As capitalism in the twenty-first century enters its deepest economic and social crisis since the decades spanning the first and second imperialist world wars, programmatic and strategic matters in dispute in the
communist workers movement in the early 1920s once again weigh heavily in prospects for the working class worldwide to advance along its historic line of march toward the conquest of power.
—From the introduction
In 1922 and 1923, V.I. Lenin, central leader of the world’s first socialist revolution, waged what was to be his last political battle. At stake was whether that revolution would remain on the proletarian course that had brought workers and peasants in the former tsarist empire to power in October 1917—and laid the foundations for a truly worldwide revolutionary movement of toilers organizing to emulate the Bolsheviks’ example.
‘Who will win?’ Lenin asked in March 1922. Could the workers and peasants, emerging from years of war, devastation, and famine, continue to hold off the hostile capitalist world surrounding the Soviet republic? Above all, could they under those conditions prevail at home against rising bourgeois layers and their self-serving allies within the state and Communist Party apparatus?
Lenin’s Final Fight brings together, for the first time, the reports, articles, and letters through which Lenin waged this political battle. Many were suppressed for decades, and some have never before appeared in English.
Introduction by Jack Barnes and Steve Clark, chronology, notes, index.
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