Situated in a particular historical moment marked by the violent crises of capitalism—the rise of the alt-right, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement—The Future of Lenin collects essays by an international cohort of scholars to assert Lenin's relevance for twenty-first-century politics and thought. Taking different and sometimes opposing vantage points on Lenin's value for the future, the contributions to this volume reveal an unexpected Lenin, one who escapes the stale Cold War-era discourse of demonization and hagiography. Instead, the future-oriented Lenin in these pages comes to life as our contemporary: an interlocutor who is surprisingly relevant for Black and anticolonial struggles in the US and beyond; for building the new Left; and for assessing Bernie Sanders' movement as well as alt-right anti-statism. In short, Lenin's concrete development of Marxism for his historical conditions may yet offer lessons for revolutionaries to come.

Reads like a true crime investigation. Hard-hitting anti-communist slant by dissident critic of the communist regime.

This volume is the first to contain all of Rosa Luxemburg's eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German revolutions. Also contained here are articles, essays, and manuscripts on the European socialist movement prior to World War I and on her efforts to rebuild the socialist movement on revolutionary foundations in its aftermath. Much of this material appears in English for the first time. Luxemburg's contributions on revolutionary strategy and the transition to socialism reveal a profound commitment to radical democracy, which becomes evident as she elaborates on her lived experience with razor-sharp conceptualizations of the mass strike. Her democratic commitment is also highlighted in her deepening conflict with the bureaucratic conservatism afflicting the German Social Democratic Party. She is horrified yet, at the same time, grimly analytical while surveying the unfolding violence and brutality of World War I. Deeply inspired by Russia's 1917 upsurge, she is nonetheless compelled to analyze and criticize fatal limitations of the Russian Revolution. Swept up in the revolutionary chaos sweeping through Germany in 1918-19, which results in her own martyrdom, she gives voice on the eve of her assassination to the revolution's final testament: "I was, I am, I shall be."

This concise monograph traces Russian Marxism from its beginnings to mid-1977, shows how and why the party achieved power, how it has strengthened its position, and how it has undertaken to remold the country and to solve its internal problems. Wesson's study is the only up-to-date party history currently available. The book opens with background material on Russian discontent and endeavors to analyze the fundamental nature of Communist Party rule, taking into account new perspectives in Lenin's revolution, the Stalinist period, and the Khrushchev years, as well as the latest period not covered in earlier accounts. It treats the rise of Lenin, the struggle for power after Lenin and after Stalin, and the consolidation of Brezhnev's authority. As the most recent history of communism in the Soviet Union, it has great topical interest and is clearly written for the benefit of the student and general reader as well as the professional.