1. Bad Marxism
   Capitalism and Cultural Studies
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2004
   Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
2. The Betrayal of Marx 
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1975
   
3. Beyond the Fragments 
   Feminism and the Making of Socialism
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1979   Published: 1980
   A call for various fractions of the left to unite and work for a socialism through grass-roots activism.
   
4. The Bolsheviks & Workers' Control 
   The State and Counter-Revolution
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1970
   A pamphlet exposing the struggle that took place over the running of workplaces in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. In doing so not only does it demolish the romantic Leninist "history" of the relationship between the working class and their party during these years (1917-21) but it also provides a backbone to understanding why the Russian revolution failed in the way it did. From this understanding flows alternative possibilities of revolutionary organization.
5. The Bolsheviks in Power
   The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2007
   
6. Bolshevism and Stalinism 
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 1947
   From any view that goes beyond the capitalist system of exploitation, Stalinism and Trotskyism are both relics of the past.
7. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1983
   
8. Didn't See The Same Movie
   Review of Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 2003
   
9. Everything you wanted to know about sects but were afraid to ask
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   First Published: 1978
   We would rather fight for what we want (even if we don’t get it in our lifetime) than fight for what we don’t want ... and get it.
10. Facing Reality 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1958   Published: 1974
    Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against capital and the union bureaucracies), the authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."
    
11. Failure of a Dream?
    Essays in the History of American Socialism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1974
    Examines the reasons for the relative weakness of American socialism.
12. The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists
    Resource Type: Book
    
13. From Lenin to Stalin
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1937   Published: 1973
    A fascinating, first-hand account of the Stalinist takeover in Russia.
    
14. International Communism in the Era of Lenin
    Resource Type: Book
    
15. The Invading Socialist Society
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1947
    History has shown that in moments of great social crisis, its farthest flights fall short of the reality of the proletarian revolution. Never was the proletariat so ready for the revolutionary struggle, never was the need for it so great, never was it more certain that the proletarian upheaval, however long delayed, will only the more certainly take humanity forward in the greatest leap forward it has hitherto made. The periods of retreat, of quiescence, of inevitable defeats are mere episodes in the face of the absolute nature of the crisis.
    
16. Lenin and the Vanguard Party
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1963
    To believe that Bolshevism, or to be more precise, Leninism, would under the circumstances advocate or preach the theory of the vanguard party is to continue slander of Leninism, but not to his theory of the party (that is no longer viable) but to his central doctrine – the role of the proletariat in the preservation of society from barbarism. To interpret Leninism as the advocacy of a vanguard party of three million is nearly as bad as the doctrine of Goebbels that Christ was not a Jew. Objective circumstances in Russia forced Lenin into a certain position. He accepted it without apologising for it. He knew what he was doing and he knew also, for he said it many times, what he was not doing. His doubts about it, not only for other countries but for Russia, he made public many, many times.
    
17. Lenin as Philosopher
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1938
    Since the importance of Lenin’s philosophy is so strongly emphasised in Leninist organizations, it is necessary to make it the subject of a serious critical study. The doctrine of Party-Communism of the Third International cannot be judged adequately unless their philosophical basis is thoroughly examined.
18. Lenin as Philosopher
    Some additional remarks to Anton Pannekoek’s recent criticism of Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1938
    Both in his revolutionary materialist philosophy and m his revolutionary jacobinic politics, Lenin hid from himself the historical truth that his Russian revolution, in spite of a temporary attempt to break through its particular limitations in connection with the simultaneous revolutionary movement of the proletarian class in the West, was bound to remain in fact a belated successor of the great bourgeois revolutions of the past.
    
19. The Lenin Legend
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1935
    For Lenisn, socialism was in the last instance merely a kind of state-capitalism.
20. Lenin, Trotsky and the Vanguard Party
    A Contemporary View
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1963   Published: 1964
    
21. The Leninist Facade
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1979
    In direct oppostion to what Marx advocated, the Bolsheviks tried to institute socialism without democracy. The damage to the socialist movement resulting from this was immense.
22. Listen, Marxist!
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1969   Published: 1971
    Murray Bookchin takes on the 'Marxist-Leninists' destroying the New Left.
23. Luxemburg versus Lenin 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1935
    On many essential points the conceptions of Luxemburg differ from those of Lenin as day from night, or – the same thing – as the problems of the bourgeois revolution from those of the proletarian.
24. Manual for Revolutionary Leaders
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    A devious satire aimed at Leninists, Trotksyists, Maoists, and vanguardists of all stripes.
    
25. Mao as a Dialectician
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1968   Published: 1971
    
26. Marxists Internet Archive 
    Resource Type: Internet WWW site
    Large archive of the writings of Marx and Engels and of others in the Marxist tradition. Searchable.
27. Multiphasic Bureaucratic Follow the Leader Exam
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1978
    
28. The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”
    What They Did to What Is To Be Done?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1990
    Lenin protested more than once that his initial formulations in WITBD were being distorted and misinterpreted by opponents, after which he went on to clarify and modify. If we want to know Lenin’s “concept of the party” we must look at the formulations he came to, after there had been discussions and attacks.
    
29. The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1954
    Lenin discovered in practice that the defeat-slogan was incompatible with a living Marxist approach to the problem of the defense of the nation, conceived not in the social-patriotic sense of the “defense of the fatherland” but in the light of a Marxist class understanding of, and a dynamically revolutionary program for, the nation.
    
30. Notebook of an Agitator
    Resource Type: Book
    
31. Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1904
    Rosa Luxemburg’s contribution to the debate within the Russian Social Democratic movement on party organization and democratic centralism. Luxemburg joins Trotsky in warning of the dangers inherent in centralism and argues against the concentration of power in a Central Committee. From a Socialist Revolutionary perspective Luxemburg puts forward compelling arguments against Lenin’s conception of the revolutionary Party.
    
32. A People's History of the World
    From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1999
    Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative or ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals.
33. Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1977
    
34. Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1920   Published: 1962
    
35. Radical America - Volume 4, Number 6
    Special Lenin-Hegel Issue - Periodical profile
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1970
    
36. The Red Menace 
    A libertarian socialist newsletter
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1975   Published: 1980
    Articles on topics such as socialism, Marxism, anarchism, work, popular education, organizing, wages for housework, Leninism, bureaucracy, hierarchy, jargon, prostitution, obscenity, science fiction, and terrorism.
    
37. Revolutionary Organisation and Open Letter to IS
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1972
    A 1972 pamphlet incorporating two previously published texts, 'Revolutionary Organisation' (1961) and 'An Open Letter to I.S.' (1968). They are presented as "a contribution to the serious discussing now taking place, within the ranks of revolutionaryies, as to what kind of organisation is necessary."
    
38. SDS 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1973   Published: 1974
    
39. Situationist International Anthology 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1981
    
40. The Sixties 
    Years of Hope, Days of Rage
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1987
    One of the best books on the Sixties in the U.S., bringing to life the political and cultural currents, including especially the music, which raged during that decade, and setting them in historical context.
    
41. Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, the State and Leninism
    A Reply to the International Socialist Organization
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 2009
    I take it that social or Left-anarchism and libertarian socialism are the same thing. Both stand opposed to Leninism, and both stand opposed to individualist anarchism.
42. The Socialist Register 1974
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1974
    
43. Society of the Spectacle 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1967   Published: 2005
    An analysis of modern society and how it can be changed written in the form of 221 theses. The first thesis reads: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." Translator Ken Knabb describes the book as "an effort to clarify the nature of the society in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. Every single thesis has a direct or indirect bearing on issues that are matters of life and death."
44. Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern
    International Communism in the Era of Stalin's Ascendancy
    Resource Type: Book
    
45. Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the Left
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1976
    
46. The State and Revolution
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1917
    
47. The Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1938
    Leon Trotsky's program for the founding of the Fourth International.
    
48. Trotskyism and the vanguard party 
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1974
    One of the most consistent achievements of the Trotskyists over the years has been to drive people away from radical politics. The number of burned-out and alienated ex-Trotskyists greatly exceeds the number of active Trotskyists. Their transparently manipulative tactics in the organizations they infiltrate tend to drive ordinary members away, forever wary of anyone identified as a Trotskyist.
    
49. The Unknown Dimension 
    European Marxism Since Lenin
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
    The radical intellectual tradition of European post-Leninist Marxism, so different from the dogma of the orthodox leftist parties, is an unknowwn dimension. This anthology sets out to recover this Marxist tradition and to restore the centrality of Marxist revolutionary thought and practice.
50. Vanguard, Vanguard, Who's Got the Vanguard
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1972
    A critique of Leninist vanguard-party theories and practice, especially as manifested in the new left groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
    
51. What Happened to Better Read Graphics?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1976
    Four members of the Better Read Graphics collective (identified only by their initials) explain the political differences which led the collective to decide to dissolve in the summer of 1976.
    
52. Why the Leninists will lose
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1978
    The Leninist groups may still have the ability to disrupt the left, but they are long past the point of being able to achieve any kind of success in their own right.
53. Why the Leninists Will Win
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    First Published: 1977
    Clark argues that the failure of the libertarian left to take organizing seriously makes it likely that capitalism will be overthrown by Leninists who will preside over a social system as undemocratic as the old.

Experts on Leninism in the Sources Directory

1. Center for Socialist History
2. Marxists Internet Archive