Lenin Was Not A Marxist

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It is erroneous to entitle Vladimir Lenin a Marxist. In his What Is to Be Done?, and The State and Revolution, Lenin discusses many Marxist categories, including the development of proletarian consciousness, the determined path of History and the inevitability of communism, and the relationship between socialism and internationalism. Vladimir Lenin’s insurgent writings represent a significant departure from the speculative writings of Karl Marx. In my essay I will show that Lenin should not legitimately describe himself as a Marxist, and that Leninism as a political philosophy is distinct from Marxism. In my essay, by differentiating Marxist and Leninist, I hope to clear up the common intellectual confusion that arises when applying such terms to a theorist and revolutionary like Lenin.


Literature and conversation regularly applies the single term ‘Marxism’ to the thought and practice of the political thinker and visionary Vladimir Lenin. Referring to Lenin as a Marxist suggests that he shared a common ideology with Karl Marx, which he did not. Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party and his German Ideology Part I are as much philosophically natured as they are political. While the infamous phrase at the end of Manifesto… is “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” he writes that such an instance is destined to happen anyway. He claims that the dictatorship of the proletariat will come into being no matter what is done to prevent it. Karl Marx did not try to theorize morality. Instead, he theorized his views of the inevitable end to History. Marxism is an interpretation of History; it examines society’s evolution. This ideology is not about right or wrong, but about what will occur eventually. Some might argue that because he did not spell out the pragmatics of putting communism into practice, tyrants such as Lenin were able to dream up their own schemes. Marx simply intended his work to help predict what was going to happen; he did not write his works to be used as theory to be put into practice.


Marx stated his prediction that the proletariat (the workers) will eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie (middle classes) and a communist society would result. The theories of Marx were written down in the early nineteenth century, during the height of the British Industrial Revolution. Britain at that time was highly industrialized, and ahead of the rest of the European states. Marx saw firsthand the mistreatment of factory workers by their employers. The proletariat class worked extremely hard to earn their wages, and they received scarcely anything in return. The bourgeoisie on the other hand did little or nothing, and received virtually all the benefits in the wage-labor system at that time. Marx believed that after the collective realization by the industrial workers that they were being severely mistreated by the upper class, they would work collectively to overthrow it.


What happened in the pre-Soviet Union (now Russia) was not what Marx predicted. Karl Marx stated that the worker’s movement would start in a fully developed capitalist society. Was what would become the Soviet Union of this nature? Indeed not! During the same time period as the Industrial Revolution in Europe, pre-Soviet Union was still engaging in a feudal system. Instead of vast factories, its system consisted of peasantry and agriculture. Because there was much less of a class system in pre-Soviet Union, Lenin likened the inequity and inequality between the land-owning nobility and the peasantry and farmers of his country to the upper and lower classes noticed by Marx.


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Karl Marx stated that communism would follow from socialism after having followed from capitalism. Capitalism had replaced feudalism in Europe with a new mode of production, which was more prolific and efficient. Communism would eventually replace capitalism. The whole point about the evolution of communism was that it would be more productive and produce greater wealth for all than would capitalism. A socialism or communism that perpetuated the impoverishment of its people would be worthless. Eventually, a communist government would slowly wither away, when there would truly be no need for property, government, religion, or any form of oppressive relationship and History would enter its ultimate conclusion true communism. But wait, pre-Soviet Union had not even reached a stage of capitalism! Instead of viewing Marx’s writings as a prediction of what would eventually happen, Vladimir Lenin sought to speed up History in order to achieve communism within his lifetime. Lenin decided to create a communist state- one that he claimed would steer closer and closer to true communism with time.


Vladimir Lenin’s ideologies were much more aligned with other writers than Karl Marx. A certain publishing by Chernyshevsky affected his approach to revolution dramatically. Chernyshevsky’s work follows a revolutionary who gives himself over entirely to his cause. This revolutionary has chosen to give up his previous lifestyle, and deny himself the pleasures of life. He sleeps on a bed of nails, eats his steak raw, and reads only what is necessary to further his cause. He gives up love, and works to harden himself, because a cold and collective demeanor will certainly be necessary in the event of his revolution. Chernyshevsky’s writing shows what a revolutionary must be like, in order to be successful. He suggests that a right thinking person must be one, and that in itself starts to limit individualist thinking. Clearly, Lenin follows this portrayal of a revolutionary much more than he does Marx. Marx speaks nothing of the sort. The revolutionary portrayed is the perfect model of a Bolshevik, and not a true follower of Marx.


As in Chernyshevsky’s writings, Lenin began to eliminate individualistic thought once he attained his sought-after power. Marx spoke out that exploitation of one another was wrong, not individualism. Just because you can allow individualism in a society doesn’t mean you have the freedom to exploit one another.


Lenin, unlike Marx, made people to believe lies, such that the class struggle among the peasantry was the same as that of the cities, and to think that if a worker wasn’t working fast enough that he or she was a saboteur. Vladimir Lenin disregards the predictions of Marx in his What Is to Be Done?. In this text, he wrote that History has shown that the working class by itself is able only to develop trade union consciousness. This paves the way for him to suggest that a small band of revolutionaries, for instance he and his comrades, were needed, and for him to seize dictatorial control. Contrastingly, Marx had written that the emancipation of the working class must be accomplished by the working class themselves! Marx never told the workers how to think, how to act, or how to feel. He instead stated merely what people would normally do naturally, and that is to loathe being exploited, and to resist it.


On the subject of the state, Marx wrote that as long as class war and exploitation existed in the world, a state is necessary. He believed that in order to free the majority in society (the proletariat), they would need power and control of their own lives. Marx, born into the bourgeois class, never tried to use his own theories to assume power. Lenin, on the other hand, broke Marx’s words, because most of the leading Bolsheviks under his command were not even workers!


Marx saw little value in the bourgeois democracy of his own time period. The bourgeois democracy of Britain failed to distribute power well, and there was rampant inequity and inequality. It would seem as though Marx envisioned a dictatorship of the proletariat, and Lenin envisioned a dictatorship of the Party.


There is a sizeable dissimilarity between what Marx promoted as communism and how Lenin rewrote it as Communism. Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx were very different people with very different ideas and goals for the future of History. Marx wrote a prediction of what he thought the logical conclusion to History would be. Lenin agreed with Marx that communism would be the ideal end of History, but instead of letting history run its course, he attempted to intervene. His ‘intervention’ could be read as an attempt to assume an authority position. Lenin’s devices for attaining the ultimate goal of true-communism would surely never have been recommended or found permissible by Marx. Lenin’s theories contradicted much of what Marx taught, and Lenin should never be thought of as a Marxist.


WORKING STUDENTS AND ACADEMIA OF ALL COUNTRIES, WHO AGREE THAT LENIN WAS BY NO MEANS A MARXIST, UNITE!











Tucker, Robert C. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Introduction By Karl Marx”. The Marx-Engels Reader Second Edition. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 178. 5-65.


---. “Manifesto of the Communist Party By Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx”. The Marx-Engels Reader Second Edition. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 178. 46-500.


---. “On the Jewish Question By Karl Marx”. The Marx-Engels Reader Second Edition. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 178. 6-5.


---. “The German Ideology Part I By Karl Marx”. The Marx-Engels Reader Second Edition. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 178. 146-00.


---. “The State and Revolution The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution By Vladimir Lenin”. The Lenin Anthology. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 175. 11-.


---. “What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement By Vladimir Lenin”. The Lenin Anthology. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 175. 1-114.


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