The "Essential Works of Lenin provides the reader with a broad perspective of Lenin's important writings. My 1986 copy has over the years begun to fall apart because of the glue bindings. You will not find all the important articles that explains the Bolshevik's transition both politically and in their policies which ran their intervention in making the Russian Revolution. However, it does provides the basic ideas and political concepts that separated Lenin fron the other leaders of the both the party and the revolution. It is very helpful to someone making a brief study of a man's political contributions in determining how to make a successful communist revolution. It also addresses the assumptions that Lenin and the other Bolsheviks made in deciding how they would in Tony Cliff's expression bend the party stick which most of the time operated like a locomotive running down a track in a specific non-opportunist or revisionist direction. They avoided being side tracked and assumed that the German, French, British or the American proletariat would split off from their capitalist ruling class. At first this appeared to be happening until certain mistakes of undermining the power of the Soviets, mass executions of individual revolutionaries who did not agree with the Bolsheviks and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Much of this came from reports of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who were first early supporters of the revolution and were American Anarchists expelled by the U.S. government because of their anti-war agitation. Morris Hillquit, of the American Socialist Party published his famous 1921, Handford Press polemic "From Marx to Lenin" a rare book I purchased also on E-Bay alleges that Lenin revised Marx and Marxism to tailor his needs to Russia and that in his opinion would make it where the proletariat experienced a longer taste of bourgeois democracy. This discussion would not be available within the Essentials of Lenin except as a one-sided paradigm and the real quesions of any student would find this lacking. It would require years of study and the chances of finding Hillquit's book is rare. It took me thirt-five years to find it and I was aware of his opposition to Leninism but I did not know all of his views. On the other hand John Reed's "Ten Years that Shook the World" currently available on E-bay would make one think the left wing of the Socialist Party USA was very large, when in fact there were three different factions. One of which never came out from being underground according to all of the books I have read on the "History of the early American Communist Party," which I purchased on E-Bay and it remains available for sale. So what is the importance of all this? Marxist-Leninism remains to be viewed as a foreign ideology. Since it landed on our shores the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs has never recovered nor has the American left. Perhaps we all need to read Mr. Hillquit and other Socialist Parties analysis closer such as the De Leonists. The New Left of the sixties made deliberate split from the old only to be engulfed in the debates anyway. I think the Essential Works of Lenin is a good starting place if the modern student of socialism makes an extra effort the "History of Socialism In United States, Socialism in Theory and Practice, and Present-Day Socialism all by Mr. Hillquit who was a good friend of Eugene Debs. If anyone has copies of these please put them up for auction on E-Bay.Read full review
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