What is Leninism?
Leninism is a form of Marxism developed by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in the early twentieth century. It adapted Marx's ideas to Russia, a country with a small industrial working class and a large peasant population. Its best-known idea is the vanguard party: a tightly organized group of committed revolutionaries who lead the working class. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Leninism became the basis for the Soviet state. Under Joseph Stalin it was codified as Marxism-Leninism, the official doctrine of the Soviet Union and of many communist states during the twentieth century. This page describes it historically.
Core beliefs
- Workers left alone tend to seek better wages rather than revolution, so a vanguard party must lead them.
- The party should follow democratic centralism: open debate before a decision, strict unity after it.
- Capitalism in its imperialist stage exports capital and conflict to colonies and weaker countries.
- The existing state must be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat led by the party.
- Revolution can begin in a less developed country, the weakest link in the capitalist chain.
History
Lenin set out his view of party organization in What Is to Be Done? (1902). His faction, the Bolsheviks, split from the Mensheviks in 1903 over these questions. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) he argued that rivalry among capitalist powers caused the First World War. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. During the civil war that followed, the government nationalized industry under a policy called War Communism and created the Cheka, a secret police force. In 1921, after economic collapse and the Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, which allowed limited private trade. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin presented Marxism-Leninism as a fixed doctrine.
Variants
Marxism-Leninism, as defined under Stalin, became the official ideology of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc states, and several governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Trotskyism claims to continue Lenin's ideas while rejecting Stalin's policies. Maoism adapted Leninism to a peasant society in China. Other variants include the Juche idea in North Korea and the doctrines of Vietnamese and Cuban communist parties. Some later communists, sometimes called Eurocommunists, kept parts of Leninist analysis while rejecting one-party rule.
Criticisms
Liberal and conservative critics argue that the vanguard party concentrated power in a small group and led directly to one-party dictatorship. Historians document that the Red Terror, which began in 1918, involved mass arrests and executions, with estimates of deaths ranging from about 13,000 to more than 140,000. Critics on the left, including Rosa Luxemburg and many anarchists, argued that Lenin's methods replaced the self-rule of workers with rule by the party. Economists point to shortages and inefficiency in centrally planned economies built on Leninist principles.
In practice
Leninist parties governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 and ruled much of Eastern Europe after 1945. Leninist principles of party organization were adopted by communist parties around the world through the Communist International. Several states today, including China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos, are still governed by parties that describe their ideology as Marxist-Leninist, though most have introduced market reforms. Lenin's theory of imperialism also influenced anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century.