The 1970 talk about Lenin

Posted item #7 Cliff speaks on Lenin (1970)

This is the first section of Cliff's talk about Lenin from 1970. He was then in the early days of rediscovering Lenin's ideas and writings for his comrades in the International Socialists. During the first half of the 1970s he gave talks and wrote numerous articles about various aspects of Lenin's life and politics, with a major emphasis on Lenin's ideas about building a revolutionary party (and the practical experience of the Bolsheviks).

This focus was linked to his dedication to orienting the IS - which in 1970 still had a fairly weak worker composition, depending heavily on students - on working class struggles and creating a party rooted in both the Marxist tradition and working class organisations. There was some resistance to this, with Cliff having to argue relentlessly for some Leninist positions.

The talks and articles of the early 70s developed into the multi-volume Lenin biography, published between 1975 and 1979, that I wrote about in my previous post. In these books Cliff elaborates the ideas he derived from Lenin - as well as the facts of Lenin's political life - in far greater detail.