Ted Sprague looks back at the period into which Lenin was born, the kind of society it was, and the key events that marked the young Lenin. He looks at the way Lenin discovered Marxism and made it his own, using it in later life to lead the Bolshevik party.
The prospect of a new Tory government coming to power after the next election should be more than enough to concentrate the minds of active workers in the Labour and Trade Union Movement. But what sort of Tory government will it be? Mark Twain made the point that although history never repeats itself, it often rhymes.
The enemies of socialism try to maintain that the collapse of the USSR was the result of the failure of the nationalised planned economy, and that the latter is inseparable from a bureaucratic regime. This was answered by Trotsky well in advance in The Revolution Betrayed. He explained that a nationalised planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen. In this introduction to the Indonesian edition of Trotsky’s classic work Alan Woods explains why the Soviet Union collapsed and what the situation is today.
