Dear comrades and friends,

DYFI CUC organised the twenty third study circle of this year yesterday. We read the Chapter 4 – Imperialism: World War and Civil War of Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought by Georg Lukacs.

The chapter talks about what Lenin was able to do with the theory of imperialism – not so much groundbreaking economic work, but groundbreaking analysis of what imperialism meant for action. Lenin was the only one at the time who was able to give a guideline for concrete action, in the backdrop of imperialism, because his was a theory of the class forces active under imperialism. As Lukacs says:

For Marxists the concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not the opposite of ‘pure’ theory; on the contrary, it is the culmination of all genuine theory, its consummation, the point where it therefore breaks into practice.

The chapter then talks about two flawed ways of assessing bourgeois and proletarian revolutions: one, to think that if a revolution is a bourgeois revolution, the only task of the proletariat is to support that revolution; two, to assume that all revolutions in an imperialist age will be proletarian revolutions. Both these approaches mechanistically divide bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, and ignore revolutionary elements in both. 

The chapter also briefly talks about what revisionism means in the context of war and civil war. We discussed the nature of the revolution in Nepal. Next week, we will read Chapter 5.

Revolutionary Greetings,

Central Unit Committee,

Democratic Youth Federation of India – Delhi