Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)
While Marx believed that the workers would rise up and create the communist revolution, Lenin argued that a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries must take power to make the transition from capitalism to dictatorial communism to democratic communism possible. This became known as Leninism, along with specific economic theories Lenin believed would be the best way of implementing Marxism. Lenin, like Trotsky, was exiled from Russia for these views and organizing as a communist. In the midst of WWI, with starvation throughout the land, the Tsar abdicated the thrown as the people of Russia rose up demanding revolution in February 1917. The social democrats (like the US democratic party, who push for social reforms without nationalization) continued to invest in fighting the war, which upset the starving Russian people and led to the return of Lenin and Trotsky and the October revolution, the second and final stage of the Russian Revolution. Lenin, who famously announced, “I bring you peace, land and bread”, found himself politically on top of a volatile and unstable situation with many parties demanding many things. Unfortunately, after the Tsar and social democrats running the country were overthrown, Lenin called together a democratic assembly but disbanded it when it did not support a majority for Lenin’s Bolshevik party.
Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940)
After Lenin’s death in 1924, not very long after the October Revolution, Trotsky and Stalin vied for power. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union should create “socialism in one country”, concentrating on Russia but supporting communist parties worldwide. This became known as Stalinism, though Stalin’s supporters called it Marxism and Leninism. Trotsky opposed this, arguing as Marx and Engels had done in the Communist Manifesto that Russia must work for revolution in developed countries like France, Germany, Britain and America. When Stalin seized power, Trotsky was exiled from Russia yet again, but this time by the communist government that he had played a large part in creating. Not only was Trotsky for internationalism, he was for democratic continuous revolution that would keep the top-down party structure in check, the Theory of Permanent Revolution. This became known as Trotskyism, and Stalin worked hard to eliminate all Trotskyites from power. Stalin became a brutal dictator, like Lenin suppressing all democratic dissent and criticism of his regime as counter-revolutionary enemies. Trotskyites argue to this day that their version is the true Marxism, just like the Stalinists, calling each other counter-revolutionaries who want to destroy true Marxism and the communist state. Today, in the wake of the tragedies of Stalin and Mao, most hard lining communists today ascribe to Trotskyism.
Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937)
Gramsci’s thought, contained in his Prison Notebooks, has become hip for many left leaning people including socialists and communists who do not like what happened in Russia or China. One of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was jailed by Mussolini after he took fascist control of the country in 1922 while Gramsci was visiting Russia as a representative. The prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial famously said, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”. Gramsci died in prison, but not before writing extensively in his prison notebooks which were smuggled out by visitors. Gramsci’s centrally celebrated concept amongst socialists, Marxists and post-Marxists is cultural hegemony. In the wake of Stalinism, communists began wondering why the revolution was not succeeding worldwide as planned. Gramsci argued that while Marx and Engels reduced all conflict to the struggle between workers and owners, society is more complex and certain groups dominate others (ex: Christians are predominant in America and this can lead to demonization of Muslims, just as Europeans are predominant such that minority groups are suppressed). The process by which these dominant and marginal forces work out their struggles is known as hegemonic discourse. With such a complex situation, communists should switch from an outright war of frontal attack to one of social positioning. Only such a long and patient effort would succeed given the divisions that exist in the world population. Like Trotsky, and following his lead, Gramsci believed that Lenin and Stalin had come to betray the revolution not because they wished to but because they did not grasp the need for a slow process of continuous revolution in setting up the dictatorship of a vanguard party. All dissent was labeled “reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary”, which masked the real divisions and issues.
Mao Zedong (1893 - 1976)
Mao had his own take on Marxism and Leninism. While the communist symbol is a hammer (for factory workers) and sickle (for farm workers), Mao argued that Lenin and Stalin had paid too much attention to the factories in the city and not enough to the farmers of the countryside. Mao shifted his attention and reforms to agriculture and farm life, which made sense considering China. Mao argued that communism in a developing country would only succeed if it did not try to jump to advanced industrialization in imitation of Britain and America but rather developed the life of the farming peasants. Mao famously said that the leader must be down on his knees with the peasants in the soil, or else there would be alienation between the rulers and the workers of the sort Marx had hoped to overcome. Unfortunately, Mao surrounded himself with supporters who wanted to please him while brutally suppressing dissent, and this created a situation where everyone was telling Mao the farms were producing overabundance when they were in fact creating massive starvation. In the wake of Mao’s death, factions accused each other of undermining Mao’s policies and thwarting the revolution. Since 1978 and the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, capitalist free-market reforms were introduced and China remains an officially communist country that has a mixed economy that leans far towards socialism. Bob Avakian, who participated in the 60s Free Speech Movement and worked with the Black Panther Party, is the most well known American Maoist.
I gave you Slavoj Zizek’s (1949 – present) introduction to the writings of Mao to read. Zizek, a post-Marxist socialist philosopher himself, argues that people make the mistake of trying to find the single moment when communism became dictatorship, but there may not be a single famous figure who “got it wrong” as Judas to Marx’s Jesus. As a Slovenian socialist, Zizek has particular interest in this because Slovenia was one of the lands brutalized under Stalin. He argues that the primary struggle today is between the first and third world, and that communism, like capitalism, can become the oppressive force that it attempts to oppose. Zizek often takes controversial figures like Jesus, Descartes and Mao and finds important contributions that are often overlooked in the wake of tragedy, opposing the externalization of the enemy. I appreciate this reversal of perspective. Thus, Zizek applauds Mao’s turn towards the farmers who Lenin sidelined for the sake of city development, as well as his return to a Hegelian understanding of the pervasiveness of contradiction and continuous struggle.
