Debunking the Myth Pt. 2: Marx Compared to Lenin

Lenin and Marx had one major difference that ended up creating a fairly large gap between their two theories. Marx held that human social was a set and inevitable process. Marx presented his theory as one as close to scientific fact as one can get in the social sciences (whether or not he intended his work to be counted as a science is a point of debate among scholars). According to Marx Capitalism was the inevitable end of Feudalism, and from that Socialism would develop, and from Socialism, Communism would develop. It was the undeniable result of human history; there was no way around it nor was there any way to hasten or change the process. That is where Lenin split from Marx.

Lenin propounded the belief in what he called a "Vanguard Party" which was a group of forward thinking individuals that would rally the lower class and lead them to socialism. He believed that this was the only way to truly achieve socialism and thus communism. With that belief he was freed from the rigid prescriptive constraints of Marx's theory. Because, according to Lenin, socialism could only be achieved through the aid of a vanguard party there was no need for human society to progress to certain levels (namely capitalism) before it could make the move to socialism. A nation or society could, potentially skip entire steps of Marx's theory, which is exactly what Lenin did. When the Czar was overthrown in 1917 in now way could Russia be considered capitalist: feudalism and serfdom was still the norm, but due to Lenin's belief in the viability of the use of a vanguard party there was no need to wait for Russia to develop into a capitalist nation because the Bolsheviks, as a vanguard party, could lead Russia to Socialism.

So how does this relate to debunking the communist myth? FIrst and foremost, Soviet Russia is the example of communism that most people in the United States are familiar with -- when a layman in the U.S. thinks about communism they think about Russia -- so to begin debunking the myth about communism it is best to show the flaws in Lenin's method and the formation of Soviet Russia. By doing so I will, hopefully, show people that they ought not look to the Soviet Russia, or any communist revolution of the 20th Century for that matter, for an indication as to the viability of Marx's theory.

But back on topic: why was Lenin's thought problematic and why did it cause Soviet Russia to be an invalid example to communism? The simple answer is that he did it wrong. Marx's thought regarding human social evolution is very, very rigid. You can't change it or deviate from it; indeed it is inevitable. Lenin did just that: he tried to change the theory yet still apply it. Using Soviet Russia to invalidate Marxist thought is the political equivalent of skipping a step in a chemistry experiment and when the experiment didn't give the results the creator said it would you pronouce the creator as wrong and that his whole theory regarding the experiment was flawed. It comes very, very close to a straw man. (I won't go so far as to definitively call it a straw man out of the interest of being charitable towards opposing views.)

There is still a lot that I can write about in regards to debunking this myth, but I think that this is enough of a groundwork that I can now move on to other topics about Marxism and deal with other things that need to be debunked as they present themselves.

Communism: Debunking the Myth Pt. 1

It seems logical that the first real thing that I try to do in this blog is, just as the title of this post says, debunk what I (and I'm sure other) refer to as "The Communist Myth," and because I have no idea just how long this will take, or I may need to bring it up later, I am doing this in parts.

So what is "The Communist Myth?" To put it simply it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Karl Marx (and Engles to a lesser extent because the man was a blockhead as far as I am concerned) wrote, what Communism was intended to be, and all of the things that went wrong in what is known, generally, as "Revolutionary Marxism." I have not studied Revolutionary Marxist nearly a much as Marxism "Proper," but I do know what I am talking about, and because it seems to be the biggest hang-up for people in the U.S. I am going to deal with it first, and it may very well take up this entire post, but will inevitably include some discussion on what Marx was, and what he though Communism would be.

But before we can get into that we need to get up a basic understanding of what Marxist theory is in terms of human social evolution. As for Marx and his thoughts on Capitalism and his political-economic theory in general, it's less important to discuss at the outset due to the fact that Revolutionary Marxism didn't disagree much with Marx's base-level assumptions and lower-level conclusions regarding economics, so we can touch on it, especially in more depth later.

Revolutionary Marxism, known more specifically as Bolshevism, and more commonly today as Leninism, is a politically theory that was developed by none other than Vladimir Lenin himself. Lenin was the founder of the Soviet Communist Party, he spearheaded the Russian Revolution that overthrew the Czar in 1917, and his political theory became the philosophic backbone of nearly every communist revolution of the twentieth century. But what was his theory, and how did he deviate from Marx? However, I want to get this post up, so I will get into that in my next installment that I will begin writing the moment I post this one.