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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 philosoph-
ical basis for the ideology of Soviet
communism.
The term "Leninism" came into wide-
spread use only after Lenin ended his active
participation in the Soviet government due to
a series of incapacitating strokes shortly be-
fore his death. Grigory Zinoviev popularized
the term at the fifth congress of the Com-
munist International (Comintern).
Leninism had become the dominant
branch of Marxism, the political and econom-
ic philosophy based on the works of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, since the estab-
lishment of the Soviet Union. Leninism’s dir-
ect theoretical descendants are Stalinism, as-
sociated 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 the-
oretical 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
2
Leninism
Russia did not fit this or many other key pre-
cepts (nationalism, irredentism, and class
warfare), Lenin had to adapt the liberating
revolution to the Russian environment. Thus,
Lenin helped spark a “revolutionary national-
ism of the poor” in Russia[1]. In his pamphlet
What is to be Done? (1902), Lenin argued
that the proletariat can only achieve a suc-
cessful 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 central-
ism, wherein tactical and ideological de-
cisions are made with internal democracy,
but once a decision has been made, all party
members must externally support and act-
ively promote that decision.
Leninism holds that capitalism can only be
overthrown by revolutionary means; that is,
any attempts to reform capitalism from with-
in, such as Fabianism and non-revolutionary
forms of democratic socialism, are doomed to
fail. The goal of a Leninist party is to orches-
trate the overthrow of the existing govern-
ment by force and seize power on behalf of
the proletariat and then implement a dictat-
orship 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 reli-
gion and nationalism, the bourgeois have in-
stilled 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 the-
oretically 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 dictator-
ship of the proletariat is democratic is dis-
puted. 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 demo-
cracy, of the exploiters and oppress-
ors of the people--this is the change
democracy undergoes during the
transition from capitalism to
communism.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The elements of Leninism that include the no-
tion of the disciplined revolutionary, the
more dictatorial revolutionary state and of a
war between the various social classes is of-
ten attributed to the influence of
Nechayevschina and of the 19th century nar-
odnik 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 descrip-
tion 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 ku-
lak classes[5]) detectable in Leninism but for-
eign in Marxism.
Imperialism
In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Cap-
italism (1916) Lenin advanced the view that
imperialism is the highest stage of the capit-
alist economic system. Lenin developed a
theory of imperialism aimed to improve and
update Marx’s work by explaining a phe-
nomenon 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 imperi-
alism lies the idea that advanced capitalist in-
dustrial nations increasingly come to export
capital to captive colonial countries. They
then exploit those colonies for their re-
sources and investment opportunities. This
superexploitation of poorer countries allows
the advanced capitalist industrial nations to
keep at least some of their own workers con-
tent, 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 revolu-
tion could only occur in a developed capital-
ist country. A particularly good candidate, in
his view, was Russia - which Lenin con-
sidered to be the "weakest link" in global
capitalism at the time.[6] At the time, Russia’s
economy was primarily agrarian (outside of
3
Leninism
the large cities of St. Petersburg and Mo-
scow), still driven by peasant manual and an-
imal labor, and very underdeveloped com-
pared to the industrialized economies of
western Europe and North America.
Successors
After Lenin died, there was a fierce power
struggle in the Soviet Union. The two main
contenders were Joseph Stalin and Leon Trot-
sky. 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 support-
ing revolutionary governments across the
world. Trotsky argued that socialism in one
country was impossible and that the USSR
should have supported revolution in the de-
veloped 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 op-
ponents), 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 or-
ganizational 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 globaliza-
tion as a modern continuation of imperialism
in that capitalists in developed countries ex-
ploit the working class in developing and un-
derdeveloped 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
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Leninism

Notes • Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the

[1] Faces Of Janus 133
[2] Harding, Neil (ed.). The State in Socialist
Society. St. Antony’s College, Oxford,
1984. 2nd. Edition, 1985. Pp. 189
[3] Figes, O: A People’s Tragedy. Page 133.
Pimlico 1997
[4] Solzhenitsyn, A: The Gulag Archipelago.
Page 27. Collins 1974
[5] Volgovonov, D: Lenin, A New Biography.
Page 243. The Free Press
[6] Tomasic, D 1953, "The Impact of Russian
Culture on Soviet Communism", The
Western Political Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4
December, pp. 808-9
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?

Further reading • Imperialism: The Highest Stage of

• 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
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

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leninism"

Categories: Communism, Marxism, Modernism, Theories of history, Vladimir Lenin, Political

philosophy by politician

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