This document provides information on Karl Marx, communism, and V.I. Lenin. It discusses Marx's influences including Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in England. It explains Marx's concepts of dialectical materialism, alienation, and class consciousness. It then discusses Lenin and how he created a distinctive version of Marxism focused on a revolutionary vanguard party seizing power to transform society along socialist lines through state control of the economy.
This document provides information on Karl Marx, communism, and V.I. Lenin. It discusses Marx's influences including Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in England. It explains Marx's concepts of dialectical materialism, alienation, and class consciousness. It then discusses Lenin and how he created a distinctive version of Marxism focused on a revolutionary vanguard party seizing power to transform society along socialist lines through state control of the economy.
This document provides information on Karl Marx, communism, and V.I. Lenin. It discusses Marx's influences including Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in England. It explains Marx's concepts of dialectical materialism, alienation, and class consciousness. It then discusses Lenin and how he created a distinctive version of Marxism focused on a revolutionary vanguard party seizing power to transform society along socialist lines through state control of the economy.
This document provides information on Karl Marx, communism, and V.I. Lenin. It discusses Marx's influences including Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution in England. It explains Marx's concepts of dialectical materialism, alienation, and class consciousness. It then discusses Lenin and how he created a distinctive version of Marxism focused on a revolutionary vanguard party seizing power to transform society along socialist lines through state control of the economy.
• (b) Class struggle and class consciousness • (c) Stages of history • (d) The Vanguard Party • (e) Marxism - Leninism KARL MARX 1818 - 1883
• Marx was born in the Rhineland, which more
than any other part of Germany had been strongly permeated with democratic ideas by the French Revolution. • In 1849 Marx went to London and he was soon joined by Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895) whom he met in Paris and who became his lifelong collaborator. • Marx stayed in England until his death in 1883. Influences on Marx : G.W.F. Hegel
• In German philosophy, it was G.W.F. Hegel who greatly influenced
Marx. • Although Marx very early criticized Hegel, he never abandoned the basic categories of Hegel s thought. • Like Hegel, Marx felt that history had meaning and that it moved in a set pattern toward a known goal. • Marx held that history had both a meaning and a goal, and the historical process was dominated by the struggles between social classes with each phase of the struggle, as in Hegel, representing a higher phase of human evolution than the preceding one. • The goal of history was predetermined for Marx, namely the classless society, leading to full human freedom; while for Hegel, it was the final victory of reason and spirit over enslavement to caprice and passion. Influences on Marx : The French Revolution
• French revolutionary politics was another
important source for Marx s intellectual development. • Marx theorised that if revolution was the principal method of destroying a capitalist society, then France and her revolutionary experience served as the best laboratory. • This must be contrasted with Burke who was horrified by what the French Revolution epitomised. Influences on Marx : The Industrial Revolution in England • Since Marx viewed economic forces as the main driving force in history, and since he felt that industrial civilization was irresistably spreading throughout the whole world, he was convinced that England was the country to live in and to study industrial capitalism. • Marx also felt that English economic analysis was the most advanced of any country and, therefore, industrial capitalism, in his opinion, could best be studied in England. Dialectical materialism
• Marx believed that political and historical events are due to
the conflict of social forces arising from economic conditions. • He advocated the concepts of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. • The thesis represented the existing order which would be challenged and overthrown by an antithesis and the new order that was created would be the synthesis. • This process would repeat itself until it finally stopped when capitalism was overthrown and there was the classless society of communism. The Duty to Work • In Marx s thought, the classless communist society of the future was by no means designed to abolish the duty to work. • The first stage of communism (socialism), Marx argued, would be guided by the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his work. • In the second, and final phase of communism, the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs would prevail. • Under capitalism, Marx argues, the worker does not work in order to fulfil himself as a person, because his work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. • Marx argued that the proletariat (working class) only had their labour to sell for a wage to the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) who owned and controlled the means of production. Alienation and Class Consciousness
• According to Marx, under capitalism people are alienated
from their work, the objects they produce, their employers, other workers, nature, and from themselves. • Such alienation was necessary to create the class consciousness that could drive class struggle to effect social change and progress that would bring about the overthrow of the capitalist state and replace it with the classless state of communism. • Marx attacked the role of religion in society as it had the potential to undermine class consciousness by offering the proletariat a means of accepting their station in life. • He called religion the opium of the masses. The Communist Manifesto - 1848
• In the Communist Manifesto , Marx and Engels explain
how social change through revolution actually occurs. • For them the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. • The end of capitalism will be brought about by the same inexorable laws of social change that destroyed previous systems. • There was no clear cut theory as to how the political transformation from capitalist to proletarian rule would actually take place - this was left to the forces of history. • Marx and Engels saw in revolution, civil war, and the dictatorship of the proletariat the preparatory stages of peace and harmony. V.I. Lenin 1870 - 1924 • Lenin must be understood both as the creator of a distinctive version of Marxism as a revolutionary theory, and also as a person steeped in the native Russian, non-Marxist revolutionary tradition. • He identified himself as a representative and a continuer of this tradition in an article in 1912 in which he linked himself to (a) the revolutionary nobles and landlords who unsuccessfully staged a troop rising in St. Petersburg following the death of Czar Alexander I in 1825, and, (b) a later generation of revolutionary commoners whose leaders carried out the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. • What Lenin found enduringly valuable in this tradition was its model of the dedicated professional revolutionist and the aspects of this tradition became known as Russian Jacobinism . Russian Jacobinism • This theory held that a revolutionary seizure of power from below should be followed by the formation of a dictatorship of the revolutionary party, which would use political power for the purpose of carrying through from above a transformation of Russian society. • Once the revolutionary intellectuals had captured power through revolutionary activity from below, they would rely chiefly on persuasion of the masses through propaganda, rather than coercion, and would gradually transform the country on socialist lines. • The thrust of Lenin s thinking was toward the creation of a revolutionary party dictatorship dedicated to the transformation of Russian society along socialist lines. • For Lenin, a proletarian dictatorship would mean a dictatorship of the revolutionary party on behalf of the proletariat. The Vanguard Party • Marx and Engels did not imagine that the proletariat, once in power, would have need of a party as their teacher, guide and leader in building a new life on socialist lines. • Leninism was, in part, a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism. • In 1902, Lenin published a booklet entitled What Is To Be Done ? in which he described the need to create the right kind of revolutionary party organization for Russia s special conditions. • He argued that the Russian Marxist party should not seek a mass working class membership, although it should strive to link itself with masses of workers and other discontented elements of society through trade unions, study circles and other groups. • This party was to be the Vanguard Party which consisted of the most committed ideologues and against which there was no competition. Lenin s Economic Theory
• According to Lenin, imperialism, in its economic
essence, is monopoly capitalism. • This determines its place in history, because the monopoly that grows out of free competition is the transition from the capitalist system to a higher socio-economic order. • In other words, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Economic Transformation • In every socialist revolution, however, the principal task of the proletariat, and of the poor peasants which it leads, is the positive or constructive work of setting up an extremely intricate and delicate system of new organizational relationships extending to the planned production and distribution of the goods required for the existence of tens of millions of people. • The principal difficulty lay in the economic sphere, namely, the introduction of the strictest and universal accounting and control of production and distribution of goods, raising the productivity of labour and socializing production in practice. • The transformation from free market competition, which drove capitalist production and distribution, to a new philosophy of State domination and control of the economy, had to be carefully managed in the interest of the population to ensure continuity without hardship.