Author: Georg Lukacs
Publisher: Seagull Books
Year: 1997
Language: English
Pages: 92
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8170462681
Description
This book is the product of an unprecedented, and unrepeatable, conjuncture. Written immediately after Lenin’s death in 1924, and thus on the cusp of a period of bureaucratic reaction in the Communist movement, it consists of the reflections of the most important Marxist philosopher of the twentieth century on the thought of the most significant Marxist politician of the century.
In sharp contrast to contemporary and later characterisations of Lenin either as a cynical and shallow opportunist or as a source of readymade dogmas and formulae, Georg Lukács restored to Lenin’s thought its true intellectual and political stature. Bringing to bear the concepts of totality, concreteness and the dialectic that he had developed in his masterwork History and Class Consciousness, Lukács convincingly demonstrated that the key conceptual innovations in Lenin’s political thought-the revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, the role of the vanguard party, the analysis of imperialism and national liberation movements, the state was a weapon of class struggle and the unifying force of the Soviets-constituted fundamental ruptures with the mechanical fatalism that had hitherto characterized official Marxism. In Lukács’s elegantly crafted, concise and accessible account, Lenin emerges as the consummate dialectician, the theoretician of practice and the practitioner of theory.
Contents
FOREWORD
The Actuality of The Revolution
The Proletariat as the Leading Class
The Vanguard Party of the Proletariat
Imperialism: World War and Civil War
The State as Weapon
Revolutionary Realpolitik
Postscript 1967
Notes