Our continuity with Lenin

Lenin’s political battle to maintain 
proletarian course of Russian Revolution 

Introduction to new edition of ‘Lenin’s Final Fight’ 
draws lessons of the working class’s historic 
line of march toward conquest of power 

Part 1:

http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7415/741550.html


Part 2:

http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7416/741650.html


Part 3:

http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7417/741750.html

excerpt:

Revolutionary prospects for 21st century

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.

“One of capitalism’s infrequent long winters has begun,” noted a political report adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in 2002, half a decade prior to the 2007 financial implosion that announced the imperialist order’s latest global crisis. And “with the accompanying acceleration of imperialism’s drive toward war, it’s going to be a long, hot winter.”

Even more important, slowly but surely and explosively, it will be one that breeds a scope and depth of resistance not previously seen by revolutionary-minded militants throughout today’s world… .

We find ourselves in the very opening stages of what will be decades of economic, financial, and social convulsions and class battles. [We] must internalize the fact that this world—the likes of which none of us have known before in our political lives—is not only the world that must be faced today, but the one we will be living and fighting in for many years.

By acting on this reality today, we will not be caught short politically as wars erupt, deeper social crises explode, pogroms are organized and attempted, and union conflicts become life-and-death battles. The proletarian party that exists tomorrow can only grow out of the proletarian party we put together today.²

In this effort, the political lessons of Lenin’s final fight, recounted in his own words in these pages, take on increasing importance for the working class, and for youth attracted to the power of working people to put an end to capitalism’s exploitative and oppressive social relations and transform the course of human history.