Socialism FAQ Part 4: What is the Difference Between Classical Marxism and Leninism?
What is Leninism, as Opposed to Marxism?
Leninism, also known as Stalinism (who later came along and “perfected” it), along with other iterations such as Trostkyism and Maoism (named after those who established it, either in theory or actually applied in a national context), are often what people today think of when they hear the words “Socialism” or “Communism.”
And unfortunately, because of its association with these terms, thanks to a combination of influences throughout the 20th century — e.g., Lenin & Stalin themselves; and both the Right and the Left in various nations, albeit for different reasons — many on the Left continue to conflate it with Marxism and believe that this is what he and Engels meant when the formulated their conceptions of an Economic (or Industrial) Democracy, i.e., Classical Marxism, in their various works such as The Communist Manifesto and Capital.
This conflation has sometimes resulted in that conception being referred to as “Leninism-Marxist” etc., as if the two are in accord. The SJWs and race-baiting orgs like Black Lives Matter likewise claim the “Marxist” mantle for themselves, something people on the Right cannot resist jumping on and trying to conflate them with the Left in general, as if those of us who do not hold the traditional principles (i.e., the Classical Left) no longer exist.
Individuals on the Left who consider anything that calls itself “Marxist” (with or without a prefix or suffix attached to it) to be the bonafide article are often referred to as “tankies” by the Classical Left, but many among our number are also greatly confused by these conflations.
So, what is the source of that confusion? And more importantly, what is the difference between Leninism and Classical Marxism?
I describe the latter in detail here. As for the former, simply read on.
Simply glancing at the above chart on display tells you a lot between the differences I will get into. But now I will elaborate further.
Marx and Engels did not describe what an Economic Democracy would look like in great detail, because they knew it would be ill-considered to do such a thing. They had no idea exactly how political, social, and economic circumstances would develop in the future; what methodology may be best for the working class of that future time period to utilize to establish an Economic Democracy; precisely what tools would be available for workers to utilize towards that purpose (e.g., Marx & Engels could not anticipate the Internet & social media); and exactly how the working class of that future era may choose to operate such a system based on all of the above factors.
Also, Marx did describe a possible means as to how that might be achieved by the working class of his day, a few decades before the Industrial Revolution made such a system completely viable in a technological sense (but could be readily anticipated, much as we can now fully envision a manned trip to Mars during the next few decades).
And this took the form of a suggestion that the workers may perhaps want to try to capture the existing state and run it via elected representatives, and therefore establish what he metaphorically referred to as a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The purpose of this theoretically worker-controlled state would be to utilize the resources to fully industrialize the nation so that a true Economic Democracy would then become possible, with the idea of these state representatives of the workers then turning over the reins fully to the workers.
However, this methodology is no longer applicable in our post-industrial age because the system is already fully industrialized at this point. That is something modern people on the progressive Left need to seriously take into account when it comes to discussing methodologies to achieve a true worker-run system in a present day context.
Of course, Marx’s use of the term “dictatorship” via a style of metaphorical rhetoric that did not age well has often been taken literally by conservatives to imply that he was speaking of an actual despotic state with extreme authoritarian leanings to demonize his writings in the eyes of freedom-loving Westerners. And sadly, it worked for a long time.
Marx’s suggested methodology for workers in a pre-industrial context to take over the state has also proven to be a bad idea in addition to no longer being necessary. This methodology was seized upon by the Russian revolutionaries under Lenin, who was a student of Marx, since 1917 Russia was still a technologically backward, agrarian society.
A true classless society was not possible from a material standpoint, and obviously no assistance was offered by an outside capitalist-controlled world. Hence, this failure to achieve such a system then and there had nothing to do with any inherent failings of human nature but with the unfortunate material reality of the time and place.
However, hindsight has shown us that though this early suggested method of Marx in such a context was indeed a viable means of industrializing the nation — and rapidly so in a world with several nations already so industrialized — the new privileged bureaucratic class established via the Leninist vanguards would not accede power to the workers.
Instead, the bureaucratic class used its control over the means of communication to send forth the propaganda that, depending upon who was in charge at the time, either a “workers state” was already achieved; or, to that the establishment of a true Economic Democracy must still be relegated to “a distant goal” of the present system when it was actually materially possible to establish now.
What Does a Leninist System Look Like?
Matters of authoritarianism aside, along with the argument of better distribution of the material resources to the proletariat, these bureaucrat-run systems retain the requirement of currency to purchase items and a basic capitalist framework of class divisions that rely on all-too-familiar means of commerce and profit. This is why they function so seamlessly in a post-industrial capitalist world because they are not so much a true alternative to it so much as another way of running a system based on money, profit, competition, and commerce.
Many genuine progressives on the Left have seized upon the traditional conflation of Leninism with Marxism to suggest that the former was indeed what Marx and Engels were referring to. And that is likely due to the fact that it bears more similarities to what we have now and hence retains the comfort of the familiar when it comes to class divisions, money, and business.
However, Leninism has been referred to as “state capitalism” by Lenin himself and others since for good reason. For one thing, it is not run bottom to top by workers who socially own the industries, services, and all the automation used to provide this as a whole. Rather, authority is dictated in a top to bottom manner by a handful of people sitting in office who comprise a bureaucratic class of decision-makers. This is the case whether they are legitimately elected by the people or not.
A bureaucratic class is still a ruling class, and still presides over a system that maintains artificial scarcity in a fully industrialized world. No matter how much one may argue that the distribution of wealth from the top to the bottom may be less lopsided, lopsided it still is.
That is why you hear people in the current version of the Communist Party USA make comments like, “Well, we obviously can’t rise everyone out of poverty or make everyone equal materially, but we can help more people than ‘capitalism’ can…” when we clearly have the technological ability to do both of those things; and why they consider modern China with its embrace of capitalist business practices to be an example of Marxism.
This is because the former Soviet Union, and China today, still utilize all the common accoutrements of capitalism: money/currency, and a reliance on it to move resources regardless of actual physical availability; class divisions, with bureaucrats taking over the position of capitalists rather than simply serving them; a compensation system based on wages that limit what workers can acquire from the social store to varying degrees as opposed to the full fruit of their labor; and basic business relations despite their insistence that people must come before profit.
These bureaucrats maintained power by staying in office. Just think of Congress and the White House dictating its current authority without answering to capitalists but sitting fully in their place. And enjoying exactly the same type of privileges in terms of having vast sums of currency to acquire a very unequal share of the wealth produced by workers compared to the latter.
And having full control over the military, police, and intelligence agencies that would have no place in a true Economic Democracy run by workers cooperatively and which did not need to utilize force or clandestine operations to maintain order.
A civilization where everyone has full access to the social store; no one enjoyed disproportionate power or wealth over anyone else; and where everyone was free from want would not need to be forced to exist in an uneasy semblance of peace but would know actual peace — including peace of mind. Order would exist naturally rather than having to be imposed by a “higher” authority using guns, billy clubs, a prison & court system as we know them today, or such a complex system of conflict-resolving laws that exist in all modern nations.
This is not a classless, moneyless, and stateless society. It will not resolve conflicts or contradictions inherent to such a system, including those that lead to war. And it will not allow everyone on the planet to enjoy the full capability of what modern industry can do for us — which is the full elimination of poverty, economic insecurity, and material want or the fear of want.
Moreover, the above limitations on a system that relies on money and class rule cannot achieve a fully harmonious relationship with the natural world and put an end to the type of dog-eat-dog competition that so often brings out the worst of us in a system predicated upon unequal distribution of the resources.
A Bit More Perspective
Within a comments section discussing this conflation on Quora, I think the commentator Shayne M put it correctly when he said:
Whether or not you agree with Lenin’s conclusions concerning revolution in underdeveloped states, which was, of necessity an innovation from Marx’s thought, everything Lenin ever wrote or said was based on his unerring faith in Marxism, albeit according to his own interpretation [emphasis mine].
… Now, arguing about whether the USSR achieved a functioning form of socialism under Lenin is a different matter. By Lenin’s own admission, they had only achieved a form of “state capitalism” [Bingo — and emphasis mine!]. Trotsky advocated “permanent revolution” as the means to both deepen Soviet socialism and broaden it by supporting revolutions abroad. Stalin, whose view prevailed, advocated a return to the militarized “war economy” model of the Civil War, ended the New Economic Policy of Lenin, and turned the state’s energy towards “socialism in one country” [Bingo!! And emphasis mine yet again].
This is where I take some issue with Shayne’s take, however:
An apologist for Marxism can, of course, argue that you can’t blame Marx for the Russian Revolution and its errors, and this is certainly true, but you cannot convincingly claim that Leninism was not an interpretation of Marxism.
It was, but we must remember that it was an attempt to establish Socialism in an industrially undeveloped location. And it did so via a methodology suggested by Marx for such a location that did not stand the test of time since he did not anticipate this bureaucratic class refusing to turn the system over to the workers once such industrialization was achieved, courtesy of a dictator like Stalin. It is something modern advocates of Leninism as “Socialism” also fail to consider when it comes to trusting bureaucrats to act as legit “representatives” of workers.
Importantly, Marx and Engels lacked that particular bit of hindsight that we who have seen such systems operate in the post-industrial world do possess.
Leninism was an attempt to put Marxist theory into practice in exactly the area Marx had not theorised in any detail; the construction of socialism.
Marx did not do so for reasons described above.
The Main Point
In summation, a Leninist/Trotskyist/Maoist model is not a classless, moneyless, and stateless society. It will not resolve conflicts or contradictions inherent to such a system, including those that lead to war; and it will not allow everyone on the planet to enjoy the full capability of what modern industry can do for us — which is the full elimination of poverty, economic insecurity, and material want or the fear of want.
And it also would not achieve a harmonious relationship with the natural world and an end to the type of dog-eat-dog competition that so often brings out the wors of us in a system predicated upon unequal distribution of the resources.
For that to happen, we need to eliminate our fetishism with money, commerce, and authority by the few and look towards an entirely new way of running the world, one that takes full advantage of what modern technology & its productive capacity makes possible. That means fully dispensing with what we are used to and thinking of something that is far better than what we have thus far achieved.