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● Securing Democracy 21st ..Leninism is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary vanguard party, as the political prelude to the establishment of communism. The function of the Leninist vanguard party is to provide the working classes with the political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in the Russian Empire (1721–1917).
Leninist revolutionary leadership is based upon The Communist Manifesto (1848) identifying the communist party as "the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country; that section which pushes forward all others." As the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks viewed history through the theoretical framework of dialectical materialism, which sanctioned political commitment to the successful overthrow of capitalism, and then to instituting socialism; and, as the revolutionary national government, to realize the socio-economic transition by all means.
In the 19th century,
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels wrote the
Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) in which they called for the political unification of the European
working classes in order to achieve
communist revolution; and proposed that, because the socio-economic organization of
Communism was of a higher form than that of
capitalism, a workers' revolution first would occur in the industrialised countries. In Germany, Marxist
social democracy was the political perspective of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany, inspiring Russian Marxists, such as Lenin.
In the early 20th century, the socio-economic backwardness of
Imperial Russia (1721–1917) — combined and uneven economic development – facilitated rapid and intensive industrialisation, which produced a united, working-class
proletariat in a predominantly agrarian society. Moreover, because the industrialisation was financed mostly with foreign capital, Imperial Russia did not possess a revolutionary
bourgeoisie with political and economic influence upon the workers and the peasants, as had been the case in the
French Revolution (1789–1799), in the 18th century. Although Russia's
political economy was agrarian and
semi-feudal, the task of democratic revolution fell to the urban, industrial working class as the only
social class capable of effecting
land reform and democratization, in view that the Russian
bourgeoisie would suppress any revolution.
In the
April Theses (1917), the political strategy of the
October Revolution (7–8 November 1917), Lenin proposed that the Russian revolution was not an isolated national event, but a fundamentally international event – the first socialist revolution in the world. Lenin's practical application of
Marxism and
proletarian revolution to the social, political, and economic conditions of agrarian Russia motivated and impelled the "revolutionary nationalism of the poor" to depose the
absolute monarchy of the three-hundred-year dynasty of the
House of Romanov (1613–1917), as
tsars of Russia.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution (1917), Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia and the basis of Soviet Democracy, the rule of directly elected soviets. In establishing the socialist mode of production in Bolshevik Russia—with the Decree on Land (1917), war communism (1918–1921), and the New Economic Policy (1921–1928)—the revolutionary régime suppressed most political opposition, including Marxists who opposed Lenin's actions, the anarchists and the Mensheviks, factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Russian Civil War (1917–1922), which included the seventeen-army Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1917–1925), and left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks (1918–1924) were the external and internal wars which transformed Bolshevik Russia into the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the core republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
As revolutionary praxis, Leninism originally was neither a proper philosophy nor a discrete political theory. Leninism comprises politico-economic developments of orthodox Marxism and Lenin's interpretations of Marxism, which function as a pragmatic synthesis for practical application to the actual conditions (political, social, economic) of the post-emancipation agrarian society of Imperial Russia in the early 20th century. As a political-science term, Lenin's theory of proletarian revolution entered common usage at the fifth congress of the Communist International (1924), when Grigory Zinoviev applied the term Leninism to denote "vanguard-party revolution." The term Leninism was accepted as part of CPSU's vocabulary and doctrine around 1922, and in January 1923, despite objections from Lenin, it entered the public vocabulary.
Communism: The principle of
state capitalism during the period of transition to communism: “The authorities pretend they are paying wages, workers pretend they are working.” Alternatively, "So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work." ~ Russian political joke [persisted to the '80s].
According to
Marxist–Leninist theory,
communism in the strict sense is the final stage of evolution of a society after it has passed through the
socialism stage. The
Soviet Union thus
cast itself as a socialist country trying to build communism, which was
supposed to be a classless society.
Russian political jokes are a part of
Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods:
Imperial Russia,
Soviet Union and finally
post-Soviet Russia. In the
Soviet period political jokes were a form of
social protest, mocking and critisizing leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites. Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of
Russian joke, most notably
Rabinovich jokes and
Radio Yerevan.
Socialist economics comprises the economic theories, practices and norms of hypothetical and existing
socialist economic systems. A socialist economic system is characterized by
social ownership and operation of the
means of production that may take the form of autonomous
cooperatives or direct
public ownership wherein production is carried out
directly for use rather than
for profit. Socialist systems that utilize
markets for allocating
capital goods and
factors of production among economic units are designated
market socialism. When
planning is utilized, the economic system is designated as a socialist planned economy. Non-market forms of socialism usually include a system of accounting based on
calculation-in-kind to
value resources and goods.
Socialist economics has been associated with different
schools of economic thought.
Marxian economics provided a foundation for socialism based on analysis of capitalism while
neoclassical economics and
evolutionary economics provided comprehensive models of socialism. During the 20th century, proposals and models for both socialist
planned and
market economies were based heavily on neoclassical economics or a synthesis of neoclassical economics with Marxian or
institutional economics.
As a term, socialist economics may also be applied to the analysis of former and existing economic systems that were implemented in
socialist states such as in the works of Hungarian economist
János Kornai. 19th-century American
individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who connected the
classical economics of
Adam Smith and the
Ricardian socialists as well as that of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Karl Marx and
Josiah Warren to socialism, held that there were two schools of socialist thought, namely
anarchist socialism and
state socialism, maintaining that what they had in common was the
labor theory of value. Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary; how far society should intervene and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change are issues of disagreement.