Radical Nonfiction Book Group at Hollow Nickel – Brooklyn, NY

Radical Nonfiction Book Group with Carlo

Discussing The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Led by former Greenlight bookseller Carlo, our Radical Nonfiction Book Group meets monthly to read and discuss nonfiction titles related to the issues of history, politics, and the promise of a better world, just around the corner!

For September, the group discusses The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork The State and Revolution. This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.