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The Revolutionary Masses
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It is
possible to list a range of Marxist principles by which Lenin was
guided in his activities first as the leader of the Russian
proletarian revolution and later as the head of the victorious
workers’ government. These ideas formed part and parcel of Leninism,
they were thoroughly assimilated by it and turned into immutable
dogmas that underpinned the construction of socialism in the former
USSR. Only the most central of them will be summarized here: |
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mankind
in its development passes through five formations with communism
being the highest and final of them;
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mankind
advances to communism, the essence of which will be ‘from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’;
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private
ownership of the means of production is connected with exploitation,
with the abolition of private property exploitation will disappear;
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class
struggle is the essence of world development: ‘the history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’ (Marx);
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class struggle is waged by two main classes: the exploited
working class and the exploiting class of the bourgeoisie;
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due to its social position the working class is naturally
attracted to socialism;
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the state is an instrument created to protect the exploiters
from the exploited;
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democracy under capitalism is merely one of the forms of the
exploiting bourgeois state;
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the road to socialism lies through a violent revolution, the
aim of which is the destruction of the bourgeois state and
private ownership and the creation of a workers' state - the
state of the dictatorship of the proletariat;
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the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a
necessary stage in the transition to a classless society, a
society without the state;
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the essence of socialism and of the transition to communism
is a gradual abolition of money-commodity relations (in
other words, of the market);
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the essence of socialist economy is high centralization and
planning of all aspects of economy;
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dictatorship of the proletariat is unthinkable without the
Communist Party's dominant position within the state.
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Marxist
tenets with Lenin’s amendments would become gospel in the Soviet
Union where the entire ideology was frequently referred to as
‘Marxism-Leninism’. The phrase was coined by Stalin to describe the
conflation of basic Marxist theory with the ideas of Lenin. From
1917 and till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
Marxism-Leninism provided the foundations of Soviet ideology and
organization.
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Tsarist Russia |
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