"Left-Wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image; some foxing on the cover; worn and rubbed spine, internally sound.
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is one of Vladimir Lenin's most incisive and combative political treatises, written in 1920 as a direct intervention into the fierce ideological debates fracturing the international communist movement. In it, Lenin mounts a rigorous and often withering critique of ultra-left factions within Western European socialist parties — particularly in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands — who rejected parliamentary participation, trade union engagement, and tactical compromise as bourgeois capitulation. With the authority of a seasoned revolutionary who had just led the Bolsheviks to power, he argues that principled flexibility, disciplined party organisation, and strategic pragmatism are not betrayals of revolutionary ideals, but their very preconditions. A cornerstone of Marxist-Leninist political theory, this work illustrates the tension between revolutionary purity and political realism that continues to define left-wing movements to this day. Lenin's prose is characteristically direct, polemical, and unsparing — he instructs, admonishes, and persuades in equal measure, drawing on the hard-won lessons of the Russian Revolution to school a new generation of international comrades. More than a historical document, it remains a challenging provocation: can any movement achieve lasting change without mastering the art of the possible?
Author: V. I. Lenin
Format: Paperback
Published: 1965, Foreign Languages Press
Genre: Politics & law
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image; some foxing on the cover; worn and rubbed spine, internally sound.
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is one of Vladimir Lenin's most incisive and combative political treatises, written in 1920 as a direct intervention into the fierce ideological debates fracturing the international communist movement. In it, Lenin mounts a rigorous and often withering critique of ultra-left factions within Western European socialist parties — particularly in Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands — who rejected parliamentary participation, trade union engagement, and tactical compromise as bourgeois capitulation. With the authority of a seasoned revolutionary who had just led the Bolsheviks to power, he argues that principled flexibility, disciplined party organisation, and strategic pragmatism are not betrayals of revolutionary ideals, but their very preconditions. A cornerstone of Marxist-Leninist political theory, this work illustrates the tension between revolutionary purity and political realism that continues to define left-wing movements to this day. Lenin's prose is characteristically direct, polemical, and unsparing — he instructs, admonishes, and persuades in equal measure, drawing on the hard-won lessons of the Russian Revolution to school a new generation of international comrades. More than a historical document, it remains a challenging provocation: can any movement achieve lasting change without mastering the art of the possible?