The State and Revolution Generic Course

[CU for Thursday, 10 September 2009]

One week after the launch of No Woman, No Revolution, the Communist University is proud to announce the completion of yet another Generic Course in the shape of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”.

It is a work that happens to be ideal in form for the Freirean method of pedagogy through study circles.

This is not surprising since Lenin, like Marx, began his political activities by organising study circles. [Pictured: Lenin’s study circle in 1896]

"The State and Revolution" is an uncompromising description of The State and of how it can be revolutionised, written as a rehearsal and a critique of Marx and Engels on the one hand, and of various reformist, opportunist and anarchist characters on the other hand.

The urgency of the work, undertaken after the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 2005 in Russia, and the working-class-and-peasant, Bolshevik, October Revolution of the same year, comes through. Lenin was working at top speed and under pressure on problems of revolution - problems which remain directly relevant to us today in South Africa.

In the process a sharp, clear picture emerges of The State and of all the implications of The State for revolutionary strategy and tactics. Lenin shows the immediate and practical significance of crucial theoretical concepts, including the “withering away of the state”. This turns out, as science usually does, to have constant relevance in the present moment. The withering away of the state is by no means something that once known about, can be disposed of or parked to one side. The withering has to start at once, and consciously so.

Please click on the link below to go to the relevant page on the YCL Discussion Forum web site, where this course is housed for the time being. As with the previous Generic Courses, it mainly consists of downloadable MS-Word files of the texts, plus pages that are the equivalent of the voluntary “openings to discussion” that comrades usually give in Party political education study groups.

The four newly-edited courses are as follows (click to go to a course):

• Capital, Volume 1
• Basic Communism
• No Woman, No Revolution
• The State and Revolution

Click here to access the original Communist University Generic Courses

The original Generic Courses were compiled nearly four years ago.

The new Generic Courses already comprise of 50 possible classes, which is more than one year’s worth of material at a rate of one per week, with holiday breaks.

Click on this link:

The State and Revolution, Console (one-page hyperlinked table)