Lenin added the concept that the road to communism did not need to wait for the creation of a proletariat of exploited workers to rise up and seize the means of production. He believed that a properly coordinated centralized group of professional revolutionaries could do so politically and this is exactly what he and the Bolsheviks did in the October Revolution of 1917. The so-called Communist Revolution was not one that Marx had originally envisioned.
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Lenin had to find a way to validate the Bolshevik revolution. He therefore revised Marxism to justify his quest for power in the old Russia. It would have been interesting to know what Marx thought about Leninism if he was alive during the Bolshevik revolution.Taking a similar view, a better question would be "What did Lenin take away from Marxism to rationalize the Bolshevik revolution and his policies that followed, such as the NEP
(new economic policy).
Lenin did not add ideas to Marxism, he distorted Marx’s ideas. Marx argued that only class-conscious workers could abolish the wages system and establish a classless society. Lenin thought workers needed to be led by a vanguard; the result was a state capitalist Dictatorship. There is no such thing as Marxism-Leninism.
communism Bolshevism and/or Leninism combines the ideas of Marx and Lenin although Lenin has changed some of Marx's ideas around. Thus there is a distinction between Bolshevism/Leninism and Marxism.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Nikolai Chernyevksy and Georgii Plekhanov also greatly influenced Lenin's revolutionary beliefs. Chernyevsky wrote the revolutionary novel, "What Is To Be Done" in 1862. Lenin was so influenced by this novel that he gave his own revolutionary pamphlet the same name. He even styled himself along the lines of the hero of the book, a man named Rakhmetev. One author of Russian history stated that Lenin read this novel five times in one summer. Plekhanov wrote a book called "On the Question of Developing a Monistic View of History" in 1895. This is the book that brought Marxism to Russia. For this reason, Plekhanov is often referred to as the founder of Russian Marxism.
During the Russian Revolution, propaganda used included dissemination of revolutionary ideas, teachings of Marxism, and theoretical and practical knowledge of Marxism economics.
Lenin adapted Karl Marx's ideas about communism and socialism although with some differences. After the Revolution and during the Russian Civil War, Lenin imposed a socialist system in place of the former capitalist system and he imposed what was called 'war communism' on the country.
Paul McCarthy