The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World

280 Pages·2018·4.251 MB·English

by  Walter Rodney, Robin D.G. Kelley (editor), Jesse Benjamin (editor), Vijay Prashad (foreword)

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�e Russian Revolution
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�e Russian Revolution
A View �om the �ird World
Walter Rodney
Edited and with an Introduction by
Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse J. Benjamin
Foreword by Vijay Prashad
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First published by Verso 2018
© Walter Rodney Foundation 2018
Introduction © Jesse J. Benjamin and Robin D. G. Kelley 2018
Foreword © Vijay Prashad 2018
Frontispiece, original art by Abbyssinian.
Redesigned by Aajay Murphy.
All rights reserved
�e moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Le� Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-530-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-531-0 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-532-7 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Sabon LT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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Most dedications are wri�en by the author to someone or something that
was important to the book’s creation. Who or what Walter Rodney would
have wri�en here was taken from us when his life was violently snatched
from us at the age of thirty-eight. It has taken us the sum of his lifetime,
another thirty-eight years, to publish this book. So, given this task, I
dedicate this book to Walter Rodney, who brilliantly penned these lectures;
and to his immeasurable mind and thirst for knowledge that made this work
possible.
�is book is dedicated to you Daddy, the world’s Walter Rodney. It is
your �rst original work produced solely from your lecture notes that has
been published posthumously, and we hope it does you justice. Most people
speak. Fewer write. Fewer research. Even fewer are fastidious and proli�c.
Rare are those who do them all, and well. �is book takes its place in your
tradition of research, scholarship and radical analysis and in your ability to
teach complex issues (of consciousness, self-activity, mass movements, class
struggle) in an understandable way.
Asha T. Rodney
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Contents
Foreword: Rodney and the Revolution
Vijay Prashad
Editors’ Note
Introduction: An “A�ican Perspective” on the Russian Revolution
Jesse J. Benjamin and Robin D. G. Kelley
1. �e Two World Views of the Russian Revolution
2. �e Russian Regime and the Soviet Revolution
3. Marx, Marxism and the Russian Le�
4. Trotsky as Historian of the Russian Revolution
5. On the “Inevitability” of the Russian Revolution
6. On Democracy: Lenin, Kautsky and Luxemburg
7. Building the Socialist State
8. �e Transformation of Empire
9. �e Critique of Stalinism
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
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Foreword
Rodney and the Revolution
Vijay Prashad
Live �rough a Revolution
In the �rst years of the 1960s, Walter Rodney went to the Soviet Union. He
was in his early twenties, a young man from a working-class Guyanese
family who had read history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
He arrived in the airport in Moscow and knew he had arrived somewhere
different:
When I travelled to the Soviet Union, I was struck on arrival at the airport by the
physical demeanour and the social aspect of the people in the airport. �ey were
workers and peasants, as far as I could see, who were �ying on those TU-104’s to
Moscow, to Leningrad, etc., as though they were using a bus. And my
understanding of an airport was that it was a very bourgeois institution. �ere
were only certain of us who were supposed to be in an airport. But the Soviets
seemed to have ascended beyond that. �at was what one confronted going into
the country. And then, having le� the airport, one goes into the streets and one is
amazed at the number of books they sell�in the streets, on the pavement, all
over. In my society, you have to search for a bookstore and be directed and told
that the bookstore is down that street, as if it’s an alien institution. And even in
America, one can buy hot dogs and hamburgers on the sidewalks, a lot of nice
things like that, but not books.1
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