Leninism

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Vladimir Lenin in 1920.

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Leninism refers to various related political and economic theories elaborated by the Bolshevik communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Leninism builds upon and elaborates the ideas of Marxism, and serves as a philosophical basis for the ideology of Soviet communism.

The term "Leninism" came into widespread use only after Lenin ended his active participation in the Soviet government due to a series of incapacitating strokes shortly before his death. Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term at the fifth congress of the Communist International (Comintern).

Leninism had become the dominant branch of Marxism, the political and economic philosophy based on the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, since the establishment of the Soviet Union. Leninism's direct theoretical descendants are Stalinism, associated with Joseph Stalin, and Trotskyism, associated with Leon Trotsky. Stalin and Trotsky were associates of Lenin who became the leaders of the two major political and theoretical factions that developed in the Soviet Union after Lenin's death. Proponents of each theory (including Stalin and Trotsky themselves) deny that the other is a "real" Leninist theory, and claim that only their own interpretation is the continuation of Leninism.

Overview

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that a liberating communist revolution would only occur under a specific set of conditions, including the precondition of an economically exhausted industrialized nation. Because Russia did not fit this or many other key precepts (nationalism, irredentism, and class warfare), Lenin had to adapt the liberating revolution to the Russian environment. Thus, Lenin helped spark a “revolutionary nationalism of the poor” in Russia^[1]. In his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902), Lenin argued that the proletariat can only achieve a successful revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a vanguard party composed of full-time professional revolutionaries. Lenin further believed that such a party could only achieve its aims through a form of disciplined organization known as democratic centralism, wherein tactical and ideological decisions are made with internal democracy, but once a decision has been made, all party members must externally support and actively promote that decision.

Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means; that is, any attempts to reform capitalism from within, such as Fabianism and non-revolutionary forms of democratic socialism, are doomed to fail. The goal of a Leninist party is to orchestrate the overthrow of the existing government by force and seize power on behalf of the proletariat and then implement a dictatorship of the proletariat. The party must then use the powers of government to educate the proletariat, so as to remove the various modes of false consciousness, such as religion and nationalism, the bourgeois have instilled in them in order to make them more docile and easier to exploit economically. Lenin's Bolshevik government was strongly hostile to Russian nationalism in particular, calling it "Great Russian chauvinism".^[2]

The dictatorship of the proletariat is theoretically to be governed by a decentralized system of proletarian direct democracy, in which workers hold political power through local councils known as soviets (see soviet democracy). The extent to which the dictatorship of the proletariat is democratic is disputed. Lenin wrote in the fifth chapter of 'State & Revolution':

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people--this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

The elements of Leninism that include the notion of the disciplined revolutionary, the more dictatorial revolutionary state and of a war between the various social classes is often attributed to the influence of Nechayevschina and of the 19th century narodnik movement (of which Lenin's older brother was a member) - "The morals of [the Bolshevik] party owed as much to Nechayev as they did to Marx" writes historian Orlando Figes.^[3] This would help explain the traces of class bigotry (e.g. Lenin's frequent description of the bourgeoisie as parasites, insects, leeches, bloodsuckers etc^[4] and the creation of the GULAG system of concentration camps for former members of the bourgeois and kulak classes^[5]) detectable in Leninism but foreign in Marxism.

Lenin's writing is relatively weak as proper philosophy or political theory. The Hungarian thinker and Marxist philosopher György Lukács played an important role in developing Leninist ideas in the field of philosophy. His major works in this period were the essays collected in his magnum opus "History and Class Consciousness", first published in 1923. Although these essays display signs of what Lenin referred to as "ultra-leftism", they arguably carry through his effort of providing Leninism with a better philosophical basis than did Lenin himself. In 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács also published the short study Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. In 1925, he published a critical review of Nikolai Bukharin's manual of historical materialism. Lukács presents the category of reification whereby, due to the commodity nature of capitalist society, social relations become objectified, precluding the ability for a spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. It is in this context that the need for a party in the Leninist sense emerges, the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxian dialectic.

Imperialism

In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Lenin advanced the view that imperialism is the highest stage of the capitalist economic system. Lenin developed a theory of imperialism aimed to improve and update Marx's work by explaining a phenomenon which Marx predicted: the shift of capitalism towards becoming a global system (hence the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"). At the core of this theory of imperialism lies the idea that advanced capitalist industrial nations increasingly come to export capital to captive colonial countries. They then exploit those colonies for their resources and investment opportunities. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. (See labor aristocracy; globalization.)

For these reasons, Lenin argued that a proletarian revolution could not occur in the developed capitalist countries as long as the global system of imperialism remained intact. Thus, he believed that a lesser-developed country would have to be the location of the first proletarian revolution. This was an open revision of Marx's thesis that such a revolution could only occur in a developed capitalist country. A particularly good candidate, in his view, was Russia - which Lenin considered to be the "weakest link" in global capitalism at the time.^[6] At the time, Russia's economy was primarily agrarian (outside of the large cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow), still driven by peasant manual and animal labor, and very underdeveloped compared to the industrialized economies of western Europe and North America.

In 1915, Lenin wrote, “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world.” (The ‘United States of Europe Slogan’, Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 232.)

After the revolution, in 1918, he wrote, “I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.” (Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, 14th May 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 9.)

Successors

After Lenin died, there was a fierce power struggle in the Soviet Union. The two main contenders were Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. In 1924, Stalin advanced a line which is usually called "Socialism in one country", which taught that the Soviet Union should aim to build socialism by itself while supporting revolutionary governments across the world. Trotsky argued that socialism in one country was impossible and that the USSR should have supported revolution in the developed countries: Stalin and his supporters termed this view as "Trotskyism", in order to suggest that their policy was Leninism's political continuation. Later described as Marxism-Leninism (or as Stalinism by its opponents), Stalin's view was adopted, and Trotsky was expelled from the country.

In the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party of China described its organizational structure as Leninist. Later, the Chinese Communists developed Marxism-Leninism into the theory of Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism, which remains popular in many third world revolutionary movements.

Present-day Leninists often see globalization as a modern continuation of imperialism in that capitalists in developed countries exploit the working class in developing and underdeveloped countries, maintaining higher profits by lowering the costs of production through lower wages, longer working time, and more intensive working conditions.

See also

• Marxism-Leninism
• He who does not work neither shall he eat
• An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor
• Lenin's national policy
• New Economic Policy
• Democratic centralism
• Anti-Leninism
• Marxism
• The Communist Manifesto

Notes

Further reading

• Marcel Liebman. Leninism Under Lenin. The Merlin Press. 1980. ISBN 0-85036-261-X
• Roy Medvedev. Leninism and Western Socialism. Verso Books. 1981. ISBN 0-86091-739-8
• Neil Harding. Leninism. Duke University Press. 1996. ISBN 0-8223-1867-9
• Joseph Stalin. Foundations of Leninism. University Press of the Pacific. 2001. ISBN 0-89875-212-4
• CLR James. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Pluto Press. 2005. ISBN 0-7453-2491-6
• Edmund Wilson. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Phoenix Press. 2004. ISBN 0-7538-1800-0
• Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (texts by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and Ruhle), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8
• Paul Le Blanc. Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Humanities Press International, Inc. 1990. ISBN 0-391-03604-1.
• A. James Gregor. The Faces of Janus. Yale University Press. 2000. ISBN 0-300-10602-5.

External links

Works by Vladimir Lenin:

• What is to be Done?
• Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
• The State and Revolution
• The Lenin Archive at Marxists.org
• First Conference of the Communist International

Other links:

• Marcel Liebman on Lenin and democracy
• An excerpt on Leninism and State Capitalism from the work of Noam Chomsky
• Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg
• LENIN'S PHILOSOPHY by Karl Korsch
• Cyber Leninism
• Lenin as a Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek
• The Lenin Legend by Paul Mattick