III

"....The Russian Revolution reserves a chair in ancient history for Kautsky...." and in Philosophy for Harper.

When the group Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) decided to translate and publish Anton Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher, it wasn't only the pseudonym J.

In 1915, as the hideous reality of the European war became ever more apparent, Rosa Luxemburg wrote "The crisis of social democracy", a text better known as the "Junius pamphlet" from the pseudonym under which Luxemburg published it. The pamphlet was written in prison and was distributed illegally by the Internationale group which had been formed immediately after the outbreak of the war...

The seizure of power in Russia inevitably posed enormous new problems for the new proletarian power, and generated heated debates within the Bolshevik party on the transitional state. The tragedy of Russia's encirclement culminated in 1921 with the Kronstadt revolt, a veritable catastrophe which saw the revolutionary government gunning down those who had been its most stalwart supporters.

Given the ruling class’ frequent depiction of Lenin as a power-hungry dictator, it is all the more ironic that during the period from April to October his "socialist" adversaries accused him of anarchism. State and Revolution is Lenin’s answer, a profound reflection from a marxist standpoint on the nature of power in the revolution. Lenin began researching the book in 1916, and brought it to fruition in June 1917. In this work, we see the fertile encounter of marxist theory and the real practical experience of the workers’ soviets in Russia, first in 1905 then in 1917.

The previous articles in this series concentrate on the experience of the Italian Fraction and its immediate successors, on which the ICC has based its own view of organisation. Here, we return to see how the question was posed in the days first of Marx, then of Lenin.

The first part of this article attempted to show how the nature of the Russian Revolution was determined, not by the particular char­acteristics of Russia at the time of the revolution, but by the overall development of world capitalism, whose passage into its epoch of historic decline was marked by the imperialist war in 1914. The objective conditions for the proletarian revolution existed internationally, and the Russian Revolution could only be part of this world revolution.