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Thinking with Lenin on the Centenary of his Death

Introducing new editions on Lenin.

21 January 2024

Thinking with Lenin on the Centenary of his Death

V.I.Lenin, leader of the 1917 October Revolution, played a decisive role in an event that transformed world history.

Out of thirty years of political activity, he spent twenty-four as an outlaw, an underground fighter, a political prisoner, and an exile. All these years this 'most earthly of all men', this great realist, was sustained by nothing more than a dream, a dream of a better, a more just, social order. When he acted, he acted in accord with the masses. He was their undisputed leader; he was also led by them.

His classic work, The State and Revolution, opens with a prophetic remark on the attempts to convert the revolutionary thinkers, after their death, into 'harmless icons', to canonise them, while at the same time robbing their revolutionary theory of its substance.

To mark the centenary of his death, we are publishing The Lenin Quintet - a series of works that allows us to think with Lenin in his time while also thinking about the struggle at hand as we make our way in this unrolling present. In revitalizing the politics and life of the man, these books present Lenin as neither the humourless, monolithic cult hero of Soviet mythology nor the bogeyman of official anti-communism.

The Lenin Quintet

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The Collected Works of Lenin

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Further Reading

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The State and Revolution
Lenin’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional s...
The Lenin Scenario
Commissioned by Oliver Stone in 2015 to commemorate the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali’s captivating screenplay of the life and times of Vladimir Lenin puts flesh on the bones of the historical reco...
Not By Politics Alone
This vivid selection, compiled and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, written by Lenin and those who knew him, brings us the revolution in his everyday life – the man who lived by politics but not by ...
Lenin's Childhood

Lenin's Childhood

When he died suddenly in 1967, Isaac Deutscher had completed only the compelling first chapter of a long-anticipated biography of Lenin, published here. It covers Lenin’s family background, birth a...
Imperialism and the National Question
Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of th...
Red Valkyries
Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...
The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume IV

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume IV

This 600-page volume of Luxemburg's Complete Works contains her writings On Revolution from 1906 to 1909 - covering the 1905-06 Russian Revolution, an epoch-making event, and its aftermath. Over 80...
The Dilemmas of Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowle...
Lenin

Lenin

Out of the chaos following Lenin’s death and the mounting fury against Lukács and his freshly penned History and Class Consciousness (1923), this book bears an assessment of Lenin as “the only theo...
The Day After the Revolution
Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Žižek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin’s...
Revolution at the Gates
The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-cen...
The Russian Revolution
Preface by Jesse Benjamin and the Walter Rodney FoundationIntroduction by Robin D.G. KelleyAfterword by Vijay PrashadIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the...
October
In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...
A History of the Barricade
In the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan's native Paris, where they were instr...
Tactics and Ethics, 1919–1929

Tactics and Ethics, 1919–1929

Tactics and Ethics collects Georg Lukács’s articles from the most politically active time of his life, a period encompassing his stint as deputy commissar of education in the Hungarian Soviet Rep...
Red Rosa
A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. But she was much more than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a wo...
Red Africa
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...
A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse
When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...
Communism and Strategy
If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing an...
The State of Capitalism
The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has c...
Dissidents among Dissidents
Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country’s most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and...
The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses
It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of the Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx...
The Comrade from Milan

The Comrade from Milan

In this much-lauded memoir, acclaimed for its blend of literary elegance and political passion, Rossana Rossanda, a legendary figure on the Italian left, reflects on a life of radical commitment.Ac...
Collected Works, Volume 1
Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...
Collected Works, Volume 2
Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...
Paperback
Collected Works, Volume 3
Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...
Collected Works, Volume 4
Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...

Filed under: Lenin-centenary