Welcome to the Revolution Manifesto course at Liberation School! In this course, we will collectively engage the PSL’s book, Revolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution, which includes The State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin. The purpose of this course is to understand the theories of the state first developed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and to revisit them in light of today’s struggles. Moreover, the course is designed to facilitate new ways of understanding how the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state relates to the struggles of our contemporary moment. Thus, we are interested in both teaching the content and, just as importantly, in utilizing this content to advance the fight against capitalist exploitation and oppression. Whether this is your first time engaging in communist study, or you have been studying Lenin and revolutionary theory for years, this course is for you.

Structure of the classes:

Each class is similarly structured. We begin with a short introduction to the class and a list of learning objectives. The next section contains the readings covered in the class, followed by groups of discussion questions for each reading. While these discussion questions are intended to help you comprehend the material, they are also meant to get you thinking about what this material means for you, for our class, and for our struggle, right here and right now. You will notice that sometimes there are page numbers listed after a discussion question. We provided these to help focus discussion for questions that were very broad, but you should certainly feel free to go outside of those page ranges.

Each class also has an art component and an engaging activity. The art component usually comes after the discussion section (except for the first class). By engaging the artistic work of our class, we want to provoke further reflection and dialogue, and to explore different ways that we can communicate revolutionary theory to our people. (Note: Rather than risk hyperlinks being broken over time, we will leave it up to you to locate this readily available material online).

The engaging activity at the end of each class is designed to help solidify the material and to exercise our creative capacities. The activities use a combination of individual, small group, and large group work. The first steps of the activity are done alone or in small groups, and then the whole class reconvenes. These activities can easily be adjusted depending on the number of people in your class.

Some classes have supplementary videos at the end that can be watched in class or individually afterwards.

If you have questions about the course, additional courses you would like to see us develop, if you want help organizing classes, or anything else, let us know! The comrades at Liberation School are more than happy to support in any way we can.

Course schedule:

Class 1: Class Society and the State
Class 2: Historical Materialism and Our World
Class 3: Revolution and the Transformation of Everyday Life
Class 4: Revolution in the U.S.
Class 5: From the Paris Commune to the Soviet Union
Class 6: Conclusions and the Cuban Revolution