PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KARL MARX LETTERS | |
Auhtor: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | |
| Language: english Published: 1911 Genres:political, revolutionary, social historyDownloads: 224 eBook size: 257Kb Review by M. Erb, February 2006 Rating: (****) Copyright: Public Domain in the U.S. Please check the copyright status in your country. | |
Summary of the Book 'PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KARL MARX LETTERS':
Every revolution begins at the top as the ruling class with no clear way forward split over what course of action to take. In January 1916 a strike wave developed against food shortages and speculators. Feeling the movement building up from below a section of the ruling class favored making limited concessions.
During late 1916 the mystic monk Rasputin was murdered and plots were laid for a palace coup to remove the Tsar and the Tsarina. The signs of splits in the ruling class opened the floodgates of revolution. The tensions brought about by the war of five million dead or wounded of the armys bread ration being cut by a third between December 1916 and February 1917 of the shortages of food in the towns burst to the surface.
The February Revolution began on the 23rd (dates are on the old Russian calendar add 13 days for the modern calendar) with a strike by women textile workers in Petrograd. On International Womens Day 90000 were on strike including many soldiers wives. They marched to the Duma (a truncated parliament) demanding bread which as Trotsky commented was like demanding milk from a he-goat. On the following day half of the industrial workers of Petrograd joined the strike.
As the strikes grew the slogans rapidly changed to directly political challenges to the regime: Down with the aristocracy! Down with the war!
Yet none of the workers organizations initially called for the strikes. Indeed the most brilliant Bolshevik organization the committee in the industrial Vyborg area feeling the tension but not believing the time was right for an insurrection which they saw could develop from the strikes initially opposed the call for strikes on February 23. Thus one of the most oppressed and least organized layers perhaps not as burdened by consideration of where their strike could lead but burning with desire to take action opened the floodgates of revolution.
The police tried to break up the crowds aided by Cossacks (cavalry) some mounted police and occasionally by infantry. The crowds fought the police but tried to neutralize the Cossacks and win over the soldiers in action.
On the 25th cadet officers fired on demonstrating workers killing 16. On the 27th there were further demonstrations and troops were called out to suppress them.
After clashed with the workers the troops began to mutiny. In some places the workers had succeeded in uniting with the soldiers penetrating the barracks and receiving rifles.
Excerpts from the Book 'PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF KARL MARX LETTERS':
... class in particu]ar, those passages in the letters which contain theoretical and political material are infinitely more important. In the revolutionary ...
... through which a country passes. Russia is experiencing a great upheaval at this very moment. In the present Russian revolution the Social-Democrat ...
... the road he took and the road to be taken towards elucidation of the law of value. He teaches us his method, using the most common objections as illustrations. ...
... of rent. Marx had already, in 1868, emphatically rejected Ricardo's errors, which he finally refuted in Volume III of Capital, published in 1894, ...
... independent, character and that proletarian leadership of the revolution is impossible! How excellently Marx, in his letters to Kugelmann, ...
... what faith in this bourgeois revolution! What revolutionary passion of a proletarian fighter who realises the vast significance the bourgeois revolution ...
... to every temporary decline in the revolution, to discard revolutionary illusions as quickly as possible, and to turn to realistic tinkering. ...
... should not have taken up arms, had the modesty to compare himself to Marx. Marx, says he, also put the brakes on the revolution in 1870. ...
... 12, 1871, Marx writes an enthusiastic letter to Kugelmann - a letter which we would like to see hung in the home of every Russian Social-Democrat ...
... all his characteristic ardour and passion, Marx, then living in exile in London, set to work to criticise the immediate steps of the recklessly brave ...
... himself to Marx! Second mistake, Marx said, continuing his technical criticism: The Central Committee (the military command - ...
... chances . In September 1870, Marx called the insurrection an act of desperate folly. But, when the masses rose, Marx wanted to march ...
... in the least forgetting that he himself in September 1870 regarded insurrection as an act of desperate folly. . . . The bourgeois ...
... And with this we shall conclude our brief review of the lessons in a policy worthy of the proletariat which Marx teaches in his letters to ...
... were called legal Marxists. ? ? The legal Marxists criticised the Narodniks for their defence of petty production and tried to use Marxism in ...
... with distortions of the Marxist theory. ? ?[p.107] ? [42] Sombartism - liberal bourgeois lrend named after Werner Sombart ...
... who fears all initiative and everything new. ? ?[p.110] ? [45] Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1958, pp. 318-19. ? ?[p.111] ...
... that the party struggle for the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship. At the same time he declared that the... >>read more<
... in Russia during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was a response to the rapid growth of industry, cities, and the proletariat (a group ...