To celebrate May Day I hereby present to the Readers the first Polish translation of a study of the thought of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by György Lukács, one of the greatest Marxist philosophers of the 20th century.
This short pamphlet is one of the best expositions of the thought of the leader of the October Revolution. It shows to what extent Lenin was able to develop a worldview not only coherent, but whose coherence reflected the material unity of the social world, and which was able to highlight and combine all the social issues and problems of the workers’ movement he encountered with the priority issue of the conquest of power. In this respect, after a century, both Lukács’ pamphlet and Lenin’s thought retain their relevance.
Of course, this is relevance with reservations. At the end of the work written immediately after Lenin’s death and in the afterword added from the perspective of four decades, Lukács warns against mechanical application of the thought of the leader of Bolshevism. Lukács can be accused of emphasizing the historical moment of the work’s creation to distance himself from the theses contained in it, which would be unacceptable in the Brezhnev era (e.g. in 1924, writing about the dialectical unity of the bourgeois and proletarian revolution under the independent leadership of the proletariat was a Bolshevik truism, two years later it would be „anti-Leninist Trotskyism”). Nevertheless, the author of „History and Class Consciousness” is not without a point.
Lenin’s oeuvre is not a book of recipes to follow, but a guide on how to analyze the reality we find ourselves in; theoretical knowledge never relieves one from the duty to think. Lukács expressed it perfectly when he finished his 1924 work with these words: “Leninism means a previously unattained level of concrete, non-schematic, non-mechanical, purely practice-oriented thinking. It is the task of the Leninists to preserve it. But in the historical process only what is alive can survive. And such preservation of the tradition of Leninism is today the highest task of anyone who takes seriously the dialectical method as a weapon in the class struggle of the proletariat.”
This pamphlet is a brilliant compendium of Leninism and thus can be a modest aid in the task of preserving its traditions. It is therefore a valuable theoretical work that every Marxist should read.
Linki:
VOLLHANDFRÜHLING 