Leninism
Encyclopedia : L : LE : LEN : Leninism
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 that assumes the role of "revolutionary vanguard". In the same book, Lenin called for professional revolutionaries to lead the party and the masses to victory. 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 and other decisions are made through voting, all party members must follow those decisions.
Lenin's vision
Leninism holds that capitalism can only be overthrown by revolutionary means (i.e. that any attempt to reform capitalism from within is doomed to fail). According to Lenin, the revolution should be followed by a period of dictatorship of the proletariat (a system of workers' democracy, in which workers hold political power through councils known as soviets; see also soviet democracy).One of the central concepts of Leninism is a view of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. 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 came to export capital to captive colonial countries and 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).
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.[[Citing sources citation needed]]
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 (for example, Lenin hoped the Russian Revolution would spark a revolution in Germany). The developed country would then establish socialism and help the underdeveloped country do the same.
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, even in the underdeveloped countries, the urban proletariat remains the main source of revolution.
Either way, socialism cannot theoretically survive in one poor underdeveloped country alone. Thus, Leninism calls for world revolution in one form or another.
Near the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Union began to move away from Lenin's policies and towards what is usually called "Stalinism", with many of Lenin's colleagues and followers (the "Old Bolsheviks") perishing in the Great Purge. In China, Stalinist organizational structure was used by the Communist Party of China; later, the Chinese Communists developed the theory of Maoism.
Other prominent variants of Leninism have also developed, most notably including Trotskyism, which defines itself in opposition to the Stalinist practices implemented in the Soviet Union soon after Lenin's death. Present-day Leninists often see globalization as the modern continuation of imperialism.
See also
Further reading
- Marcel Liebman. Leninism Under Lenin. [The Merlin Press]. 1980. ISBN 085036261X
- Roy Medvedev. Leninism and Western Socialism. [Verso Books]. 1981. ISBN 0860917398
- Neil Harding. Leninism. Duke University Press. 1996. ISBN 0822318679
- Joseph Stalin. Foundations of Leninism. University Press of the Pacific. 2001. ISBN 0898752124
- CLR James. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. [Pluto Press]. 2005. ISBN 0745324916
- Edmund Wilson. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Phoenix Press. 2004. ISBN 0753818000
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]
- [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]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.