Today is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Lenin. It is being noted everywhere, but primarily in the east where, during his last illnesses after 1921, Lenin devoted most of his thoughts on the coming world revolution. As it turned out, that revolution – in the form of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia — would only realize its successful denouement twenty years and more after Lenin’s death.
It would have been heresy then to say so, but did Lenin come to believe near the close of his life (he died in 1924) that the victory of Communism somehow lay in the struggles of the exploited and downtrodden in the colonial East? Marxism from its earliest times had fundamentally believed in the industrial working class, the proletariat, as the historical absolute, the infallible harbinger of revolution.
It is of course too early to tell if the stirrings in Asia are but the preface to the end of capitalism. But it is in India, not England, China, not Germany, and in the former colonies of Indo-China, not in Brussels or Paris, where Lenin is today most honored.