#martov

[milfstalin]

hello?

[noyabrina]

poor little meow meow

[bubervitch]

Lenin near the end of his life, when he could still speak, reminiscing about his long ago close friendship with Martov, thinking back to the man with whom he was at one time so close, but who then stood totally against him and actively had worked against his revolution. Thinking back, I would like also to think, onto his brief fantasy of bridge mending between the old Menshevik and Bolshevik factions, just before the revolution, but knowing even then that he and his friend of a hopeful youth long since passed would never again see eye to eye.

His small egg of a bald head resting on the pillow of his sickbed, the few wispy hairs left slicked with sweat to his pale, emaciated skull. The fruits of his labour, a world he and his once closest friend discussed in detail late into the night and early into the morning, risking death and facing exile to usher forward, laying just outside his window, while his old comrade lay almost still, in his own bed in Germany. The sun of development rising over one country, and setting in the other.

Telling Krupskaya, eyes closed in their deep-set sockets, with his voice barely above a whisper, “I hear Martov is dying too…”

[yngwrthr]

Iskra cites France as an example. But that was Jacobin France. To make a bogey of Jacobinism in time of revolution is a cheap trick. A democratic dictatorship, as I have pointed out, is not an organisation of “order”, but an organisation of war. Even if we did seize St. Petersburg and guillotined Nicholas, we would still have several Vendées to deal with. Marx understood this perfectly when in 1848, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he recalled the Jacobins. He said that “the Reign of Terror of 1793 was nothing but a plebeian mariner of settling accounts with absolutism and counter-revolution.” We, too, prefer to settle accounts with the Russian autocracy by “plebeian” methods and leave Girondist methods to Iskra… The revolutionary temper of the proletariat is mounting almost hourly. At such a moment Martovism is not mere folly, but a downright crime, for it saps the revolutionary energy of the proletariat, clips the wings of its revolutionary enthusiasm… It is the mistake Bernstein made in the German Party, under different circumstances, on the question, not of the democratic, but of the socialist dictatorship.

Lenin, minutes to the Third Congress of the RSDLP, “Report on the Question of the Participation of the Social-Democrats in a Provisional Revolutionary Government”, 1905.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Ten Days That Shook the World: On the eve of the October Revolution

Ten Days That Shook the World: On the eve of the October Revolution

Ten Days That Shook the World, the most famous first-hand account of the Great October Socialist Revolution, was written by the radical journalist and co-founder of the U.S. communist movement, John Reed. 

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

The…

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[milfstalin]

source

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

The Aurora in the Neva: Symbol of capitalism's death knell

The Aurora in the Neva: Symbol of capitalism’s death knell

All is changed and yet all remains as before. The revolution has shaken the country, deepened the split, frightened some, embittered others, but not yet wiped out a thing or replaced it. Imperial St. Petersburg seems drowned in a sleepy lethargy rather than dead. The revolution has stuck little red flags in the hands of the cast-iron monuments of the monarchy. Great red streamers are hanging down…

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[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

The victorious Congress of Soviets

The victorious Congress of Soviets

In Smolny on the 25th of October the most democratic of all parliaments in the world’s history was to meet. Who knows – perhaps also the most important.

Having got free of the influence of compromisist intellectuals, the local soviets had sent up for the most part workers and soldiers. The majority of them were people without big names, but who had proved themselves in action and won lasting…

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