THIS month marks the centenary of Lenin’s death on January 21 1924. Most of the Full Marx columns to date have been to do with the significance of Marxism in relation to history, philosophy, economics and the environment. But often you’ll come across the term “Marxism-Leninism.” What’s that “Leninism” bit about?

Sometimes it’s explained as that the theory is Marx and the revolutionary practice is Lenin. But that would be far too simple. Marx and Engels did initiate a theoretical analysis of class society, particularly capitalism, and its dynamics. But they were also committed to changing the world and were closely involved with European political movements of their time.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party and first head of the Soviet state, also wrote extensively, both before and after the October 2017 Russian Revolution in which he played such a significant part, developing Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism, as well as revolutionary theory and practice.

Let’s focus on some of Lenin’s texts. The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), written while in prison and completed in exile in Siberia, examines the growing role of commercial capital in the exploitation of factory workers and the large-scale expropriation of the peasants, challenging the notion that the rural commune could form the basis for communism and emphasising the common interest of the rural and urban proletariat.

Materialism and Empirio Criticism (1909) explores and explains the importance of a materialist, dialectical approach to understanding the world against what he saw as the solipsism of the physicist Ernst Mach.

Other writings from the 1890s onwards address the question of agriculture and the role of the peasantry (some 80 per cent of the Russian population) and have influenced the development of liberation struggles throughout the colonial and neocolonial world.

All were written in the midst of struggle, and relate to specific conditions of his time and place. All concern practical activity to change the world as well as interpret it.

Perhaps the best-known text, one which positioned Lenin as the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, is What Is To Be Done? Written in 1902, when left and progressive forces in tsarist Russia were fragmented and demoralised, it focused on precisely that question — what the next steps should be.

Lenin’s starting point is the need for a revolutionary party: “There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory.” But theory, he declares, is not something abstract. It is developed in the course of struggle, and workers themselves become intellectuals in the process.

Without theory, working-class struggles are limited to attempts to improve their conditions within capitalism, to demands for reform. Struggle cannot become a “class struggle” until it is led by “a strong organisation of revolutionaries.”

Lenin argued for alliances with other anti-tsarist movements including peasant organisations. He anticipates later unifying demands and slogans (“peace, bread and land”) and the formation of broad representative and responsive organisations (the soviets) which became the basis for the Bolshevik success in 1917.

But his central argument is that theory and practice are inseparable, and that trade union consciousness needs to be developed into a revolutionary understanding to achieve socialism. The theme continues throughout Lenin’s subsequent revolutionary writing and action.

Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism was written in 1916, during the first world war — a war between imperialist nations which had already resulted in the death of millions of combatants and non-combatants alike, and which had resulted in left-right splits in the working-class, socialist and women’s movements.

Parts of it need deciphering, because, writing it in exile, he used a style which he hoped would allow it to evade the censors and be published in Russia, with references to other capitalist nations (such as Japan) in place of Russia.

But the central purpose was to explain the origins of the war, in particular growth of monopolies and conglomerates and their financial backers — finance capital — and the way that imperialism was no longer solely about the import and export of goods (raw materials and manufactures) but about the territorial division of the world by competing capitals with the domination of an increasing number of debtor states (later misleadingly called the “developing world”) by capital’s metropolitan heartlands (today the G8 group of countries).

State and Revolution, finished in August 1917 after Lenin had returned secretly from exile to Russia and only weeks before the October Revolution, takes the analysis further. The warring capitalist states differ in character but all have at their heart the exploitation of waged labour at home and the immiseration of subject peoples elsewhere.

Lenin reiterates Marx and Engels’ analysis of the state as, ultimately, an organ of class rule, and emphasises the irreconcilability of class interests. Elsewhere he declares it is natural for a liberal to speak of “democracy” in general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask: “For what class?”

Referring to the brutal repression of workers in the Paris Commune of 1871, Lenin anticipated the intensity of impending struggles and challenges those socialists (many of whom meekly supported Russia’s continued engagement in the war) who believed that those whose interests were threatened would meekly accept socialism.

Lenin emphasises the need for determination in implementing Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” during the initial phases of socialism if the ultimate object of the revolution — a classless society characterised by “to each according to their needs” can be achieved.

The intermediate phase, argues Lenin, must be characterised by a genuine, participative, democracy at the level of the workplace and communities, which will replace the need for a coercive state.

Following the revolution and the establishment of Soviet power, Lenin’s text Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) also focuses on issues (and individuals) of the day, and again emphasises the difference between (short-term) tactics and (long-term) strategy.

Within the new post-war context of “existing socialism” (still threatened by counter-revolution and Allied and Japanese wars of intervention) and the defeat of socialist movements elsewhere, Lenin emphasises the need to work with other progressive forces in a broad progressive anti-capitalist alliance.

The text includes an interesting chapter on “left-wing communism” in Britain. This starts with the assertion that one of the “greatest obstacles to the immediate formation of a united Communist Party is presented by the disagreement on the questions of participation in Parliament and on whether the new Communist Party should affiliate to the old, trade-unionist, opportunist and social-chauvinist Labour Party…”

It contrasts the positions of Sylvia Pankhurst, who — reflecting the anger of many British communists at the role of Parliament and the Labour leadership in pursuing the disastrous war — argued against participation in parliamentary elections, and Willie Gallacher, who subsequently became a Communist MP.

Lenin argues that British communists should unite into a single Communist Party, that they should participate in elections as part of the process of replacing Parliament with truly democratic system of soviets, that Pankhurst’s insistence that “the Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure” was mistaken, and that while he could not deal with the question of affiliation or non-affiliation to the Labour Party, a new Communist Party should work closely with the Labour Party while retaining “complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity.”

Lenin contributed greatly to both theory and practice in the period on either side of the Russian Revolution. A century after Lenin’s death, we can learn a good deal from the study of that period.

The Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School’s rich 2024 programme kicks off this Saturday January 20 at 11am with an on-site and online symposium, “Lenin in Britain.” The morning session will examine Lenin’s life and work in London including an opportunity to visit the Library’s “Lenin room.” The afternoon will include three sessions on Lenin's intellectual and political legacy including an exploration of Lenin on imperialism and the labour aristocracy, and his thinking on the state and revolution. Speakers include Bob Henderson (author of The Spark that Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London), Professor Mary Davis (historian and secretary of the Marx Memorial Library), Jonathan White (author of Making Our History: A Users Guide to Historical Materialism) and Vijay Prashad (Indian historian and journalist, author of Red Star Over the Third World). For more details go to www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.