The history of "left communism"
Above, from left: Pannekoek, Bordiga, Damen, Chirik A note to supplement Todd Hamer's article "Transforming the labour movement: a reply to our critics" The nearest that Lenin came to summing up, in "textbook" form, the lessons to be learned by Marxists from Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, was his famous 1920 pamphlet, Left-wing communism: an infantile disorder. "In the first months after the proletariat in Russia had won political power (October 25 [November 7], 1917)", wrote Lenin, "it might have seemed that the enormous difference between backward Russia and the advanced countries of...