Skip to Content

Lenin

Did Lenin Really Distort Marx?

Summer School 1998 - 'Marxism Revisited'

Fircroft College, Birmingham

Recorded: 
Saturday, 4 July 1998

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

audio/mpeg iconDid Lenin Really Distort Marx.mp3

State Capitalism for Russia

Lenin’s economic policy

Among the first to describe the Russian economy under the Bolshevik government as "state capitalism", was Lenin himself in 1918. By this term he meant state control of capitalist-owned industries. He had been impressed by the system of industrial control which the German government had built up during the war. If the Kaiser and the Prussian Junkers could control capitalist industry for their purposes why, thought Lenin, could not the Bolshevik Party control capitalist industry for the benefit of the workers and poor peasants of Russia?

Russian Imperialism

If, in 1918, the words and deeds of the Bolsheviks inside Russia stirred the imaginations of workers everywhere, so also did their abrupt reversal of their foreign policy. They preached “no annexations, no indemnities,” called on all workers to repudiate the aggressive policies of their governments, and demanded the ending of the war. They published the sordid treatise in which the Allied Governments had secretly agreed to dismember Turkey and divide up the rest of the spoils of war. They renounced Czarist Russia’s century-old aim of controlling the Dardanelles, and voluntarily gave up the Russian “spheres of interest” in China and Persia extorted by force from governments too weak to resist. They proclaimed the right of “self-determination” and allowed Finns, Poles, Esthonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to secede and become independent states.

Trotsky States His Case

(The Real Situation in Russia, by Leon Trotsky. Translated by Max Eastman. 364 pages. 7s. 6d. George Alien & Unwin.)

This book consists for the most part of the statement submitted by Trotsky (and 12 other minority members) to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in September, 1927. The document was suppressed by Stalin and his supporters, and the opposition group - both in the Central Committee and in the country at large - was broken up by the imprisonment, persecution and exile of its prominent members. As might have been expected a copy of the statement was smuggled out of Russia, and now appears in an English edition. It is translated by Max Eastman, who is an American admirer of Trotsky, and was himself recently in Russia.

Syndicate content


Theme by Dr. Radut.