Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary and Marxist theoretician. He was the founder and first leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and later the Soviet Union. His contributions to Marxism synthesized into Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of Stalin.

He was born on the 10th of April 1870 in Simbirsk, Russia, and died in Moscow on the 21st of January 1924 after suffering three strokes and barely surviving an assassination attempt in 1918.

Leninism

See also: Marxism-Leninism

Imperialism

Marx and Engels had initially predicted that the revolution would take place in the most developed countries, where the proletariat was most developed, and as a result, the entire global capitalist system would collapse in one continuous revolution. They began to modify this view in their later life. However, Lenin in 1917 would give a scientific explanation for qualitative changes within the global capitalist system, an explanation which would explain Lenin's own revolution later that year.

Lenin's work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism showed that the progress of capitalist monopoly had led to the accumulation of capital in some countries - the first world - and underdevelopment of others. Capitalism had ceased to advance the productive forces, as Marx had predicted, but in a very imbalanced way.

Under imperialism, capitalist monopolies were gaining "superprofits" from the third world, temporarily delaying Marx's prediction of the falling rate of profit. With these, they had bought off large sections of the proletariat within the Western imperial core, creating a non-revolutionary "labor aristocracy", including union leaders. These people were willing to be bought off from the cause of general labor.

Vanguardism

Lenin also developed the science of the communist political party to a higher degree than Marx or Engels, due to the repressive conditions of tsarism. In this fire he forged democratic centralism as an iron discipline, by which the Party would survive all kinds of tsarist infiltration and repression, and without which it would fail.

Lenin rejected the Menshevik view that the Party should be, like a mass org, open to all kinds of workers and revolutionary sympathizers. The Bolsheviks split on the basis that the Party is only for the cream of the crop, for cadres who put in time and effort to understanding theory and working for the cause.

Lenin discussed this in What Is To Be Done? (1901).

Anti-revisionism and revolutionary defeatism

Lenin came from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). Since the death of Marx and Engels, the prominent Marxists in this party had slid into revisionism, promoting reformism and collaboration with the bourgeois.

Lenin split off the Bolshevik faction from them on the basis of advocating for vanguardism (see above). (Bolshevik means majority, though it was initially a minority.) The remaining revisionists called themselves "Mensheviks" ("minority") and identified as "orthodox Marxists" against the Leninists. (This is a misnomer since Lenin truly upheld Marx.)

With the outbreak of the inter-imperialist World War One in 1914, the Mensheviks supported the tsarist government's war. Lenin refused to support either side and invoked revolutionary defeatism, supporting the downfall of his own government.

Notable Works

• What Is to Be Done? (1901–1902)
• Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909)
• The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
• State and Revolution (1917)
• “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)