New book opens imaginative doors to understanding Lenin’s global legacy

Communists in Sri Lanka carry a portrait of Vladimir Lenin during a May Day rally in Colombo in 2018. | Eranga Jayawardena / AP

Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce is an intriguing book. Edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, this collection of brief commentaries on Lenin’s life, thought, and enduring influences celebrates the revolutionary’s contribution to human progress.

With over 100 short essays and more than a dozen artistic and photographic contributions, the book features an array of writers and artists from diverse political backgrounds, geographical locations, and occupations.

What makes these contributions particularly fascinating are the writers’ personal and political relationships with Lenin’s legacy. Scholars, journalists, poets, fiction writers, lawyers, and political activists from Afghanistan to Brazil, the Caribbean to the South Pacific, Nanjing to New York, France to Tanzania, and Lagos to Ho Chi Minh City provide unique insights into their connections with Lenin.

The book’s strength lies in the fact that most contributors avoid clichés about Stalinism or self-pitying laments about what did or did not happen after the fateful October Revolution of 1917. Instead, the most engaging and significant contributions reflect a newly embraced enthusiasm for potentially reviving what Lenin believed and for his mode of strategic thinking.

Despite the collection’s broad cultural and geographical differences, most contributors share common perceptions of Lenin’s precise contribution to Marxist thought. They wrote about Lenin’s most well-known principles—the joint organization of anti-imperialist struggles with the socialist project through an internationalist frame, the united front of the major toiling classes in the revolutionary struggle, the necessity for unity within and the strategic role of the revolutionary party, the willingness to embrace creative, even long-term forms of political struggle in non-revolutionary conditions, and his famous rejections of racism, sexism, and homophobia on the grounds that human diversity was a source of our collective strength toward liberation.

Above all, the contributors to this volume of short essays regard creative political thought and practice as a Leninist principle that needs to be grasped again as we struggle against the reemergence of fascism, the violence of neoliberalism, and the system of world imperialism.

I especially enjoyed and learned from essays or contributions that involved humanizing Lenin. Those included reflections presented as creative fiction, dramatic dialogue, poetry, or discussions of Lenin statues. Canadian poet Sheila Delany’s “Words: 26 October 1917” invokes Lenin’s opening statement to the Second Congress of the Soviets just after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky regime. “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.”

…the most amazing words of our time

at last, at first,

or any time so far.

Helsinki-based Turkish artist Baran Caginli shared both a story about his radical father, who faced political repression and torture under the Turkish military regime in the 1980s, and a bread recipe he cooked with molds of Lenin, Marx, and Luxemburg. Scholar Sevgi Dogan presents an imagined dialogue between Lenin and German Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg set in a German prison that invokes the famous disputes between the two revolutionaries.

David McIlwraith’s short story, “Richter and Gus,” presents an imagined encounter between the revolutionist and a porter named Augustus Cole at the British Museum during Lenin’s 1902 visit to London, during which he used the pseudonym Richter to hide from czarist spies. Nigerian socialist Baba Aye’s “A Letter to Lenin in Lagos” gently chides the Nigerian left for failing to organize a revolutionary activist left even as it organizes academic conferences on Marx and Lenin’s legacies.

Afro-Caribbean activist Earl Bousquet’s reflection on “How the Soviet Union Saved the Caribbean without Colonisation” does not emphasize Lenin’s personal legacy as much as it foregrounds how the existence of the Soviet Union made the world, on the whole, a better place. Bousquet, who had been known as a “communist Rastafarian,” discusses how the Soviets prevented the Nazis from conquering Caribbean colonies during World War II. He recalls how the New Jewel Movement in Grenada developed political education classes that included several of Lenin’s most widely read works, which he sees as part of what he refers to as the “Black Attraction to the Soviet Union.”

Brazilian scholar Marcela Magalhães, in a short piece on “The Need to Dream and the Importance of (Re)Believing in Lenin,” delivers a hopeful call to return to his “intrepid faith in the transformative power of collective vision and action.”

Other enlightening contributions to the book include brief overviews of historical events in different parts of the world. Cabo Verdean scholar Abel Djassi Amado delivers a brief, dense discussion of Lenin’s influences on Amilcar Cabral. He finds no one-to-one match of ideas and strategies transferred from the former to the latter. However, he concludes that Cabral creatively applied Lenin’s theories of imperialism, the vanguard party, and the determinate role of the anti-colonial struggle to conditions of life in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde.

Cuban historian Natasha Gómez Velázquez also emphasizes how the very Leninist notion of creative applications of Marxist thought and theory to local conditions influenced the early years of the Communist Party of Cuba. In this vein, she briefly explores the experiences and writings of Julio Antonio Mella, a founder and an important party leader in the early years of its existence. In his eulogy upon Lenin’s death, Mella had written how “historical contexts” drive the revolutionary approaches of the Leninist party. People change the worlds they actually live in; they don’t change it through radical sloganeering.

Chinese scholar Yuan Xianxin gives just a taste of Lenin’s influence on early Chinese Communists. The Soviet Union’s decision to renounce czarist claims to Chinese concessions drew many Chinese political radicals into the anti-imperialist fold, including Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Guomindang. Sun later would write that the “heart is connected” to Lenin despite the thousands of miles that separated them.

Thai scholar Puangchon Unchanam traces the truncated history of political radicalism in that country, where tyranny and the monarchy have traveled hand-in-hand. During the Cold War, widespread political repression forced the Communist Party of Thailand, which had mobilized mass opposition to U.S. military actions in Southeast and East Asia, nearly out of existence. However, Lenin’s influence has seen a resurgence there, as the Marxist-influenced Move Forward Party has won significant electoral victories in recent years. Writes Unchanam, “Lenin is once again relevant in Thailand.”

Other valuable contributions include separate discussions of Lenin’s specific influences on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and on the Chinese Communist journalist Qu Quibai’s adaptation of Marxist-Leninist thought to China’s historical and cultural development.

In an era when the people who dominate the world seem more inclined to bring about the end of humanity rather than to end capitalism’s inherent brutality, Lenin’s theoretical mind, practical organizing talents, and commitment to working-class leadership are needed more than ever. While this book does not try to give a political biography of Lenin or deliver a definitive perspective on his thought, it does open many imaginative doors to understanding Lenin’s global legacy.

The diverse contributions in Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce illuminate Lenin’s enduring influence on Marxist thought and its application to various global contexts. The humanizing perspectives and historical overviews offer valuable insights into Lenin’s principles and their relevance in contemporary struggles against fascism, neoliberalism, and imperialism.

Review of Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce

Edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson

Wakefield, Canada, Daraja Press, 2024.

ISBN:9781998309047

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CONTRIBUTOR

Joel Wendland-Liu

Joel Wendland-Liu teaches courses on diversity, intercultural competence, migration, and civil rights at Grand Valley State University in West Michigan. He is the author of "Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature, Settler Colonialism, and Racial Capitalism in the Long Nineteenth Century" (International Publishers) and "The Collectivity of Life" (Lexington Books).