Marxism

The rise of Leninism dramatically changed the complexion of Marxism. As Neil Harding has argued, Marxism in its guise as "a theory and practice of revolutionary transformation" was virtually dead by 1914 (p. 114). Although many Marxists still made use of revolutionary rhetoric, the advance of political democracy, economic improvement, and the failure of class polarization to occur militated against revolutionary action. But in August 1914, World War I began, and all the national parties in the Socialist International supported their respective governments in the war crisis, although they had sworn not to do so. Lenin, head of the revolutionary Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, was enraged at the apostasy of virtually all "orthodox" Marxists. More than this, he quickly came to see the war as marking the total bankruptcy of capitalist civilization, which in his view had forfeited its right to exist.

In response to the crisis of 1914, Lenin, living in exile in Switzerland, formulated a distinctive version of Marxism, which first took shape in his pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in Zurich in 1915–1916 and published in Russia in April 1917, after he had returned there in the wake of the February Revolution. By a combination of intelligence, a focus on essentials, brilliant organization, ruthlessness, and luck, Lenin and his colleagues, notably Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), seized power in the October 1917 revolution (actually, more a coup d'état than a revolution), and held onto it. The regime that they established in the former Russian Empire (reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] in 1922) promoted the Leninist interpretation of Marxism as the authoritative version. Later, under the auspices of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the authoritative version came to be known as "Marxism-Leninism."

In the period of the Cold War, the world was dominated by a bipolar conflict between "the West" and "the Communist world." Communist regimes claimed to take their inspiration from the so-called "classic writers of Marxism-Leninism." At a minimum these included Marx himself, Engels, and Lenin. (Other figures also achieved canonical authority where they had the power to impose it, notably Stalin and Mao Zedong [1893–1976].) For much of the twentieth century it was overwhelmingly Marxism-Leninism that defined Marxism, and the fate of Marxism-Leninism was closely tied to the fate of the USSR. Even now the popular image of Marxism most often simply reproduces the Marxist-Leninist version. There are even theorists who claim that there is no "authentic Marx" apart from Lenin.

Lenin before Leninism.

The central problem that faced Lenin before 1914 was the problem of how socialist revolution was to be brought about in Russia, where industry, by 1900, had barely developed and where most of the population were illiterate peasants of diverse nationalities. In the face of this problem and in response to disagreements within the Russian Social Democratic Party, Lenin, in his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, laid great emphasis on party organization. Attacking Russian colleagues who celebrated a "spontaneous" awakening of the proletariat and who denigrated "theory" and "method," he argued that workers left to their own resources cannot go beyond a "trade union consciousness." Only with guidance from a centrally organized party of professional revolutionaries in possession of the right (Marxist) theory can the proletariat rise up to revolutionary consciousness and action.

Some commentators have seen Lenin's position as involving a kind of conspiratorial Jacobinism or Blanquism foreign to the spirit of Marx himself. (Blanquism was so named after the French activist Louis Auguste Blanqui [1805–1881], an advocate of the forcible seizure of political power by professional revolutionaries.) But this criticism is mistaken. First, in 1902 and even much later, Lenin held that the success of revolution in Russia depended on socialist revolution also breaking out in the more advanced countries to Russia's west. Second, Marx himself faced, in his early years, the problem of how revolution was to come to Germany, which at that time was economically backward in comparison to France, Belgium, and England. In the same essay in which he announced his "discovery" of the proletariat, he also asserted emphatically that revolution will come to Germany when philosophy (theory) allies itself with the oppressed proletariat's practical experience. Marx did not claim that the oppressed weavers of Silesia would become conscious of their situation on their own (Marx, "Introduction" to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right," published February 1844). In short, only the intelligentsia is capable of revealing to the proletariat the true meaning of its own experience.

Capitalism and imperialism.

Lenin's immediate reaction to the outbreak of World War I was to engage in "a doctrinaire restatement of the fundamentals of Marxism" (Harding, p. 77). He then turned to an attempt to reconstruct the deep roots of Marxism in Hegel's thought, which led him to conclude that his fellow Marxists had failed to understand Marx's dialectical method, which always looks to find contradictions in existing reality.

Lenin also concluded that other Marxists had failed to understand the actual situation of capitalism in its contemporary guise. In Lenin's view, capitalism had now entered into the stage of state-directed violence. Its economic contradictions were such that they could only be overcome, temporarily, by an imperialist expansion enabling the extraction of super-profits from less-developed countries. Capitalism now constituted a world system, and Lenin argued that the system was destined to break at its weakest link, which was most likely to be at the periphery—for example, Russia. Thus, on returning to Russia in April 1917, Lenin felt justified in proclaiming that a socialist—and not just a bourgeois—revolution was underway.

Leninism and science.

Lenin's views altered to some extent in the difficult years from 1917 to his death in 1924. The complexities must be left aside here. The central point is that notions of open discussion and mass participation quickly disappeared from the horizon of the regime. Rather, the party, and in particular its highest leaders, came to substitute for the proletariat, which itself amounted to only a small part of the population of the USSR.

The theoretical justification for this development was to be found ultimately in Marx's commitment to science. It is not for nothing that in December 1920 Lenin announced that "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country" ("Soviet [worker-council] power" quickly faded, however). In theory, all decisions were to be made on the basis of expert, scientific knowledge, and politics was to fade from view. In practice, the attempt to impose decisions on the country—to make the country conform to the theory—was undoubtedly an important reason why the USSR under Stalin became a tyranny the likes of which had never before been seen.

In the canonical form that it acquired by the late 1930s, Marxism-Leninism claimed to offer the explanatory key to all of reality. The term associated with this monism was "dialectical materialism" (coined by the Russian Marxist G. V. Plekhanov [1857–1918] in 1890). Unimportant before 1917, in the Soviet period dialectical materialism became a widely used shorthand term for Marxism, in large measure as a result of Stalin's efforts. According to dialectical materialism, an inexorable developmental process permeates all of reality. The struggles that occur in human history are merely one manifestation of this process. We are thus in a position to know that history will lead, with utter inevitability, through the travails of the present to the sunny uplands of socialism.

It is often assumed that Marx himself was a "dialectical materialist." The theory of dialectical materialism was originated by Engels. It is not articulated in any of Marx's own writings. Both Marx and Engels claimed that Marxian socialism was scientific, but it was Engels who intuited that many potential adherents of Marxism were looking for an all-embracing worldview. Purporting to explain everything, dialectical materialism aimed to displace all competing worldviews, notably religion. To its adherents, it offered a sense of certainty. In Stalin's calculation, this sense of certainty served the interests of the bureaucratic tyranny that he established over the USSR.

Advance and retreat of Marxism-Leninism.

Marxism-Leninism prescribed a way out of backwardness through revolution, science, and rationality that many intellectuals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America found appealing. For over half a century it had a significant following in the "underdeveloped" world. However, few Marxist-Leninist regimes came into being independently of the direct application of military force by the USSR. In order to succeed, revolutionary movements needed a favorable concatenation of circumstances and an indigenous cadre of militants willing to adjust their message to suit the audience. This did happen in China. In 1926 urban workers made up only 0.5 percent of the Chinese population. As Mao Zedong saw in his prescient "Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (1927), the party had to appeal to the peasantry. The People's Republic of China came into being in 1949 as a result of a successful mobilizing of a revolutionary peasantry. Meanwhile, in the wake of World War II the Soviet Union and its victorious army imposed Marxism-Leninism on Eastern Europe.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the fundamental fact confronting doctrinal Marxism was the all but total disappearance of Marxist-Leninist regimes and movements. Over the course of a generation and more, the Soviet Union became more and more sclerotic and then, in 1991, collapsed, having already lost its Eastern European satellites in 1989. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China turned toward participation in the market following the "Reform and Opening" process initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. By 2004, only a few countries, notably Cuba and North Korea, were still claiming to be built on Marxist-Leninist principles.

As for large-scale Marxist or Marxist-Leninist political movements, by 2004 none existed. When the Leninist regime in the USSR was being consolidated, some elements of European social democracy set themselves up as the avowedly democratic wing of Marxism in opposition to Leninism. But social democracy's Marxism became attenuated over time, eventually disappearing into a generalized commitment to social welfare and to some measure of social and economic egalitarianism.