We are changing things up here at Measures Taken HQ! In this new series (which will supplement but not replace our former episode track) we discuss what's being talked about on the contemporary left.

We discuss Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" as well as the responses and political positions of some of the pamphlet's main targets. We also examine the concept of left-wing communism itself, asking whether or not it is a category that can clarify our political lives today.

What components of Marxism can most successfully help us to understand the appearance and shape of the phenomenon of ‘Red Terror?’

The seizure of state power by Russian social democrats, and the success of their party in developing military and administrative capacities, forced the class-conscious worker the rest of the world over to decide to what extent it was appropriate to accept organizational leadership from the first and only proletarian dictatorship (if one does not count the inspired and brief experiments in Paris 1871). The choice all but made itself, especially if bearing witness to industrial warfare had made it difficult for any worker to desire a return to a past within living memory or, indeed, imagine that the political and economic status quo might persist. If they had heretofore modelled their organization on its German counterpart, the Russian party now served as the living example of successful Marxist revolutionism. Having adopted a new program in the Spring of 1919, what now called itself the Russian Communist Party delegated to Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky the task of expositing its contents. The text they produced, rather wonderfully named The ABC of Communism, remains the most important source for understanding what Communism entailed at its birth. 

The climax of the World War would present socialists with the actuality of revolution and result in a new North Star for Marxism, but its immediate effects were to irrevocably destroy the fabric of the international socialist movement, and in doing so inaugurate a period of painful soul-searching. In this episode, we will trace the responses of socialists to the war, as well as responses to the existential crises it provoked.

Ben is editor and translator of a number of important collections of primarily source documents from the Second International period, including Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Haymarket). He is also the author of Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline (Berghahn Books). You can support his translation work on Patreon by searching for his project, Marxism Translated.

The question of Social Democracy’s role when it came to peasants and agricultural laborers opened the floodgates to a wide range of theoretical and tactical debates. In this episode, we will dive into this era’s landmark texts and strategic, Party-level debates and decisions on the agrarian question— a question that will arise and be contested many more times as we proceed through the history of Marxism as a political tradition.

It has hardly been lost on convinced readers of Capital that the book contains no blueprint for building an organization, one that might sound the “death knell” of the capitalist mode of production, expropriate the expropriators, and usher in the free association of labor. In this episode, we will open up the organizational question to see what we can learn from our traditions best planned failures.

Questions of the bourgeois state, democracy, and the proletariat’s conquest of state power were the subject of a number of debates and attempts at theoretical formulation in the Second International. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly, the stakes of the debate became even more pronounced, with figures such as Lenin, Kautsky, and Luxemburg focusing especially on the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat.

The most popular book produced by a Second International figure was August Bebel’s “Women Under Socialism.” It introduced scientific socialism to a question prominent on the political scene, namely, that of women’s oppression and emancipation. For decades, Marxists would argue, both amongst themselves and with their opponents, on the relationship of the so-called “woman question” to class struggle and the social revolution.