I am writing with some notes on our readings from Luxemburg and Trotsky on the Bolshevik Revolution and the greater revolutionary crisis of 1917-19.

I am writing with some very brief notes on the 3rd part of Lukacs's essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," "The Standpoint of the Proletariat," which is very important for Platypus's grasp of the self-understanding of the revolutionary Marxism in 1917-19 that Lukacs was trying to theoretically digest. -- In a certain sense, this piece by Lukacs is the culmination of all the prior readings we have done by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs and Korsch.

As I have pointed out in previous posts, the Lenin of 1920 is pointed to by anarchists and Left-communists as the Right, opportunist Lenin, the Lenin that suppressed the Kronstadt mutiny and implemented the New Economic Policy sanctioning capitalist enterprise, etc. This text is taken as a rationalization for such a (supposedly) Right turn by Lenin (and Trotsky, who supported it). On the other hand, Lenin's pamphlet has also been abused -- perhaps above all -- by Stalinist-informed reformist "Marxism." The pejorative "ultra-Left" has an unfortunate ideological history traceable to a fundamental misunderstanding of the point Lenin was trying to make here.

I am writing with some notes towards discussion of Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917).

I am writing with some notes on Rosa Luxemburg's Mass, Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), which we read as our second text from the period of the 1905 Revolution in Russia.