Leninism
The term Leninism ( Russian Ленинизм ) summarizes the views of the Russian Marxist and communist revolutionary Lenin , who adapted Marxism to the historical conditions of the society of the Russian Empire .
term
The term probably first appeared in 1904 with Julius Martow as a name for the Bolsheviks and their party concept . After Lenin's death in 1924, a dispute broke out over Lenin's political legacy. In his Nekrolog auf Lenin, Trotsky spoke generally of Leninism as the teaching, work and method of Lenin. The Bolshevik Party is "applied Leninism" . It is the "collective leader of the workers." Trotsky's opponents Stalin held from April to May 1924 under the Lenin levy under the title The Foundations of Leninism a series of lectures at the Communist Sverdlov University , in which he tried to be a true heir of Lenin to represent. Stalin declared that Leninism is not just “the application of Marxism to the peculiar conditions in Russia” , but rather it is “the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. More precisely: Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular. ” The task of working out a Marxist theory of revolution came after Stalin only to Lenin, since Marx and Engels were in a “ pre-revolutionary period “ Would have worked. In these lectures, Stalin spoke about "the historical roots of Leninism" and described his own views on the method of Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasant question , the national question , strategy and tactics, and the party's working style as Leninism.
The term Leninism has now entered common usage. Lenin did not see himself as the founder of a new doctrine, but as a defender of Marxism and its practitioner under the given historical circumstances. First of all, Leninism in the international communist movement was understood primarily to mean the consistent revolutionary side of Marxism - in contrast to the reformists who also referred to Marxism . In the course of the discussions within the Communist Party of Russia (KPR (B)) after the death of Lenin, "Leninism" was invoked in the dispute over the correct further course of the party.
Basic ideas of Lenin
Initially, meetings a.o. a. from literary studies by German, English and French scholars, which were later published as his own works of great value.
Voluntarism
Lenin, who always thought and acted as a practical revolutionary, saw in Marxism by no means a doctrine of the deterministic development of society. Rather, he emphasized the “subjective factor”, activity, the will to change the world. The Russian revolutionaries Tkachev and Nechayev are likely to have had a considerable influence on Lenin's voluntaristic interpretation of Marxism . Tkachev believed that a revolutionary minority must seize power in order to realize the democratic and social revolution.
Cadre party
According to the historian Hermann Weber, it cannot be overlooked that Lenin's Marxism was given a new face through voluntarism, the concept of the elite and the tradition of the Russian conspirators. In his 1902 work What to do? Lenin puts forward the thesis that the proletariat cannot develop enough class consciousness for a revolution on its own : “The history of all countries shows that the working class on its own is only a trade unionist [i.e. H. trade union ] awareness (...). The doctrine of socialism , on the other hand, emerged from the philosophical, historical, and economic theories worked out by the educated representatives of the possessing classes, the intelligentsia . (...) The political class consciousness can only be brought to the worker from outside, i. H. from an area outside of the economic struggle, outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. " He therefore deviates from Marx's starting believes that the communist movement" the independent movement "of the proletariat was. Lenin modified the idea of a communist party, already represented by Marx, into an avant-garde concept of the party as the “ vanguard of the working class ”. According to Lenin, the party should carry out the revolution as an avant-garde, exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat in its favor and at the same time educate the masses to communism .
Imperialism as the last stage of capitalism
In 1916 Lenin wrote his main work on political economy, the brochure " Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism ". In this book he tried to give a further development of the Marxist analysis of capitalism. His theory of imperialism emerged from an examination of the capitalist world economy and its interrelationships in the period before the world war. In so far as Lenin assessed economic development or analyzed imperialism in this book, he relied largely on the work of Hobson and Hilferding. As a consequence, however, Lenin went much further. He characterized the capitalism of the 20th century according to its internal structure as monopoly capitalism, its foreign policy effectiveness as imperialism and its importance as decaying, dying capitalism, as a harbinger of the approaching world revolution. Lenin wrote that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, that it could only be eliminated through a proletarian revolution.
Revolution despite backwardness
The world was welded together into one economy by imperialism, and so the revolution could also begin in such backward countries as Russia, which were 'isolated' by no means ripe for a social upheaval. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, given the special conditions in backward Russia , it was important for Lenin to take the first steps towards socialism as far as possible - starting from the working class and its revolutionary party and in alliance with the peasants . Within the framework of a world revolution, it is precisely in such countries that the revolution could begin, provided that the workers have reached revolutionary maturity. That was Lenin's new theory. While for Marx and Engels a socialist revolution was only conceivable in advanced countries, Lenin tried - with the aid of the Marxist terminology - to prove that a socialist revolution was also possible in backward Russia. Half a year after the imperialism brochure, Lenin declared that the Russian Revolution must be defined as a prologue to the world socialist revolution, the first stage of this revolution. It was clear that socialist living conditions could only be achieved in the industrialized countries with a victorious proletariat. With the proletarian revolution not taking place in the West, the question arose of how long the proletarian state power in the Soviet Union could hold out without the help of the revolution in the West. This dilemma is also to be seen as the reasons for the increasing activism of the Third International . Stalin's later slogan of “ socialism in one country ” was not a viable option for Lenin, as for most Bolsheviks .
Concept history
It was only Stalin who defined Leninism as "Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and the proletarian revolution (...) the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular." (Stalin, On the foundations of Leninism , 1924). This article was written by Stalin on the occasion of the "Lenin contingent", a broad membership recruitment campaign (and the beginning of the personal cult of Lenin initiated by Stalin ), which increased the Communist Party of Russia by 50% with politically untrained people who became willing voters and supporters of Stalin within the There were power struggles in the party. Later, Stalin's reading of "Leninism", enriched with the theory of socialism in one country, became the construct of Marxism-Leninism , the new official party and state doctrine. This "Marxism-Leninism" is up to the famous XX. CPSU party congress in 1956 to be equated with so-called Stalinism .
Characteristics of Leninism, so Stalin further, are the “ruthless fight against the opportunism of the Second International ”, the tracking down of the “weakest link in the chain of the imperialist world front” and the clarification of the role of the “dictatorship of the proletariat as an instrument of the proletarian revolution, ... as the rule of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie “with the state form of Soviet power . According to Lenin, the party must be a “vanguard”, “organized troop”, “highest form of organization” and “instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, it must exclude factions and purge itself of opportunist elements. Lenin's working style combined "Russian revolutionary swing and American objectivity". In reality, however, Stalin had almost completely subordinated the Communist Party and the Third International to the Soviet state and its own interests in order to assert his power . Opposition to his course in Party and International was initially suppressed with the help of the Soviet state apparatus and increasingly physically liquidated. Almost all members of the former Left Opposition were interned or immediately executed in the Moscow trials during the " Great Terror " of 1936–1938 in Gulags . As early as Stalin's fifty-fifth birthday in 1934, an article by the repentant oppositionist Karl Radek began the positive use of the term “Stalinism” and the use of the formula “Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism”. In the iconographic representation, the profiles of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin appear more and more in a row.
But not only Stalin invoked Lenism positively. The criticism of Stalinism at the 20th party congress of the CPSU in 1956 and the resulting de-Stalinization was described by Khrushchev as the “restoration of Leninism”. Most recently at the CPSU celebration of the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution (1987), Mikhail Gorbachev also invoked Leninism for his policy of glasnost and perestroika : "The revolution continues."
Many other opponents of Stalinism understood each other in a positive way about Lenin . For example the Trotskyists , but also the neo-Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci . The "Bolshevik-Leninists" (later so-called "Trotskyists"), a communist movement founded by Leon Trotsky and supported theoretically, formed a Soviet resistance movement as the left opposition and later as the underground party. The Trotskyists saw their work as a continuation of Leninist theory, with particular reference to Lenin's anti-bureaucratic and (socialist) council-democratic views, which could not be realized during the Russian Civil War and due to the isolation of the revolution. (Cf. Nadezhda Krupskaja , Lenin's wife: "If Lenin were still alive, he would have been in prison for a long time", as well as Lenin himself: "Every cook must be able to exercise state power").
The founder of the Communist Party of Italy , Amadeo Bordiga , wrote on the subject of Leninism in the Unità of September 30, 1925: “Our movement is based on a theoretical system that is a closed worldview : I mean Marxism, historical materialism , which is in the Lenin has found one of his most energetic followers. There is no reason to call it Leninism, even Lenin would not have found it necessary. What is the relationship to this system? If he had revised it, it would be correct to replace the names Marxism and Leninism with Leninism and Bolshevism. But Lenin was not a revisionist , proudly fought against the revisionists of all schools, denied them the right to use the name and tradition of Marx and brought brusque evidence of this ... "
literature
- Michael Brie: Rediscover LENIN. The light blue ribbon on the dialectic of revolution & metaphysics of rule , VSA-Verlag Hamburg, 2016, ISBN 978-3-89965-734-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Historical Dictionary of Philosophy : Leninism , p. 234 ff.
- ↑ Leon Trotsky : Lenin dead . Tbilisi, January 22, 1924. In: Fourth International . Vol. 12, No. 1, January / February 1951, p. 29 ( English online version ; checked on: May 13, 2009).
- ↑ Josef Stalin : On the foundations of Leninism . Sverdlov University 1924. In: Questions of Leninism . Verlag für foreign language literature, Moscow 1946, 11th edition 1939 ( online version ( Memento of the original dated May 4, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to instructions and then remove this notice .; checked on: May 13, 2009).
- ↑ Dmitri Antonowitsch Wolkogonow : Lenin, Utopie und Terror , ECON Verlag Düsseldorf, Vienna, New York, Moscow 1994, p. 408, ISBN 3-430-19828-3
- ↑ a b c d Hermann Weber: Lenin , rororo, 17th edition January 2001
- ↑ Lenin, What to do? , in: Works , Berlin (GDR): Dietz Verlag 1981, p. 107 f.
- ^ Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels - Manifesto of the Communist Party. In: www.mlwerke.de. Retrieved June 29, 2016 (Marx-Engels-Werke 4, p. 472).
- ↑ "So [...] Josef Stalin developed the plan of" building socialism in one country ". The political theory he founded was called Marxism-Leninism." Iring Fetscher: In the name of the father , in: DIE ZEIT Geschichte 3/2009: Karl Marx , p. 88
- ↑ Amadeo Bordiga , in: L'Unità , September 30, 1925, quoted from: Protocol of the Extended Executive of the Communist International , Hamburg: Hoym-Verlag 1926.
