Member-only story
Leninism
A big reason why the Soviet Union was so frelled up
Despite Karl Marx’s adamant critiques of capitalism and society, he took little to no political actions to change society. Whatever his motivations were, Marx never offered a systematic doctrine to replace capitalism, nor did he intend to inspire a political party. Nevertheless, his critique of industrial capitalism and his theory that economic forces determined political and social events were useful for anti-government political parties. When such parties began to adopt the label “Marxist” to describe their beliefs, Marx declared that he was not a Marxist.
Marx was a theorist, not an activist. It was left to others to take action, or at least plan to take action, to form a revolution that would emancipate the working class. The most successful revolutionary was Russian Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). From his late teens, Lenin was an activist against the Tsarist autocratic government. He adopted The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital as a set of guiding principles, and over several decades, he developed his own theory of how capitalism could be destroyed and what should take its place.
It is important to remember that Lenin, like everyone else at the time, did not know about Marx’s 1844 manuscripts that described the humanist basis for the workers’ revolution. Having developed a strict interpretation of Marx’s economic determinism and historical class struggle, Lenin created his own rigid program to bring about a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin’s Theory of the Vanguard Party
Beginning in the early 1890s, Lenin was involved in efforts to organize workers, becoming a member of, and eventually rising to the leadership of, a Marxist-styled political party. The issue that brought him to the party leadership was emblematic of his political program. At a party congress in 1903, debate arose over how democratic the party should be and how much party members could be free to express their views independent of the party leadership. Lenin argued that the leadership should have complete control over the party. Lenin’s position gained the support of the majority of those at the congress. He named his winning faction the Bolsheviks, from the Russian bolshinstvo, “majority.” Within two years, Lenin’s…
