Marxism and the Leninist Revolutionary Model

The study sets forth a comparative analysis of Marxist and Leninist revolutionary theory. It treats the influence of the Hegelian dialectic, the economic and political propositions of historical materialism, and the role of the Communist vanguard in the revolutionary movement and Communist party cadre political rule in the socialist state. Coverage includes Marx and Lenin's notion of the role of revolutionary political allies, the distinction between agitation and propaganda, and the outcome of permanent revolution in the revolutionary movement. Coverage also includes Lenin's notion of professional revolutionaries, the orthodoxy and discipline of democratic centralism, and the two-camp theory. Attention is drawn to Lenin's notion of the dialectical relation between democracy and dictatorship whereby dictatorship as the self-negation of democracy serves as the instrumental condition of the negation of its own self-negation in the higher truth of democracy as majoritarian class rule. Special treatment is accorded to Marx's theory of the overaccumulation of capital as the basis of economic imperialism, and how Lenin in his wartime writings conflates this Marxist teaching to his revolutionary political theory of the struggle for national self-determination, resulting in socialism in one country.