Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo,
2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la
crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as
part of: José Carlos Mariátegui,
History of the World Crisis and Other
Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN
978-0-692-88676-2.
Author’s Notes:
Lenin was born in Simbirsk, in 1870, the son of a primary school headmaster. He studied law in Petrograd, where his brother Alexander – who was executed following an attempt on the life of Alexander III – introduced him to Capital. He joined the socialist movement and gave himself completely to the workers’ cause. He dedicated himself not only to the study of theories but, mainly, to the direct study of the worker’s problems and spirit. He was an organizer from his time as a student. Eventually, they threw him out of the University. Following a textile strike, he was sent to Siberia. There, he completed his theoretical studies and his practical observations on the social issue in the world and in Russia. He based his ideology on proletarian reality; he fought against the workers’ confusion generated by Russia’s political situation; he fought to differentiate Marxists from those who weren’t. He took part in the 1905 revolution alongside the workers of Moscow. In 1907 he emigrated to Finland and then abroad. In that period he wrote his book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. In 1912 he was in Krakow, encouraging the workers’ movement. Then, in Switzerland.
In 1907, at the Stuttgart Congress, the International approved a motion by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg which, in its conclusion, said: “If a war threatens to breakout, it is the duty of the working classes in the countries involved to coordinate their efforts, with the support of the International, to prevent it by whatever means they consider most effective, and which naturally vary according to the intensity of the class struggle and the general political situation. In case war should break out, it is the socialists’ duty to intervene for its speedy end and to strive with all their power to use the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby bring about the downfall of the capitalist order.”
Then, during the war, came the Zimmerwald and Kienthal congresses, to which
went those union and socialist fractions who were loyal to those principles.
There, the Third International began to germinate.
Lenin’s role in the Russian revolution.
His books: The State and Revolution, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, The Fight for Bread, The Soviet’s Work of Rebuilding, Critical Notes Concerning a Reactionary Philosophy, and others.[1]
His collaboration in Pravda, Izvestia, and the Journal of the III International.
Sorel’s pages on “Defense of Lenin” in his book Reflections on Violence.
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[1] These works may be consulted online at the Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.or/lenin/, save for “The Fight for Bread” (La lucha por el pan). That title may be a reference to an anthology of writings by Lenin and Leon Trotsky, La lucha por el pan; Trabajo, orden y disciplina salvarán la República Socialista de los Soviets, published in Buenos Aires in 1920. – Trans.