The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents, 1918-1919; Preparing the Founding Congress (Communist International in Lenins T) - Softcover

Leon Trotsky; V.I. Lenin; Rosa Luxemburg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873489179 ISBN 13: 9780873489171

Publisher: Pathfinder Press, 1998

Synopsis

The documents in this book, most of which have never before been published in English, record the first months of the 1918 German Revolution.

In November of that year workers and soldiers toppled the German Empire and forced an abrupt end to the World War. A sharp struggle wracked the newborn republic. Should capitalist rule be reestablished or should it be replaced by a government based on councils of the exploited working people?

Part of a multivolume series on the Communist International, this book shows the important role of the German revolution in the International’s formation and in posing key questions debated at its first four congresses.

Recorded here are the contending positions of German Communist and Social Democratic leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and Friedrich Ebert, and debates within the German Communist Party.

Comments on the German events by Bolshevik leaders including V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Radek; the debate between Kautsky and Lenin on Soviet power in Russia; and preparations for the March 1919 founding congress of the Comintern round out this collection.

This book is part of a series, The Communist International in Lenin’s Time.

About this title

About the Authors

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was part of the central leadership forged by Bolshevik party leader V.I. Lenin that organized the revolutionary conquest of power by workers and peasants in Russia in October 1917. Trotsky commanded the Red Army, was a founding leader of the Communist International, and of communists in the Soviet Union and worldwide who fought to continue Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course. He continued that struggle from exile after being deported in 1929. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin’s secret police.

Since the early 1930s Pathfinder and its predecessors have translated, published, and kept in print Trotsky’s principal works. These include:
The Third International after Lenin (1996)
In Defense of Marxism (1995)
History of the Russian Revolution (1980)
The Revolution Betrayed (1972)
The First Five Years of the Communist International (two volumes, 1972)
Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929–40 (14 volumes, 1972–79)

V.I. Lenin (1870–1924) was the central leader of the Bolshevik Party, which led workers and peasants to power in the world’s first socialist revolution in October 1917. He was chairman of the revolutionary workers and peasants government in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Lenin was the founding leader of the Communist International, which worked to advance the building of proletarian parties worldwide able to emulate what toilers in Russia had accomplished by conquering state power. In the final year of his active political life, Lenin led the fight within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against the course of the growing petty bourgeois and newly emerging bourgeois layers in the Soviet Union that Joseph Stalin came to represent.

Lenin's writings include:

Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings 1922–23 (2010)

Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (1987)

Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International: Documents, 1907–1916 (1986)

Pathfinder has also published Three Study Guides on Lenin's Writings (2017)

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a leader of the revolutionary proletarian wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). She opposed the SPD leadership majority who sought to “reform” capitalism and fought the reformists’ patriotic capitulation to Berlin’s imperialist war aims in World War I. She hailed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. She was killed by thugs of the SPD-backed bourgeois regime. Her writings include Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970) and Reform or Revolution (1970).

Edition details

• Publisher: Pathfinder Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0873489179
• ISBN 13: 9780873489171
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 772