In March 1902, Lenin published a book entitled What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, proposing a model of party organization for the nascent Russian social democratic movement, which had to be organized nationally. The book has historically raised a number of questions, of which the most important are: Was Lenin proposing a new model of party organization (a "cadre party" as opposed to a "mass party") or simply adapting the example of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD, the backbone of the Second International) to the conditions of Russian autocracy and to the factional struggle against the "economists", the Jewish Bund and a series of local organizations? Did that model of party organization represent an individual initiative of Lenin, or was it the joint project of the group that published the newspaper Iskra (Spark), which had been appearing since the first of December 1900 and which would organize the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in July-August 1903? Finally, what was the connection between the model of party organization proposed in Lenin's book and the subsequent split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the Second Congress of the RSDLP? In this article we will try to answer these questions in the light of a number of primary documents recently translated from Russian as well as of the criticism by Vera Zasulich, one of the most prominent representatives of the Iskra editorial board, of the tactics of individual terrorism employed by the newly created Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, a criticism published in the theoretical organ of the German Social Democracy, Die neue Zeit, in December 1902.

This article deals with the reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism in the Second International before the start of the First World War. Our analysis shows that, if the condemnation of The Accumulation of Capital by the political right and centre was almost unanimous, its acceptance by the left was far from universal. In fact, both Lenin and Pannekoek rejected Luxemburg’s theory, adopting instead the economic analysis of an important spokesman of the centre, the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Our work concludes by analysing the reasons for those theoretical differences.

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Charles post's recent collection of essays, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877, was greeted with enthusiasm in Marxist circles. post's essays are an attempt to apply the so-called "Brenner thesis" (according to which the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the result of the self-transformation of the English landowners) to american historical development. Since in the United States there was no class of feudal landlords to act as prime movers of an "agrarian" capitalist development, post makes the merchant-turned-land speculator the demiurge of american capitalism, asserting, against all historical evidence, that this class was able to "impose a social monopoly on land" shortly after the american revolution. The rest of post's theses are just elaborations of this fundamentally mistaken interpretation. However, The American Road to Capitalism does provide a welcome opportunity to discuss the classical Marxist analysis of "the american path of bourgeois development," which remains the foundation of any materialist analysis of american history.

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