S8 Ep256: LENIN'S INNOVATION: REVOLUTIONARY DEFEATISM AND GLOBAL CIVIL WAR Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. Focusing on Vladimir Lenin, this section examines how he radicalized Marx's vision through the concept of "revolutionary defeatism." Lenin believed that di

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 12 minutes

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LENIN'S INNOVATION: REVOLUTIONARY DEFEATISM AND GLOBAL CIVIL WAR Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. Focusing on Vladimir Lenin, this section examines how he radicalized Marx's vision through the concept of "revolutionary defeatism." Lenin believed that disastrous imperial wars, like World War I, should be welcomed as catalysts to turn international conflict into domestic civil war. His goal was to spark a chain reaction of global civil wars until the "proletarian revolution" was achieved. Unlike socialists who sought reform through elections, Lenin demanded a "vanguard" of professional revolutionaries to impose doctrine from the top down. McMeekinhighlights Lenin's ruthlessness, noting that he suppressed his own appreciation for music to avoid becoming sentimental, believing the political vision required an unyielding hardness to operationalize Marx's theories into a strategy of perpetual war. NUMBER 3

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0:31.8	This is CBS.
0:33.3	I on the world.
0:34.6	I'm John Batchel, visiting with Professor Sean McMeekin. The new book is to overthrow
0:38.7	the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism. We spent our time in the 19th century with
0:43.8	Karl Marx and his antecedents. Now the man himself, Vladimir Iliic Ulyanov, the son of schoolteachers, principals, a man who has a very colorful 54 years, I believe.
1:00.9	Born in 1870, died in 1924 after a series of strokes.
1:06.8	How did he come to be a Marxist?
1:09.0	What is it that compelled him? Probably the family story, but also a communist manifesto and Dust Capital were published in Russian and were very large successes, especially Dust Capital. The manifesto I have, Karl Marx, Vladimir Leninimir Lennon, he calls himself Lennon.
1:29.2	His name is Ulyanov, but he takes up the Norm de Gere during his publishing of something
1:33.7	called the Iskra, the Spark.
1:36.0	He reads it for the first time and adopts it in 89.
1:39.7	What about the manifesto that appealed to him?
1:41.9	Was it the leveling?
1:43.1	Was it the transformation of all,
	...

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