Leninism

In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism. Developed by, and named for, the Russian revolutionary and later Soviet premier Vladimir Lenin, Leninism comprises socialist political and economic theories, developed from Marxism, as well as Lenin’s interpretations of Marxist theory for practical application to the socio-political conditions of the agrarian early-20th-century Russian Empire. In February 1917, for five years, Leninism was the Russian application of Marxist economics and political philosophy, effected and realised by the Bolshevik party, the vanguard party who led the fight for the political independence of the working class.Functionally, the Leninist vanguard party provided to the working class the political consciousness (education and organisation), and the revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in Imperial Russia. After the October Revolution of 1917, Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia; in fact, the Bolsheviks considered it the only legitimate form and persecuted non-Leninist Marxists such as Mensheviks and some factions of Socialist Revolutionaries. The Russian Civil War thus included various left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks, but they were overpowered, and Leninism became the official state ideology of Soviet democracy (by workers’ council) in the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), before its unitary amalgamation into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. In 1925–29 post-Lenin Russia, Joseph Stalin reinforced the assertion that Leninism was the only legitimate form of Marxism by recasting them as one indivisible entity called Marxism–Leninism, which then became the state ideology of the Soviet Union.As a political-science term, Leninism entered common usage in 1922, after infirmity ended Lenin’s participation in governing the Russian Communist Party. Two years later, in July 1924, at the fifth congress of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev popularized the term to denote ""vanguard-party revolution"". Leninism was composed as and for revolutionary praxis, and originally was neither a rigorously proper philosophy nor discrete political theory. After the Russian Revolution, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), György Lukács ideologically developed and organised Lenin’s pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution (Leninism). As a work of political science and philosophy, History and Class Consciousness illustrated Lenin’s 1915 dictum about the commitment to the cause of the revolutionary man, and said of Lukács: