Leninism
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Leninism refers to various related political and economic theories elaborated by Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, and by other theorists who claim to be carrying on Lenin's work. Leninism builds upon and elaborates the ideas of Marxism, and serves as the philosophical basis for Communism and the pre-Stalin government of the Soviet Union.
The term "Leninism" itself did not exist during Lenin's life. It 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 has become one of the dominant branches of Marxism since the establishment of the Soviet Union. Leninism's direct theoretical descendents are Stalinism and Trotskyism, named for Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, 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 (such as Stalin and Trotsky themselves) often deny that the other is a "real" Leninist theory, and claim that their own theory is the only true successor to Lenin's ideas.
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[edit] Overview
In his book What is to be Done? (1903), Lenin argued that the proletariat can only achieve a successful revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a Communist Party comprised 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 Communist Party officials are elected democratically, but once they are elected, all party members must abide by their decisions.
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 the bourgeois have instilled in them in order to make them more docile and easier to exploit economically, such as religion and nationalism.
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). (In practice, the Bolsheviks banned other political organizations and removed all real political power from the soviets during the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution.)
[edit] Imperialism
One of the central concepts of Leninism is 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 allowed 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. A particularly good candidate, in his view, was Russia - which Lenin considered to be the "weakest link" in global capitalism at the time.[citation needed] 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.
However, if the revolution could only start in a poor, underdeveloped country, this posed a challenge: According to Marx, such an underdeveloped country would not be able to develop a socialist system (in Marxist theory, socialism is the stage of development that comes after capitalism but before communism), because capitalism hasn't run its full course yet in that country, and because foreign powers will try to crush the revolution at any cost. To solve this problem, Leninism proposes two possible solutions.
One option would be for the revolution in the underdeveloped country to spark off a revolution in a developed capitalist nation. The developed country would then establish socialism and help the underdeveloped country do the same. Lenin hoped that the Russian Revolution would spark a revolution in Germany; indeed it did, but the German uprisings were quickly suppressed. (see Spartacist League and Bavarian Soviet Republic)
Another option would be for the revolution to happen in a large number of underdeveloped countries at the same time or in quick succession; the underdeveloped countries would then join together into a federal state capable of fighting off the great capitalist powers and establishing socialism. This was the original idea behind the foundation of the Soviet Union. What differentiates this from Maoism is that under Leninism, even in the underdeveloped countries, the urban proletariat remains the main source of revolution.
[edit] Successors
Either way, socialism cannot theoretically survive in one poor underdeveloped country alone. Thus, Leninism calls for world revolution in one form or another.
After Lenin died, there was a fierce power struggle in the Soviet Union. The two main contenders were Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin won, and Trotsky was expelled from the country. Thus, near the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union began to move away from Lenin's policies and towards what is usually called "Stalinism", which taught that the Soviet Union was strong enough to build socialism by itself. "Socialism in one country" was presented as a more realistic option than "world revolution". Another prominent feature of Stalinism was the extreme centralization of government control and the expansion of government powers into a totalitarian state, far beyond anything Lenin had advocated.
Writing from abroad, Trotsky elaborated his own successor theory to Leninism, Trotskyism, and accused Stalin of betraying the revolution. Trotsky and almost all of Lenin's original revolutionary colleagues, the so-called "Old Bolsheviks", were systematically killed on Stalin's orders during the Great Purge.
In the People's Republic of China, Stalinist organizational structure was used by the Communist Party of China; later, the Chinese Communists developed the theory of Maoism, which is currently 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 under-developed countries; Capitalists can maintain higher profits by lowering the costs of production, through lower wages, longer working time and more intensive working conditions.
[edit] See also
[edit] 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
[edit] 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 Leninismbg:Ленинизъм
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