This study is a contribution to the debate, begun just after the October Revolution, concerning the relationship between Marx's project and Soviet society. It focuses, however, only on the political aspects of the matter: to what extent was early Soviet authoritarianism the necessary outcome of Marx's works? Since Lenin's practice and theory largely determined and justified the early political character of the Soviet state, we may ask whether Lenin was implementing Marx's project or a project of his own design. Lenin, influenced by debates within Social Democracy and by the experience of the Russian revolutionary tradition, used a one-sided interpretation of Marx's work to build and defend a 'transition' which was fundamentally authoritarian. Marx was not causally responsible for the theoretical foundation of Soviet authoritarianism.

Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience offers a fresh look at Communism, both the bad and good, and also touches on anarchism, Christian theory, conservatism, liberalism, Marxism, and more, to argue for the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and V.I. Lenin as democratic revolutionaries. It examines the "Red Decade" of the 1930s and the civil rights movement and the New Left of the 1960s in the United States as well. Studying the past to grapple with issues of war and terrorism, exploitation, hunger, ecological crisis, and trends toward deadening "de-spiritualization", the book shows how the revolutionaries of the past are still relevant to today's struggles. It offers a clearly written and carefully reasoned thematic discussion of globalization, Marxism, Christianity (and religion in general), Communism, the history of the USSR and US radical and social movements.

In this book, Gary P. Steenson offers new interpretations of the history and nature of socialist movements in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy, from after Karl Marx's death until World War I. Based largely on Friedrich Engels's correspondence and those of other socialist party leaders, Steenson analyzes Engels's view of European politics and those of his strategic counsel. He also derives the standards of Marxian orthodoxy from party publications and the political press. The central importance of Engels is clear, as is the seductive appeal of his frequently insightful, often misguided counsel to working politicians. Steenson also finds that this period saw no contradiction in adherence to Marxism and full participation in democratic, representative politics-and that in those countries where democratic forms did not exist, Marxists led the struggle to obtain them.

This book explores the time in which Lenin initiated his use of the electorate, beginning with the Marxist roots of his politics, from his leadership of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the First and Second State Dumas to Russia's first experiment in representative democracy from 1906 to 1907.

Back in print with a comprehensive new introduction by the author, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism is the classic account of Lenin's extensive writings on Hegel in relationship to his theorization of imperialism, the state, and revolution.

Brief collection of the basic ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin.

The first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968 The sixties were a time when radical movements learned to embrace twentieth-century Marxism. Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of this turning point, and examines what the resistance of today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che. It tells the story of the “new communist movement” which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation, and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American movements, embraced a Third World oriented version of Marxism. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the Republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution. Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early “good sixties” and a later “bad sixties,” Max Elbaum is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for today’s activists who, like their sixties’ predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines. With a new foreward by Alicia Garza, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter.

One of the pre-eminent scholars in the history and theory of European socialism, John Kautsky in this volume develops the argument that Marxism and Leninism are two quite different ideologies. He counterposes this view with the commonly accepted one of Leninism as simply one form that Marxism took in the course of its evolution. The easy identification of Marxism and Leninism with each other has been responsible for great confusion in the realm of both scholarly and political discourse. Kautsky develops his position within the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, by the close examination of the different meanings of the Marxist vocabulary as it was used by Marxists and Leninists. His frame of reference turns on the position of labor in turn-of-the-century industrial Europe and the role of modernizing intellectuals in underdeveloped countries. While the vocabulary used was often common to Marx and Lenin, Marxism was explicitly concerned with appeals to workers in industrial nations such as Germany and Austria, whereas Leninism appeals to revolutionaries in underdeveloped nations such as Russia and China. Whatever be the current assessment of the future of socialism and communism, Kautsky holds that it is important to study the core structure of both Marxism and Leninism, since they were major phenomena that powerfully affected the world in the twentieth century. Beyond that, in dealing with how different ideologies can be ensconced within the same rhetoric, the book offers an outstanding entrance into the sociology of knowledge as a tool for political analysis. This is a unique work in the function of language no less than the nature of ideology. The work is divided into five parts: Two environments, two ideologies, one terminology. The evolution of Marxism, its appeals in the German Empire. The evolution of Leninism, its appeals to strata involved in making modernizing revolutions. The differential outcomes of Marxism in the East and Leninism in the West. And finally, an examination of why Marxism and Leninism have been seen as a single ideology. In a new essay prepared for this new edition, Kautsky provides important autobiographical as well as historical reflections on how this book fits into the overall pattern of the author's work.