The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World PDF
Preview The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World
1 2 �e Russian Revolution 3 4 �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 5 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 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 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 6 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 7 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 8 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 9
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