Misplaced Pages

Western Marxism

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism . The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union .

#808191

192-410: Less concerned with economic analysis than earlier schools of Marxist thought, Western Marxism placed greater emphasis on the study of the cultural trends of capitalist society, deploying the more philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism, and incorporating non-Marxist approaches to investigating culture and historical development. An important theme was the origins of Karl Marx 's thought in

384-484: A troika that featured Stalin as General Secretary, the de facto centre of power in the party and the country. The direction of the party was decided in confrontations of politics and personality between Stalin's troika and Trotsky over which Marxist policy to pursue, either Trotsky's policy of permanent revolution or Stalin's policy of socialism in one country . Trotsky's permanent revolution advocated rapid industrialisation, elimination of private farming and having

576-523: A Marxism that underlines the Hegelian basis of Marx's thought. They argue that Marxism is not simply a theory of political economy that improves on its bourgeois predecessors. Nor is it a scientific sociology , akin to the natural sciences . For them, Marxism is primarily a critique – a self-conscious transformation of society. They stipulate that Marxism does not make philosophy obsolete, as "vulgar" Marxism believes; instead, Marxism preserves

768-702: A definition of economics as a study of human behaviour, subject to and constrained by scarcity, which forces people to choose, allocate scarce resources to competing ends, and economise (seeking the greatest welfare while avoiding the wasting of scarce resources). According to Robbins: "Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses". Robbins' definition eventually became widely accepted by mainstream economists, and found its way into current textbooks. Although far from unanimous, most mainstream economists would accept some version of Robbins' definition, even though many have raised serious objections to

960-451: A distinct field. The book focused on determinants of national income in the short run when prices are relatively inflexible. Keynes attempted to explain in broad theoretical detail why high labour-market unemployment might not be self-correcting due to low " effective demand " and why even price flexibility and monetary policy might be unavailing. The term "revolutionary" has been applied to the book in its impact on economic analysis. During

1152-478: A distinct movement in the Soviet Union when Stalin and his supporters gained control of the party . It rejected the common notion among Western Marxists of world revolution as a prerequisite for building socialism, in favour of the concept of socialism in one country . According to its supporters, the gradual transition from capitalism to socialism was signified by the introduction of the first five-year plan and

1344-520: A high degree of centralised control by the state and Communist party , political repression , state atheism , collectivisation and use of labour camps , as well as free universal education and healthcare , low unemployment and lower prices for certain goods . Historians such as Silvio Pons and Robert Service stated that the repression and totalitarianism came from Marxist–Leninist ideology. Historians such as Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick have offered other explanations and criticise

1536-420: A lower relative cost of production, rather relying only on its own production. It has been termed a "fundamental analytical explanation" for gains from trade . Coming at the end of the classical tradition, John Stuart Mill (1848) parted company with the earlier classical economists on the inevitability of the distribution of income produced by the market system. Mill pointed to a distinct difference between

1728-597: A massive urbanisation in the country. Unemployment was virtually eliminated in the country during the 1930s. However, this rapid industrialisation also resulted in the Soviet famine of 1930–1933 that killed millions. Social developments in the Soviet Union included the relinquishment of the relaxed social control and allowance of experimentation under Lenin to Stalin's promotion of a rigid and authoritarian society based upon discipline, mixing traditional Russian values with Stalin's interpretation of Marxism. Organised religion

1920-762: A model for later Soviet-type regimes; its global influence, having at its height covered at least one-third of the world's population, has made Marxist–Leninist a convenient label for the Communist bloc as a dynamic ideological order. Historiography of Marxist–Leninist states is polarised. According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , historiography is characterised by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists", who characterise themselves as objective reporters of an alleged totalitarian nature of communism and Marxist–Leninist states, are criticised by their opponents as being anti-communist , even fascist , in their eagerness on continuing to focus on

2112-449: A more comprehensive theory of costs on the supply side. In the 20th century, neoclassical theorists departed from an earlier idea that suggested measuring total utility for a society, opting instead for ordinal utility , which posits behaviour-based relations across individuals. In microeconomics , neoclassical economics represents incentives and costs as playing a pervasive role in shaping decision making . An immediate example of this

SECTION 10

#1732870052809

2304-460: A more important role in mainstream economic theory. Also, heterogeneity among the economic agents, e.g. differences in income, plays an increasing role in recent economic research. Other schools or trends of thought referring to a particular style of economics practised at and disseminated from well-defined groups of academicians that have become known worldwide, include the Freiburg School ,

2496-459: A new meaning since the Russian Revolution , as they became equivalent to the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, namely the interpretation of Marxism by Vladimir Lenin and his successors. Endorsing the final objective, namely the creation of a community-owning means of production and providing each of its participants with consumption " according to their needs ", Marxism–Leninism puts forward

2688-586: A proportion of the value their work had created. Marxian economics was further developed by Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)'s The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx and The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) , Rudolf Hilferding 's (1877–1941) Finance Capital , Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924)'s The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism , and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)'s The Accumulation of Capital . At its inception as

2880-409: A rapidly growing population against a limited amount of land meant diminishing returns to labour. The result, he claimed, was chronically low wages, which prevented the standard of living for most of the population from rising above the subsistence level. Economist Julian Simon has criticised Malthus's conclusions. While Adam Smith emphasised production and income, David Ricardo (1817) focused on

3072-630: A reinforcement of proletarian revolution in Europe. In 1912, Lenin resolved a factional challenge to his ideological leadership of the RSDLP by the Forward Group in the party, usurping the all-party congress to transform the RSDLP into the Bolshevik party. In the early 1910s, Lenin remained highly unpopular and was so unpopular amongst international socialist movement that by 1914 it considered censoring him. Unlike

3264-469: A set of stable preferences, a definite overall guiding objective, and the capability of making a choice. There exists an economic problem, subject to study by economic science, when a decision (choice) is made by one or more players to attain the best possible outcome. Keynesian economics derives from John Maynard Keynes , in particular his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), which ushered in contemporary macroeconomics as

3456-409: A single tax on income of land owners. In reaction against copious mercantilist trade regulations, the physiocrats advocated a policy of laissez-faire , which called for minimal government intervention in the economy. Adam Smith (1723–1790) was an early economic theorist. Smith was harshly critical of the mercantilists but described the physiocratic system "with all its imperfections" as "perhaps

3648-452: A social science, economics was defined and discussed at length as the study of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth by Jean-Baptiste Say in his Treatise on Political Economy or, The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth (1803). These three items were considered only in relation to the increase or diminution of wealth, and not in reference to their processes of execution. Say's definition has survived in part up to

3840-435: A sought after end). Some subsequent comments criticised the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets. From the 1960s, however, such comments abated as the economic theory of maximizing behaviour and rational-choice modelling expanded the domain of the subject to areas previously treated in other fields. There are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for

4032-851: A successful revolution occurred in Asia, when the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 established the Mongolian People's Republic (1924–1992). The percentage of Bolshevik delegates in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets increased from 13%, at the first congress in July 1917, to 66%, at the fifth congress in 1918. As promised to the Russian peoples in October 1917, the Bolsheviks quit Russia's participation in

SECTION 20

#1732870052809

4224-442: A synthesis emerged by the 2000s, often given the name the new neoclassical synthesis . It integrated the rational expectations and optimizing framework of the new classical theory with a new Keynesian role for nominal rigidities and other market imperfections like imperfect information in goods, labour and credit markets. The monetarist importance of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy and in particular controlling inflation

4416-453: A version of Korean ultranationalism , which eventually developed after losing its original Marxist–Leninist elements. According to North Korea: A Country Study by Robert L. Worden, Marxism–Leninism was abandoned immediately after the start of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union and has been totally replaced by Juche since at least 1974. Daniel Schwekendiek wrote that what made North Korean Marxism–Leninism distinct from that of China and

4608-527: Is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist traditionalists whom they would term biased and unscholarly. Academic Sovietology after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union, stressing the absolute nature of Stalin's power. The "revisionist school" beginning in

4800-853: Is a social science that studies the production , distribution , and consumption of goods and services . Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as basic elements within economies , including individual agents and markets , their interactions, and the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, and sellers. Macroeconomics analyses economies as systems where production, distribution, consumption, savings , and investment expenditure interact, and factors affecting it: factors of production , such as labour , capital , land , and enterprise , inflation , economic growth , and public policies that have impact on these elements . It also seeks to analyse and describe

4992-708: Is a contemporaneous figure who is likewise sometimes judged to be one of Western Marxism's founding fathers. After the Second World War , a French Western Marxism was constituted by theorists based around the journals Arguments , Les Temps Modernes and Socialisme ou Barbarie such as Lucien Goldmann , Henri Lefebvre , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , and Jean-Paul Sartre . This later generation of Western Marxists were overwhelmingly professional academics and frequently professors of philosophy. Although there have been many schools of Marxist thought that are sharply distinguished from Marxism–Leninism , such as Austromarxism or

5184-839: Is a decisive precursor to Marx, while Della Volpe's pupil Lucio Colletti holds that the true philosophical predecessor to Marx is Immanuel Kant . While Western Marxism is often contrasted with the Marxism of the Soviet Union , Western Marxists have been divided in their opinion of it and other Marxist–Leninist states . Some have offered qualified support, others have been highly critical, and still others have changed their views over time: Lukács, Gramsci, and Della Volpe were members of Soviet-aligned parties; Korsch, Herbert Marcuse , and Guy Debord were inimical to Soviet Communism and instead advocated council communism ; Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and Lefebvre were, at different periods, supporters of

5376-574: Is a feature that distinguishes Western Marxism from the schools of Marxism that preceded it. Many Western Marxists have drawn from psychoanalysis to explain the effect of culture on individual consciousness. Concepts taken from German Lebensphilosophie , Weberian sociology, Piagetian psychology , French philosophy of science , phenomenology , and existentialism have all been assimilated and critiqued by Western Marxists. The epistemological principles of Marx's thought are an important theme for Western Marxism. In this regard, Western Marxists view

5568-421: Is a term for the "way (nomos) to run a household (oikos)", or in other words the know-how of an οἰκονομικός ( oikonomikos ), or "household or homestead manager". Derived terms such as "economy" can therefore often mean "frugal" or "thrifty". By extension then, "political economy" was the way to manage a polis or state. There are a variety of modern definitions of economics ; some reflect evolving views of

5760-438: Is also applied to such diverse subjects as crime , education , the family , feminism , law , philosophy , politics , religion , social institutions , war , science , and the environment . The earlier term for the discipline was "political economy", but since the late 19th century, it has commonly been called "economics". The term is ultimately derived from Ancient Greek οἰκονομία ( oikonomia ) which

5952-458: Is an empty term that depends on the approach and basis of ruling Communist parties, and is dynamic and open to redefinition, being both fixed and not fixed in meaning. As a term, "Marxism–Leninism" is misleading because Marx and Lenin never sanctioned or supported the creation of an -ism after them, and is reveling because, being popularized after Lenin's death by Stalin, it contained three clear doctrinal and institutionalized principles that became

Western Marxism - Misplaced Pages Continue

6144-527: Is derived from Marxism–Leninism, although its evolution is disputed. Marxist–Leninist states are commonly referred to as " communist states " by Western academics. Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism . Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism . A vanguard party , organized through democratic centralism , would seize power on behalf of

6336-452: Is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. The claim that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions evolved into the idea that he had updated it in a fundamental way applying to the world as a whole. Consequently, Mao Zedong Thought became the official state ideology of the People's Republic of China as well as

6528-413: Is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it

6720-421: Is so great that we cannot, at one stroke, restore full-scale factory, state, socialist production." He added that the development of socialism would proceed according to the actual material and socio-economic conditions in Russia and not as abstractly described by Marx for industrialised Europe in the 19th century. To overcome the lack of educated Russians who could operate and administrate industry, Lenin advocated

6912-510: Is superior to Stalin only in one respect, namely, in being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades." Upon his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin's political testament was read aloud to the Central Committee, who chose to ignore Lenin's ordered removal of Stalin as General Secretary because enough members believed Stalin had been politically rehabilitated in 1923. Consequent to personally spiteful disputes about

7104-598: Is the consumer theory of individual demand, which isolates how prices (as costs) and income affect quantity demanded. In macroeconomics it is reflected in an early and lasting neoclassical synthesis with Keynesian macroeconomics. Neoclassical economics is occasionally referred as orthodox economics whether by its critics or sympathisers. Modern mainstream economics builds on neoclassical economics but with many refinements that either supplement or generalise earlier analysis, such as econometrics , game theory , analysis of market failure and imperfect competition , and

7296-506: The 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) chose Stalin's policy, defeating Trotsky as a possible leader of the party and of the Soviet Union. In the 1925–1927 period, Stalin dissolved the troika and disowned the centrist Kamenev and Zinoviev for an expedient alliance with the three most prominent leaders of the so-called Right Opposition , namely Alexei Rykov ( Premier of Russia , 1924–1929; Premier of

7488-673: The 1936 Soviet Constitution . By the late 1920s, Stalin established ideological orthodoxy in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) , the Soviet Union, and the Communist International to establish universal Marxist–Leninist praxis . The formulation of the Soviet version of dialectical and historical materialism in the 1930s by Stalin and his associates, such as in Stalin's text Dialectical and Historical Materialism , became

7680-593: The Axis powers , the native communist party usually led the armed resistance ( guerrilla warfare and urban guerrilla warfare ) against fascist military occupation. In Mediterranean Europe, the communist Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito effectively resisted the German Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation. In the 1943–1944 period, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated territories with Red Army assistance and established

7872-668: The Bavarian Soviet Republic . In Hungary, the disorganised workers who had proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic were fought and defeated by the royal armies of the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as well as the army of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia . These communist forces were soon crushed by anti-communist forces and attempts to create an international communist revolution failed. However,

Western Marxism - Misplaced Pages Continue

8064-594: The Chinese Communist Party . After military defeat exiled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang nationalist government to Formosa island ( Taiwan ), Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. In the late 1940s, the geopolitics of the Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet predominance featured an official-and-personal style of socialist diplomacy that failed Stalin and Tito when Tito refused to subordinating Yugoslavia to

8256-635: The Eastern Bloc , and various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War , as well as the Communist International after Bolshevization . Today, Marxism–Leninism is the ideology of the ruling parties of China , Cuba , Laos and Vietnam (all one-party socialist republics ), as well as many other communist parties . The state ideology of North Korea

8448-460: The Left Opposition to Stalin within the Soviet party and government, Leon Trotsky and Trotskyists argued that Marxist–Leninist ideology contradicted Marxism and Leninism in theory, therefore Stalin's ideology was not useful for the implementation of socialism in Russia. Moreover, Trotskyists within the party identified their anti-Stalinist communist ideology as Bolshevik–Leninism and supported

8640-507: The Politburo . In 1929, Stalin politically controlled the party and the Soviet Union by way of deception and administrative acumen. In that time, Stalin's centralised, socialism in one country régime had negatively associated Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevism with Stalinism, i.e. government by command-policy to realise projects such as the rapid industrialisation of cities and the collectivisation of agriculture. Such Stalinism also subordinated

8832-622: The Red Army , who were poorly led, ill-trained and under-equipped. As a result, they fought poorly and suffered great losses of soldiers (killed, wounded and captured). The weakness of the Red Army was partly consequence of the Great Purge (1936–1938) of senior officers and career soldiers whom Stalin considered politically unreliable. Strategically, the Wehrmacht 's extensive and effective attack threatened

9024-810: The Russian Civil War (1917–1922) against the Bolshevik government. Moreover, despite the White–Red civil war, Russia remained a combatant in the Great War that the Bolsheviks had quit with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which then provoked the Allied Intervention to the Russian Civil War by the armies of seventeen countries, featuring Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Imperial Japan. Elsewhere,

9216-724: The Russian Republic (September–November 1917). Later in the October Revolution , the Bolshevik's seizure of power against the Provisional Government resulted in their establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991), yet parts of Russia remained occupied by the counter-revolutionary White Movement of anti-communists who had united to form the White Army to fight

9408-747: The School of Lausanne , the Stockholm school and the Chicago school of economics . During the 1970s and 1980s mainstream economics was sometimes separated into the Saltwater approach of those universities along the Eastern and Western coasts of the US, and the Freshwater, or Chicago school approach. Within macroeconomics there is, in general order of their historical appearance in

9600-514: The Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966) and the two countries broke their international relations (diplomatic, political, cultural and economic). China's Great Leap Forward , an idealistic massive reform project, resulted in an estimated 15 to 55 million deaths between 1959 and 1961, mostly from starvation. In Eastern Asia, the Cold War produced the Korean War (1950–1953), the first proxy war between

9792-635: The State Duma and the Russian Constitution of 1906 ) were the Tsar's piecemeal and cosmetic concessions to social progress because public office remained available only to the aristocracy , the gentry and the bourgeoisie . These reforms resolved neither the illiteracy , the poverty , nor malnutrition of the proletarian majority of Imperial Russia. In Swiss exile, Lenin developed Marx's philosophy and extrapolated decolonisation by colonial revolt as

SECTION 50

#1732870052809

9984-505: The Third World socialist regimes, have been variously described as "bureaucratic-authoritarian systems", and China's socio-economic structure has been referred to as "nationalistic state capitalism". Criticism of Marxism–Leninism largely overlaps with criticism of communist party rule and mainly focuses on the actions and policies of Marxist–Leninist leaders, most notably Stalin and Mao Zedong . Marxist–Leninist states have been marked by

10176-675: The Tito–Stalin split , the Sino-Soviet split , and the Sino-Albanian split . The socio-economic nature of Marxist–Leninist states, especially that of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1924-1953), has been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism , state capitalism , state socialism , or a totally unique mode of production . The Eastern Bloc, including Marxist–Leninist states in Central and Eastern Europe as well as

10368-637: The Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939) and to jointly invade and partition Poland , by way of which Nazi Germany started the Second World War (1 September 1939). In the 1941–1942 period of the Great Patriotic War , the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941) was ineffectively opposed by

10560-576: The Western Front (4 August 1914 – 11 November 1918), Imperial Germany impelled the withdrawal of Imperial Russia from the war's Eastern Front (17 August 1914 – 3 March 1918) by sending Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort in a diplomatically sealed train, anticipating them partaking in revolutionary activity. In March 1917, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II led to the Russian Provisional Government (March–July 1917), who then proclaimed

10752-527: The Young Hegelians , and Ludwig Feuerbach reveal what they see as the humanist core of Marxist theory. However, the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser , which attempts to purge Marxism of Hegelianism and humanism, also belongs to Western Marxism, as does the anti-Hegelianism of Galvano Della Volpe . Althusser holds that Marx's primary philosophical antecedent is not Hegel or Feuerbach, but Baruch Spinoza . Della Volpe claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau

10944-699: The absolute monarchy of the Tsar of Russia . Most importantly, the experience of this revolution caused Lenin to conceive of the means of sponsoring socialist revolution through agitation, propaganda and a well-organised, disciplined and small political party. Despite secret-police persecution by the Okhrana (Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order), émigré Bolsheviks returned to Russia to agitate, organise and lead, but then they returned to exile when peoples' revolutionary fervour failed in 1907. The failure of

11136-492: The death of Lenin , Joseph Stalin completed his rise to power and was the leader of the Soviet Union who theorised and applied the socialist theories of Lenin and Karl Marx as political expediencies used to realise his plans for the Soviet Union and for world socialism . Concerning Questions of Leninism (1926) represented Marxism–Leninism as a separate communist ideology and featured a global hierarchy of communist parties and revolutionary vanguard parties in each country of

11328-433: The macroeconomics of high unemployment. Gary Becker , a contributor to the expansion of economics into new areas, described the approach he favoured as "combin[ing the] assumptions of maximizing behaviour, stable preferences , and market equilibrium , used relentlessly and unflinchingly." One commentary characterises the remark as making economics an approach rather than a subject matter but with great specificity as to

11520-467: The neoclassical model of economic growth for analysing long-run variables affecting national income . Neoclassical economics studies the behaviour of individuals , households , and organisations (called economic actors, players, or agents), when they manage or use scarce resources, which have alternative uses, to achieve desired ends. Agents are assumed to act rationally, have multiple desirable ends in sight, limited resources to obtain these ends,

11712-615: The permanent revolution to differentiate themselves from Stalin's justification and implementation of socialism in one country . After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and ideological leader of world communism . In that vein, Mao Zedong Thought , Mao Zedong 's updating and adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions in which revolutionary praxis

SECTION 60

#1732870052809

11904-429: The proletariat and establish a one-party socialist state, called the dictatorship of the proletariat . The state would control the means of production , suppress opposition , counter-revolution , and the bourgeoisie , and promote Soviet collectivism , to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless . After the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Marxism–Leninism became

12096-415: The societal to the microeconomic level: Economics is a study of man in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. Lionel Robbins (1932) developed implications of what has been termed "[p]erhaps the most commonly accepted current definition of

12288-400: The "choice process and the type of social interaction that [such] analysis involves." The same source reviews a range of definitions included in principles of economics textbooks and concludes that the lack of agreement need not affect the subject-matter that the texts treat. Among economists more generally, it argues that a particular definition presented may reflect the direction toward which

12480-610: The "totalitarian model", as outlined by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich , which stated that the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states were totalitarian systems, with the personality cult, and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader", such as Stalin. It was considered to be outdated by the 1980s and for the post-Stalinist era. Some academics, such as Stéphane Courtois ( The Black Book of Communism ), Steven Rosefielde ( Red Holocaust ), and Rudolph Rummel ( Death by Government ), wrote of mass, excess deaths under Marxist–Leninist regimes. These authors defined

12672-557: The 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level. Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces." These "revisionist school" historians challenged

12864-486: The 1970s and 1980s, when several major central banks followed a monetarist-inspired policy, but was later abandoned because the results were unsatisfactory. A more fundamental challenge to the prevailing Keynesian paradigm came in the 1970s from new classical economists like Robert Lucas , Thomas Sargent and Edward Prescott . They introduced the notion of rational expectations in economics, which had profound implications for many economic discussions, among which were

13056-673: The 1970s, a small portion of Marxist–Leninists began to downplay or repudiate the role of Mao in the Marxist–Leninist international movement in favour of the Albanian Labour Party and stricter adherence to Stalin. The Sino-Albanian split was caused by Albania 's rejection of China's Realpolitik of Sino–American rapprochement, specifically the 1972 Mao–Nixon meeting which the anti-revisionist Albanian Labour Party perceived as an ideological betrayal of Mao's own Three Worlds Theory that excluded such political rapprochement with

13248-411: The Bolshevik government fought the internal Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and repelled the external Allied intervention to the Russian Civil War (1918–1925). Vast industrialisation was initiated mostly based with a focus on heavy industry . The Cultural revolution in the Soviet Union focused on restructuring culture and society. During the 1930s, the rapid industrialisation of the country accelerated

13440-492: The Bolshevik government had achieved economic production levels equal to Russia's production levels in 1913. Initial Bolshevik economic policies from 1917 to 1918 were cautious, with limited nationalisations of the means of production which had been private property of the Russian aristocracy during the Tsarist monarchy. Lenin was immediately committed to avoid antagonising the peasantry by making efforts to coax them away from

13632-602: The Bolshevik régime because they had not resolved the food shortages and material poverty of the Russian peoples as promised in October 1917. From that social discontent, the Cheka reported 118 uprisings, including the Kronstadt rebellion (7–17 March 1921) against the economic austerity of the War Communism imposed by the Bolsheviks. The principal obstacles to Russian economic development and modernisation were great material poverty and

13824-400: The Bolsheviks into the party's political vanguard which was composed of professional revolutionaries who practised democratic centralism to elect leaders and officers as well as to determine policy through free discussion, then decisively realised through united action. The vanguardism of proactive, pragmatic commitment to achieving revolution was the Bolsheviks' advantage in out-manoeuvring

14016-584: The Cold War in Europe were the Soviet and Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian military interventions to the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) on behalf of the Communist Party of Greece ; and the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) by the Soviet Union. The event that precipitated the Cold War in continental Asia was the resumption of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) fought between the anti-communist Kuomintang and

14208-547: The Cold War, Marxism–Leninist countries like the Soviet Union and its allies were one of the major forces in international relations . With the death of Stalin and the ensuing de-Stalinisation, Marxism–Leninism underwent several revisions and adaptations such as Guevarism , Ho Chi Minh Thought , Hoxhaism , Maoism , socialism with Chinese characteristics , and Titoism . More recently Nepalese communist parties have adopted People's Multiparty Democracy . This also caused several splits between Marxist–Leninist states, resulting in

14400-467: The Cold War. These academics include Mark Aarons , Noam Chomsky , Jodi Dean , Kristen Ghodsee , Seumas Milne , and Michael Parenti . Ghodsee, Nathan J. Robinson , and Scott Sehon wrote about the merits of taking an anti anti-communist position that does not deny the atrocities but make a distinction between anti-authoritarian communist and other socialist currents, both of which have been victims of repression. Although Marxism–Leninism

14592-524: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union , Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences (25 February 1956) in which he specified and condemned Stalin's dictatorial excesses and abuses of power such as the Great purge (1936–1938) and the cult of personality . Khrushchev introduced the de-Stalinisation of the party and of the Soviet Union. He realised this with

14784-455: The Congress of Soviets, a committee dominated by Vladimir Lenin , who had previously supported multi-party free elections. After the Bolshevik defeat, Lenin started referring to the assembly as a "deceptive form of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism". This was criticised as being the development of vanguardism as a form of hierarchical party–elite that controlled society. Within five years of

14976-639: The Dialectic in 1955. Merleau-Ponty delineated a body of Marxist thought starting with György Lukács that differs from both the Soviet interpretation of Marxism and the earlier Marxism of the Second International . Perry Anderson notes that Western Marxism was born from the failure of proletarian revolutions in various advanced capitalist societies in Western Europe ;– Germany , Austria , Hungary , and Italy  – in

15168-452: The Dutch left communism of Antonie Pannekoek and Herman Gorter , theorists who downplay the primacy of economic analysis are considered Western Marxists. Where the base of the capitalist economy is the focus of earlier Marxists, Western Marxists concentrate on the problems of superstructures , as their attention centres on culture , philosophy , and art . Western Marxism often emphasises

15360-674: The Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, resulted from dual origins, namely the nationalist Koreans' post-war resumption of their Korean Civil War and the imperial war for regional hegemony sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. The international response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea was realised by the United Nations Security Council , who voted for war despite the absent Soviet Union and authorised an international military expedition to intervene, expel

15552-417: The Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yugoslavia's international relations matured into the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) of countries without political allegiance to any power bloc . At the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then consolidated an anti-Stalinist government. In a secret meeting at the 20th Congress of

15744-614: The European Parliament . Without denying the tragedy of the events, other scholars criticise the interpretation that sees communism as the main culprit as presenting a biased or exaggerated anti-communist narrative. Several academics propose a more nuanced analysis of Marxist–Leninist rule, stating that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in Marxist–Leninist states and drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries , particularly during

15936-507: The European socialists had failed the working classes for preferring patriotic war to proletarian internationalism . To debunk patriotism and national chauvinism , Lenin explained in the essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) that capitalist economic expansion leads to colonial imperialism which is then regulated with nationalist wars such as the Great War among the empires of Europe. To relieve strategic pressures from

16128-495: The European socialists who chose bellicose nationalism to anti-war internationalism, whose philosophical and political break was consequence of the internationalist–defencist schism among socialists, the Bolsheviks opposed the Great War (1914–1918). That nationalist betrayal of socialism was denounced by a small group of socialist leaders who opposed the Great War, including Rosa Luxemburg , Karl Liebknecht and Lenin, who said that

16320-619: The European-Russian and the Asian-Chinese interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism in each country. The political differences then provoked geopolitical, ideological and nationalist tensions, which derived from the different stages of development, between the urban society of the industrialised Soviet Union and the agricultural society of the pre-industrial China. The theory versus praxis arguments escalated to theoretic disputes about Marxist–Leninist revisionism and provoked

16512-575: The February Revolution exiled Bolsheviks, Mensheviks , Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists such as the Black Guards from Russia. Membership in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik ranks diminished from 1907 to 1908 while the number of people taking part in strikes in 1907 was 26% of the figure during the year of the Revolution of 1905, dropping to 6% in 1908 and 2% in 1910. The 1908–1917 period

16704-607: The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), the Soviet Union was a military superpower with a say in determining the geopolitical order of the world. Apart from the failed Third Period policy in the early 1930s, Marxist–Leninists played an important role in anti-fascist resistance movements , with the Soviet Union contributing to the Allied victory in World War II. In accordance with the three-power Yalta Agreement (4–11 February 1945),

16896-656: The Great War on 3 March 1918. That same year, the Bolsheviks consolidated government power by expelling the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets . The Bolshevik government then established the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) secret police to eliminate anti–Bolshevik opposition in the country. Initially, there was strong opposition to

17088-793: The Nazi's lasted until the Schutzstaffel and the Einsatzgruppen began their Lebensraum killings of the Jewish populations, the local communists, the civil and community leaders—the Holocaust meant to realise the Nazi German colonisation of Bolshevik Russia. In response, Stalin ordered the Red Army to fight a total war against the Germanic invaders who would exterminate Slavic Russia. Hitler's attack against

17280-546: The Red Army began to repel the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, especially at the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943) and at the Battle of Kursk (5 July – 23 August 1943). The Red Army then repelled the Nazi and Fascist occupation armies from Eastern Europe until the Red Army decisively defeated Nazi Germany in the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation (16 April–2 May 1945). On concluding

17472-596: The Sinified Marxism–Leninism of Mao Zedong—his Chinese adaptations of Stalinist interpretation and praxis for establishing socialism in China. To realise that leap of Marxist faith in the development of Chinese socialism, the Chinese Communist Party developed Maoism as the official state ideology. As the specifically Chinese development of Marxism–Leninism, Maoism illuminated the cultural differences between

17664-433: The Socialist Revolutionaries, allowing a peasant takeover of nobles ' estates while no immediate nationalisations were enacted on peasants' property. The Decree on Land (8 November 1917) fulfilled Lenin's promised redistribution of Russia's arable land to the peasants, who reclaimed their farmlands from the aristocrats, ensuring the peasants' loyalty to the Bolshevik party. To overcome the civil war's economic interruptions,

17856-497: The Soviet Russians learned the technology and the techniques required to operate and administrate industries. Importantly, Lenin declared that the development of socialism would not be able to be pursued in the manner originally thought by Marxists. A key aspect that affected the Bolshevik regime was the backward economic conditions in Russia that were considered unfavourable to orthodox Marxist theory of communist revolution. At

18048-513: The Soviet Union (Nazi Germany's erstwhile ally) realigned Stalin's political priorities, from the repression of internal enemies to the existential defence against external attack. The pragmatic Stalin then entered the Soviet Union to the Grand Alliance , a common front against the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan ). In the continental European countries occupied by

18240-552: The Soviet Union , 1924–1930), Nikolai Bukharin ( General Secretary of the Comintern , 1926–1929; Editor-in-Chief of Pravda , 1918–1929), and Mikhail Tomsky (Chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions in the 1920s). In 1927, the party endorsed Stalin's policy of socialism in one country as the Soviet Union's national policy and expelled the leftist Trotsky and the centrists Kamenev and Zinoviev from

18432-506: The Soviet Union included Stalin dismantling the remaining elements of democracy from the party by extending his control over its institutions and eliminating any possible rivals. The party's ranks grew in numbers, with the party modifying its organisation to include more trade unions and factories. The ranks and files of the party were populated with members from the trade unions and the factories, whom Stalin controlled because there were no other Old Bolsheviks to contradict Marxism–Leninism. In

18624-407: The Soviet Union promote the spread of communist revolution abroad. Stalin's socialism in one country stressed moderation and development of positive relations between the Soviet Union and other countries to increase trade and foreign investment. To politically isolate and oust Trotsky from the party, Stalin expediently advocated socialism in one country, a policy to which he was indifferent. In 1925,

18816-598: The Soviet Union purged native fascist collaborators and these in collaboration with the Axis Powers from the Eastern European countries occupied by the Axis Powers and installed native Marxist–Leninist governments. Upon Allied victory concluding the Second World War (1939–1945), the members of the Grand Alliance resumed their expediently suppressed, pre-war geopolitical rivalries and ideological tensions which disunity broke their anti-fascist wartime alliance through

19008-503: The Soviet Union was that it incorporated national feelings and macro-historical elements in the socialist ideology, opting for its "own style of socialism". The major Korean elements are the emphasis on traditional Confucianism and the memory of the traumatic experience of Korea under Japanese rule as well as a focus on autobiographical features of Kim Il Sung as a guerrilla hero. In the other four existing Marxist–Leninist socialist states , namely China, Cuba , Laos , and Vietnam ,

19200-640: The Soviet Union. In 1948, circumstance and cultural personality aggravated the matter into the Yugoslav–Soviet split (1948–1955) that resulted from Tito's rejection of Stalin's demand to subordinate the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia to the geopolitical agenda (economic and military) of the Soviet Union, i.e. Tito at Stalin's disposal. Stalin punished Tito's refusal by denouncing him as an ideological revisionist of Marxism–Leninism; by denouncing Yugoslavia's practice of Titoism as socialism deviated from

19392-461: The Soviet communists to fight throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, creating agreements with France to challenge Germany. After Germany and Britain signed the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938) which allowed the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945), Stalin adopted pro-German policies for the Soviet Union's dealings with Nazi Germany. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to

19584-435: The Soviet people's sociological transition from poverty to relative plenty when politically illiterate peasants passed from Tsarist serfdom to self-determination and became politically aware urban citizens. The Marxist–Leninist economic régime modernised Russia from the illiterate, peasant society characteristic of monarchy to the literate , socialist society of educated farmers and industrial workers. Industrialisation led to

19776-533: The Soviet-aligned Communist Party of France , but all would later become disillusioned with it; Ernst Bloch lived in and supported the Eastern Bloc , but lost faith in Soviet Communism towards the end of his life. Nicos Poulantzas, a later Western Marxist, was an advocate for Eurocommunism . Economic analysis Economics ( / ˌ ɛ k ə ˈ n ɒ m ɪ k s , ˌ iː k ə -/ )

19968-786: The Third World. With the end of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War, anti-fascism became part of both the official ideology and language of Marxist–Leninist states, especially in East Germany . Fascist and anti-fascism , with the latter used to mean a general anti-capitalist struggle against the Western world and NATO , became epithets widely used by Marxist–Leninists to smear their opponents, including democratic socialists , libertarian socialists , social democrats and other anti-Stalinist leftists . The events that precipitated

20160-662: The West. To the Albanian Marxist–Leninists, the Chinese dealings with the United States indicated Mao's lessened, practical commitments to ideological orthodoxy and proletarian internationalism . In response to Mao's apparently unorthodox deviations, Enver Hoxha , head of the Albanian Labour Party, theorised anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism, referred to as Hoxhaism , which retained orthodox Marxism–Leninism when compared to

20352-407: The analysis of wealth: how wealth is created (production), distributed, and consumed; and how wealth can grow. But he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus. This is because war has as the goal winning it (as a sought after end ), generates both cost and benefits; and, resources (human life and other costs) are used to attain the goal. If

20544-479: The area of inquiry or object of inquiry rather than the methodology. In the biology department, it is not said that all biology should be studied with DNA analysis. People study living organisms in many different ways, so some people will perform DNA analysis, others might analyse anatomy, and still others might build game theoretic models of animal behaviour. But they are all called biology because they all study living organisms. According to Ha Joon Chang, this view that

20736-443: The author believes economics is evolving, or should evolve. Many economists including nobel prize winners James M. Buchanan and Ronald Coase reject the method-based definition of Robbins and continue to prefer definitions like those of Say, in terms of its subject matter. Ha-Joon Chang has for example argued that the definition of Robbins would make economics very peculiar because all other sciences define themselves in terms of

20928-489: The cause of world communism ; and by expelling the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). The break from the Eastern Bloc allowed the development of a socialism with Yugoslav characteristics which allowed doing business with the capitalist West to develop the socialist economy and the establishment of Yugoslavia's diplomatic and commercial relations with countries of

21120-399: The centres of revolutionary action were too far apart for proper political coordination. To generate revolutionary momentum from the Tsarist army killings on Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905), the Bolsheviks encouraged workers to use political violence in order to compel the bourgeois social classes (the nobility, the gentry and the bourgeoisie) to join the proletarian revolution to overthrow

21312-471: The collectivisation of agriculture. It achieved 23.6% of collectivisation within two years (1930) and 98.0% of collectivisation within thirteen years (1941). As the revolutionary vanguard, the communist party organised Russian society to realise rapid industrialisation programs as defence against Western interference with socialism in Bolshevik Russia. The five-year plans were prepared in the 1920s whilst

21504-517: The colonies. Physiocrats , a group of 18th-century French thinkers and writers, developed the idea of the economy as a circular flow of income and output. Physiocrats believed that only agricultural production generated a clear surplus over cost, so that agriculture was the basis of all wealth. Thus, they opposed the mercantilist policy of promoting manufacturing and trade at the expense of agriculture, including import tariffs. Physiocrats advocated replacing administratively costly tax collections with

21696-686: The communist political authority that became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . To end the Imperial Japanese occupation of China in continental Asia, Stalin ordered Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party to temporarily cease the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) against Chiang Kai-shek and the anti-communist Kuomintang as the Second United Front in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In 1943,

21888-489: The concept of totalitarianism into the anti-communist Western Bloc and the Marxist–Leninist Eastern Bloc . The renewed competition for geopolitical hegemony resulted in the bi-polar Cold War (1947–1991), a protracted state of tension (military and diplomatic) between the United States and the Soviet Union which often threatened a Soviet–American nuclear war , but it usually featured proxy wars in

22080-587: The construction of socialism in one country, the NKVD established the Gulag system of forced-labour camps for regular criminals and political dissidents, for culturally insubordinate artists and politically incorrect intellectuals and for homosexual people and religious anti-communists . Beginning in 1928, Stalin's five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union achieved the rapid industrialisation (coal, iron and steel, electricity and petroleum, among others) and

22272-730: The continual and permanent development of Marxism–Leninism, with ideological adaptation to material conditions. The Bolshevik Party lost in the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election , obtaining 23.3% of the vote, to the Socialist Revolutionary Party , which obtained 37.6%. On 6 January 1918, the Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was issued by the Central Executive Committee of

22464-535: The country). By 1939, with the exception of Stalin himself, none of the original Bolsheviks of the October Revolution of 1917 remained in the party. Unquestioning loyalty to Stalin was expected by the regime of all citizens. Stalin exercised extensive personal control over the party and unleashed an unprecedented level of violence to eliminate any potential threat to his regime. While Stalin exercised major control over political initiatives, their implementation

22656-409: The dekulakisation to lessen the negative social impact in the relations between the Soviet peoples and the party, but Stalin took umbrage and then accused them of uncommunist philosophical deviations from Lenin and Marx. That implicit accusation of ideological deviationism licensed Stalin to accuse Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky of plotting against the party and the appearance of impropriety then compelled

22848-488: The design of modern monetary policy and are now standard workhorses in most central banks. After the 2007–2008 financial crisis , macroeconomic research has put greater emphasis on understanding and integrating the financial system into models of the general economy and shedding light on the ways in which problems in the financial sector can turn into major macroeconomic recessions. In this and other research branches, inspiration from behavioural economics has started playing

23040-510: The development of a technical intelligentsia who would propel the industrial development of Russia to self-sufficiency. As he neared death after suffering strokes, Lenin's Testament of December 1922 named Trotsky and Stalin as the most able men in the Central Committee, but he harshly criticised them. Lenin said that Stalin should be removed from being the General Secretary of the party and that he be replaced with "some other person who

23232-552: The dismantling of the Gulag archipelago of forced-labour camps and freeing the prisoners as well as allowing Soviet civil society greater political freedom of expression, especially for public intellectuals of the intelligentsia such as the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , whose literature obliquely criticised Stalin and the Stalinist police state . De-Stalinisation also ended Stalin's national-purpose policy of socialism in one country and

23424-506: The distribution of income among landowners, workers, and capitalists. Ricardo saw an inherent conflict between landowners on the one hand and labour and capital on the other. He posited that the growth of population and capital, pressing against a fixed supply of land, pushes up rents and holds down wages and profits. Ricardo was also the first to state and prove the principle of comparative advantage , according to which each country should specialise in producing and exporting goods in that it has

23616-464: The economy can and should be studied in only one way (for example by studying only rational choices), and going even one step further and basically redefining economics as a theory of everything, is peculiar. Questions regarding distribution of resources are found throughout the writings of the Boeotian poet Hesiod and several economic historians have described Hesiod as the "first economist". However,

23808-798: The election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party government in Germany initially caused the Soviet Union to sever diplomatic relations that had been established in the 1920s. In 1938, Stalin accommodated the Nazis and the anti-communist West by not defending Czechoslovakia, allowing Hitler's threat of pre-emptive war for the Sudetenland to annex the land and "rescue the oppressed German peoples" living in Czecho. To challenge Nazi Germany 's bid for European empire and hegemony, Stalin promoted anti-fascist front organisations to encourage European socialists and democrats to join

24000-457: The establishment of the Soviet Union in the former Russian Empire , Bolshevism was the ideological basis. As the only legal vanguard party , it decided almost all policies, which the communist party represented as correct. Because Leninism was the revolutionary means to achieving socialism in the praxis of government, the relationship between ideology and decision-making inclined to pragmatism and most policy decisions were taken in light of

24192-505: The event, the Russian peoples created an economy of barter and black market to counter the Bolshevik government's voiding of the monetary economy . In 1921, the New Economic Policy restored some private enterprise to animate the Russian economy. As part of Lenin's pragmatic compromise with external financial interests in 1918, Bolshevik state capitalism temporarily returned 91% of industry to private ownership or trusts until

24384-619: The first large-scale macroeconometric model , applying the Keynesian thinking systematically to the US economy . Immediately after World War II, Keynesian was the dominant economic view of the United States establishment and its allies, Marxian economics was the dominant economic view of the Soviet Union nomenklatura and its allies. Monetarism appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, its intellectual leader being Milton Friedman . Monetarists contended that monetary policy and other monetary shocks, as represented by

24576-405: The focus on the upper levels of society and use of concepts such as totalitarianism which have obscured the reality of the system. While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally communist state led to communism's widespread association with Marxism–Leninism and the Soviet model , several academics say that Marxism–Leninism in practice was a form of state capitalism. In

24768-536: The following decades, many economists followed Keynes' ideas and expanded on his works. John Hicks and Alvin Hansen developed the IS–LM model which was a simple formalisation of some of Keynes' insights on the economy's short-run equilibrium. Franco Modigliani and James Tobin developed important theories of private consumption and investment , respectively, two major components of aggregate demand . Lawrence Klein built

24960-509: The global economy . Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics , describing "what is", and normative economics , advocating "what ought to be"; between economic theory and applied economics ; between rational and behavioural economics ; and between mainstream economics and heterodox economics . Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, including business , finance , cybersecurity , health care , engineering and government . It

25152-424: The growth in the money stock, was an important cause of economic fluctuations, and consequently that monetary policy was more important than fiscal policy for purposes of stabilisation . Friedman was also skeptical about the ability of central banks to conduct a sensible active monetary policy in practice, advocating instead using simple rules such as a steady rate of money growth. Monetarism rose to prominence in

25344-451: The ideological basis of communist parties around the world which sympathised with China. In the late 1970s, the Peruvian communist party Shining Path developed and synthesised Mao Zedong Thought into Marxism–Leninism–Maoism , a contemporary variety of Marxism–Leninism that is a supposed higher level of Marxism–Leninism that can be applied universally. Following the Sino-Albanian split of

25536-489: The ideology of the post-Stalin Soviet Union. In North Korea , Marxism–Leninism was superseded by Juche in the 1970s. This was made official in 1992 and 2009, when constitutional references to Marxism–Leninism were dropped and replaced with Juche . In 2009, the constitution was quietly amended so that not only did it remove all Marxist–Leninist references present in the first draft but also dropped all references to communism . Juche has been described by Michael Seth as

25728-481: The importance of Stalin's leadership to the Marxist–Leninist ideology. Radek's suggestion failed to catch on, as Stalin as well as CPSU's ideologists preferred to continue the usage of Marxism–Leninism . Marxism–Leninism–Maoism became the name for the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and of other Communist parties , which broke off from national Communist parties, after the Sino–Soviet split , especially when

25920-400: The importance of the study of culture , class consciousness , and subjectivity for an adequate Marxist understanding of society. Western Marxists have thus tended to heavily use Marx's theories of commodity fetishism , ideology , and alienation , and they have expanded on these with new concepts such as reification and cultural hegemony . Engagement with non-Marxist systems of thought

26112-463: The importance of various market failures for the functioning of the economy, as had Keynes. Not least, they proposed various reasons that potentially explained the empirically observed features of price and wage rigidity , usually made to be endogenous features of the models, rather than simply assumed as in older Keynesian-style ones. After decades of often heated discussions between Keynesians, monetarists, new classical and new Keynesian economists,

26304-456: The intent of orders from Moscow, but this allowed their corruption. To Stalin, the correction of such abuses of authority and economic corruption were responsibility of the NKVD. In the 1937–1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, purged from every stratum of Soviet society and every rank and file of the party, of which 681,692 people were killed as enemies of the state . To provide manpower (manual, intellectual and technical) to realise

26496-539: The interests (political, national and ideological) of Asian and European communist parties to the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union. In the 1928–1932 period of the first five-year plan , Stalin effected the dekulakisation of the farmlands of the Soviet Union, a politically radical dispossession of the kulak class of peasant-landlords from the Tsarist social order of monarchy. As Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky recommended amelioration of

26688-544: The issues of the Cold War . Alternative characterisations for traditionalists include "anti-communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper ), "orthodox", and "right-wing"; Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to them as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", "romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the " HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship". According to Haynes and Klehr, "revisionists" are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. A suggested alternative formulation

26880-486: The lack of modern technology which were conditions that orthodox Marxism considered unfavourable to communist revolution. Agricultural Russia was sufficiently developed for establishing capitalism, but it was insufficiently developed for establishing socialism. For Bolshevik Russia, the 1921–1924 period featured the simultaneous occurrence of economic recovery, famine (1921–1922) and a financial crisis (1924). By 1924, considerable economic progress had been achieved and by 1926

27072-426: The largest faction of the communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution . It was the predominant ideology of most communist governments throughout the 20th century. It was developed in Russia by Joseph Stalin and drew on elements of Bolshevism , Leninism , Marxism , and the works of Karl Kautsky . It was the state ideology of the Soviet Union , Soviet satellite states in

27264-416: The late 1930s, the Soviet Union adopted the 1936 Soviet Constitution which ended weighted-voting preferences for workers, promulgated universal suffrage for every man and woman older than 18 years of age and organised the soviets (councils of workers) into two legislatures, namely the Soviet of the Union (representing electoral districts) and the Soviet of Nationalities (representing the ethnic groups of

27456-483: The liberal and conservative political parties who advocated social democracy without a practical plan of action for the Russian society they wished to govern. Leninism allowed the Bolshevik party to assume command of the October Revolution in 1917. Twelve years before the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks had failed to assume control of the February Revolution of 1905 (22 January 1905 – 16 June 1907) because

27648-399: The literature; classical economics , neoclassical economics , Keynesian economics , the neoclassical synthesis , monetarism , new classical economics , New Keynesian economics and the new neoclassical synthesis . Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism Marxism–Leninism ( Russian : Марксизм-Ленинизм , romanized :  Marksizm-Leninizm ) is a communist ideology that became

27840-449: The market's two roles: allocation of resources and distribution of income. The market might be efficient in allocating resources but not in distributing income, he wrote, making it necessary for society to intervene. Value theory was important in classical theory. Smith wrote that the "real price of every thing ... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it". Smith maintained that, with rent and profit, other costs besides wages also enter

28032-437: The most famous passages in all economics," Smith represents every individual as trying to employ any capital they might command for their own advantage, not that of the society, and for the sake of profit, which is necessary at some level for employing capital in domestic industry, and positively related to the value of produce. In this: He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he

28224-406: The northern invaders from the south of Korea and restore the geopolitical status quo ante of the Soviet and American division of Korea at the 38th Parallel of global latitude. Consequent to Chinese military intervention in behalf of North Korea, the magnitude of the infantry warfare reached operational and geographic stalemate (July 1951 – July 1953). Afterwards, the shooting war was ended with

28416-483: The official Soviet interpretation of Marxism , and was taken as example by Marxist–Leninists in other countries; according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia , this text became the foundation of the philosophy of Marxism–Leninism. In 1938, Stalin's official textbook History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) popularised Marxism–Leninism . The internationalism of Marxism–Leninism

28608-470: The periods and countries vary among different ideologies and parties, they generally accept that the Soviet Union was socialist during Stalin's time, Maoists believe that China became state capitalist after Mao's death, and Hoxhaists believe that China was always state capitalist, and uphold the Albania as the only socialist state after the Soviet Union under Stalin. Communist ideologies and ideas have acquired

28800-503: The pessimistic analysis of Malthus (1798). John Stuart Mill (1844) delimited the subject matter further: The science which traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object. Alfred Marshall provided a still widely cited definition in his textbook Principles of Economics (1890) that extended analysis beyond wealth and from

28992-496: The philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the recovery of what they called the " Young Marx " (the more humanistic early works of Marx). While some early Western Marxists were prominent political activists, Western Marxism became predominantly the reserve of university-based philosophers. Since the 1960s, the concept has been closely associated with the New Left . Many Western Marxists were adherents of Marxist humanism , but

29184-667: The policy of War Communism (1918–1921), a regulated market , state-controlled means of distribution and nationalisation of large-scale farms, was adopted to requisite and distribute grain in order to feed industrial workers in the cities whilst the Red Army was fighting the White Army's attempted restoration of the Romanov dynasty as absolute monarchs of Russia. Moreover, the politically unpopular forced grain-requisitions discouraged peasants from farming resulted in reduced harvests and food shortages that provoked labour strikes and food riots. In

29376-510: The political repression by communists as a " Communist democide ", "Communist genocide", "Red Holocaust", or followed the "victims of Communism" narrative. Some of them compared Communism to Nazism and described deaths under Marxist–Leninist regimes (civil wars, deportations, famines, repressions, and wars) as being a direct consequence of Marxism–Leninism. Some of these works, in particular The Black Book of Communism and its 93 or 100 millions figure, are cited by political groups and Members of

29568-432: The praxis of Leninism , the October Revolution veterans Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev said that the true threat to the ideological integrity of the party was Trotsky, who was a personally charismatic political leader as well as the commanding officer of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War and revolutionary partner of Lenin. To thwart Trotsky's likely election to head the party, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev formed

29760-483: The present, modified by substituting the word "wealth" for "goods and services" meaning that wealth may include non-material objects as well. One hundred and thirty years later, Lionel Robbins noticed that this definition no longer sufficed, because many economists were making theoretical and philosophical inroads in other areas of human activity. In his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science , he proposed

29952-409: The price of a commodity. Other classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the ' labour theory of value '. Classical economics focused on the tendency of any market economy to settle in a final stationary state made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size . Marxist (later, Marxian) economics descends from classical economics and it derives from

30144-400: The principles of socialist realism and Russian traditions that Stalin admired were allowed to continue. Foreign policy in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1941 resulted in substantial changes in the Soviet Union's approach to its foreign policy. In 1933, the Marxist–Leninist geopolitical perspective was that the Soviet Union was surrounded by capitalist and anti-communist enemies. As a result,

30336-429: The purest approximation to the truth that has yet been published" on the subject. The publication of Adam Smith 's The Wealth of Nations in 1776, has been described as "the effective birth of economics as a separate discipline." The book identified land, labour, and capital as the three factors of production and the major contributors to a nation's wealth, as distinct from the physiocratic idea that only agriculture

30528-408: The recognition of the class struggle as a dominating principle of a social change and development. In addition, workers (the proletariat ) were to carry out the mission of reconstruction of the society. Conducting a socialist revolution led by what its proponents termed the " vanguard of the proletariat ", defined as the communist party organised hierarchically through democratic centralism ,

30720-539: The resignations of the Old Bolsheviks from government and from the Politburo. Stalin then completed his political purging of the party by exiling Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929. Afterwards, the political opposition to the practical régime of Stalinism was denounced as Trotskyism (Bolshevik–Leninism), described as a deviation from Marxism–Leninism, the state ideology of the Soviet Union. Political developments in

30912-432: The ruling parties hold Marxism–Leninism as their official ideology, although they give it different interpretations in terms of practical policy. Marxism–Leninism is also the ideology of anti-revisionist, Hoxhaist, Maoist, and neo-Stalinist communist parties worldwide. The anti-revisionists criticise some rule of the communist states by claiming that they were state capitalist countries ruled by revisionists . Although

31104-412: The scope and method of economics, emanating from that definition. A body of theory later termed "neoclassical economics" formed from about 1870 to 1910. The term "economics" was popularised by such neoclassical economists as Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley Marshall as a concise synonym for "economic science" and a substitute for the earlier " political economy ". This corresponded to the influence on

31296-505: The secret police NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) to rise above the law and the GPU (State Political Directorate) to use political violence to eliminate any person who might be a threat, whether real, potential, or imagined. As an administrator, Stalin governed the Soviet Union by controlling the formulation of national policy, but he delegated implementation to subordinate functionaries. Such freedom of action allowed local communist functionaries much discretion to interpret

31488-486: The so-called Lucas critique and the presentation of real business cycle models . During the 1980s, a group of researchers appeared being called New Keynesian economists , including among others George Akerlof , Janet Yellen , Gregory Mankiw and Olivier Blanchard . They adopted the principle of rational expectations and other monetarist or new classical ideas such as building upon models employing micro foundations and optimizing behaviour, but simultaneously emphasised

31680-444: The source of the word economy. Joseph Schumpeter described 16th and 17th century scholastic writers, including Tomás de Mercado , Luis de Molina , and Juan de Lugo , as "coming nearer than any other group to being the 'founders' of scientific economics" as to monetary , interest , and value theory within a natural-law perspective. Two groups, who later were called "mercantilists" and "physiocrats", more directly influenced

31872-506: The split was finalised by 1963. The Italian Communist Party was mainly influenced by Antonio Gramsci , who gave a more democratic implication than Lenin's for why workers remained passive. A key difference between Maoism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism is that peasants should be the bulwark of the revolutionary energy, which is led by the working class. Three common Maoist values are revolutionary populism , pragmatism, and dialectics . According to Rachel Walker, "Marxism–Leninism"

32064-406: The state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Jean-Baptiste Say (1803), distinguishing the subject matter from its public-policy uses, defined it as the science of production, distribution, and consumption of wealth . On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle (1849) coined " the dismal science " as an epithet for classical economics , in this context, commonly linked to

32256-408: The subject of mathematical methods used in the natural sciences . Neoclassical economics systematically integrated supply and demand as joint determinants of both price and quantity in market equilibrium, influencing the allocation of output and income distribution. It rejected the classical economics' labour theory of value in favour of a marginal utility theory of value on the demand side and

32448-402: The subject or different views among economists. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1776) defined what was then called political economy as "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations", in particular as: a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ... [and] to supply

32640-471: The subject": Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. Robbins described the definition as not classificatory in "pick[ing] out certain kinds of behaviour" but rather analytical in "focus[ing] attention on a particular aspect of behaviour, the form imposed by the influence of scarcity ." He affirmed that previous economists have usually centred their studies on

32832-773: The subsequent development of the subject. Both groups were associated with the rise of economic nationalism and modern capitalism in Europe. Mercantilism was an economic doctrine that flourished from the 16th to 18th century in a prolific pamphlet literature, whether of merchants or statesmen. It held that a nation's wealth depended on its accumulation of gold and silver. Nations without access to mines could obtain gold and silver from trade only by selling goods abroad and restricting imports other than of gold and silver. The doctrine called for importing inexpensive raw materials to be used in manufacturing goods, which could be exported, and for state regulation to impose protective tariffs on foreign manufactured goods and prohibit manufacturing in

33024-430: The successful October Revolution in Russia had facilitated the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and revolutions and interventions in Hungary (1918–1920) which produced the First Hungarian Republic and the Hungarian Soviet Republic . In Berlin, the German government aided by Freikorps units fought and defeated the Spartacist uprising which began as a general strike . In Munich, the local Freikorps fought and defeated

33216-441: The term also encompasses figures and schools of thought that were strongly critical of humanism and the dialectics of Hegel. In the 1920s, the Third International disparagingly branded certain Marxists of the period as " West European " theorists. By 1930, one such figure, Karl Korsch , had begun to refer to himself as a "Western Communist". Maurice Merleau-Ponty popularized the term Western Marxism with his book Adventures of

33408-413: The territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and the political integrity of Stalin's model of a Marxist–Leninist state, when the Nazis were initially welcomed as liberators by the anti-communist and nationalist populations in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic , the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic . The anti-Soviet nationalists' collaboration with

33600-440: The theoretical contributions of Friedrich Engels 's Anti-Dühring as a distortion of Marx. While Engels sees dialectics as a universal and scientific law of nature, Western Marxists do not view Marxism as a general science, but as a theory of the cultural and historical structure of society. Many Western Marxists believe the philosophical key to Marxism is found in the works of the Young Marx , where his encounters with Hegel,

33792-413: The time, orthodox Marxists claimed that Russia was ripe for the development of capitalism, not yet for socialism. Lenin advocated the need of the development of a large corps of technical intelligentsia to assist the industrial development of Russia and advance the Marxist economic stages of development as it had too few technical experts at the time. In that vein, Lenin explained it as follows: "Our poverty

33984-500: The truths of philosophy until their revolutionary transformation into reality. Their work was met with hostility by the Third International, which saw Marxism as a universal science of history and nature. Nonetheless, this style of Marxism was taken up by Germany's Frankfurt School in the 1930s. The Prison Notebooks of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci , written during this period, but not published until much later, are also classified as belonging to Western Marxism. Ernst Bloch

34176-430: The wake of the First World War . He argues that the tradition represents a divorce between socialist theory and working-class practice that resulted from the defeat and stagnation of the Western working class after 1920. Western Marxism traces its origins to 1923, when György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy were published. In these books, Lukács and Korsch proffer

34368-467: The war is not winnable or if the expected costs outweigh the benefits, the deciding actors (assuming they are rational) may never go to war (a decision ) but rather explore other alternatives. Economics cannot be defined as the science that studies wealth, war, crime, education, and any other field economic analysis can be applied to; but, as the science that studies a particular common aspect of each of those subjects (they all use scarce resources to attain

34560-404: The word Oikos , the Greek word from which the word economy derives, was used for issues regarding how to manage a household (which was understood to be the landowner, his family, and his slaves ) rather than to refer to some normative societal system of distribution of resources, which is a more recent phenomenon. Xenophon , the author of the Oeconomicus , is credited by philologues for being

34752-460: The work of Karl Marx . The first volume of Marx's major work, Das Kapital , was published in 1867. Marx focused on the labour theory of value and theory of surplus value . Marx wrote that they were mechanisms used by capital to exploit labour. The labour theory of value held that the value of an exchanged commodity was determined by the labour that went into its production, and the theory of surplus value demonstrated how workers were only paid

34944-559: The world. With that, Stalin's application of Marxism–Leninism to the situation of the Soviet Union became Stalinism , the official state ideology until his death in 1953. In Marxist political discourse, Stalinism, denoting and connoting the theory and praxis of Stalin, has two usages, namely praise of Stalin by Marxist–Leninists who believe Stalin successfully developed Lenin's legacy, and criticism of Stalin by Marxist–Leninists and other Marxists who repudiate Stalin's political purges, social-class repressions and bureaucratic terrorism. As

35136-483: Was created after Vladimir Lenin 's death by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, continuing to be the official state ideology after de-Stalinisation and of other Marxist–Leninist states, the basis for elements of Marxism–Leninism predate this. The philosophy of Marxism–Leninism originated as the pro-active, political praxis of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in realising political change in Tsarist Russia. Lenin's leadership transformed

35328-454: Was expressed in supporting revolutions in other countries, initially through the Communist International and then through the concept of socialist-leaning countries after de-Stalinisation . The establishment of other communist states after World War II resulted in Sovietisation , and these states tended to follow the Soviet Marxist–Leninist model of five-year plans and rapid industrialisation , political centralisation, and repression. During

35520-440: Was hailed to be a historical necessity by Marxist–Leninists. Moreover, the introduction of the proletarian dictatorship was advocated and classes deemed hostile were to be repressed. In the 1920s, it was first defined and formulated by Joseph Stalin based on his understanding of orthodox Marxism and Leninism . In 1934, Karl Radek suggested the formulation Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism in an article in Pravda to stress

35712-560: Was in the control of localities, often with local leaders interpreting the policies in a way that served themselves best. This abuse of power by local leaders exacerbated the violent purges and terror campaigns carried out by Stalin against members of the party deemed to be traitors. With the Great Purge (1936–1938), Stalin rid himself of internal enemies in the party and rid the Soviet Union of any alleged socially dangerous and counterrevolutionary person who might have offered legitimate political opposition to Marxism–Leninism. Stalin allowed

35904-421: Was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) used the concept of diminishing returns to explain low living standards. Human population , he argued, tended to increase geometrically, outstripping the production of food, which increased arithmetically. The force of

36096-415: Was one of disillusionment in the Bolshevik party over Lenin's leadership, with members opposing him for scandals involving his expropriations and methods of raising money for the party. This political defeat was aggravated by Tsar Nicholas II 's political reformations of Imperial Russian government. In practise, the formalities of political participation (the electoral plurality of a multi-party system with

36288-892: Was productive. Smith discusses potential benefits of specialisation by division of labour , including increased labour productivity and gains from trade , whether between town and country or across countries. His "theorem" that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market" has been described as the "core of a theory of the functions of firm and industry " and a "fundamental principle of economic organization." To Smith has also been ascribed "the most important substantive proposition in all of economics" and foundation of resource-allocation theory—that, under competition , resource owners (of labour, land, and capital) seek their most profitable uses, resulting in an equal rate of return for all uses in equilibrium (adjusted for apparent differences arising from such factors as training and unemployment). In an argument that includes "one of

36480-437: Was recognised as well as the traditional Keynesian insistence that fiscal policy could also play an influential role in affecting aggregate demand . Methodologically, the synthesis led to a new class of applied models, known as dynamic stochastic general equilibrium or DSGE models, descending from real business cycles models, but extended with several new Keynesian and other features. These models proved useful and influential in

36672-525: Was replaced with proletarian internationalism , by way of which Khrushchev re-committed the Soviet Union to permanent revolution to realise world communism . In that geopolitical vein, Khrushchev presented de-Stalinisation as the restoration of Leninism as the state ideology of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological bad news for the People's Republic of China because Soviet and Russian interpretations and applications of Leninism and orthodox Marxism contradicted

36864-476: Was repressed, especially minority religious groups. Education was transformed. Under Lenin, the education system allowed relaxed discipline in schools that became based upon Marxist theory, but Stalin reversed this in 1934 with a conservative approach taken with the reintroduction of formal learning, the use of examinations and grades, the assertion of full authority of the teacher and the introduction of school uniforms. Art and culture became strictly regulated under

#808191