What is Leninism? | Ideology explained

This video is an explanation of Leninism. Please note that Marxism-Leninism is just another word for the same thing so there will be no separate video on that. In my video I explain what Leninism is, how it came about and how it worked. I discuss the unique situation of Russia before the first world war along with the ways in which the October revolution took place. I also explain the concept of a vanguard party. I explain that leninism is a way to bring forth a socialist revolution without mass class consciousness Old video: Sources: –Leninism Patreon: Subreddit: Twitter: E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@ The song in the outro was produced by 08 (who gave me no way to credit them), you can listen to the whole remix on my second channel: Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:28 Marxism 1:50 Russian conditions 2:15 Leninism Then 3:53 Leninism Now 4:18 Critiques 5:00 Outro Transcript: Hello everybody, today we are learning about Leninism. Leninism is the historically most prominent form of real-world socialism, as such there are many things to be said about it and many people have many opinions in it. The short version is that, it’s a way to bring forth a revolution which replaces capitalism with socialism without large scale class consciousness. It’s also called Marxism-Leninism, so let’s start with the first half. Marxism itself is a big topic, all we need to know for this video is that Marx believed that for a variety of reasons capitalism as a system would eventually collapse. He believed that one day the industrialized workers of the world will notice that capitalists aren’t actually generating any value and that they only take from the workers, at which point the workers will start a revolution and take control of the economy themselves, this process is known as seizing the means of production. An economy in which the workers then own the machines is called socialist. Note for that revolution to happen you need a large worker’s population, meaning not a feudalist state but industrialized workers in an industrialized society, who are aware that they are being exploited. That awareness is called class consciousness. After the workers take over, they would then be hyper productive as they produce for themselves rather than someone else and eventually that will lead to everything being produced so much that it is super abundant, which means there is more than we can ever need, at this point money no longer has value and work itself will become optional, this stage is called communism. I will leave the judgement of whether this can actually happen up to the viewer. Let’s now have a look at the situation Lenin found himself in, in Russia in 1917. The Russian economy was practically feudalistic with barely any industrialized factories, therefore no industrial workers to carry a revolution. So instead of squeezing the square material conditions of Russia into the round hole of a Marxist revolution Lenin started improvising. First, the workers would not run the revolution because they didn’t know about Marx yet. So instead, Lenin would form a party with all the educated people who knew about Marx and they would start a revolution instead. After having taken power they would then transform the economy into a more industrialized one and educate the people on Marx. Eventually the party and the state would become unnecessary and the workers would take over, after which they would reach communism. And the theory worked well for Russia at the time, after a revolution Lenin and his party, who were called the Bolsheviks seized power and began to transform the country and economy. Of course, they were immediately at war with the capitalist nations who tried to destroy the revolution. To be able to effectively fight this war Lenin adapted the soviet state to be more centralized so resources could be allocated better. After the revolutionary war Lenin established many different policies which were in line with his goals, this means he began to transform the economy and he began to educate the peasants on Marxist theory. Of course, he made some mistakes in this, but this video isn’t about that. Because the USSR was standing alone as the only socialist nation in the world it also became pretty authoritarian and focused on it’s survival with a large army, gulags and secret police.