Marxism-Leninism

Marxism-Leninism holds that a disciplined vanguard party must lead the working class in seizing state power, abolish private ownership of the means of production, and direct society through a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat toward a classless, stateless communism.

Its decisive addition to Marx is a theory of organization. In What Is to Be Done? (1902) Lenin argued that workers left to themselves attain only 'trade-union consciousness' — better wages within capitalism — so a vanguard of professional revolutionaries is required to carry them to full class consciousness and to seize the moment of revolution. The state, on this view, is an instrument of class rule to be captured and wielded, not reformed, and only later to 'wither away.'

It is the most consequential political doctrine of the twentieth century, realized in the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the Soviet Union, and — through adaptation — China, Cuba, Vietnam, and much of the postwar communist world. In power it meant one-party rule, central planning, collectivized agriculture, and, under Stalin, mass repression and famine.

The doctrine spans a real range from early left-Bolshevik currents that read workers' democracy into it to the Stalinist codification that fused party and state and made 'socialism in one country' orthodox. On the economy, however, doctrine and practice converge tightly: comprehensive collective ownership under party direction is definitional.

Its critics on the left — Luxemburg early, Trotsky later, the council communists throughout — argued that the vanguard model inevitably substitutes the party for the class it claims to serve, producing a new bureaucratic ruling stratum rather than workers' rule; liberal critics see in it the template of the one-party police state.

It is often treated as simply identical to Marxism, but it is one contested descendant among several, distinguished precisely by the claims Marx never made — about the party, the seizure of the state, and the leadership of the peasantry — that its rivals reject.