Lenin Lives Attend the launch of our international campaign
Core Argument¶
The article's central thesis is that Lenin's theoretical and political legacy remains indispensable for the contemporary revolutionary movement, and that the centenary of his death should be the occasion for an international campaign to reclaim his ideas from a century of bourgeois slander. The claim is not merely commemorative but strategic: Lenin's method — the fusion of revolutionary theory with the practical construction of a party capable of leading the working class to power — is presented as the necessary precondition for any successful challenge to capitalism today. The article positions the campaign as a direct intervention against the ruling class's ideological offensive, which seeks to deny workers and youth the memory of a successful socialist revolution.
Theoretical Grounding¶
The analysis draws on the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party as the organised vanguard of the working class, a tradition rooted in the theoretical work of Marx and Engels but given its most systematic practical expression in the Bolshevik experience. The article invokes Lenin's famous dictum — "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" — to ground the campaign in the Marxist understanding that consciousness does not arise spontaneously from economic conditions but must be brought to the working class from without, through the work of professional revolutionaries armed with a scientific worldview.
The argument sits firmly within the Marxist tradition that rejects both reformism and spontaneism. It implicitly counters the dominant academic and media narrative that Leninism is inherently authoritarian or obsolete, reasserting the classical Marxist position that the dictatorship of the proletariat — the working class holding state power — is the necessary transitional form between capitalism and communism. The reference to John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World situates the argument within the tradition of eyewitness revolutionary testimony that has long served as a counterweight to official historiography.
Conjunctural Relevance¶
The article connects Lenin's legacy to the current moment through a stark characterisation of capitalism as offering "nothing but poverty, suffering and war." This is not developed with specific data in the article itself, but the timing of the campaign — January 2024 — places it within a period of multiple, overlapping crises: the ongoing war in Ukraine, the escalation of conflict in Gaza following October 7th, the deepening cost-of-living crisis across Europe and North America, and the generalised instability of the global economy in the aftermath of the pandemic-era inflation spike and interest rate rises.
The article's call to "build a revolutionary party much like the Bolsheviks" is a direct response to the political conjuncture in which the traditional social-democratic and Stalinist parties have either collapsed or been fully integrated into the management of austerity. The campaign implicitly argues that the objective conditions for revolution are ripening — war, economic crisis, declining living standards — but that the subjective factor, revolutionary consciousness and organisation, remains underdeveloped. Lenin's relevance is thus framed as practical and urgent, not merely historical.
Where the Argument Continues¶
This article is the launch announcement for a campaign that is developed across multiple IDOM articles and Against the Stream episodes throughout 2024. The promised biography In Defence of Lenin by Alan Woods and Rob Sewell is the central text of the campaign and should be read as the full theoretical elaboration of the positions sketched here. The campaign also connects to the ongoing series of articles on the Russian Revolution, the history of the Bolshevik Party, and the theoretical debates of the Second and Third Internationals that regularly appear on marxist.com.
The argument about the necessity of revolutionary theory is developed at greater length in Alan Woods' The History of Philosophy: A Marxist Perspective and in the ongoing series of articles on dialectical materialism. The critique of reformism that underlies the article's political stance is elaborated in the IMT's extensive literature on the betrayal of the Second International and the rise of Stalinism, particularly in Woods' Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution.
Connections¶
The article should be read alongside Lenin's own key texts — What Is To Be Done?, The State and Revolution, and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder — which are the theoretical foundations of the argument being made. John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World is referenced directly and provides the eyewitness account that the campaign seeks to rehabilitate. The campaign also connects to the broader Marxist literature on the revolutionary party, including Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution and his writings on the transitional programme.
Within the contemporary corpus, the article connects to IDOM's coverage of the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, and the political instability in Britain, France, and the United States — all of which are presented as evidence that the conditions Lenin analysed are returning. The campaign is also linked to the IMT's international school and its efforts to train a new generation of revolutionaries in the method of Marxism.
Key Quotes¶
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"Lenin was loved by hundreds of millions of people who wanted to change society, but hated by the ruling class and their apologists."
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"The reason for this hatred is because Lenin was successful. In October 1917, for the first time in history, the working class took power and held it."
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"They showed that they could run society without the help of bosses and bankers. This was all possible because the working class had a leadership in the Bolshevik Party that was able to guide the revolution to success."
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"Lenin once said that capitalism is horror without end. Capitalism today offers us nothing but poverty, suffering and war."
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"Far from being old and outdated, Lenin's ideas are more relevant than ever. They provide an invaluable tool in the hands of revolutionaries today."
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"As Lenin once said, 'without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement'. It is up to revolutionaries of today to study the works of Lenin and to build a revolutionary party much like the Bolsheviks in order to make the struggle for Communism successful."