NRWITBD 2026: Richard Appignanesi, Lenin for Beginners [1978]

[Fade in] The year is 2026. Picture this: industrial-scale war on multiple continents. Cities in ruins, millions dead and millions more made refugees - starvation, disease, mutilations, deportations, pogroms, genocides, dispossessions. Across every land, a working class on its knees before an ever-shrinking class of oligarchs with an ever-growing pile of treasure, weapons and slaves - determined to pit brother against brother in endless wars for resources that can only end when the whole earth is a toxic wasteland. And what they call "peace" is not much better.

This is the brutal present, a Second Gilded Age, but we could travel back a hundred years and describe more or less the exact same scene. In the century since Lenin lived and walked the earth, less has changed than the eternal optimists - Panglossian techno-liberals like Steven Pinker and the other intellectuals of the Epstein class - would like us to think. Really, we're back where it all began in the First Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century: on the outside looking in, asking the age-old question: what is to be done? Things are really getting quite bad. No, really - what is to be done!!?

In our gatherings of late, we've been tinkering around the edges of a few answers. Prior Lenin readings as well as our exploration of the Yan'an Forum and our whistle-stop tour through the last twenty years of street protests with Vincent Bevins have given us some things to chew on. Now there's been a clamour from plenty of regulars, as well as a few newcomers, that we continue to pull at the vital thread that seems to be running through all our discussions and see where it might lead us: namely, the revolutionary theories of Lenin.

This will be a series of readings running every other Thursday night in Whitechapel. We'll start with something a little unusual for us: Richard Appignanesi's Lenin for Beginners, an illustrated guide to Lenin's life and thought designed for newcomers to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Despite having lots of pictures and goofy cartoons, it's very much not dumbed down - it simply provides an accessible intro to concepts which can seem obscure in Lenin's own writing (given translation issues and the old-world style of a man from the 19th century).

Find the text here (uploaded by me personally to Riseup Share, an encrypted service): https://share.riseup.net/#sk4GQeoLBxlb5U-Dn9D19w

With No, Really: What is to be done?, we'll be taking a deep dive into revolutionary Marxism with a read-through of texts like Lars Lih's Lenin rediscovered: what is to be done? in Context, non-standard biographies like Carter Ellwood's Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the Bolshevik Party 1910-1914 as well as some articles, essays and discussion prompts which most readers likely won't have encountered before.

Take care and happy reading!