What do you think?
Rate this book
Lenin: On Workers' Control and the Nationalization (Nationalisation) of Industry
5.25" x 8.25"; 272 pages. Printed in the Soviet Union. Text is in English.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1970
1 person is currently reading
2 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
2,772 books1,893 followersVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), statesman and political theorist. After the October Revolution he served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 26, 2026
Surprising for a selection put together during the height of Soviet revisionism, little attempt is made to conceal Lenin’s real thoughts on how workers’ control over the means of production ought to manifest and the revolutionary significance of nationalisation (probably because there was very little could be cherrypicked to justify the restoration of capitalism that had unfolded in the Soviet Union after 1953).
The selections contained in this volume are, in the first place, a brilliant exposition of the day-to-day functioning of the socialist economy in the advance to communism. Not a few Trotskyites and such people are fond of taking certain excerpts from Critique of the Gotha Programme or Anti-Dühring out of their intended context to argue that the socialist system in the Soviet Union was a sham or that the economy of the Stalin-era was bureaucratic state capitalism. Of course, in outstanding works like Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., the political report to the 18th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, etc., Stalin defended the socialist economy of the Soviet Union against the slanders of these vulgarisers. But, in this volume, the reader is shown that the economic policies which earn such scorn from these “avowed communists” were, in fact, not a betrayal of Lenin’s views but their realisation.
The bulk of these works were written in a time when the socialist system of the Soviet Union was in its infancy, when the stresses of civil war, foreign intervention, and the destruction caused by WWI still weighed on the country. Consequently, many of the plans outlined by Lenin herein or theses did not see the full potential of their implementation until after Lenin’s death. The works contained, thus, form the basis for the implementation of socialism in the Soviet Union, the completion and later elucidation of which was done by Lenin’s best pupil — Stalin.
On the other hand, in these works is found also a striking condemnation of the so-called “nationally-specific socialisms” preached by Tito, Khrushchev, Mao, Deng, and other renegades. As Marxists, we recognise that economic laws are objective, and Marx and Engels began a rough sketch of what the economic laws of socialism would be during their lifetimes. But their elucidation took final shape in the Soviet Union, beginning with the works of Lenin contained here. A great example of the immense value of Lenin’s works against these revisionists, including apologists for China and Yugoslavia, is found in Lenin’s expositions on the role of the centralising state in the socialist economy. Lenin writes: “Communism requires and presupposes the greatest possible centralisation of large-scale production throughout the country.… To deprive the all-Russia centre of the right of direct control over all the enterprises of the given industry throughout the country… would be regional anarcho-syndicalism, and not communism” (p. 172).
Thus, the works contained in this volume outline how a socialist society functions and transitions to communism (alongside the classic works of Marx, Engels, and Stalin), offering a great contribution to understanding the objective laws of socialism and how the workers express their control over the economy under socialism, and delivering a massive blow to the sham “socialisms” of the post-1953 Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia, China, etc. A must-read in understanding socialist economics.
The selections contained in this volume are, in the first place, a brilliant exposition of the day-to-day functioning of the socialist economy in the advance to communism. Not a few Trotskyites and such people are fond of taking certain excerpts from Critique of the Gotha Programme or Anti-Dühring out of their intended context to argue that the socialist system in the Soviet Union was a sham or that the economy of the Stalin-era was bureaucratic state capitalism. Of course, in outstanding works like Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., the political report to the 18th Congress of the Bolshevik Party, etc., Stalin defended the socialist economy of the Soviet Union against the slanders of these vulgarisers. But, in this volume, the reader is shown that the economic policies which earn such scorn from these “avowed communists” were, in fact, not a betrayal of Lenin’s views but their realisation.
The bulk of these works were written in a time when the socialist system of the Soviet Union was in its infancy, when the stresses of civil war, foreign intervention, and the destruction caused by WWI still weighed on the country. Consequently, many of the plans outlined by Lenin herein or theses did not see the full potential of their implementation until after Lenin’s death. The works contained, thus, form the basis for the implementation of socialism in the Soviet Union, the completion and later elucidation of which was done by Lenin’s best pupil — Stalin.
On the other hand, in these works is found also a striking condemnation of the so-called “nationally-specific socialisms” preached by Tito, Khrushchev, Mao, Deng, and other renegades. As Marxists, we recognise that economic laws are objective, and Marx and Engels began a rough sketch of what the economic laws of socialism would be during their lifetimes. But their elucidation took final shape in the Soviet Union, beginning with the works of Lenin contained here. A great example of the immense value of Lenin’s works against these revisionists, including apologists for China and Yugoslavia, is found in Lenin’s expositions on the role of the centralising state in the socialist economy. Lenin writes: “Communism requires and presupposes the greatest possible centralisation of large-scale production throughout the country.… To deprive the all-Russia centre of the right of direct control over all the enterprises of the given industry throughout the country… would be regional anarcho-syndicalism, and not communism” (p. 172).
Thus, the works contained in this volume outline how a socialist society functions and transitions to communism (alongside the classic works of Marx, Engels, and Stalin), offering a great contribution to understanding the objective laws of socialism and how the workers express their control over the economy under socialism, and delivering a massive blow to the sham “socialisms” of the post-1953 Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia, China, etc. A must-read in understanding socialist economics.
Displaying 1 of 1 review