Australian Left Review
Article Title
The Making of a Communist: An Interview with Guido Baracchi
Abstract
Could you tell us something about works of Lenin that were available in Australia in those early days?
Up till the time I was expelled from the Communist Party at the end of 1925, I hadn’t read What Is To Be Done at all and I don’t know anyone who would have read it unless it was a Russian reading it in a Russian edition. We got our Leninism from The State and Revolution. I can remember a VSP man called Hoskins. He wrote under the name of “Dogmatist” . He wrote a pamphlet The Materialist Conception of History. It was a very famous little pamphlet in its sphere and in its time — an able bit of work in its way. It was from this, from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky and Left Wing Communism a little bit later that we got our Leninism.