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{{Mergeto|Marxism-Leninism|Talk:Marxism-Leninism|date=February 2009}}
[[Image:Lenin_1920.jpg|150px|thumb|Vladimir Lenin in 1920.]]
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   My dear friends, it is with great regret that I must announce a sad tragedy.  
   It seems that Tony Greenstein was performing a cornhold on Roland Rance, when Roland had a sudden bout of violent flatulence.  
   Alas, both comrades were blown to smithereens and are now in the great Gulag of the Sky.

   ---  Mark Elf

'''Leninism''' refers to various related [[Political science|political]] and [[economics|economic]] theories  elaborated by the [[Bolshevik]] [[Communism|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 [[stroke]]s shortly before his death. [[Grigory Zinoviev]] popularized the term at the fifth congress of the [[Comintern|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<ref>Faces Of Janus 133</ref>.  In his pamphlet ''[[What is to be Done? (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".<ref>Harding, Neil (ed.). ''The State in Socialist Society''. St. Antony's College, Oxford, 1984. 2nd. Edition, 1985. Pp. 189</ref>

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 [[soviet (council)|soviet]]s ''(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': <blockquote>
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.
</blockquote>

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 [[Sergey Nechayev|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 [[Sergey Nechayev|Nechayev]] as they did to Marx" writes historian Orlando Figes.<ref> Figes, O: A People's Tragedy. Page 133. Pimlico 1997 </ref> This would help explain the traces of class bigotry  (e.g. Lenin's frequent description of the bourgeoisie as parasites, insects, leeches, bloodsuckers etc<ref> Solzhenitsyn, A: The Gulag Archipelago. Page 27. Collins 1974 </ref> and the creation of the [[GULAG]] system of concentration camps for former members of the bourgeois and kulak classes<ref> Volgovonov, D: Lenin, A New Biography. Page 243. The Free Press </ref>) 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 [[capitalism|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 [[superprofit|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 [[Imperial Russia|Russia]] - which Lenin considered to be the "weakest link" in global capitalism at the time.<ref name=tomasic> Tomasic, D 1953, "The Impact of Russian Culture on Soviet Communism", ''The Western Political Quarterly'', vol. 6, no. 4 December, pp. 808-9</ref> At the time, Russia's economy was primarily [[agriculture|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]].

==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]]
* [[National delimitation in the Soviet Union|Lenin's national policy]]
* [[New Economic Policy]]
* [[Democratic centralism]]
* [[Anti-Leninism]]
* [[Marxism]]
* [[The Communist Manifesto]]

==Notes==
{{reflist}}

==Further reading==
* [[Marcel Liebman]]. Leninism Under Lenin. [http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/ The Merlin Press]. 1980. ISBN 0-85036-261-X
* [[Roy Medvedev]]. Leninism and Western Socialism. [http://www.versobooks.com/ 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. [http://www.plutobooks.com/ 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:
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ What is to be Done?]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1 The State and Revolution]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/index.htm The Lenin Archive at Marxists.org]
* [http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/FCCI19.html First Conference of the Communist International]

Other links:
* [http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Liebman.html Marcel Liebman on Lenin and democracy]
* [http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/intellectuals-state.html An excerpt on Leninism and State Capitalism from the work of Noam Chomsky]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy] by [[Rosa Luxemburg]]
* [http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/lenphl13.htm LENIN'S PHILOSOPHY] by [[Karl Korsch]]
* [http://www.leninism.org/ Cyber Leninism]
*[http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/index.htm Lenin as a Philosopher] by [[Anton Pannekoek]]
*[http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/lenin-legend.htm The Lenin Legend] by [[Paul Mattick]]

[[Category:Communism]]
[[Category:Marxism]]
[[Category:Modernism]]
[[Category:Theories of history]]
[[Category:Vladimir Lenin| ]]
[[Category:Political philosophy by politician]]

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