Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce

Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce brings together 100+ authors and visual artists from 50+ countries across the world – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – in order to critically commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, on 21 January 1924.

Combining academic, journalistic and more personal-political texts, including poetry, theatrical skits and fictional writing, the books’ contributors aim to identify and constructively engage with the living legacy of Lenin’s life and work before, during and after the October Revolution. Concretely, the 100+ texts deal with a great variety of “old [Leninist] truths that are ever new” (Lenin), both historically and in today’s times: Imperialism, the National Question and the Right to Self-Determination, the Vanguard Party, Trans Liberation, Ecological Leninism, Dialectics, Artificial Intelligence, Military Marxisms, Black Liberation, Communist Feminism as well as Revolutionary Dreaming and Organising, among many others.

Also, Lenin is put into dialogue with a number of revolutionary comrades-in-arms, among them Amílcar Cabral, Mao Zedong, Julius Nyerere, José Carlos Mariátegui, Juan Antonio Mella, G.F.W. Hegel, Antonio Gramsci, Qui Quibai, Alexandra Kollontai and Rosa Luxemburg.

In sum, the book aspires to help liberate the old Ilyich from the musty, petrifying solitude of his mausoleum and to invite him back into the “real movement, which abolishes the state of things” (Marx & Engels) in the here and now, i.e. our multiple, intersecting struggles against all types of capitalist-colonial-heteropatriarchal-ableist oppression and for the rekindling and strengthening of the new Communist horizon.

While many on the contemporary Left continue to openly disavow any association with Tovarish Lenin, Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce affirms the opposite – that there will be no revolution without Vladimir Ilyich among our rank-and-file comrade-ancestors. Or in the words of one of the book’s authors, Himani Bannerji, “We neglect Lenin’s voice at our own peril.”