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MARXISM-LENINISM

Lenin was committed to the works of Karl Marx and Friederick Engels. He believed in the manifesto they wrote in 1848 with its promise of a collective free enterprise by and for the masses without class exploitation. Lenin believed that his political party would bring this into being by prohibiting capitalism -- the free enterprise of people of wealth, the bourgeoisie. He called this prohibition the dictatorship of the proletariat and wanted it enforced by the "vanguard" of the revolution: his political party.

Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks saw as ideological enemies those in the labor movement who believed in negotiations, compromise and power through representation in parliaments.

Lenin abolished Russia's Constituent Assembly with bayonets, claiming that it was bourgeois. Instead he wanted the country's political assemblies to be the people's councils (soviets) that had risen with the revolution against the tsar in 1917, where the Bolsheviks were now dominant.

In 1921, during Russia's civil war, Lenin had to ease up on his prohibition of capitalistic free enterprise. Capitalism, he said, must come to the revolution's aid so he could destroy it later. He allowed some private commerce and small-scale industries, and peasants were allowed to continue owning land. In Moscow new restaurants appeared, and on the streets of Moscow shiny cabs and private cars appeared, carrying men and women in mink coats to places that common people could not afford.

Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke in 1922 and died in 1924 -- while the U.S. was living under another great prohibition, against booze. His New Economic Policy was, indeed, temporary. It lasted until 1928. That year, Josef Stalin dominated in the Soviet Union, and he began to apply Lenin's collectivism to industrial five-year plans and then in the early 1930s to a horrific collectivization of agriculture in the countryside. Also, in an effort to engineer society the Bolsheviks were prohibiting the a free expression of ideas, including among fellow Bolsheviks. One of their problems was the question who exactly was bourgeois and what exactly was a bourgeois idea.

Leninism was a big mistake and more ideological than it was the sociological science it purported to be. His scheme was at its core humanitarian. Those who sacrificed themselves for it do not deserve your spit. They were seduced by scheme that was too grand and without the modesty possessed by science.

Lenin hated World War I. He hated the imperialism that went into making World War I. After taking power he took Russia out of the war, and he had the power to put laws in place to benefit working people, but his idea of prohibiting "bourgeois" free enterprise didn't fare as well as the Social Democrat alternative to Leninism. The Social Democrats were not much for prohibitions except against unsafe and unrewarding working conditions, and they had more staying power than the Marxist-Leninists. The Soviet Union founded under Lenin's leadership no longer exists, and most Communist Parties in the world have dwindled to insignificance.

Time has told the story: In the long run the Social Democrats have been more successful politically and they have produced more for labor. It turned out that Eduard Bernstein, who clashed with Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, was the superior strategist.

Lenin's kind of collectivism failed also in China, where the Communist Party chose a successful mix of socialism and capitalism.