Talk:Marxism

Draft:Ideological aracialism

Aracialism isn't necessarily South-African or Marxist but the main article isn't analytical enough.

create the pages: ideological aracialism, ideological statelessness (chosen, [usually] not because of the circumstances), ethnocultural nonconformity

On "Marxism-Leninism"

I was looking over recent edits while reviewing and took note of this one by Joeylamond which was then reverted by Acroterion. This is a claim I have heard before, and I was curious enough to check the original source (available for checkout on the Internet Archive), which reads as follows:

Marxism-Leninism. Term that originated in the debates and struggle for power in the former USSR following Lenin's death and culminating in the ascendancy of Stalin. It thus came to mean the theory and practice of Marx and Lenin as narrowly defined by Stalin, and was used as a yardstick of orthodoxy to refute all opposition and became part of the official self-description of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism was taken up by the Chinese Communists under Mao as a description and justification of their policies. Currently the term Marxism-Leninism tends to be used by any Marxist party which has retained some sympathy for the policies of Stalin or Mao. See MARXISM; LENINISM; STALINISM; MAOISM. For further reading: L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1970)

It might be a slight oversimplification to say the theory was "developed by" Stalin but I think Joeylamond is right to argue it cannot have been developed by Lenin if it appeared only after his death. Maybe other sources, like those on Marxism-Leninism would be of use? —Rutebega (talk) 00:52, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

It's a significant oversimplification, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's also part of a pattern of edits by at least three new accounts here and at Marxism-Leninism that are asserting the same thing, so I'm not prepared to take things at face value. I would suggest that, depending on sources, it would be better described as formalized, or synthesized from aspects of Marxism and Leninism, or that the term for the combined ideologies was coined by Stalin, or some combination of those, in pursuit of a plausible basis for Stalin's manner of rule. As the article on Marxism-Lenininism states, Marxism-Leninism was "...political expediencies used to realise [Stalin's] plans for the Soviet Union..." and ultimately became Stalinism, so there was a co-opting of ideological labels in pursuit of Stalin's goals. So it's not quite as simple as asserted by these edits, and I think there are opportunities for well-sourced examination of that evolution of ideas, labels and exploitation across all of those articles, rather than the simplistic assertion made in those edits. Acroterion (talk) 00:55, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

I'm watching this. I'm not impressed by a series of new accounts trying to force this issue. --Hammersoft (talk) 01:33, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

It is absolutely incorrect to state that Lenin developed Marxism-Leninism (ML) and that should be removed from the article. As the quote above makes clear the the ML term was made up during the "struggle for power...after Lenin's death". IE the struggle between Stalin and his supporters on the one hand, and Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the other. Stalin used the term ML to make out, falsely, that he, and not Trotsky, was following Lenin. The ML term was used by Stalin for his ideas which were distinctly different from Lenin's. Note that Lenin had said that Stalin should be removed as general secretary - as the Lenin article states: "During December 1922 and January 1923, Lenin dictated "Lenin's Testament", in which he discussed the personal qualities of his comrades, particularly Trotsky and Stalin. He recommended that Stalin be removed from the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party, deeming him ill-suited for the position. Instead he recommended Trotsky for the job, describing him as "the most capable man in the present Central Committee..." Hewer7 (talk) 11:16, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

No one has cited any evidence that so called "Marxism-Leninism" was developed by Lenin. The line should be changed to say that it was developed by "Stalin and his supporters". Hewer7 (talk) 17:34, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Sure.

• Clarke, Simon (1998). "Was Lenin a Marxist? The Populist Roots of Marxism-Leninism". Historical Materialism. 3 (1): 3–28 [24]. doi:10.1163/156920698100414257. ISSN 1465-4466. But Lenin's transformation of Plekhanov's political theory was not in the direction of Marxism, but rather assimilated Plekhanov's Marxism back into the populist traditions from which Lenin had emerged. While Plekhanov used the populist philosophy to bridge the gap from populist to Marxist politics, Lenin used it to reverse the movement, and to put the revolution back on the Russian agenda.
  The populist roots of Lenin's political thought are obvious and well-known, Revolutionary populism had four distinctive features which Lenin brought into the centre of his Marxism and which formed the core of 'Marxism-Leninism'.
  First, it stressed the active role of revolutionary ideas in determining the course of history, and so gave the intellectuals a prominent political role. This was the element which was developed by Plekhanov and adopted from him by Lenin. ...
• Hogan, Homer (1967). "The basic perspective of Marxism-Leninism". Studies in Soviet Thought. 7 (4): 297–317 [297]. doi:10.1007/BF01043635. ISSN 0039-3797. For a systematic discussion of Marxism-Leninism between advocates and questioners, its theory of reflection should therefore provide a useful starting-point.
  The classic formulation of that theory is in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (hereafter abbreviated as MEC), published in 1908 as a refutation of certain Russian Marxists who thought that Marxism could be combined with the epistemology of Ernst Mach. Essentially, the theory is Lenin's restatement of two simple assertions he holds to be basic in the thought of Marx and Engels: (1) a world exists 'independent' of and 'external' to consciousness, and (2) knowledge consists of approximately faithful 'reflections' of that world in consciousness.

Is this an acceptable start? Remsense 🌈 论 18:05, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't see the idea that Lenin "stressed the active role of revolutionary ideas in determining the course of history" being something different from what Marx and Engels put forward. Marx famously stated that "Ignorance never yet helped anybody". Engels made clear the need for theory.

Similarly, in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin was defending Marxist materialism against the followers of Mach and others. As the quote says, Lenin considered his points a "restatement of two simple assertions he holds to be basic in the thought of Marx and Engels". Hewer7 (talk) 18:37, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't see the idea that ...

Happy to elaborate further:

The orthodox Marxism of the Second International certainly did not underestimate the role of ideas in historical development, but revolutionary ideas emerged out of the revolutionary movement, however much intellectuals might play a role in their formulation. Although Kautsky's theory gave the intellectuals a special position in the struggle for socialism, it did not give them any special authority. For Lenin, the spontaneous struggle of the working class is inevitably a sectional struggle for economic aims. It is only the scientific theory of Marxism which can reveal the wider class perspective which is necessary to advance beyond trades union demands to a political struggle. This perspective is provided by the intellectuals, and institutionalised in the party, which expresses the political interests of the class as a whole against the sectional interests of its component parts. For Kautsky, by contrast, there is no such divorce of economic from political struggles and the revolution depends not on the leading role of the vanguard party, representing the class as a whole, but on the fusion of socialist ideas with working class struggle.

That's the passage immediately following the first excerpt. If you don't have access to these or other WP:TWL sources, I'd be happy to send them to you in full via email.

As the quote says ...

AFAIK it's quite well known that Lenin always endeavoured rhetorically to present the positions he advocated for as representing the orthodox Marxist position. Remsense 🌈 论 18:49, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

It is true that in "What is to be done" Lenin, in arguing against those who emphasized the economic struggle of the working class, did allowed himself to exaggerate by saying that political or socialist consciousness “[W]ould have to be brought to them [the workers] from without." However he later stated that he had 'bent the stick too far' in doing so. In so exaggerating he had in fact been following Kautsky, who at the time was considered as the leading Marxist internationally. To say that "For Kautsky, by contrast, there is no such divorce of economic from political struggles" as if Lenin was divorcing them is patently wrong. Lenin was arguing to unify both economic and political struggles. The concept of the vanguard party is also based on Kautsky's writings. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguardism Hewer7 (talk) 20:03, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't reject any of those connections out of hand. I'm just providing reliable sources and repeating the analysis they give, as requested. Remsense 🌈 论 20:52, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

My personal opinion is that Lenin doesn't really significantly diverge from Engels. Based on the sources under discussion I have to say that I tand to think Hewer7 is a bit closer to correct in interpretation although I suspect you are both splitting hairs a bit here. Simonm223 (talk) 20:53, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm fine with any presentation that doesn't exclusively credit Stalin et al. with formulating Leninism as such. Remsense 🌈 论 20:54, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

That seems reasonable. Simonm223 (talk) 21:35, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

"I'm fine with any presentation that doesn't exclusively credit Stalin et al. with formulating Leninism as such."

The thing is that we are not discussing Leninism, we are discussing so called "Marxism-Leninism" ie Stalinism. To not exclusively credit Stalin and his supporters with the creation of so called "Marxism-Leninism" it would need to be shown that it was Lenin who developed it's particular main characteristics. However "Marxism-Leninism" is distinctly different from Lenin's ideas. To give just one example: it is based on the idea of "socialism in one country" (see references in the link). All of the Bolsheviks, up till Lenin's death advocated the need for a revolution in more industrially advanced counties. Lenin formed the Communist International to spread the revolution and ensured that it meet every year, even in the difficult circumstances of the civil war. Under Stalin and his followers it would meet much less frequently, before finally being abolished by Stalin. There are numerous other distinctions between Lenin's thought and so called "Marxism-Leninism" - the Stalinism page has a number of faults but gives a rough indication of them. One of those faults being that it doesn't prominently state Lenin's proposed alternative to Stalin's forced collectivization - that Lenin had advocated the the development of rural cooperatives, through which the peasants could sell their produce at fixed rates of exchange for consumer goods, receive credit to purchase tools, and obtain agronomic aid. See http://www.orlandofiges.info/section9_TheNewEconomicPolicy/WhatdidtheNEPdoforthepeasants.php#:~:text=Lenin%20believed%20that%20the%20key,tools%2C%20and%20obtain%20agronomic%20aid. Hewer7 (talk) 12:01, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

It's hard to make essentializing statements like this, if we look at Heinrich and other scholars really engaging with the new insights provided by MEGA II, Engels isn't entirely in agreement with the late Marx. Of particular note is Kautsky (whom you correctly mentioned here) in Engels' later development, the primary correspondences are very insightful and should be read if addressing this at all, but here is some secondary sources on the matter.

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/engels-after-marx-a-critical-defence/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-socialism/second-international-18891914/2BAE714E6221CB527156C784AC4BC3E3

Marx over the course of his life took from different influences at times Fichte and Bruno Bauer shine through and make him look like a late-romantic thinker, it is a context like this in which Wilhelm Liebknecht reports of Marx having skulls measured to admit or deny membership in the communist league make sense, but especially in the late work Marx takes a critical distance from these late romantic tendencies. All "Marxist" material Lenin had access to in his lifetime came filtered through Kautsky and Engels. Kautsky however is a genuinely late-romatic thinker whose writings are in stark contrast to the late Marx' output as unearthed by MEGA II. Of course Lenin and Kautsky later had their differences but ultimately the problem here is that orthodox Marxism at the turn of the century was mostly what Kautsky believed and convinced Engels of and not very connected to the last writings of Marx (though very compatible with his earlier work). Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 22:13, 1 August 2025 (UTC)

Interpretation of Marx's work and life by Enrique Dussel, a Latin American philosopher

There are issues that remain unclear regarding the interpretation of Marx's work and life, as exemplified by the usual interpretation from Marxism-Leninism, which makes use of superstructures. In his work spanning more than 50 years since the mid-1980s, Enrique Dussel has presented an interpretation that is completely different from that of the Soviet Russians. He has studied Marx's life and Capital extensively, showing the categories used by Marx not only in Capital but also in the Grundrisse and manuscripts. Following his line of research¹, he defines and develops a political economy of non-equivalential systems and accounts for the mysterious essence of capital (unpaid live work, or surplus value, according to Marx himself). His proposal goes beyond class struggle; it does not stop there, but rather draws on Marx's own work (economic-political categories in Capital, manuscripts from his youth, Grundrisse, etc.) to provide an explanation and greater clarity of the transfer of surplus value in capital between countries.He even sheds light on the theories of dependency and competition that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and were not taken too seriously.It is for this reason that I wish to explicitly state that Marx's interpretation is more profound, and that this article should include additional sections analysing Marx's theoretical work and life from perspectives other than Marxist-Leninist or Marxist orthodox, as this represents a theoretical and historical bias and does not comply with the principles of Wikipedia as a neutral , free and impartial encyclopaedia.

In addition to the aforementioned, Marx's theoretical work is not yet fully known, and unpublished manuscripts in German (which have not yet been translated into Spanish or other many languages) continue to be published, so that today, in the 21st century, Marx remains largely unknown.

1.Enrique D. (2001). Moseley, Fred Baker (ed.). Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63. Translated by Angulo, Yolanda. London; New York: Routledge. p. xxxiii 161.18.187.10 (talk) 22:05, 27 September 2025 (UTC)