Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? In Context

Product Description

What Is to Be Done? has long been interpreted as evidence of Lenin’s “elitist” attitude toward workers. Lih uses a wide range of previously unavailable contextual sources to fundamentally overturn this reading of history’s most misunderstood revolutionary text. He argues that Lenin’s polemic must be seen within the context of a rising worker’s movement in Russia, and shows that Lenin’s perspective fit squarely within the mainstream of the socialist movement of his time.

Rather than the manifesto of an authoritarian leader, Lih reveals a guide to action to help cohere and strengthen a promising movement, which still maintains remarkable relevance to today’s world.

“Clearly written, well-reasoned, and effectively documented, it is a work that no scholar seriously examining the life and thought of Lenin will be able to ignore.”
—Paul Le Blanc, author of
Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization

“If we are honestly to assess the lessons of the Russian Revolution, then it is essential that we unpick the real Lenin from this shared Stalinist and liberal myth of ‘Leninism’. It would be difficult to praise too highly Lars Lih’s contribution to such an honest reassessment of Lenin’s thought. At its heart, Lih’s book aims to overthrow, and succeeds in overthrowing, what he calls the ‘textbook interpretation’ of Lenin’s What is to be done? Lih thus adds to and deepens the arguments of those who have sought to recover the real Lenin from the Cold War mythology.”
—Paul Blackledge, author,
Historical Materialism and Social Evolution


Review
"It would be difficult to praise too highly Lars Lih's contribution to such an honest reassessment of Lenin's thought." --Paul Blackledge,
International Socialism "Extraordinary and extraordinarily welcome." -- John Molyneux "A magnificent contribution to our understanding of V.I. Lenin, Bolshevism, Marxism, and the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and of Communism." -- Paul LeBlanc "Historians of the Russian Revolution owe a great debt to Lars Lih. The new textbook on the formative years of Bolshevism is much more convincing than the old version." -- Kevin Murphy "An important advance in the historiography of classical Marxism" -- Alan Shandro,
Science & Society 73/ 4, (October 2009), 556-9 [...] Lih's arguments are important to the modern left. weeklyworker, Issue 638, 30 August 2006 "Lars T. Lih hat sich mit seinem voluminosen Buch die Aufgabe gestellt, der Entstehung und dem Kontext von Lenins Schrift gerecht zu werden und die gangige Meinung, darin gehe es nur um die Organisationsfrage in der russischen Sozialdemokratie, zu widerlegen. "Owing to the fatal fascination with spontaneity vs. Consciousness', the creators of the textbook interpretation looked in the wrong places [...], at Tkachev, Chernyshevsky and Bakunin instead of Kautsky and Bebel, Lafargue and Guesde. They did not uncover the shared assumptions and the empirical clashes that inform Lenin's polemics with fellow Social Democrats. They did not look at the extensive range of Lenin's writings produced in the Iskra period" (S. 555). Diese Unstimmigkeit versucht Lih durch sein Werk zu korrigieren, was ihm auch gelungen ist. Es ist sein Verdienst, auf die Mangel gangiger Interpretationen hingewiesen und Lenins Schrift in den Zusammenhang ihrer Zeit gestellt zu haben. Wie er selbst zugibt, hat er auch versucht, dem Leser etwas von der revolutionaren Aufbruchsstimmung der Zeit mitzugeben. Zwar sind einige von Lihs Argumenten nicht unbedingt neu, aber die Art und Weise, wie er sie prasentiert und kontextualisiert, ist das Neue - auerdem lasst sich sein Buch leicht und angenehm lesen." -- Laura Polexe, Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte online About
Bread and Authority (1990) (by Lars T. Lih) '
If we could put the desperately ill Russia of today on the psyciatrist's couch, we would inevitably have to spend a great many sessions o