Political Thought

Revolution in Prospect. With his approach to the revolution completed, Lenin wrote a pamphlet which reveals his expectations when he took the final step. His State and Revolution was left unfinished because the revolution interrupted it. Even the subject suggested the changed direction of his thought, for Lenin had not given much attention to forms … Read more

Approach to March Revolution. The March Revolution in Russia found Lenin prepared to take the steps which he could rationalize either as completing the middle-class revolution or beginning a socialist revolution. It was no longer important to draw a sharp line, for revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry had brought him by … Read more

Imperialist Capitalism. The outbreak of World War I in 1914, and more especially the support of the war by the socialist parties of Western Europe, turned Lenin’s thought in a new direction. Up to 1914, though he had been a close student of all Marxian literature, his thought had centered on the problems of a … Read more

The Bourgeois and the Proletarian Revolutions. No principle of Marxian strategy was better settled than the rule that it is impossible to make a revolution by force or conspiracy before the time is ripe, that is, before the contradictions in a society have produced a revolutionary situation. It was this which was thought to distinguish … Read more

Lenin on Dialectical Materialism. Lenin’s writings about the party, and indeed everything he wrote, clearly reveal him as a man of action, an astute and not overscrupulous political operator prepared to manipulate his Marxism, as he habitually manipulated his allies, for his own purposes. There was, however, another and a surprising side to his character … Read more

Lenin’s Theory of The Party. This question of the organization of the party was the subject of Lenin’s first important theoretical work, a pamphlet entitled What is to be done? which he published in 1902 in Iskra, a new journal large) planned and founded by him. The pamphlet was a bitter attack o, bread-and-butter trade … Read more

Russian Marxism. When a Marxian socialist party was first organized in Russia, early in the 1880’s, it followed a native socialism with a generally agrarian and humanitarian philosophy. The main principle of this philosophy was the idea that a socialist society might be developed from the primitive communism of the Russian village and thus might … Read more

The philosophy of communism is a revised version of Marxism, largely the work of Lenin and therefore often called “Marxism-Leninism.” Trotsky’s part in it, which was in fact considerable, is systematically denied or obscured by communist writers because of his later expulsion from the party. The official definition of Lenin’s relation to Marx, stated by … Read more

The Strategy of the Social Revolution. Marx always regarded his philosophy as the guide to a successful proletarian revolution, and his career was divided between scholarship and socialist leadership. It would be hard to name any form of political, radicalism in Western Europe after Marx that was not in some way affected by his thought. … Read more

The Collapse of Capitalism.The major purpose of Capital, therefore, was to show that capitalism in destroying itself must give rise to socialism, its antithesis. The plan of Marx’s argument was to accept the labor theory of value, which Ricardo had made the central principle of classical economics and which Mar regarded as an authentically scientific … Read more