The Vladimir Lenin Collection: State and Revolution, What Is to Be Done?, & Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism

By: Vladimir Lenin

Narrated by: Michael Richards

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924) is better known by his alias Lenin. A Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist, he served as the head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia became the Soviet Union, a one-party state governed by the Communist Party.

The Vladimir Lenin Collection includes:

Book one: State and Revolution discusses the role of the state in society, the need for proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inability of social democracy to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin's definition of the state is “A special organisation of force: it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class". Quoting Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the existence of the state after the proletarian revolution, addressing the arguments of anarchists, social democrats, and reformists. He describes the progressive stages of societal change as the revolution that establishes “the lower stage of communist society” and the “higher stage of communist society” that would yield a stable society where personal freedom might be expressed.

Book two: What Is to Be Done? (1902) is a political pamphlet in which Lenin contends that the working class will not become politically aware simply by struggling with employers over wages, hours, and working conditions. He maintains that Marxists should form a political party of committed revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet was partly responsible for the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Claiming that socialist theory was the product of the "revolutionary socialist intellectuals", Lenin states that the working class was able to develop only a “trade-union consciousness". He points out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.

Book three: "Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism", a 1916 essay by Lenin, was an early attempt to account for the increasing importance of the global market in the 20th century. Lenin claims that colonialism and the First World War emerged from the worldwide spread of the capitalist economy. In the course of colonizing undeveloped countries, the great powers: the German, British, French, and Russian empires eventually engage in geopolitical conflict over the economic exploitation of large portions of the globe. Furthermore, in the capitalist homeland, the profits generated by the exploitation of colonies allow the business class to bribe native politicians, labor leaders, and the labor aristocracy in order to thwart worker revolts. The essay is a synthesis of Lenin's development of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in Das Kapital (1867).

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

An amazing listen

Even a century since they were written each of these works remains relevant and useful to understanding the world to this day

Engaging

The reader was excellent in his job and the work itself was an engaging work of genius

I learned a few things I didn't know before

it wasn't what I thought it would be but I learned a few things I never knew before.

Incomplete Edit

The content is great, but the audio is edited out in certain places. I recommend the book but don't recommend this audio book

Great, but choppy

There are a handful of moments when the audio cuts ahead or jumps back, and it appears to be a part of the re-recording or compilation. It's not often, and doesn't interfere with understanding of the passages when it occurs since it's only a second or two forward or back, but it's worth noting that these moments exist. Otherwise, it's an amazing collection with a lot of good insights that hold up today.

Defective Product - Do Not Buy

This review is focused on the product itself, not the textual content of the books presented. The books themselves are historically significant works which should interest anyone who finds history, political theory/philosophy, or radical movements to be engaging topics. Were the product not defective, this review would be overwhelmingly positive.

The unfortunate fact about this collection is that the recording is essentially defective. Throughout the entire collection, various editing errors are plainly audible, and many of these errors cause words to become garbled or even dropped entirely. Specifically:
- Numerous times, multiple takes of the same sentence are left in, giving the impression the narrator is repeating himself.
- Often, particularly in the second book (What Is to Be Done?), sentences will be cut short. This causes words (perhaps even phrases) to be lost, rendering portions difficult to understand.
- Occasionally, a bad splice will occur in the middle of a word, rendering it difficult to hear that word.
- Strange noises are audible throughout, including a couple (admittedly literally just a couple) which are loud enough to be uncomfortable to listen to through headphones or earbuds

These errors are unfortunate, as the diction of the narrators is excellent and the material is otherwise well-presented. Perhaps in the future, the publisher will release a revised version which fixes the aforementioned issues, but until that is the case, avoid this defective product.