Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties in the face of their respective national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of the crisis of the world movement. The result was a popular outline book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which went on to become a core text for the international communist movement. But Lenin also sought to break with the Eurocentrism of the socialist movement that tended to look down with disdain at or simply reject struggles for self-determination especially by colonised peoples. This volume, introduced by the renowned abolitionist and anti-imperialist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, brings together both the texts on imperialism and those on the national question to provide a window into Lenin's global vision of revolution.

A basic consideration of the conditions and problems in the formation of a vanguard, revolutionary party.

Lenin's booklet State and Revolution is widely recognised to be a lightening bolt in Marxist theory. Written in the months immediately running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional socialist concept of the state on its head, arguing for the need to smash the organs of the bourgeois state and for them to be replace by a "semi-state" of soviets, or workers' councils, in which ordinary people would take on the functions of the state machine themselves in a new and radically democratic manner. This new edition includes a substantial new introduction by renowned theorist Antonio Negri, who argues for the continued relevance of these ideas.

Lenin's concept of the revolutionary-democratic government of the working class and the peasantry, and the path of transition to socialism, written in 1905.

A vivid collection of texts, gathered and introduced by Tamara Deutscher, by Lenin and those who knew him, that shows the Lenin of everyday reality, the man who lived by politics but not by politics alone. Here, we see the Lenin of work and leisure, geared to his life's purpose and yet enjoying to the full all the pleasures of a healthy human existence; neither the humourless monolithic cult-hero of Soviet mythology, nor the bogeyman of official anti-communism. What did Lenin read? How did he relax? What did he think and feel? This surprising collection, covering everything from his passionate Baritone singing voice to his love of hunting wild game and beyond, reveals the man beyond the myth.

An analytical discussion of the role of the state as the instrument of the ruling class.

A new beautiful edition of the Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin's key revolutionary tract It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of The Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx and Engels's most famous work with Lenin's own revolutionary manifesto, "The April Theses," which lifts politics from the level of everyday banalities to become an art-form. The Communist Manifesto "Oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." The Communist Manifesto is the most influential political text ever written-few other calls to action have stirred and changed the world. Now, in the wake of a punishing financial crisis, in a world built on regimes of permanent austerity, each rife with horrific disparities in wealth, this short book remains a reference point for those trying to understand the transformations being wrought by capitalism and its concomitant forms of exploitation. This centenary edition includes a new introduction by Tariq Ali, contextualizing the period-the eve of the 1848 revolutions-in which Marx and Engels penned their masterpiece and argues that it desperately needs a successor. "The April Theses" "The chain breaks first at its weakest link." In Lenin's "April Theses," written in 1917, he presented his ten analytical maxims, outlining a programme to accelerate and complete the revolution that had begun in February of that year. Now, on the revolution's centenary, Verso presents them here alongside Lenin's 'Letters from Afar', written in exile that March and addressed to his comrades in Petrograd. In these missives, he offers advice and instruction to comrades pushing ahead with their ideals in the aftermath of the February revolution. The introduction by Tariq Ali traces The Communist Manifesto's influence on Lenin's "April Theses," the text that brought the manifesto to life and made it one of the most widely read books in history. For Lenin, writes Ali, it was the birth of imperialism, the legitimate offspring of capitalism, that signalled the end of the latter's "progressive capacities."

Four most significant works, also including "The Development of Capitalism in Russia"; "Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism"; "The State and Revolution".

2013 Reprint of 1929 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In "What Is to Be Done?," Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and the like. To convert the working class to Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or "vanguard," of dedicated revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet partly precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and is perhaps the hallmark of Leninism.

Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.

In 1917, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin revisited Marx and Engels' views on the state and realised that their ideas had been distorted by the Socialist movement created in their name. Written at the outset of WWI, this classic text puts to rest the notion that Lenin favoured dictatorship over the working class. With great insight and polemical bravado, Lenin elaborates on the Marxist concept of the state as a structure of domination.