Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818–March 14, 1883) was a German-Jewish philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, revolutionary, and communist icon.

Marx's approach to history and politics is indicated by the opening line of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period—socialism—in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change. On this model, it is the structural contradictions within capitalism which necessitate its end, giving way to communism:

On the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. On this model, capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class, led by a Communist Party: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." (from The German Ideology)

While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century.

Biography

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Trier, in the Kingdom of Prussia's Province of the Lower Rhine, the third of seven children. His father, Heinrich Marx (1777–1838), born Herschel Mordechai (the son of Levy Mordechai (1743-1804) and wife Eva Lwow (1753-1823)) was descended from a long line of rabbis but converted to Lutheran Christianity, despite his many deistic tendencies and his admiration of such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Rousseau, in order to be allowed to practice Law. Marx's mother was Henriette née Pressburg (1788–1863), she was the grand-aunt of industrialists Gerard Philips and Anton Philips and a maternal descendant of the Barent-Cohen family through her parents.

Soon after losing his job as editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a Cologne newspaper, Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen, the educated daughter of a Prussian baron. Their engagement was kept secret at first, and for several years was opposed by both the Marxes and Westphalens. From 1844 to 1848, Marx enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle, with income derived from the sale of his works, his salary, gifts from friends and allies: a large inheritance from his fathers death, long delayed, also became available in March 1848. During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty and constant fear of creditors in a three room flat on Dean Street in Soho, London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and three more were to follow. Of these only three survived to adulthood. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels, who was drawing a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Inheritances from one of Jenny's uncles and her mother who died in 1856 allowed the family to move to somewhat more salubrious lodgings at 9 Grafton Terrace, Kentish Town a new suburb on the then-outskirts of London. Marx generally lived a hand-to-mouth existence, forever at the limits of his resources, although this did extend to some spending on relatively bourgeois luxuries, which he felt were necessities for his wife and children given their social status and the mores of the time.

Karl Marx's Tomb at Highgate Cemetery London

Following the death of his wife Jenny in December 1881, Marx developed a catarrh that kept him in ill health for the last fifteen months of his life. It eventually brought on the bronchitis and pleurisy that killed him in London on March 14, 1883. He died a stateless person and was buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, on March 17, 1883. The messages carved on Marx's tombstone are: “WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE”, the final line of The Communist Manifesto, and Marx’s version of the 11th

Thesis on Feuerbach: “THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN VARIOUS WAYS - THE POINT HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT”

The tombstone was a monument built in 1954 by the Communist Party of Great Britain with a portrait bust by Laurence Bradshaw; Marx's original tomb had been humbly adorned. In 1970, there was an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the monument, with a homemade bomb.

Several of Marx's closest friends spoke at his funeral, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and Friedrich Engels. Engels' speech included the words: “On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep — but forever.”

Education

Marx was educated at home until the age of thirteen. After graduating from the Trier Gymnasium, Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn in 1835 at the age of seventeen; he wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted that it was more practical to study law. At Bonn he joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president. Because of Marx's poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. During this period, Marx wrote many poems and essays concerning life, using the theological language acquired from his liberal, deistic father, such as "the Deity," but also absorbed the atheistic philosophy of the Young Hegelians who were prominent in Berlin at the time. Marx earned a doctorate in 1841 with a thesis titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, but he had to submit his dissertation to the University of Jena as he was warned that his reputation among the faculty as a Young Hegelian radical would lead to a poor reception in Berlin.

London

Marx moved to London in May 1849, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He briefly worked as correspondent for the New York Tribune in 1851. In London Marx devoted himself to two activities: revolutionary organizing, and an attempt to understand political economy and capitalism. Having read Engels' study of the working class, Marx turned away from philosophy and devoted himself to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in 1864. He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.

Given the repeated failures and frustrations of worker's revolutions and movements, Marx also sought to understand capitalism, and spent a great deal of time in The British Library studying and reflecting on the works of political economists and economic data. By 1857 he had accumulated over 800 pages of notes and short essays on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, foreign trade and the world market; this work however was not published until 1941, under the title Grundrisse. In 1859, Marx was able to publish Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, his first serious economic work. In the early 1860s he worked on composing three large volumes, the Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. This work, that was published posthumously under the editorship of Karl Kautsky is often seen as the Fourth book of Capital, and constitutes one of the first comprehensive treatises on the history of economic thought. In 1867, well behind schedule, the first volume of Capital was published, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. Here, Marx elaborated his labor theory of value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III remained mere manuscripts upon which Marx continued to work for the rest of his life and were published posthumously by Engels.

Marx's thought

The American Marx scholar Hal Draper once remarked, "there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike." The legacy of Marx's thought is bitterly contested between numerous tendencies who claim to be Marx's most accurate interpreters, including but not exclusively Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and libertarian Marxism.

Influences on Marx's thought

Marx's thought was strongly influenced by:

The dialectical method and historical orientation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; The classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo; French socialist and sociological thought, in particular the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de

Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier; Earlier German philosophical materialism, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach The solidarity with the working class of Friedrich Engels

Marx's view of history, which came to be called historical materialism (controversially adapted as the philosophy of dialectical materialism by Engels and Lenin) is certainly influenced by Hegel's claim that reality (and history) should be viewed dialectically. Hegel believed that human history is characterized by the movement from the fragmentary toward the complete and the real (which was also a movement towards greater and greater rationality). Sometimes, Hegel explained, this progressive unfolding of the Absolute involves gradual, evolutionary accretion but at other times requires discontinuous, revolutionary leaps — episodal upheavals against the existing status quo. For example, Hegel strongly opposed slavery in the United States during his lifetime, and he envisioned a time when Christian nations would eliminate it from their civilization.

Marx's critiques of German philosophical idealism, British political-economy, and French socialism depended heavily on the influence of Feuerbach and Engels. Hegel was an idealist, and Marx sought to rewrite dialectics in materialist terms. He wrote that Hegelianism stood the movement of reality on its head, and that it was necessary to set it upon its feet. Marx's acceptance of this notion of materialist dialectics which rejected Hegel's idealism was greatly influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that God is really a creation of man and that the qualities people attribute to God are really qualities of humanity. Accordingly, Marx argued that it is the material world that is real and that our ideas of it are consequences, not causes, of the world. Thus, like Hegel and other philosophers, Marx distinguished between appearances and reality. But he did not believe that the material world hides from us the "real" world of the ideal; on the contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideology prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly.

Philosophy

Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature. Fundamentally, Marx assumed that it is human nature to transform nature, and he calls this process of transformation "labour" and the capacity to transform nature "labour power." For Marx, this is simultaneously a physical and a mental act: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” (Capital, Vol. I, Chap. 7, Pt. 1)

Marx did not believe that all people worked the same way, or that how one works is entirely personal and individual. Instead, he argued that work is a social activity and that the conditions and forms under and through which people work are socially determined and change over time. Beyond these basic points, Marx made no claims about human nature.

Marx's analysis of history focuses on the organization of labor and is based on his distinction between the means / forces of production, literally those things such as land, natural resources, and technology, that are necessary for the production of material goods, and the relations of production, in other words, the social relationships people enter into as they acquire and use the means of production. Together these compose the mode of production, and Marx distinguished historical eras in terms of distinct modes of production. For example, Marx observed that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. Marx believed that under capitalism, the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). For Marx this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure is a major source of social disruption and conflict.

Marx understood the "social relations of production" to comprise not only relations among individuals, but between or among groups of people, or classes. As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources. For Marx, different classes have divergent interests, which is another source of social disruption and conflict. Conflict between social classes being something

which is inherent in all human history: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1)

Marx was especially concerned with how people relate to that most fundamental resource of all, their own labor power. Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labor — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Marx called this reversal "commodity fetishism" (at the time Marx wrote, historians of religion used the word fetish to describe something made by people, which people believed had power over them).

Commodity fetishism is an example of what Engels called false consciousness, which is closely related to the understanding of ideology. By ideology they meant ideas that reflect the interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, but which are presented as universal and eternal. Marx and Engels' point was not only that such beliefs are at best half-truths; they serve an important political function. Put another way, the control that one class exercises over the means of production includes not only the production of food or manufactured goods; it includes the production of ideas as well (this provides one possible explanation for why members of a subordinate class may hold ideas contrary to their own interests). Thus, while such ideas may be false, they also reveal in coded form some truth about political relations. For example, although the belief that the things people produce are actually more productive than the people who produce them is literally absurd, it does reflect (according to Marx and Engels) that people under capitalism are alienated from their own labor-power.

Political economy

Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity—when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are "proletarians". The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois". The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.

According to Marx, capitalists take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices. Marx called the difference "surplus value" and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.

The capitalism is capable of tremendous growth because the capitalist can, and has an incentive to, reinvest profits in new technologies and capital equipment. Marx considered the capitalist class to be the most revolutionary in history, because it constantly improved the means of production. But Marx argued that capitalism was prone to periodic crises. He suggested that over time, capitalists would invest more and more in new technologies, and less and less in labor. Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labor is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew. When the rate of profit falls below a certain point, the result would be a recession or depression in which certain sectors of the economy would collapse. Marx thought that during such a crisis the price of labor would also fall, and eventually make possible the investment in new technologies and the growth of new sectors of the economy.

Marx believed that this cycle of growth, collapse, and growth would be punctuated by increasingly severe crises. Moreover, he believed that the long-term consequence of this process was necessarily the enrichment and empowerment of the capitalist class and the impoverishment of the proletariat. He believed that were the proletariat to seize the means of production, they would encourage social relations that would benefit everyone equally, and a system of production less vulnerable to periodic crises. In general, Marx thought that peaceful negotiation of this

problem was impracticable, and that a massive well-organized violent revolution would be required, because the ruling class would not give up power without struggle. He theorized that to establish the socialist system, a dictatorship of the proletariat - a period where the needs of the working-class, not of capital, will be the common deciding factor - must be created on a temporary basis. As he wrote in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", "between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."[23] While he allowed for the possibility of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (e.g. Britain, the US and the Netherlands), he suggested that in other countries with strong centralized state-oriented traditions, like France and Germany, the "lever of our revolution must be force."[24]

Marx's influence

Six years after Marx's death, Engels and others founded the "Second International" as a base for continued political activism. This organization was far more successful than the First International had been, containing mass workers' parties, particularly the large and successful Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was predominantly Marxist in outlook. This international collapsed in 1914, however, in part because some members turned to Edward Bernstein's "evolutionary socialism", and in part because of divisions precipitated by World War I.

World War I also led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which a left splinter of the Second International, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took power. The revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution organized and led by a centrally organized "Communist Party".

Marx believed that the communist revolution would take place in advanced industrial societies such as France, Germany and England, but Lenin argued that in the age of imperialism, and due to the "law of uneven development", where Russia had on the one hand, an antiquated agricultural society, but on the other hand, some of the most up-to-date industrial concerns, the "chain" might break at its weakest points, that is, in the so-called "backward" countries, and ignite revolution in the advanced industrial societies of Europe, where society is ready for socialism, and which could then come to the aid of the workers state in Russia.

Marx and Engels make a very significant comment in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto: “Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” (Marx and Engels, Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto)

Marx's words served as a starting point for Lenin, who, together with Trotsky, always believed that the Russian revolution must become a "signal for a proletarian revolution in the West". Supporters of Trotsky argue that the failure of revolution in the West along the lines envisaged by Marx, to come to the aid of the Russian revolution after 1917, led to the rise of Stalinism, and set the cast of human history for seventy years. This is termed the theory of the Permanent Revolution, which became official policy in Russia until Lenin's death in 1924 and the subsequent development of the concept of "Socialism in one country" by Stalin.

In China Mao Zedong also claimed to be an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants and not just workers could play leading roles in a Communist revolution, even in third world countries marked by peasant feudalism in the absence of industrial workers. Mao termed this the New Democratic Revolution. It was a departure from Marx, who had stated that the revolutionary transformation of society could take place only in countries that have achieved a capitalist stage of development with a proletarian majority. Marxism-Leninism as espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.

In Marx's 'Das Kapital' (2006), biographer Francis Wheen reiterates David McLellan's observation that since Marxism had not triumphed in the West, "it had not been turned into an official ideology and is thus the object of serious study unimpeded by government controls."

The following countries had governments at some point in the twentieth century who at least nominally adhered to Marxism (those in bold still did as of 2008): Albania, Afghanistan, Angola, Bulgaria, China, Cuba,

Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Ethiopia, Hungary, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam. In addition, the Indian states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal have had Marxist governments. Marxist political parties and movements have significantly declined since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some exceptions, perhaps most notably Nepal.

Karl Kautsky (October 16, 1854 - October 17, 1938) was a leading

theoretician of social democracy. He became a significant figure in Marxist

history as the editor of the fourth volume of Karl Marx's economic critique,

Das Kapital. He became the leading promulgator of Orthodox Marxism after

the death of Friedrich Engels.

Life

Karl Kautsky was born in Prague of artistic middle class parents. The family

moved to Vienna when he was seven years old. He was studying history and

philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1874, and became a member of the

Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) in 1875. In 1880 he joined a group

of German socialists in Zurich who were supported financially by Karl Höchberg, and who smuggled socialist

material into the Reich at the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Influenced by Eduard Bernstein, Höchberg's secretary,

he became a Marxist and in 1881 visited Marx and Engels in England.

In 1883, Kautsky founded the monthly Die Neue Zeit ("The New Time") in Stuttgart, which became a weekly in

1890, and was its editor until September 1917 which gave him a steady income and allowed him to propagate

Marxism. From 1885 to 1890, he spent time in London, where he became a close friend of Friedrich Engels. In

1891, he co-authored the Erfurt Program of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) together with August

Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.

Following the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became one of the most important and influential theoreticians of

Marxism, representing the centre current of the party together with August Bebel. When Bernstein attacked the

traditional Marxist position on the necessity for revolution in the later 1890s, Kautsky denounced him, arguing that

Bernstein's emphasis on the ethical foundations of Socialism opened the road to a call for an alliance with the

"progressive" bourgeoisie and a non-class approach.

In 1914, when the German Social-Democrat deputies in the Reichstag voted for the war credits, Kautsky, who was

not a deputy but attended their meetings, had suggested abstaining. Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a

defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia. However, in June 1915, about ten months after the war had begun

and when it had become obvious that this was going to be a sustained, appallingly brutal and costly struggle, he

issued an appeal with Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the

government's annexationist aims. In 1917 he left the SPD for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany

(USPD), which united Socialists who opposed the war.

Kautsky was described as a "renegade" by Vladimir Lenin, and he in turn castigated Lenin in his 1934 work

Marxism and Bolshevism: Democracy and Dictatorship:

"The Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd

and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Tsarist dictatorship."

His work Social Democracy vs. Communism treated the Bolshevist rule in Russia. In Kautsky's view, Bolsheviks

(or, Communists) had been a conspirational organisation, which gained power by a coup and initiated revolutionary

changes for which there were no economic presumptions in Russia. Instead, a bureaucratic society developed,

misery of which eclipsed the problems of the Western capitalism. The attempts (be it undertaken by Lenin or Stalin)

of building a working and affluent socialist society failed.

“Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand

before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of

human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments. They extracted the means

for the creation of material productive forces by destroying the most essential productive force of all-the laboring

man. In the terrible conditions created by the Piatiletka, people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did not

show this.” (ch. 6 Is Soviet Russia A Socialist State?)

Eduard Bernstein (January 6, 1850 – December 18, 1932) was a German social

democratic theoretician and politician, a member of the SPD, and the founder of

evolutionary socialism or reformism.

Life

Bernstein was born in Berlin to Jewish parents. His political career began in 1872,

when he became a member of the so-called Eisenachers (named after the German town

Eisenach), a socialist party with Marxist tendencies. Bernstein's party contested two

elections against a rival socialist party, but in both elections neither party was able to

win a significant majority of the left-wing vote. Consequently, together with August

Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Bernstein prepared the Einigungsparteitag ("unification party congress") with the

Lassalleans in Gotha in 1875.

In 1878, Bernstein accepted the position of private secretary for social democratic patron Karl Höchberg, who lived

in Zürich. On October 12, 1878, Otto von Bismarck's strict anti-Socialist legislation was passed in the Reichstag,

and, as a result, Bernstein found himself an exile. In 1888, Bismark successfully convinced the Swiss government to

expel a number of key members of the German social democratic movement from its country, and so Bernstein

moved to London, where he had close contacts to Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky.

Views

Die Voraussetzungen was Bernstein's most significant work and was principally concerned with refuting Marx's

predictions about the imminent demise of capitalism. In it, Bernstein pointed out simple facts that he took to be

evidence that Marx's predictions were not being borne out: he noted that the centralisation of capitalist industry,

while significant, was not becoming wholescale and that the ownership of capital was becoming more, and not less,

diffuse. He also pointed out some of the flaws in Marx's labor theory of value.

In its totality, Bernstein's analysis formed a powerful critique of Marxism, and this led to his vilification among

many orthodox Marxists. Bernstein remained, however, very much a socialist, albeit an unorthodox one (he was not

hostile to Trade Unions and Producers Co-operatives); he believed that socialism would be achieved through

capitalism, not through capitalism's destruction (as rights were gradually won by workers, their cause for grievance

would be diminished, and consequently, so too would the foundation of revolution). Although Marx would argue

that free trade would be the quickest fulfillment of the capitalist system, and thus its end, Bernstein viewed

protectionism as helping only a selective few, being fortschrittsfeindlich (anti-progressive), for its negative effects

on the masses. Germany's protectionism, Bernstein argued, was only based on political expediency, isolating

Germany from the world (especially from Britain), creating an autarky that would only result in conflict between

Germany and the rest of the world.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (April 22 1870 – January 21, 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich

Ulyanov was a Russian revolutionary, a communist politician, the principal leader of

the October Revolution, the first head of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and,

from 1922, the first de facto leader of the Soviet Union. In 1999, he was named by Time

Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. His contributions to Marxist theory are

commonly referred to as Leninism.

Early life

Born in Simbirsk – later renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son – beside the Volga River in the Russian

Empire, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova. His father was a

successful Russian official in public education who wanted democracy. The family was of mixed ethnicity, his

ancestry being “Russian, Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (see Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and

possibly others” according to biographer Dmitri Volkogonov. Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox

Church.

In January 1886, Lenin’s father, a schoolmaster, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and, in May 1887, when Lenin was

17 years old, his eldest brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for participating in a terrorist bomb plot

threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III. His sister Anna, who was with Alexander at the time of his arrest, was

banished to his family estate in the village of Kokushkino. This event radicalized Lenin, and his official Soviet

biographies describe it as being central to the revolutionary track of his life. It is also significant, perhaps, that this

emotional upheaval transpired in the same year as that which saw him enroll at the Kazan State University. The

phrase “We will follow a different path” refers to Lenin's choosing a Marxist approach to popular revolution, instead

of anarchist or individualist methods. As Lenin became interested in Marxism, he was involved in student protests

and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from Kazan University for his political ideas. He continued to

study independently, however, and it was during this period of exile that he first familiarized himself with Karl

Marx’s Das Kapital. Lenin was later permitted to continue his studies, this time at the University of Saint

Petersburg, and, by 1891, had been admitted to the Bar. In January 1892, Lenin was awarded a first class degree in

law by the University. He also distinguished himself in Latin and Greek, and learned German, French and English.

His knowledge of the latter two languages was limited: he relied on Inessa Armand to translate an article into French

and into English in 1917.

Revolutionary activity, travel and exile

Lenin practiced as a lawyer for some years in Samara, a port on the Volga river, before moving to St Petersburg in

1893. Rather than pursuing a legal career, he became increasingly involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts,

joining the local Marxist group. On December 7, 1895, Lenin was arrested, detained by authorities for fourteen

months, in cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison, and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye

in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to

Russia.

In July 1898, Lenin married socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya and he published the book The Development of

Capitalism in Russia in April 1899.[10] In 1900, his exile came to an end, and he began his travels throughout Russia

and the rest of Europe. Lenin lived in Zurich, Geneva (where he lectured and studied at Geneva University),

Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London, and, during this time, he co-founded the newspaper Iskra (“The

Spark”) with Julius Martov, who later became a leading opponent. He also wrote several articles and books related

to the revolutionary movement, striving to recruit future Social Democrats. He began using various aliases, finally

settling upon "Lenin".

Lenin was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; РСДРП in Russian) and, in 1903, led the

Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks. The names ‘Bolshevik’, or ‘Majority’, and ‘Menshevik’, or

‘Minority’, referred to the narrow outvoting of the Mensheviks in the decision to limit party membership to

revolutionary professionals, rather than including sympathizers. The division was inspired partly by Lenin’s

pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1901–02), which focused on his revolutionary strategy. It is said to have been one of

the most influential pamphlets in pre-revolutionary Russia, with Lenin himself claiming that three out of five

workers had either read it or had had it read to them.

In November 1905, Lenin returned from exile to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution. In 1906, Lenin was

elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. At this time he shuttled between Finland and Russia but, in December 1907,

with the revolution crushed by the Tsarist authorities, he returned back to European exile. Until the revolutions of

1917, he spent the majority of his time exiled in Europe, where, despite relative poverty, he managed to continue his

political writings.

When the First World War began in 1914, and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (at that time self-

described as Marxist, and including luminaries such as Karl Kautsky) supported their various countries’ war efforts,

Lenin was absolutely stunned, refusing to believe at first that the German Social Democrats had voted for war

credits. This led him to a final split with the Second International, which was composed of these parties. Lenin

(against the war in his belief that the peasants and workers were fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie for them)

adopted the stance that what he described as an “imperialist war” ought to be turned into a civil war between the

classes.

It was in Zurich in the spring of 1916 that Lenin wrote the important theoretical work Imperialism, the Highest

Stage of Capitalism. In this work Lenin argues that the merging of banks and industrial cartels give rise to finance

capital. According to Lenin, in the last stage of capitalism, in pursuit of greater profits than the home market can

offer, capital is exported. This leads to the division of the world between international monopolist firms and to

European states colonizing large parts of the world in support of their businesses. Imperialism is thus an advanced

stage of capitalism, one relying on the rise of monopolies and on the export of capital (rather than goods), and of

which colonialism is one feature.

Return to Russia

After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin realized that he must

return to Russia as soon as possible, but this was problematic because he was isolated in neutral Switzerland as the

First World War raged throughout neighboring states. The Swiss communist Fritz Platten nonetheless managed to

negotiate with the German government for Lenin and his company to travel through Germany by rail, on the so-

called “sealed train”. The German government clearly hoped Lenin’s return would create political unrest back in

Russia, which would help to end the war on the Eastern front , allowing Germany to concentrate on defeating the

Western allies.

On April 16, 1917, Lenin arrived by train to a tumultuous reception at Finland Station, in Petrograd. He immediately

took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses, which called for an

uncompromising opposition to the provisional government.

Lenin disguised as “Vilén”, wearing a wig and his goatee shaved off. Finland, August

11, 1917.

After the turmoil of the July Days, when workers and soldiers in the capital clashed

with government troops, Lenin had to flee to Finland for safety, to avoid arrest by

Kerensky. The Bolsheviks had not arranged the July Uprising. The time was still not

ripe for revolution, claimed Lenin: the workers in the city were willing, but the

Bolsheviks still needed to wait for the support of the peasants. During his short time in

Finland, Lenin finished his book State and Revolution, which called for a new form of government based on

workers’ councils, or soviets, elected and revocable at all moments by the workers. After an abortive coup attempt

by General Kornilov in late August the masses rallied to the Bolsheviks and their programme of 'peace, bread and

land'. Imprisoned Bolshevik leaders were released and Lenin returned to Petrograd in October, inspiring the October

Revolution with the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” Lenin directed the overthrow of the Provisional Government

from the Smolny Institute between 6 and 8 November 1917. The storming and capitulation of the Winter Palace on

the night of the 7th to 8th of November marked the beginning of Soviet rule.

Head of the Soviet state

On November 8, 1917, Lenin was elected as the Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars by the Russian

Congress of Soviets.

“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country,” Lenin said, emphasizing the importance

of bringing electricity to all corners of Russia and modernizing industry and agriculture.

He initiated and supervised the devising and realisation of the GOELRO plan, the first-ever Soviet project for

national economic recovery and development. He was very concerned about creating a free universal health care

system for all, the rights of women, and teaching the illiterate Russian people to read and write. But first and

foremost, the new Bolshevik government needed to take Russia out of the World War.

Faced with the imposing threat of a continuing German advance eastwards, Lenin argued that Russia should

immediately sign a peace treaty. Other Bolshevik leaders, such as Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a

means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position,

of “No War, No Peace”, calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no territorial gains on either side be

consolidated. After the negotiations collapsed, the Germans renewed their advance, resulting in the loss of much of

Russia’s western territory. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin’s position consequently gained the support of the

majority in the Bolshevik leadership. On March 3, 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to

the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia lost significant territories in Europe.

Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Kalinin, 1919.

The Russian Constituent Assembly was shut down during its first session

January 19 and the Bolsheviks in alliance with the left Socialist Revolutionaries

then relied on support from the soviets.

The Bolsheviks had formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. However,

their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and joined other parties in

seeking to overthrow the Bolshevik government. Lenin responded to these efforts by a policy of wholesale

persecution, which included jailing some of the members of the opposing parties.

From early 1918, Lenin campaigned for a single individual (accountable to the state to which the workers could ask

for measures) to be put in charge of each enterprise (workers having to obey him until it was changed by the state),

contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise

according to Lenin (it was argued by most proponents of self-management that the intention behind this move was

to strengthen state control over labour and that the failures of self-management were mostly because of lack of

resources —a problem the government itself could not solve as his licensing for a month of all workers of most

factories proved).

Lenin had a certain admiration for the Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly, and the Soviet Union was the

first country to recognize the Irish Republic which fought a war of independence against Britain. He would often

meet with the famous revolutionary’s son, Roddy Connolly and developed a close friendship with him.

Creation of the secret police

To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counterrevolutionaries and other political opponents,

the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the Cheka, in December 1917.

The Bolsheviks had planned to hold a trial for the former Tsar, but in July 1918, when the White Army was

advancing on Yekaterinburg where the former royal family was being held, Sverdlov acceded to the request of the

local Soviet to execute the Tsar right away, rather than having him freed by the Whites. The Tsar and the rest of his

immediate family were executed, though whether this was a decision of the central government or the local Soviet

remains the subject of historical dispute. Lenin was informed about the execution only after it had taken place, but

did not criticize it. Censorship was quickly imposed, and it was up to the Cheka to confiscate the literature of

dissident workers. Workers were re-forming independent soviets; the Cheka broke them up. Independent

newspapers criticized Lenin’s government; the Cheka closed them down, until the Bolshevik-controlled Pravda and

Izvestia had a monopoly on the supply of news. Shapiro asserts that “The refusal to come to terms with the socialists

and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed

not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he

socialist, worker or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule.”

Assassination attempts

On January 14, 1918, an assassination attempt on Lenin was made in his car in Petrograd by unrecognizable

gunmen. Lenin and Fritz Platten were in the back of the car together, after having given a public speech. When the

shooting started, “Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down. … Platten’s hand was covered in blood,

having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin.”

On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he had

spoken at a meeting and was on the way to his car. He had his foot on the running board. She called out to Lenin,

who turned to answer. She immediately fired three shots hitting Lenin twice: one bullet, relatively harmless, lodged

in the arm; the second round, more seriously entering at the juncture of Lenin’s jaw and neck, the third shot striking

a woman who was talking with Lenin when the shooting began. Lenin fell to the ground, unconscious. He was taken

to his apartment in the Kremlin, refusing to venture to a hospital since he believed that other assassins would be

waiting there. Doctors were summoned but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. While Lenin

began his slow recovery Pravda ridiculed Kaplan as a latter-day Charlotte Corday; assuring its readers that

immediately after the shooting: “Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs, spilling blood, refuses help and goes

on his own. The next morning, still threatened with death, he reads papers, listens, learns, and observes to see that

the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working…” Although Lenin

had no “pierced lungs”, the potentially fatal neck-jaw wound had allowed blood to enter one of his lungs, which is

still a very serious condition.

Other than similar exhortation by the press, little was revealed to the Russian public – either about the attempted

assassination, the suspect, or Lenin’s condition. Historian Richard Pipes wrote, “The impression one gains … is that

the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that whatever happened to Lenin, they

were firmly in control.”

Popular reaction to the assassination attempt on Lenin was described at the time by Leonid Krasin, who wrote to his

wife on 7 Sept 1918:

“As it happens, the attempt to kill Lenin has made him much more popular than he was. One hears a great many

people who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would be an absolute disaster if

Lenin had succumbed to his wounds, as it was first thought he would. And they are quite right, for in the midst of all

this chaos and confusion he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests”

A personal cult of Lenin, which he himself tried to discourage, began with this incident. Lenin’s health declined

from this point. It is believed by some that the incident contributed to his later strokes.

Lenin and the Red Terror

Following the assassination attempt on Lenin and the successful assassination of Petrograd chief of secret police

Moisei Uritsky, Stalin, in a telegram argued that a policy of “open and systematic mass terror” be instigated against

“those responsible”. The other Bolsheviks agreed, and instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin had appointed to

head the Cheka in 1917, to commence a “Red Terror”, which was officially announced to the public on September

1, 1918, by the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta. According to Christopher Read, at this time, due to the

assassination attempt by Kaplan, Lenin was lying severely wounded in the hospital and was too ill to advise

retaliatory measures. But while recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and

urgently to prepare the terror." Suspected enemies were shot, others drowned, buried alive, or hacked to death by

swords. Quite often those about to be executed were forced to dig their own graves. It is undoubtable that such

atrocities indeed occurred. Historian Orlando Figes claims the torture practiced by the Chekas was matched only by

the Spanish Inquisition . The only published Soviet statistics regarding Cheka executions are the semi-official ones

provided by the Chekist Martin Latsis, limited to RSFSR over the period 1918–1920, giving the grand total of

12,733 executed, including 3,082 for taking part in rebellions, 2,024 for membership of counter-revolutionary

organisations, 643 for gangsterism, 455 for incitement to revolution, 206 for corruption, 102 for desertion and the

same number for espionage. These statistics are considered by many scholars to be decidedly understated, as they

did not embrace the war zones of the Ukraine or the Crimea. In the latter at least 50,000 people were shot or hanged

after General Wrangel was put down at the end of 1920. Some historians estimate that between 1917 and 1922 up to

280,000   people were killed by the Chekas , of which about half perished through summary executions and the other

half through the suppression of rebellions (e.g. Tambov Rebellion). Orlando Figes goes so far as to assert that it is

possible more people were killed by the Cheka than died in battle. During the Civil War, atrocities were carried out

by both Reds and Whites.

According to the Black Book of Communism, in May 1919 there were 16,000 people in labour camps based on the

old Tsarist katorga labour camps, and in September 1921 there were more than 70,000. Lenin's Hanging Order

documents that Lenin himself ordered terror on August 11, 1918.

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of “mass terror against enemies of the revolution”

and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist

establishment. Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger

against the privileged. When Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the “excesses” of the Cheka in late 1918, it was

Lenin who defended it.

Lenin remained an advocate of mass terror. In a letter of March 19, 1922, to Molotov and the members of the

Politburo, following an uprising by the clergy in the town of Shuia, Lenin outlined a brutal plan of action against the

clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables: “We must (…) put

down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. (…) The greater the number of

representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing (…) the better.”

Estimates of the numbers of the clergy killed vary. According to The Black Book of Communism, 2,691 priests,

1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were killed in 1922. The late Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Presidential Committee

for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, cites documents that confirm nearly 3,000 were put to

death in 1918 alone.

In September 1918, during the Red Terror, 25 former tsarist ministers and high civil servants along with 765 so-

called White Guards were shot in Moscow. Lenin personally signed the execution lists. Despite this attempt by

Lenin to stop them the Whites continued active and indulged in a massive anti-Red terror and also pogroms against

the Jews. For instance the Whites killed 115,000 Ukrainian Jews in 1919 alone. According to The Black Book of

Communism, the two types of terror were not on the same level. The Red Terror, which was official policy, was

more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. The White Terror was never systematized in

such a fashion, and was almost invariably the work of detachments that were taking measures not authorized by the

military command.

Russian Communist Party and civil war

In March 1919, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and

formed the Communist International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks

themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement. From that point onwards, they would become known as

communists. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the “Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks),” which

eventually became the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the civil war raged across Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up

arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many different factions were involved in the civil

war, the two main forces were the Red Army (communists) and the White Army (traditionalists). Foreign powers

such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in this war (on behalf of the White Army).

Eventually, the more organizationally proficient Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the

White Russian forces and their allies in 1920. Smaller battles continued for several more years, however.

The civil war has been described as one “unprecedented for its savagery,” with mass executions and other atrocities

committed by both sides. Between battles, executions, famine and epidemics, many millions would perish.

In late 1919, successes against the White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to

the West, by force if necessary. When the newly independent Second Polish Republic began securing its eastern

territories annexed by Russia in the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, it clashed with Bolshevik forces for

dominance in these areas, which led to the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919. With the revolution in

Germany and the Spartacist League on the rise, Lenin viewed this as the perfect time and place to “probe Europe

with the bayonets of the Red Army.” Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in

order to link up the Russian Revolution with the communist supporters in the German Revolution, and to assist other

communist movements in Western Europe. However the defeat of Soviet Russia in the Polish-Soviet War

invalidated these plans.

Lenin was a harsh critic of imperialism. In 1917, he declared the unconditional right of separation for national

minorities and oppressed nations. However, when the Russian Civil War was won he used military force to

assimilate the newly independent states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. He argued that the inclusion of those

countries into the newly emerging Soviet government would shelter them from capitalist imperial ambitions.

During the civil war, as an attempt to maintain food supply to the cities and the army in the conditions of economic

collapse, the Bolsheviks adopted the policy of war communism. That involved “requisitioning” supplies from the

peasantry for little or nothing in exchange. This led the peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. The

resulting conflicts began with the Cheka and the army shooting hostages, and, according to The Black Book of

Communism, ended with a second full-scale civil war against the peasantry, including the use of poison gas, death

camps, and deportations. The same source emphasizes that in 1920, Lenin ordered increased emphasis on the food

requisitioning from the peasantry, at the same time as the Cheka gave detailed reports about the large scale famine.

The long war and a drought in 1921 also contributed to the famine. Estimates on the deaths from this famine are

between 3 and 10   million .

The long years of war, the Bolshevik policy of war communism, the Russian famine of 1921, and the encirclement

of hostile governments took their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country lay in ruins. There were many

peasant uprisings, the largest being the Tambov rebellion. After an uprising by the sailors at Kronstadt in March

1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP) , in a successful attempt

to rebuild industry and especially agriculture. The new policy was based on recognition of political and economic

realities, though it was intended merely as a tactical retreat from the socialist ideal. The whole policy was later

reversed by Stalin.

Later life and death

Lenin’s health had already been severely damaged by the strains of revolution and war. The assassination attempt

earlier in his life also added to his health problems. The bullet was still lodged in his neck, too close to his spine for

medical techniques of the time to remove. In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed on

his right side, and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December of the same year, he

resigned from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered his third stroke and was left bedridden for the remainder of

his life, no longer able to speak.

Lenin with future dictator Stalin, whom Lenin warned was becoming too powerful and called to be removed.

After his first stroke, Lenin dictated to his wife several papers regarding the

government. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which was partially

inspired by the 1922 Georgian Affair and among other things criticized top-

ranking communists, including Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev,

Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist

Party’s general secretary since April 1922, Lenin said that he had “unlimited

authority concentrated in his hands”. He suggested that “comrades think about a

way of removing Stalin from that post” because his rudeness would become

“intolerable in a Secretary-General”. Upon Lenin’s death, his wife mailed his

Testament to the central committee, to be read at the 13th Party Congress in May

1924. However, the committee and especially the ruling “triumvirate” – Stalin,

Kamenev and Zinoviev – had a vested interest in not releasing the will to the wider public. Lenin’s Testament was

first officially published in 1925 in the United States by Max Eastman.

Lenin died at 18:50 Moscow time on January 21, 1924, aged 53, at his estate in Gorki Leninskiye. Over

900,000 people passed through the Hall of Columns during the four days and nights that Lenin lay in state. Large

sections of the population in other countries expressed their grief at the death of Lenin. Speaking at a memorial

meeting, Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen. said:

“Through the ages of world history thousands of leaders and scholars appeared who spoke eloquent words, but these

remained words. You, Lenin, were an exception. You not only spoke and taught us, but translated your words into

deeds. You created a new country. You showed us the road of joint struggle... You, great man that you are, will live

on in the memories of the oppressed people through the centuries.”

Winston Churchill, who had supported the British interventionist forces which, in league with the Whites, had tried

to suppress the Bolsheviks, later commented that:

“He alone could have found the way back to the causeway...The Russian people were left floundering in the bog.

Their worst misfortune was his birth...their next worst his death.”

During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was so popular that Leonid Krasin and Alexander

Bogdanov proposed to cryonically preserve Lenin’s body in order to revive him in the future. Necessary equipment

was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realized. Instead his body was embalmed and

placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow on January 27, 1924. Lenin stated that he

wanted to be buried next to his mother and did not want any monuments to himself.