*What is Marxist-Leninism?”
If you read my article on Russia, you probably asked that question.
This is a good time to go over what Marxist-Leninism is. But we need to start with Marxism. Spoiler alert, I am not a Marxist. I am very much a capitalist. But I’m a curious guy, so I would like to understand Marxism well. Luckily my dad was trained as a Marxist (Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana was an “African Socialist”) so Ghanaian intellectuals had to read Marx. He still has those books today so I have had the chance to read about Marxism.
The pithy TLDR is that “Marxist Leninism = Socialist Authoritarianism”.
The more expansive TLDR is that Marxism has three parts:
(1) Historical materialism - history is just clashes of two groups, and whichever group promotes human freedom eventually wins, evolving from the previous two groups: feudalism (peasants vs. Lords)—> capitalism (business owners vs workers) —> communism.
(2) A critique of capitalism: The rich get richer while the working class gets crappy wages & dull and alienating work.
(3) Socialist Revolution - The working class needs to develop class consciousness to revolt against society to be more equitable. Marx also thought religion, was a “mind drug” for working people to cope with death and a shit life.
Leninism is the idea that the working class are too uneducated/religious/patriotic to actually rebel against the state. So an intellectual class of people will become the vanguard party that will run the government to control everything to make society better. Screw political parties, the people, if given the chance, will elect idiots and demagogues that will destroy their own country. When you combine the ideologies you get “Marxist-Leninism”, the idea that capitalism is bad, markets are not a good way to determine prices, and you need to overthrow liberal democracy with a one party state of intellectuals who will control businesses to make society better for everyone. In a Marxist-Leninist economy, what to produce, how much to make, how to distribute, at what price to set, is decided ahead of time by a government agency instead of businesses or individuals. Also, to educate the masses quickly, religion needs to be severely repressed. That is how the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Communist Albania, Communist Hungary, Communist Ethiopia, and many other countries ran their economies during the cold war before abandoning the ideology.
Marxist-Leninism is what people colloquially call “communism”. After Mao Zedong died, and Deng Xiaoping took over, China basically abandoned the Marxism, while keeping the Leninism in the late 1970s. They basically use Marxism as a propaganda tool at this point, but Xi Jinping actually does believe in Marxism.
Marxism
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a popularizer of socialism and he made the case for socialism in a more “scientific” rather than a moral stance. He didn’t invent the ideology. Socialism was already an established philosophy and there were already trade unions promoting communism/socialism before his writings. French socialists like Charles Fourier or Pierre Joseph-Proudhonon were already talking about socialism and abolition of private property years/decades before Marx did. In fact, the ideas people producing for community instead of the individual goes back to Plato’s Republics in the 4th Century BC. There are other forms of socialism too like Anarchist Socialism.
He wrote so many pamphlets & books on what communism/socialism is like “The Communist Manifesto (1848)” and “Das Kapital”. He was born in the Kingdom of Prussia (modern day Germany) who thought that capitalism will eventually die and that communism will create a classless, moneyless, and stateless society. Money will be replaced with labor vouchers, so you an individual gets exact what he puts in, before even labor vouchers are no longer necessary. If this sounds like idealistic bullshit, a Marxist would say your mind is co-opted by the capitalist mode of production. '
For being a radical, Marx was kicked out of Prussia (Germany).France, & Belgium . Marx eventually landed himself as a political journalist who worked for the NY Herald Tribune in 19th London. During this time, child labor was normal, only land owning men could vote, women were second class citizens (until 1918), there were no laws for protecting conditions for workers, and there was no safety net for the poor. Also, most of Continental Europe at that time were still feudalist societies until the Revolutions of 1848.
His ideal society would be nothing like Maoist China or the Soviet Union, but would be more like the Paris Commune in 1871 which he praised (for a bit) in his book “The Civil War in France (1871)”. For 2 months, right after France lost the Franco-Prussia(Germany) war, a group of revolutionary working class soldiers seized power in Paris. They made an anti-religious, feminist, self-policing, state that abolished child labor, cancelled paying rent, and gave employees the right to take over their owner’s firm. This state was not only economically unsustainable, crime was rampant, and they didn’t have a standing military to defend themselves. When the French government re-emerged, the French army killed over 10K communists in Paris.
Marx thought that first societies need to develop from feudal, farm economies to industrial capitalist economies that establish “equality under the law”. Then industrial capitalism will die to socialism due to the massive inequality created by capitalism. This is an important nuance, because Marx thought that communism should take place in industrial societies like the United States or the United Kingdom. Instead, communist revolutions were tried in agrarian societies like Tsarist Russia or the Republic of China. This allows communists an easy way to say “True communism hasn’t been tried yet.”
What did Marx think?
Marx saw history as a form of class struggle between two classes. At first one class wins, until the other one does. That’s how progress goes from feudalism to capitalism to eventually communism. Marx saw capitalism as a mode of production which is a fancy way of saying “an economic system to distribute resources & produce stuff”.
The first mode of production Marx spoke about was agrarian Feudalism. The relationship was between the serf and the landlord. Eventually feudalism gave way to the industrial revolution in UK and the West, which had capitalism as its mode of production. In Capitalism, Marx said the relationship was between the employers (bourgeoise) and the employee (proletariat). The employer risks his money to start a business and the employer owns the firm, the employee earns a wage under the employer. He also said that the government, is a regulator of capitalism. This is what Fox News conservatives get wrong about socialism. They define Marxism as “the government does stuff”, which is wrong. Marxists are opposed the center left liberals and center right conservatives. Both Marxists and center left liberals have more perceived compassion for the less fortunate, but Marxists see center left liberals as useful idiots for the capitalist class who perpetuate a broken system. Meanwhile center left liberals see Marxists as utopic dreamers, who are too idealistic to get their hands dirty in using the system to make lives better for more people.
Marx didn’t see the state as an entity that was separated from capitalism, but a maintainer of capitalism. The state in Marx’s eyes was an entity that recognized property rights of landowners and business owners, recognized business contracts between employees and employers, and collected taxes to invest in projects which he thought capitalists wouldn’t do a good job of investing in (roads, dams, parks, postal services, etc.). Marx defined Communism as the future mode of production where there is no state and there is no business owner who owns everything; but rather enterprises will be owned and by self managed employees. The new class struggle will be between the business owners and workers. The difficult part for Marx is how to get society to have enterprise owned and operated entirely by workers.
Marx applauded capitalism for making an economic system for making more stuff, making more stuff available for more people, increased living standards, and for liberating the masses from feudalism. However, he hated that for most people capitalism did not bring self-actualization for most people except the business owners. As an unpaid peasant farmer in feudalism, you had land, but as a urban worker under capitalism, you had to work just afford rent in a dirty building or be homeless. Yes, your living standards went up but its still shit. He wrote about the squalor, slum living, in detail in his book - “The Condition of the English Working Class” (1844)
Also, Marx made the point at the time that not everyone can be a capitalist or an investor. Being a capitalist assumes you have workers, and being an investor means you have excess cash.
Lastly, Marx in his book “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) had this idea called “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Which means just like the business owners revolted against the Church and nobility from yesteryear, the working class must revolt against the business class and the state. Due to the inherit “boom-bust cycle” of capitalism, eventually the recessions, unemployment and lack of wage growth will make the working class revolt. The working class will then need to create their own transitional government before the state can wither away on its own. (Do you really think a government will just purposefully decide to self-immolate itself?)
Capitalism
What’s funny is that Karl Marx didn’t coin the term socialism, but rather Marx coined the term capitalism as a snarl word. Capitalism was literally an unknown word in the English language until Marx’s “Das Capital” was translated to English. But eventually people turned the snarl word into a word they own up to. Capitalism was not the word Adam Smith, James Stuart, or David Ricardo used to describe the early industrialization phase of Britain. They used the words “free enterprise”, “free markets”, or “free commerce”. Much of what Karl Marx wrote and what “Marxism” is a critique of capitalism.
For example, Marx wrote about a concept Adam Smith wrote about called the “labour theory of value”, which is basically the idea that labor is a commodity that’s traded in the market just like oil or corn. Marx wrote that if a worker only has his job if the value of his labor is more than the wage he earns. So, a worker will never be paid how much he/she is actually worth. Thus, Marx said that any employer-employee contract is inherently exploitative. Unless a worker is paid a wage that reflects his labor he is being exploited. (This differs from mainstream economics. In normal econ, the value of labor is what a buyer of labor(an employer) is willing to pay for it. If the labor is more in demand, like a computer scientist or data scientist, than more employers are willing to pay for that labor than a retailer. .)
More importantly, in this relationship is the idea of class-struggle. The owner wants to collect as many profits as possible in the smallest time possible, while the worker wants to make as much money as possible doing the least labor: these sides will always conflict each other.
Conclusion
When Marx died, Socialism split into two camps. Democratic socialists - Socialists who believed that socialism must win in liberal democratic societies by changing the hearts and minds of people. A good example of this, are the democratic socialists of the UK who made the Fabian society and developed the National Health Service. The other camp were the Revolutionary socialists. These socialists believed that liberal democracy was inherently flawed since lobbyists influence Parliament/Congress to serve business interests over the needs of the people. These people rejected liberal democracy and promoted violent revolutions to create a one-party Marxist-Leninist state. A good example of this, is Vladimir Lenin, who overthrew Tzarist Russia to create the Soviet Union.
Sources
Links are underlined!
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/date/index.htm
Ironically I wouldn't even call Marx a socialist by today's standards, but instead an anarchist.
"Yes, there is currently no foundation in place to realize the societal system idealized by Marx. According to Marx's theory, social productivity needs to be highly developed and everyone’s cognitive level needs to reach a certain degree. If society is to evolve according to Marx’s theory, it will be a long time before that happens. I believe the historical mission of communist revolutions several decades ago was to promote the overthrow of Western colonial rule in various regions and achieve national independence. Marxism can be considered merely a tool to achieve this goal, but people became blindly devoted to it over time.
In today’s society, regardless of any ideology, the important thing is to improve productivity, enhance the level of education among people, and promote fairness and justice on a global scale. Deng Xiaoping once said that China is currently in the primary stage of socialism and that it would take a hundred generations of effort to achieve communism. However, everyone knows that China is, in reality, more like state capitalism."