Among Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s most outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of Marxism are his writings on nationalism and the national question.

Assembled in this volume are a comprehensive selection, presented in chronological order, of Lenin’s writings on this subject covering the period from the preparations for the second congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1903 to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in December 1922.

Whose century was the 20th, and whose century will the 21st be? As the millennium draws to a close, we should reflect on this. Capitalism is still in power across most of the globe. Capitalists in the imperialist countries have accumulated unprecedented wealth. They have previously undreamt-of military power and weapons of mass destruction at their disposal. Some think they can act with complete impunity, slaughtering millions in Iraq with bombs and brutal blockades or raining destruction on Serbia from a great height, free from retaliation.

Phil Hearse’s polemic against my pamphlet (Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution: A Leninist critique, Resistance Books, Sydney, 1998) proceeds from a fundamentally false assumption, i.e., that my pamphlet “attempts [to give] a general strategic view” of revolution in “the semi-colonial and dependent semi-industrialised countries”. He alleges that my pamphlet presents Lenin’s policy of carrying out the proletarian revolution in semi-feudal Russia in two-stages (a bourgeois-democratic and then a socialist stage) “as a general schema for the ‘Third World’ today”. Nowhere in my pamphlet, however, do I make such a claim.

This book by Frederick Engels explains the origins of the modem socialist movement. It is probably the most influential work expounding the basic ideas of Marxism, other than the Communist Manifesto.

As Engels himself explains in his introduction to the first English edition, published in 1892, it was drawn from three chapters of his 1878 book Anti-Dühring, a polemic against the views of Eugen Dühring, a professor at Berlin University. In his lectures and numerous writings which flooded the book market after 1869, Dühring claimed to be the originator of a “revolution in science” which superseded Marxism.

This work was written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in April 1920 and published in booklet form in Russian in June 1920, and in English, French and German the following month. The manuscript of the booklet was entitled: “An Attempt to Conduct a Popular Discussion on Marxist Strategy and Tactics”. Copies of it were given to each delegate attending the 2nd Congress of the Communist International held in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow between July 19 and August 7, 1920.

The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a general introduction to the fundamental ideas of historical materialism – the Marxist theory of human history and society.

For Marxists the study of human history is inseparable from the study of society.

Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question is a collection of essays written over the last 24 years by Michael Löwy, director of research in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. The book was published under the auspices of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education, founded by Ernest Mandel and other leaders of the Trotskyist Fourth International.

Lenin’s purpose in writing this work was, as he stated at the beginning of chapter 1, to clearly demonstrate the “unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism” on the question of the state and the proletarian revolution then prevailing in the international socialist movement by re-establishing what Marx and Engels themselves had written on this subject. Most of the book therefore takes the form of an extended commentary, with extensive quotations, on the writings of Marx and Engels. It then deals with the person “who is chiefly responsible for these distortions”, namely, Karl Kautsky, the editor of Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and the best-known leader of the Second International, the international association of socialist parties founded in Paris in 1889.

The Communist Manifestois the most famous of all documents produced by the socialist movement. It appeared in February 1848, on the eve of an explosion of popular revolutionary struggles in France and Germany – revolutionary mass movements that the Manifesto had foreseen.

In my opinion, Greg Ogle’s review of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham’s book The End of Capitalism in GLW #256 concedes far too much to the drivel of these “post-modernists”. For example: He writes, “many on the left abandoned such economic reduction long ago [i.e., the Marxist understanding that “society is structured by class, of people and institutions being constrained (if not positively formed) by material conditions which ultimately relate to a particular production dynamic”], not least because of powerful feminist criticism that gender oppression could not be reduced to class.”