive understanding of Marxist theory as necessarily subject to development (theoretical reorganisation) as a result of its application in concrete analyses.’¹⁷ This is because Marxist theory is the comprehension of the irreconcilable antagonism of proletarian interests to the whole of the capitalist socio-political order; it must grasp this whole theoretically and must therefore be open to modification so as to grasp the process by which the innovative logic of political struggle can refract the lines of demarcation of the class struggle and so constantly, and sometimes significantly, modify the contours of the whole.¹⁸

Class society is in motion. It throws up ever new obstacles in the way of the working class. The balance of forces, the dynamic of all the classes, sub-classes and groups within society, shift, and rearrange. The conditions of struggle evolve. Novel factors rise in importance, and previously central facts recede into the background. And all the time the bourgeoisie develop new ways to convince working people of the impossible: that class antagonism is reconcilable. For all these reasons, Marxist theory, since its aim is to bring the working class to power, must be responsive, must comport itself to an ever-changing situation, and must therefore develop itself. As Lenin himself put it, ‘Marxism is not a lifeless dogma, not a completed, ready-made, immutable doctrine, but a living guide to action.’¹⁹ Shandro’s book is valuable not only for bringing these ideas to light, but for showing how Lenin implemented them in practice.

3: The Future of Lenin, Alla Ivanchikova and Robert R. Maclean (eds.)

The Future of Lenin collects essays that interrogate, not so much Lenin himself, but what goes under the name of Leninism. True, the book contains contributions on various aspects of Lenin’s thought, including essays on his conception of the state, of law, and of the party, as well as an extremely useful essay by Daniel Egan on Lenin’s military metaphor of the “Vanguard.” But the “future” of Lenin is evaluated primarily in terms of the living tradition of Leninism, in terms of the legacy of Leninists. These Leninists are our contemporaries—as Alla Ivanchikova puts it in the introduction, the book ‘shows the actuality of Lenin, who has come back, for these new times.’²⁰ But they are also those who struggled under what Ho Chi Minh called the ‘compass’ of Leninism in the twentieth century.²¹

In this way, the core of the book, in my view, consists of the three essays by Charisse Burden‐Stelly, Robert R. Maclean and Zeyad el Nabolsy on “The Black Leninist Tradition.” These essays trace the lineage of Black Leninist theory and struggle over the course of the 20^th century, a lineage that arises out of the ‘conjuncture where the multi-century history of Black struggle aligns and articulates with the organized Marxist Left in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917,’ as Maclean puts it.²² This ‘oceanic, planetary, or global struggle’ intersects with (in fact forms a core part of) what Domenico Losurdo has called ‘the principal question of the twentieth century’: the world anti-colonial revolution inaugurated by the October Revolution.²³ But if this struggle cannot be understood without Leninism, then the reverse is equally true; as Maclean puts it, ‘one cannot understand “Leninism” without appreciating the centrality of Black anti-colonial struggle and the liberation struggles of all oppressed nations.’²⁴

The three essays in The Future of Lenin track Black Leninism across the Caribbean, Africa, North America and Europe, considering figures like Amilcar Cabral, Dani Wadada Nabudere, Walter Rodney, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis and C.L.R James. But the Leninism of these revolutionaries did not consist in the rote application of supposedly Leninist categories to their situations. That would, of course, be totally against the spirit of Leninism. Instead, the Leninism of these theorists was a genuine Leninism, one grounded in a concrete analysis of concrete situations. Thus, as Burden-Stelly and Maclean note, Harry Haywood theorised, in dialogue with Lenin’s ideas on imperialism and the right of nations to self-determination, that Black people within the United States constituted an oppressed nation, and that therefore the struggle for Black emancipation must be conceived as a national liberation struggle.²⁵ On a similar basis, Claudia Jones theorised the “super exploitation” of working-class Black women.²⁶ Babu drew on Lenin’s writing against the Narodniks, the romantic anti-capitalists, to intervene in the debate on “African Socialism.”²⁷ Nkrumah and Nabudere drew on Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism to theorise imperialism in the second half of the century, and Nkrumah endeavored to establish a federation of African states as a way to combat its stranglehold.²⁸

This is only to highlight a few examples covered in the book, which should serve as a starting point and not the end of an investigation into these central figures of twentieth century revolutionary history. The tradition of Black Leninism shows that, when it comes to Leninism, orthodoxy and dynamism are not opposed, but in fact mutually entail one another—one cannot be a dogmatist and a Leninist at the same time. The Future of Lenin puts that fact in stark relief.

4: Reconstructing Lenin, Tamás Krausz

Among the best of the many biographies of Lenin available in English, in Tamás Krausz’s book we get a sense of Lenin as a thinker and practitioner of class politics. Krausz’s Lenin is a living Lenin, always acting in relation to his—sometimes rapidly shifting—conjuncture. This is a Lenin of concrete situations, of ‘the development of capitalism in Russia, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the crisis of Marxism in 1914, the evolution of imperialism, the Revolution of October 1917, war communism, and the New Economic Policy.’²⁹ For an account of Lenin’s own practice, of the details of Lenin’s own political interventions, there are few better resources.

Krausz comes from the Lukacian tradition of Marxist thought in Hungary, which also includes such notables as Istvan Mesvaros, whom Krausz cites approvingly throughout the book. But Krausz does not fall into the outright liberalism of some figures who claim that same legacy. Instead, Krausz’s approach is Lukacian in a genuinely Marxist way—in that, for Krausz as for the Lukacs’s of 1924, the central concept of Lenin’s practice is the ‘actuality of revolution.’³⁰ As Krausz writes of Lenin, ‘at the centre of his thought and all his activities we find the exploration of opportunities for the proletarian revolution in Russia and the world at large, and their inherent potential for practical realisation.’³¹ For Lenin, the concrete analysis of concrete situations is not an end in itself. Rather, analysis brings into view lines of action, plans of attack (or retreat), features of the conjuncture that can be brought into play to further the class struggle, and the means available that can be used to do so—in short, all that must be materially considered for the revolution to become actual. It is for this reason that analysis must be concrete. In Lukacs’ words, political analysis must discover in capitalism’s ‘tangle of interwoven tendencies’ those paths which lead to the liberation of the working class and oppressed people.³² As Krausz summarises:

In Lenin’s thought, the prerequisite for determining what is and what is not possible resides in the historical, concrete analysis of political relations and the respective power of the classes, a selection of the direction of change and of strategy for securing the lasting allies for the working class.³³

Krausz’s book has other merits besides these. The first chapter is an excellent (and in some places quite moving) account of Lenin’s personal biography—the Lenin who loved chess, music, literature and who (hilariously, for a budding socialist) hand wrote newspapers for his family as a child.³⁴ But in Reconstructing Lenin we also get a sense of Lenin’s contributions to Marxist theory (the book is an intellectual biography after all). Krausz gives us a compelling account of Lenin the theorist of imperialism, national liberation, and the state—an account which benefits from over a hundred years of writing on Lenin, a tradition that Krausz knows and draws on. The theoretical discussions that punctuate the book are, in general, only enriched by the surrounding historical context Krausz brings into play.

But if there is one area where the book needs to be supplemented (it would be too much to say that it falls short), then it is on the question of organisation.³⁵ In an interview with Róbert Nárai, Krausz states that ‘the challenge for today’s Left is the constitution of a new social subject, independent of liberalism, within the dispersed masses of working and oppressed people.’³⁶ The question, of course, is under what forms of organisation is this possible? Lenin had an answer, one which is discussed at length in works like Shandro’s, but which tends to become submerged in the historical complexities of Krausz’s account.

This is not to insist on the timelessness of every facet of the Bolshevik form of organisation. The Bolsheviks themselves were keen to stress that ‘there is no absolute form of organisation which is correct for all Communist Parties at all times.’³⁷ The point is to understand, from the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others, the aim and function of socialist organisation, and thereby to separate the generally applicable from the historically specific.³⁸ Only in this way can forms of organisation effective in our current context be brought into view. But on this question in particular, Krausz’s book needs to be supported by others.

5: Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn & Patrick Anderson (eds.)

Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce collects 104 short contributions by authors from practically every region of the planet to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of Lenin’s death (21 January, 2024). The contributions vary wildly in form: visual art, poems, short fiction, essays, and polemics—basically every genre of writing, and many genres of art, with all shades of tone and content, are represented. One contributor even stages a fictional conversation between Lenin and Julius Nyerere in heaven.³⁹

Despite this, the political essay is still the predominant form of the book’s contributions. But even here eclecticism is the name of the game—the book is able to sustain completely opposing positions on a whole host of political issues: on China, on the Russia-Ukraine war, and on the Soviet Union post-Lenin (the “Stalinist” bugbear rears its head too often for my taste). We get appearances from some big names in contemporary “theory” (Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean all contribute), from Lenin scholars, (Lars Lih and Tamás Krausz), historians of the Soviet Union (Ronald Grigor Suny), academics from Tsinghua University (Yuan Xianxin, Andrea Bonfanti, Luka Golez), and from a whole range of union organisers, activists, and party builders from Pakistan, Nigeria, Tunisia, Iran, Vietnam, Senegal, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Mexico, Thailand, the former Eastern Bloc countries, and basically everywhere else.

The sheer diversity of contributions—in terms of their sources, politics and forms—means the book has to be read critically (it would be impossible to synthesise this book into something consistent); but doing so is rewarding. There is a sense in which it is interesting enough that Lenin’s life, thought and practice compelled a book like this into existence. It speaks to the global spread of Lenin and Leninism, and for that reason alone it is worth paying attention to.

The Future of Lenin, Lenin: the Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce brings Lenin into view as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thinker, a thread many of the writers from the Global South pick up on. Luka Golez, in a fascinating contribution on the early 20^th century Chinese Marxist Qu Qiubai, gives a compelling account of the origin of this part of Lenin’s legacy:

One of the turning points in the history of the communist movement that occurred with the establishment of the Comintern is the question of imperialism and its connection with the discovery of the revolutionary potential of national liberation struggles in the peripheries of the capitalist world. Lenin, in his interpretation of the imperialist era of capitalism, had discovered in colonial and semi-colonial nations a new subject of anti-capitalist struggle and thus expanded the spectrum of communist movements in the global level.⁴⁰

But in addition to contributions on Lenin’s internationalism, the book also contains a number of contributions on Lenin’s commitment to women’s liberation that are worth noting. A contribution by Ly Hoang Minh Uyen draws attention to how, for Lenin, the struggle for socialism itself depends on women’s emancipation, and in particular on the liberation of women from the task of social reproduction (housework), something that has continued to be emphasised by Marxist Feminist thinkers today.⁴¹

Frigga Haug’s contribution draws attention to several passages from Lenin’s work where he stresses the need to fight for, not only ‘formal equality’ for women, but also for their ‘economic and social equality,’ that is, for their emancipation from the obligation of being the primary (or even sole) socially reproductive labourer in the household.⁴² As Haug notes, for Lenin ‘the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women,’ a struggle that ‘will end in the complete triumph of communism’ and nothing less than that.⁴³

All of this is not only consistent with Leninist approach to social change, but is in fact essential to it. Capitalism does not manifest itself in just the worker/owner antagonism, but in the whole system of social life premised on capitalist relations of production. This system supports and is supported by gendered (and racial) oppression. From this it follows, as Lenin understood, that the whole social order based on bourgeois rule can only be fully dismantled if the gendered oppression which buttresses it is itself dismantled.

Refracting Lenin through 104 lenses is in many ways consistent with the spirit of his approach. A Leninist analysis brings every factor of the conjuncture into view. Lenin: the Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce succeeds in doing just that when it comes to Lenin himself.

Notes

1. Jodi Dean, “What is Leninist Thinking,” in Alla Ivanchikova & Robert R. Maclean (eds.), The Future of Lenin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2022), 59. ↩︎
2. In addition to this book, and of course Krupskaya’s own work, see also the theoretical articles on Lenin’s written by her—collected, for example, here: https://foreignlanguages.press/foundations/on-education-n-k-krupskaya/ ↩︎
3. Lenin, “Kommunismus,” in Collected Works vol. 31, 166. ↩︎
4. Vincent Bevins, If We Burn (London: Wildfire, 2023), 235. ↩︎
5. Bevins, If We Burn, 259. ↩︎
6. Bevins, If We Burn, 264. ↩︎
7. Bevins, If We Burn, 264. ↩︎
8. Bevins, If We Burn, 11-2. ↩︎
9. Bevins, If We Burn, 17-20 ↩︎
10. Bevins, If We Burn, 268. ↩︎
11. Bevins, If We Burn, 266. ↩︎
12. Mao Zedong, ‘A Dialectical Approach to Inner Party Unity,’ in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung vol. 5, 500. ↩︎
13. Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015), 119. ↩︎
14. Lenin, What is to be Done?, in Collected Works vol. 5, 375. ↩︎
15. Lenin, What is to be Done?, in Collected Works vol. 5, 412. My emphasis. ↩︎
16. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 313. ↩︎
17. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 122. ↩︎
18. Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 146. ↩︎
19. Lenin, “Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism,” in Collected Works, vol. 17, 42. ↩︎
20. Alla Ivanchikova, “Introduction,” in Alla Ivanchikova & Robert R. Maclean (eds.), The Future of Lenin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2022), 2. ↩︎
21. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1960/04/x01.htm ↩︎
22. Robert. R Maclean, “Black Leninist Internationalism,” in The Future of Lenin, 180. ↩︎
23. Maclean, “Black Leninist Internationalism,” 180; Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024), 224. ↩︎
24. Maclean, “Black Leninist Internationalism,” 177. ↩︎
25. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Elaborations of Lenin,” in The Future of Lenin, 159-61; Maclean, “Black Leninist Internationalism,” 195-9. ↩︎
26. Burden-Stelly, “Elaborations of Lenin,” 169; Maclean, “Black Leninist Internationalism,” 184. ↩︎
27. Nabolsy, “Lenin and East African Marxism,” 215-9. ↩︎
28. Burden-Stelly, “Elaborations of Lenin,” 162-3. Zeyad El Nabolsy, “Lenin and East African Marxism,” in The Future of Lenin, 208-12. ↩︎
29. Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 356. ↩︎
30. See Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought(London: Verso, 2009),11-12. ↩︎
31. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 369. ↩︎
32. Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, 76. ↩︎
33. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 365. ↩︎
34. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, 28. ↩︎
35. See the inadequate discussion of Lenin and the question of organisation on pages 360-2 of Krausz’s book, which relies quite a bit on the both the early (History and Class Consciousness) and late (Ontology of Social Being) Lukacs. ↩︎
36. https://monthlyreview.org/2019/04/01/searching-for-alternatives-in-eastern-europe/ ↩︎
37. The full passage, from “The Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of Their Work,” passed at the third congress of the Comintern, is worth always keeping in mind: ‘There is no absolute form of organisation which is correct for all Communist Parties at all times. The conditions of the proletarian class struggle are constantly changing, and so the proletariat vanguard has always to be looking for effective forms of organisation. Equally, each Party must develop its own special forms of organisation to meet the particular historically-determined conditions within the country.’ Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (London: Inks Links, 1980), 234. ↩︎
38. To once again quote Shandro, ‘the notion of a vanguard does not designate a particular institution or set of individuals but, fundamentally, certain political functions in the movement of the class.’ (Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony, 313.) ↩︎
39. Issa Shiviji, “Lenin and Nyerere – A Conversation in the Heavens,” in Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn & Patrick Anderson (eds.), Lenin: The Heritage We [Don’t] Renounce (Quebec: Daraja Books, 2024). ↩︎
40. Luka Golez, “Lenin and the Long Journey to the East: The Case of Qu Qiubai,” in Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, 191-2. ↩︎
41. See Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (2017), edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, and Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (1983). ↩︎
42. Lenin, quoted in Frigga Haug, “How I Cooked Soup with Lenin,” in Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, 114. ↩︎
43. Lenin, quoted in Frigga Haug, “How I Cooked Soup with Lenin,” in Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, 114. ↩︎