Tom Freeman was a lifelong revolutionary and a member of the International Socialist Tendency for nearly 30 years. His work stands as a valuable contribution to what can be considered the field of "Lenin Studies" that has been blossoming over the past decade, taking its place with the varied, important contributions of Lars Lih, Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro, Tamás Krausz, August Nimtz, and others.

His clear and meticulous research reveals a continuity between Lenin's revolutionary organisational perspectives of the early 1900s with those advanced during the revolutionary mass upsurge of 1905 – and this in a way that can be useful for revolutionary activists of today and tomorrow. Freeman highlights the dynamic interplay of theory and practice, of Marxism and mass struggle, of intellectual activists and radicalising workers and mass insurgencies that shaped the past and are the hope of the future.