Lenin Rediscovered

What Is to Be Done? in Context
Erscheinungsjahr 2005
ISBN: 978-90-04-13120-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 9, 868 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 242 mm, Gewicht: 1683 g

Reihe: Historical Materialism Book Series

Lenin’s What is to Be Done? (1902) has long been seen as the founding document of a 'party of a new type'. For some, it provided a model of ‘vanguard party’ that was the essence of Bolshevism, for others it manifested Lenin’s élitist and manipulatory attitude towards the workers.
This substantial new commentary, based on contemporary Russian- and German-language sources, provides hitherto unavailable contextual information that undermines these views and shows how Lenin's argument rests squarely on an optimistic confidence in the workers' revolutionary inclinations and on his admiration of German Social Democracy in particular. Lenin's outlook cannot be understood, Lih claims here, outside the context of international Social Democracy, the disputes within Russian Social Democracy and the institutions of the revolutionary underground.
The new translation focuses attention on hard-to-translate key terms. This study raises new and unsettling questions about the legacy of Marx, Bolshevism as a historical force, and the course of Soviet history, but, most of all, it will revolutionise the conventional interpretations of Lenin.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lih, Lars T

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Illustrations, Note on the Text, Glossary, Acknowledgements

COMMENTARY

Introduction
Part I Erfurtianism
1. ‘The Merger of Socialism and the Worker Movement’
2. A Russian Erfurtian
3. The Iskra Period
Part II Lenin’s Significant Others
4. Russian Foes of Erfurtianism
5. A Feud Within Russian Erfurtianism
6. The Purposive Worker and the Spread of Awareness
Part III The World of What Is to Be Done?
7. Lenin’s Erfurtian Drama
8. The Organisational Question: Lenin and the Underground
9. After the Second Congress
Conclusion
Annotations Part One: Section Analysis
Annotations Part Two: Scandalous Passages

TRANSLATION

Note on the Translation
Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?
Foreword
Chapter I: Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’
Chapter II: The Stikhiinost of the Masses and the Purposiveness of Social Democracy
Chapter III: Tred-iunionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics
Chapter IV: The Artisanal Limitations of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionaries
Chapter V: The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political
Newspaper
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1: Kautsky’s Circles of Awareness
Table 2.1: List of Lenin’s Programmatic Writings in the 1890s
Table 3.1: Titles in Lenin’s Political Agitation Series

Über Autor(innen)

Lars T. Lih, Ph.D. (1984) Princeton, is the editor of Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, the author of Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, the chapter on ideology in the forthcoming The Cambridge History of Russia and numerous articles on the Bolsheviks.