Topic 4: Karl Marx, V.I.

Lenin and Communism

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY-KARL MARX
 Biography 1-Karl Marx
• The greatest single influence in the development of revolutionary
communism was Karl Marx (1818-1883).
• Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818.
• He was the son of a lawyer who abandoned the Jewish faith and turned
to Christianity because the government declared that no Jew could
practice law.
• Marx attended the University of Bonn; however due to his “lack of
seriousness” his parents transferred him to the University of Berlin
where he studied jurisprudence, philosophy and history but quickly
became engaged in political activities in 1842.
• After, he married his sweetheart and moved to Paris.
 Biography 2-Revolutionary Communism
• The following year Marx met what was to be his lifelong friend and
companion, Fredrich Engels.
• Engels was the first to draw Marx’s attention to England as a laboratory
in which industrial capitalism could be accurately observed.
• In 1845, Marx was expelled from France through the intervention of the
Prussian government and he went to Brussels.
• There Marx composed, with the aid of Engels, the “Communist
Manifesto (1848).
• In 1849, followed by Engels, Marx went to London where he stayed
until his death in 1883.
 Biography 3-Marx continued
• The first volume of “Das Kapital”, his monumental analysis of the
capitalist system, was published in 1867.
• The 2nd and 3rd volumes was published between 1885-1895, edited by
Engels.
• Marx’s writing showed little penetration of English political thought
and his lack of insight into the forces of motivation of English politics
would have been little better or worse had he stayed in Germany all his
life.
INFLUENCES ON MARX’S THINKING
 Influence 1. G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)
• It was above all, Hegel who influenced Marx.
• Although Marx criticized Hegel, he never abandoned the basic
categories of Hegel’s thought.
• Marx felt that History had meaning, and that it moved in a set pattern
toward a known goal.
• He held that history had both a meaning and a goal, and the historical
process was dominated by the struggles between social classes.
• The goal of history was predetermined for Marx, namely the classless
society, leading to full human freedom (abolition of capitalism and
destruction of all forms of injustice and exploitation); while for Hegel,
it was the final victory of reason and spirit over enslavement to caprice
and passion.
 Hegel’s Dialectics
• Comprised three dialectical stages of development:
1. Thesis-represents the existing order
2. Anti-thesis-overthrows the existing order; contradicts/negates thesis.
3. Synthesis-the new order that is created.

Problem Reaction Solution

 Dialectical Materialism
• Marx and Engels adapted the Hegelian dialectic into arguments regarding traditional
materialism
 Influence 2. 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.
• The French Revolution (1789) was merely the beginning of a series of
revolutionary upheavals, the end of which was not in sight.
• Marx saw that industrial capitalism and economic science could best be
studied in England. Since Marx viewed economic forces as the main driving
force in history, and since he felt that industrial civilization was spreading
throughout the world, he was convinced England was the country to live in if
one wanted to study capitalism.
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY-FRIEDRICH ENGELS
 FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820-1895)
• In the mid-1840’s, Marx, the radical philosopher, teamed up with Engels.
• Engels depended on Marx for political inspiration and intellectual stimulation.
• After Marx’s death, Engels added his own ideas to Marx’s theory.
• Some scholars have suggested that it was Engel’s, not Marx, who invented Marxism
so that later Soviet Marxism owes more to Engels than Marx.
• Engels was the guardian of Marxian orthodoxy to whom Marxists in Germany and
elsewhere looked for theoretical inspiration and clarification, and practical advice.
• Engels supplied a simplified version of Marx’s theory.
• Engel’s made 2 important moves:
1. He claimed for Marxism, the title of “scientific
socialism” and
2. He reinterpreted what Marx meant by materialism.
POLITICAL WORKS
 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.
 Marx’s stages of Communism
• The first stage of communism, Marx argued, would be guided by the
principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his
work”.
• The second and higher 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.
 Marx view of the Revolutionary Sequence

Economic
Crisis
(economic
downturn, Immiseration Revolutionary Seizure of State
recession of proletariat Class power
and Consciousness
depressions

Communism Withering away Dictatorship of

of state Proletariat
 Das Kapital Video Link:
https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvxWn3yUDXY
 Marx’s Problems with Capitalism
1. Modern Work is Alienated
2. Modern Work is Insecure
3. Workers Get Pain Little While Capitalist Get Rich
4. Capitalism is Very Unstable
5. Capitalism is Bad for Capitalists
LENINISM
 LENINISM
• The man who made Marxism a political reality in Russia was Vladimir Illychi
Ulyanov or Lenin as he later called himself (1870-1924).
• Lenin had a typical middle class education, attending secondary school, then to
law school.
• Due to his brother’s death by hanging for plotting against Czar Alexander III,
Lenin found himself under constant police supervision.
• Despite this, Lenin still managed to maintain political contacts and join illegal
groups.
• Lenin’s most important contribution to the theory of Marxism is the doctrine of
the Professional Revolutionary, as first developed in What is to be Done?
(1902)
• There, Lenin drew a distinction between an organization of workers and an
organization of revolutionaries.
 LENINISM CONTINUED
• Whereas Marx had assumed that the working class would inevitably
develop its class consciousness in the daily struggle for its economic
existence, Lenin had less confidence in the ability of the workers to
develop politically by their own effort and experience.
• Lenin did not care whether the professional revolutionaries destined to
lead the proletariats were of working class origin or not as long as the
Professional Revolutionary did his job well.
• Lenin’s views of the extreme concentration of powers in the hands of a
few leaders led Trotsky to assert that Lenin doctrine really meant the
Dictatorship over the Proletariats and the struggle of centralism versus
democracy became one of the major issues of communist party
organization before 1917.
 LENIN
• For Marx, the communist movement should be a large inclusive and
broadly based organization of working people from many countries.
• But Lenin believed that the Communist Party should be small,
exclusive and highly organized, tightly discipled and conspiratorial.
• Lenin's views was put to the test in 1903 where they succeeded, calling
themselves “ Bolsheviks” meaning majority (the majority in the
Russian Communist Party).
 LENIN
• Lenin’s most influential political work is State and Revolution (1918).
• Whereas Marx and Engels neglected the factor of political power, Lenin was
interested in the anatomy of the state.
• He denies that capitalism and democracy are compatible and affirms that under
capitalism, democracy always remains a “democracy for a minority, only for the
possessing class, only for the rich”.
• He denies that the transition from capitalism to communism can be accomplished
simply, smoothly and directly, “as the liberal professors and the petty bourgeois
opportunist would have us believe”.
• In the transitional stage between capitalism and communism, the state will
continue to exist because the machinery for the suppression of the capitalist
exploiters will still be required in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
 LENINISM CONTINUED
• 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 wrote “the theory of socialism grew out of the philosophic, historical
and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied
classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific
socialism Marx and Engel’s themselves belonged to bourgeois intelligentsia”.
 SOCIALISM- DEFINED
Socialism is a body of Western teachings and practice
resting upon the belief that most social evils are due to
unequal, or excessively unequal, distribution of material
resources; and that these evils can be cured only by the
transferences, gradual or immediate, total or partial, of
the ownership of property and of the means of
production, exchange and distribution from private to
public control.
Sir Isaiah Berlin
 SOCIALISM TODAY
• Marxist- Leninist version of Communism is dying, if not
already dead.
• Two points are worth noting:
1. The Communist Party has lost its claim to speak for and in the
name of the proletariat; and
2. Communist have typically taken democratic centralism to
mean that political power and economic planning are to be
under the control of the Communist Party.
END OF LECTURE