The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations implies universal and full freedom to criticize, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.
Why was Rakhmetov was introduced, if now he’s gone and will no longer appear in my story? Was it really necessary to introduce a special character so that he could express his opinion of the others?
What can be more comical than fighting “kulaks, usurers, parasites and sharks” by perfecting the “rules” of credit banks? Usury in its worst forms is most tenacious in our rural districts, and is so precisely because of the exclusiveness of the estate system there…
Deputy Surkov’s speech in the Duma during the debate on the Synod estimates, and the discussion that arose within our Duma group when it considered the draft of this speech (both printed in this issue) have raised a question which is of extreme importance and urgency at this…
History shows that if at different times men were imbued with different ideas and desires, the reason for this is that at different times men fought nature in different ways to satisfy their needs and, accordingly, their economic relations assumed different forms.
Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. It is impossible to emphasize this thought too much at a time when along with the fashionable preaching of opportunism people are carried away with the narrowest possible forms of practical activity.
I have few personal recollections of Georgii Valentinovich. Our meetings were infrequent, although they were not devoid of significance, and I gladly record my memories of him.
Materialists have been criticising Kant from a standpoint diametrically opposite to that from which Mach and Avenarius criticise him.
All possible brands of Kantianism form the main bulwark in the struggle against materialism; it is the philosophical spiritual weapon employed by bourgeois reaction in the ideological sphere. In the field of social science, Kantianism is utilised for this purpose as a dualist…
Sixty years ago, on November 14, 1831, died a man who will indisputably and always occupy one of the very first places in the history of thought. Not one of the sciences which the French call “sciences morales et politiques” has remained unaffected by the powerful and…
The kings of steel, of petroleum, and all the other kings of the United States have always in a high degree excited my power of imagination. It seemed to me certain that these people who possess so much money could not be like other mortals.
Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race…
The comrade who first introduced me to Ilyich told me that he was a man of scientific bent, that he read scientific books exclusively, that he had never read a novel and never read poetry. This surprised me. I myself in my youth had read all the classics; I knew practically the…
You ask me, my young comrade, what role does proletarian ideology give to “love”? Perhaps you are concerned that labour youth are presently “more preoccupied with love and all sorts of related questions” than with the larger tasks facing the workers’ state. If so (it is difficult…
“Dogmatism,” “doctrinairism,” “ossification of the party — the inevitable retribution that follows the violent strait-lacing of thought” — these are the enemies against which the knightly champions of “freedom of criticism” in Rabocheye Dyelo rise up in arms. We are very…
The root evil in the United States is slavery. The party seeking the abolition of chattel slavery has its stronghold in the states of New England. These states demand protective tariffs. It may very well be that they are mistaken about this, that they don’t in fact need…
The term Romanticism designates a complex synthesis of literary and general cultural movements that developed from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th. Though it tends to be more associated with either end of these movements, it refers to very diverse phenomena.
One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone.
The October Socialist Revolution presented the toilers — workers and peasants — with extremely vast opportunities to rebuild their life. The worker felt he was the master of his enterprise: the peasant received land and saw his cherished dream come true. All that awakened them to…
1. If self-education is to be successful, it is necessary to develop a number of habits: to read to oneself; to not read too slowly; to know how to use books, newspapers, manuals and library catalogues; to know what to extract and how to write down notes. In…
It was for Yuny Communist in 1919 that I wrote my first article on self-education. It pointed out correctly that it was not “by sitting in an office, but by participating in collective activity that one could best educate oneself.” That is true. But then, the article was…
I send my warmest greetings to the Soviet Republics of the Caucasus, and should like to express the hope that their close alliance will serve as a model of national peace, unprecedented under the bourgeoisie and impossible under the capitalist system.
The question of the tax in kind is at present attracting very great attention and is giving rise to much discussion and argument. This is quite natural, because in present conditions it is indeed one of the principal questions of policy.
It is a strange thing: every Communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it ruins every living endeavor, that it distorts all measures, all decrees, all orders; but when a Communist begins to work in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he…
The “majority” and “minority” first came into being at the Second Party Congress (1903). That was the congress at which our scattered forces were to have united in one powerful party. We Party workers placed great hopes in that congress. “At last!” — we exclaimed joyfully — “we…
What we need here now is Iskra (although it has no sparks, we need it: at all events it contains news, the devil take it, and we must thoroughly know the enemy), beginning with No. 63. We very much need Bonch-Bruyevich’s publications: The Fight for the Congress, To…
The Soviet government is inviting foreign capitalists to obtain concessions in Russia.
Is there any connection between imperialism and the monstrous and disgusting victory opportunism (in the form of social-chauvinism) has gained over the labour movement in Europe? This is the fundamental question of modern socialism.
What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our Theses? It is the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations. We emphasise this difference — in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy. It is especially important for the proletariat and…
The tsar was told by his most important general that there was a certain person, “of unknown rank, without a passport, who goes by the name of Lenin.” This Lenin threatened to take away the tsar’s soldiers with one word and to grind the generals, commanders, and officers — even…
Chernyshevsky’s ideas are important to the person who is certain of victory, important to us because we are building socialism, and building it consciously, because we have real power, even if limited, over events.
That part of philosophy which deals with questions of man, just like the other part which deals with questions of external nature, is based on the natural sciences. The principle underlying the philosophical view of human life and all its phenomena is the idea, worked out by the…
Some time ago the members of the Political Bureau of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.) received a letter from Comrade Yaroshenko, dated March 20, 1952, on a number of economic questions which were debated at the November discussion. The author of the letter complains that the basic…
The world-famous British chemist, William Ramsay, has discovered a method of obtaining gas directly from a coal seam. Ramsay is already negotiating with a colliery owner on the practical application of this method. A great modern technical problem is thus approaching solution.
All in that city was strange, incomprehensible. Churches in great number pointed their many tinted steeples toward the sky, in gleaming colours; but the walls and the chimneys of the factories rose still higher, and the temples were crushed between the massive façades of…
The Information Bulletin of the Technical Commission Abroad (No. 1, August 11, 1911) and the message To All Members of the R.S.D.L.P., signed by “A Group of Pro-Party Bolsheviks,” which appeared almost simultaneously in Paris, are attacks identical in substance…
In his controversy with the Lefts, Kautsky declared that imperialism was “merely a system of foreign policy” (namely, annexation), and that it would be wrong to describe as imperialism a definite economic stage, or level, in the development of capitalism. Kautsky is…
Russia was an industrially backward country and for that reason her labour movement began to develop only in the 1890s — at the time when in a number of other countries the working class, armed with the experience of the 1848 Revolution and of the Paris Commune of 1871, was…
The publication by a small group of “Left Communists” of their journal Kommunist, and of their “theses,” strikingly confirms my views expressed in the pamphlet The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government. There could not be better confirmation, in political…
Britain and France are the most civilized countries in the world. London and Paris are the world’s capitals, with populations of six and three million, respectively. The distance between them is an eight- to nine-hour journey. One can imagine how great is the commercial…
1. Anarchism, in the course of the 35 to 40 years (Bakunin and the International, 1866-) of its existence (and with Stirner included, in the course of many more years) has produced nothing but general platitudes against exploitation. These…
The Russian workers in practically all the large cities of Russia have already made their response in connection with the death of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. In one way or another, they expressed their attitude to the writer who produced a number of most remarkable works of art…
The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest…
If today we analyze On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, read by Khrushchev at a closed door session during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later hailed as the Secret Report, one detail immediately draws our…
Albanian comrades should not be in a hurry to establish collective farms. Albania is a backward mountainous country. Even in the Soviet Union we do not have collective farms in mountainous regions. This is why collective farms need not be formed in Albania right now. If the…
Howard: Should war come, Mr. Stalin, where is it most likely to break out? Where are the war clouds the most menacing, in the East or in the West?
The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence — one of the “essentials,” one of the principal (if not the principal) characteristics or features — of dialectics.
Whither is the NEP leading us: Toward capitalism or toward socialism? This is, of course, the central question. The market, the free trade in grain, competition, leases, concessions — what will be the upshot of all this? If you give the devil a finger, mightn’t it be necessary to…
Leaving it to the bourgeois scholars to absorb themselves in discussion of the question of the superiority of one sex over the other, or in the weighing of brains and the comparing of the psychological structure of men and women, the followers of historical materialism fully…
Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding…
Constitutional illusions are what we call a political error when people believe in the existence of a normal, juridical, orderly and legalised — in short, “constitutional” — system, although it does not really exist. At first glance it may appear that in Russia today, July 1917…
The distinguishing feature of the period in which Sismondi wrote was the rapid development of exchange (what in modern terminology we refer to as “money economy”), which manifested particularly sharply after the remnants of feudalism were destroyed by the French…
The third chapter of Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts & Reds” is often seen stand-alone under the title “Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut.” Though it is amazing that such a brilliant piece of writing is widely available, and though it definitely holds up on its own, I tend to…
The Bolshevik revolution has now definitively become part of the general revolution of the Russian people. As of two months ago the maximalists played the role of agitators against stagnation, urging the forward march not to slow down towards a premature settlement — one which…
Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of…
Emil Ludwig was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical “greats.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow on 13 December 1931.
H. G. Wells was a very famous English novelist, and has been referred to as the “Shakespeare of science fiction.” He interviewed Joseph Stalin during his trip to the USSR in 1934.
When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves.
Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the…