Leninism

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 a philosophical basis for the ideology of Soviet Communism.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 had become one of the dominant branches 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 the oretical descendantsare Marxism-Leninism 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 as Stalin and Trotsky themselves) often deny that the other is a "real" Leninist theory, and claim that their own interpretation is the truest successor to Lenin's ideas.

In his 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 (although in the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviets seized power, not the Bolshevik Party), 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). The extent to which the dicatorship of the proletariat is democratic is disputed. Lenin wrote in the fifth chapter of 'State & Revolution':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.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 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 Nechayev as they did to Marx" writes historian Orlando Figes. This would help explain the traces of class bigotry (e.g. Lenin's frequent description of the bourgeoisie as parasites, insects, leeches, bloodsuckers etc and the creation of the GULAG system of concentration camps for former members of the bourgeois and kulak classes ) detectable in Leninism but foreign in Marxism.

Imperialism

In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Lenin advanced 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 allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. 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' thesis that such a revolution could only occur in a developed capitalist country. A particularly good candidate, in his view, was Russia - which Lenin considered to be the "weakest link" in global capitalism at the time.^[4] 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. This required Lenin to openly revise Marx's theory on this point. He proposed 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.Notably, during Lenin's lifetime, he never asserted that the Soviet Union had become a socialist society, only that the communist party had won power. In fact, he saw to the enactment of what was called "state capitalism" to accelerate the development of what was essentially a third world economy to the point where socialism was feasible. Shortly after his death, it was Joseph Stalin who formally "declared" the establishment of socialism in the Soviet Union, although the Soviet economy remained far behind Western Europe and the United States.

Successors

Leninism calls for world revolution in one form or another under the idea that socialism can not survive in one country alone.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.

Lenin's Testament

Lenin's testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. He also commented on the leading members of the Soviet leadership and suggested that Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee.

Document history

Lenin wanted the testament to be read out at the XII Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be held in April 1923. However, after Lenin's third stroke in March 1923 left him paralyzed and unable to speak, the testament was kept secret by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in hopes of Lenin's eventual recovery. It wasn't until after Lenin's death on January 21, 1924, that she turned the document over to the Communist Party Central Committee Secretariat and asked that it be made available to the delegates of the XIII Party Congress in May 1924.Lenin's testament presented the ruling triumvirate (Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev) with an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand, they would have preferred to suppress the testament since it was critical of all three of them as well as of their ally Bukharin and their opponents Trotsky and Pyatakov. (Although Lenin's comments were damaging to all Communist leaders, Stalin stood to lose the most since the only practical suggestion in the testament was to remove him from the position of the General Secretary of the Party's Central Committee.)
On the other hand, the leadership didn't dare to go directly against Lenin's wishes so soon after his death, especially with his widow insisting on having them carried out. The leadership was also in the middle of a factional struggle over the control of the Party, the ruling faction itself consisting of loosely allied groups that would soon part ways, which would have made a coverup difficult.The final compromise proposed by the triumvirate at the Council of the Elders of the XIIIth Congress after Kamenev read out the text of the document was to make Lenin's testament available to the delegates on the following conditions (first made public in a pamphlet by Trotsky published in 1934 and confirmed by documents released during and after glasnost):

• the testament should be read by representatives of the Party leadership to each regional delegation separately
• making notes would not be allowed
• the testament must not be referred to during the plenary meeting of the Congress

The proposal was adopted by a majority vote over Krupskaya's objections. As a result, the testament didn't have the effect that Lenin had hoped for and Stalin retained his position as General Secretary.Failure to make the document more widely available within the Party remained a point of contention during the struggle between the Left Opposition and the Stalin-Bukharin faction in 1924-1927. Under pressure from the opposition, Stalin had to read the testament again at the July 1926 Central Committee meeting. An edited version of the testament was printed in December 1927 in a limited edition made available to XVth Party Congress delegates. The case for making the testament more widely available was undermined by the consensus within the Party leadership that it could not be printed publicly as it would have damaged the Party as a whole.The text of the testament and the fact of its concealment soon became known in the West, especially after the circumstances surrounding the controversy were described by Max Eastman in Since Lenin Died (1925). The Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's account and used Party discipline^{[citation needed]} to force Trotsky, then still a member of the Politburo, to write an article Eastman's version of the events.The full English language text of Lenin's testament was published in the New York Times in 1926.From the time Stalin consolidated his position as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s on, all references to Lenin's testament were considered anti-Soviet agitation and punishable as such. The denial of the existence of Lenin's testament remained one of the cornerstones of Soviet historiography until Stalin's death in 1953. After Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, the document was finally officially published by the Soviet government.

Related documents

This term is not to be confused with "Lenin's Political Testament", a term used in Leninism to refer to a set of letters and articles dictated by Lenin during his illness which instruct how to continue the construction of the Soviet state. Traditionally it includes the following works.

• A Letter to a Congress, "Письмо к съезду"
• About Assigning of Legislative Functions to Gosplan,"О придании законодательных функций Госплану"
• To the "Nationalities Issue" or about "Automomization","К 'вопросу о национальностях' или об 'автономизации' "
• Pages from the Diary, "Странички из дневника"
• About Cooperation, "О кооперации"
• About Our Revolution, "О нашей революции"
• How shall We Reorganize the Rabkrin,"Как нам реорганизовать Рабкрин"
• Better Less but Better, "Лучше меньше, да лучше"

Contents of Lenin's Last Testament

The letter constitutes a critique of the Soviet government as it then stood, warning of dangers he anticipated and making suggestions for the future. Some of those suggestions include increasing the size of the Party's Central Committee, giving the State Planning Committee legislative powers and changing the nationalities policy which had been implemented by Stalin.
The criticism of Stalin and Trotsky:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.In a postscript written a few weeks later, Lenin recommended Stalin's removal from the position of General Secretary of the Party:Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.In the December 30, 1922 article "Nationalities Issue" or about "Autonomization" Lenin criticized the actions of Dzerzhinsky, Ordzhonikidze, and Stalin in the "Georgian Affair", accusing them of "Great Russian chauvinism".I think that a fatal role was played here by hurry and the administrative impetuousness of Stalin and also his infatuation with the renowned "social-nationalism". Infatuation in politics generally and usually plays the worst role.Lenin also criticized other Politburo members. He wrote thatthe October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [their opposition to seizing power in October 1917] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.He also criticized other Bolshevik leaders by name in addition to his general political suggestions.