Lars Lih

Given the recent marking of the centenary of Lenin’s death, Lars T Lih looks at what his ‘intricate polemic’ in ‘What is to Be Done?’ might offer today’s left.

For those who want to end capitalist rule, much can still be learnt from the October Revolution because its experience critically poses key political questions. The second in this two-part series by Jonathan Strauss seeks to respond to the question: What can it tell us about organising for social change?
 
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Banners: “Power to the Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Soviets”;
“Down with the Minister Capitalists”.
 

By Lars Lih

March 24, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentary website — “All power to the Soviets!” is surely one of the most famous slogans in revolutionary history. It is right up there with “Egalité, liberté, fraternité” as a symbol of an entire revolutionary epoch. In this essay and others to follow later in the spring, I would like to examine the origin of this slogan in its original context of Russia in 1917.

 
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By Lars T. Lih

In place of an introduction

February 25, 2017 Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentary websiteThe following essay was written in 2011 for circulation among colleagues. I have decided to publish it unchanged in 2017 for two main reasons. First and foremost, the essay explains and documents the views of Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov, and Karl Kautsky on a crucial issue: the proper relations between workers and intellectuals within Social Democracy. It therefore serves as an extension of my earlier attack on the “textbook interpretation” of Lenin’s views.

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Pravda editor Lev Kamenev.

Article by Lars Lih, introduction by John Riddell

April 22, 2015 -- Johnriddell.wordpress.com, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission -- Did the Bolsheviks, as has often been argued, set aside their pre-1914 strategy in April 1917 on Lenin’s insistence? Recent studies by Lars Lih criticise this thesis, maintaining that the actual course followed by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was close to that of pre-war “Old Bolshevism”.

In the following article, Lih tests his conclusion by examining the editorial course of the Bolsheviks’ main newspaper, Pravda, soon after the February revolution and before Lenin’s return to Russia.

Lih’s text is followed by both a translation and the original Russian text of a March 1917 Pravda editorial by Lev Kamenev, and by a note on further reading.