Left-Wing Communism

Written at speed in April and May 1920 and put into delegates' hands for the Second Congress of the Communist International that summer.

It was a tract for a particular moment. Across Europe new Communist parties were forming out of the wreckage of the war, and many of the freshest recruits had drawn a bracing but mistaken lesson from the Bolshevik victory: that revolutionaries should keep their hands clean - boycott bourgeois parliaments, refuse to work inside conservative trade unions, spurn all compromise with reformist leaders. Lenin wrote to talk them out of it. The infantile disorder of the title is that purism: leftism not as an excess of principle but as political immaturity, the refusal to do the patient and soiling work of winning a majority.

Read for what it is, this is one of the most attractive things he ever wrote, because it shows him at his least dogmatic. The art of politics, he says, consists in correctly gauging the conditions and the moment, and a serious leader has to distinguish the compromises that are simply treachery from those that are the price of reaching people where they actually are. Communists must work in reactionary unions precisely because that is where the workers are; they must use parliament as a platform even while despising it; and they must build with the human material capitalism has actually left them rather than with an imagined kind.

A handbook of flexibility, later made into a rod.

Translated by Julius Katzer.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.