Marxism postulates dialectical materialism as the key to and the essence of reality. While applicable to philosophy, science, and in fact to everything, dialectical materialism exercised its greatest impact on the study - and later manipulation - of human society, on that combination of sociology, history, and economics that represented Marx's own specialty. "Materialism" asserts that only matter exists; in Marxism it also led to a stress on the priority of the economic factor in man's life, social organization, and history.
In the social production of their means of existence men enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of these productive relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.
The fundamental division in every society is that between the exploiters and the exploited, between the owners of the means of production and those who have to sell their labor to the owners to earn a living. A given political system, religion, and culture all reflect and support the economic set-up, protecting the interests of the exploiters. The base, to repeat, determines the superstructure.
"Dialectical" adds a dynamic quality to materialism, defining the process of the evolution of reality. For the Marxists insist that everything changes all the time. What is more, that change follows the laws of the dialectic and thus presents a rigorously correct and scientifically established pattern. Following Hegel, Marx and Engels postulated a three-step sequence of change: the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. A given condition, the thesis, leads to opposition within itself, the antithesis, and the tension between the two is resolved by a leap to a new condition, the synthesis. The synthesis in turn becomes a thesis producing a new antithesis, and
the dialectic continues. The historical dialectic expresses itself in class struggle: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." As an antithesis grows within a thesis, "the material productive forces of a society," always developing, "come into contradiction with the existing productive relationships," and social strife ensues. Eventually revolution leads to a transformation of society, only to become itself the new established order producing a new antithesis. In this manner the Italian towns and the urban classes in general revolted successfully against feudalism to inaugurate the modern, bourgeois period of European history. That period in turn ran its prescribed course, culminating in the full flowering of capitalism. But, again inevitably, the capitalists, the bourgeois, evoked their antithesis, their "grave-diggers," the industrial workers or the proletariat. In the words of Marx foretelling the coming revolution:
The expropriation is brought about by the operation of the immanent laws of capitalist production, by the centralization of capital… The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This husk bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Interestingly if illogically, the victorious proletarian revolution would mark the end of all exploitation of man by man and the establishment of a just socialist society. In a sense, humanity would return to prehistory, when, according to Marx and the Marxists, primeval communities knew no social differentiation or antagonism.
Leninism
Lenin's theoretical contribution to Marxism could in no sense rival the contributions of the two originators of the doctrine. Still, he did his best to adapt Marxism to the changing conditions in the world as well as to his own experience with the Second International and to Russian circumstances, and he produced certain important additions to and modifications of the basic teaching. More to the point for students of Soviet history is the fact that these amendments became gospel in the Soviet Union, where the entire ideology has frequently been referred to as "Marxism-Leninism."
Among the views developed by Lenin, those on the party, the revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, together with those on the peasantry and on imperialism, deserve special attention. As already mentioned, it was a disagreement on the nature of the party that in 1903 split the Russian Social Democrats into the Lenin-led Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks. Lenin insisted on a tightly knit body of dedicated professional revolutionaries, with clear lines of command and a military discipline. The Mensheviks, by contrast, preferred a larger and looser organization. With characteristic determination and believing in the imminent worldwide overthrow of the capitalist system, Lenin decided in 1917 that he and his party could then stage a successful revolution in Russia, although at first virtually no one, even among the Bolsheviks, agreed. After the Bolsheviks did seize power in the October Revolution, Lenin proceeded to emphasize the role of the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin's revolutionary optimism stemmed in part from his reconsideration of the role of the peasantry in bringing about the establishment of the new order. Marx, Engels, and Marxists in general have neglected the peasants in their teachings and relegated them, as petty proprietors, to the bourgeois camp. Lenin, however, came to the conclusion that, if properly led by the proletariat and the party, poor peasants could be a revolutionary force: indeed later he proclaimed even the middle peasants to be of some value to the socialist state. The same April Theses that urged the transformation of the bourgeois revolution into a socialist one stated that poor peasants were to be part of the new revolutionary wave.
Lenin expanded Marxism in another, even more drastic manner. In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916 and published in the spring of 1917, he tried to bring Marxism up to date to account for such recent developments as intense colonial rivalry, international crises, and finally the First World War. He concluded that in its ultimate form capitalism becomes imperialism, with monopolies and financial capital ruling the world. Cartels replace free competition, and export of capital becomes more important than export of goods. An economic and political partitioning of the world follows in the form of a constant struggle for economic expansion, spheres of influence, colonies, and the like. International alliances and counteralliances arise. The disparity between the development of the productive forces of the participants and their shares of the world is settled among capitalist states by wars. Thus, instead of the original Marxist vision of the victorious socialist revolution as the simple expropriation of a few supercapitalists, Lenin described the dying stage of capitalism as an age of gigantic conflicts, relating it effectively to the twentieth century. Still more important, this externalization, so to speak, of the capitalist crisis brought colonies and underdeveloped areas in general prominently into the picture. The capitalists were opposed not only by their own proletariats, but also by the alien peoples whom they exploited, more or less regardless of the social order and the stage of development of those peoples. Therefore, the proletarians and the colonial peoples were natural allies. Lenin, it is worth noting, paid much more attention to Asia than did Western Marxists. Eventually