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Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernst Mach, believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. [95]
Lenin argued that human minds are capable of forming representations of the world that portray the world as it is. Thus, Lenin argues, our beliefs about the world can be objectively true; a belief is true when it accurately reflects the facts. According to Lenin, absolute truth is possible, but our theories are often only relatively true.
Influenced by the events of the First World War, Lenin wrote the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He also criticised Kautsky's view ...
Lenin's socio-political analysis of empire as the ultimate stage of capitalism derived from Imperialism: A Study (1902) by John A. Hobson, an English economist, and Finance Capital (Das Finanzcapital, 1910) by Rudolf Hilferding, an Austrian Marxist, whose syntheses Lenin applied to the geopolitical circumstances of the First World War, caused ...
Lenin said that the appearance of new socialist states was necessary for strengthening Russia's economy in establishing Russian socialism. Lenin's socio-economic perspective was supported by the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Italian insurrection and general strikes of 1920, and worker wage-riots in the UK, France, and the US.
To educate the working class on Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. [4]
The State and Revolution is considered to be Lenin's most important work on the state and has been called by Lucio Colletti "Lenin's greatest contribution to political theory". [2] According to the Marxologist David McLellan , "the book had its origin in Lenin's argument with Bukharin in the summer of 1916 over the existence of the state after ...
Lenin, according to his interpretation of Marx's theory of the state, believed democracy to be unattainable anywhere in the world before the proletariat seized power. [7] According to Marxist theory, the state is a vehicle for oppression and is headed by a ruling class , [ 7 ] an "organ of class rule". [ 8 ]