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Marxist Self-Education​

Marxism is studied through primary sources. This section brings together foundational works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, arranged by theoretical subject.

Works are best read in chronological order; the order of the subject sections is less important. The general recommendation is to proceed from the simple to the complex. Engels and Stalin wrote more works of popular exposition, which are easier to follow; Marx and Lenin require a deeper knowledge of the context.

The most difficult work of Marxist theory, Capital, has its own section, with supplementary materials: Rosenberg's commentaries, works by Ilyenkov and Rosenthal on the dialectical method, and the correspondence between Marx and Engels from the entire period during which they worked on the book.

Studying primary sources requires some preparation. A grounding in formal logic is recommended when studying dialectics. Knowledge of history is essential: the bourgeois revolutions, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the imperialist wars.

Study of the classics is essential. We strongly advise against studying Marxism through paraphrases or popularizations that offer ready-made conclusions.

Videos and language models are no substitute for working with texts. Such content is useful insofar as it leads to reading Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin and studying the history of the workers' movement. For example: Strela TV (in Russian) – talks by professional Marxist historians on the twentieth century.

1. Introduction to Marxism​

Marxism is the science of the laws governing the development of society and a theory of its revolutionary transformation. It was founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century and further developed by V. I. Lenin.

The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism​

This formulation is Lenin's; it is the title of his 1913 work. The three sources of Marxism are German classical philosophy, English political economy, and French utopian socialism. Its three component parts are philosophy, political economy, and scientific communism.

Sources. German classical philosophy: the dialectics of Hegel and the materialism of Feuerbach. English political economy: Smith and Ricardo, with their labour theory of value. French utopian socialism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen.

Component parts. Philosophy: dialectical and historical materialism. Political economy is the science of the relations of production; its cornerstone is the theory of surplus value. Scientific communism is the theory of the proletariat's class struggle, the socialist revolution, and the paths to building socialism and communism.

The Main Ideas of Marxism​

Marxism is usually presented in six propositions.

The materialist conception of history. Social being determines consciousness. Society is based on the mode of production; politics, law, morality, philosophy, and religion make up the superstructure over the economic base.

Class struggle. A class is defined by its relation to the means of production, not by income level or occupation. Under capitalism, the principal classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Surplus value. The wage-worker sells labour-power and receives its value. In the labour process, they create more value than that. The difference, surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist without compensation.

The inevitability of crises. The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is between the social character of production and the private form of appropriation. It manifests itself in the anarchy of production and periodic economic crises – crises of overproduction.

Revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Between capitalism and socialism lies the transitional period of revolutionary transformation. Its state is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat; the state is understood as an apparatus of class rule.

The two phases of communism. The first is socialism, with distribution according to work. The higher phase is communism, with distribution according to need; classes disappear.

Marxism and Marxism-Leninism​

Marxism-Leninism is Marxism in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. Stalin gave this definition in The Foundations of Leninism (1924).

Lenin studied capitalism's transition to its monopoly stage and, on the basis of the law of uneven development, derived the possibility of revolution's victory initially in one country. He further developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and worked out the theory of a party of a new type.

For more, see the articles "Marxism" and "Marxism-Leninism".

How Marxism Differs from the Idea of Social Justice​

Marxism does not derive the necessity of a new society from ideas of abstract justice. It derives it from an analysis of the contradictions of the existing mode of production. The utopians designed an ideal system and argued for its rationality; Marx showed that capitalism itself generates the force that will destroy it.

Class contradictions cannot be resolved by any redistribution of income. As long as the means of production remain in private ownership, the mechanism for appropriating surplus value persists at any level of wages and social guarantees. The transition to socialism requires the working class to take state power and socialize the means of production. To deny this proposition is to revise the doctrine.

A Starter Reading List​

2. The Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism​

The philosophy of Marxism is dialectical materialism extended to the understanding of the history of society as historical materialism. It answers the question of the relation between thought and being as follows: the world is material, exists independently of consciousness, and is knowable; consciousness is a reflection of objective reality. Dialectics provides the method: to consider phenomena in their development, interconnection, and internal contradictions.

Marxist philosophy arose as the theoretical foundation of the working class's revolutionary struggle. Lenin explicitly raised the question of the party character of philosophy: every philosophical system expresses the interests of a particular class.

Dialectical Materialism​

Here materialism is joined with dialectics. Hegel developed dialectics on an idealist basis, as the self-development of spirit. Marx placed it on a materialist foundation: development takes place in material reality itself, and thought reflects that development.

The main laws of dialectics:

• The unity and struggle of opposites – the principal law, which reveals the source of development. Every phenomenon contains an internal contradiction; the struggle between its opposing sides is the driving force of change.
• The transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes – development proceeds not smoothly but through the accumulation of quantitative shifts, leading to a leap-like change in quality.
• The negation of the negation – the new negates the old while retaining its positive content; development proceeds neither in a circle nor in a straight line, but in a spiral.

The categories of dialectics include essence and phenomenon, content and form, necessity and chance, possibility and actuality, cause and effect.

Lenin developed questions of knowledge in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: the theory of reflection and an analysis of attempts to replace materialism with subjective idealism under the guise of the latest natural science.

Further reading: methodological literature and study guides on dialectical materialism, tests, and problem books.

Historical Materialism​

Historical materialism is the application of dialectical materialism to the life of society. Its starting proposition is that it is not people's consciousness that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.

At every stage, society takes the form of a socio-economic formation. Its foundation is the base – the totality of relations of production, which develop independently of people's will and correspond to the attained level of the productive forces. Rising above the base is the superstructure: the state, law, political institutions, morality, philosophy, art, and religion.

The superstructure is generated by the base and actively serves to strengthen it, while possessing relative independence. Engels specifically addressed this question in letters of the 1890s, rejecting the vulgar reduction of all social life directly to economics.

The development of the productive forces comes into conflict with the existing relations of production. An epoch of social revolution ensues, and the formation changes through class struggle. Primitive communal society gave way to slave-owning society, then to feudalism and capitalism; capitalism is superseded by the communist formation, whose first phase is socialism.

3. Capitalism and Its Crisis​

Marxism views capitalism as a historically developed mode of production, with its own laws of motion and its own limit. The task of political economy is to uncover these laws, show where profit comes from, why crises recur periodically, and why the system generates the force that will destroy it.

The Political Economy of Capitalism​

The starting point of the analysis is the commodity. Every commodity has use-value (the capacity to satisfy a need) and exchange-value. The magnitude of value is determined by the socially necessary labour-time expended in production.

Exploitation and Surplus Value​

The capitalist buys a particular commodity on the market – labour-power – and pays its value, that is, the value of the means necessary for its reproduction. But the consumption of labour-power, that is, labour itself, creates more value than labour-power is worth. The working day is divided into necessary labour-time, during which the value of labour-power is reproduced, and surplus labour-time, during which surplus value is created and appropriated by the capitalist without compensation.

Exploitation under capitalism does not involve a violation of the rules of exchange. Exchange takes place at value; everything proceeds according to the laws of capitalist production itself. Stalin formulated the fundamental economic law of capitalism as securing the maximum profit through the exploitation, ruin, and impoverishment of the majority of the population of a given country; the subjugation and systematic plunder of the peoples of other countries; the militarization of the economy; and wars.

The Accumulation of Capital​

Surplus value is not consumed in its entirety; part of it is capitalized, that is, converted into new capital. This is accumulation. The organic composition of capital rises: the share of the means of production grows faster than the share of living labour. This gives rise to a reserve army of labour and concentrates wealth at one pole while poverty grows at the other.

As production expands, labour devoted to supervision and management becomes distinct. In Volume III of Capital, Marx showed its dual character: on the one hand, it is a function of all cooperative labour, necessary under any system; on the other, it is a function of exploitation, capital's supervision of those it exploits.

Economic Crises​

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is between the social character of production and the capitalist form of private appropriation. Production is carried on anarchically, without an overall plan; crises of overproduction periodically break out. Commodities go unsold not because needs have been met, but because the mass of the population lacks effective demand. In Volume III of Capital, Marx also shows the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Further reading: methodological literature and study guides to Capital.

Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism​

By the turn of the twentieth century, free-competition capitalism had passed into its monopoly stage. Lenin studied it in his 1916 work and identified five principal features of imperialism:

1. The concentration of production and capital has reached a stage at which monopolies emerge and play a decisive role in economic life.
2. The merging of bank capital with industrial capital and the formation, on this basis, of finance capital and a financial oligarchy.
3. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities, acquires particular importance.
4. The formation of international monopolist associations of capitalists, which divide the world among themselves.
5. The completion of the territorial division of the earth among the biggest powers.

Imperialism is the highest and final stage of capitalism, the eve of the socialist revolution. The world has been divided among monopolies and great powers; further redivision is possible only by force, hence the inevitability of imperialist wars. Imperialism is characterized by parasitism and decay: part of the bourgeoisie lives on income from capital exports, while superprofits are used to bribe the upper stratum of the working class – the labour aristocracy – which provides opportunism with its social base.

From the law of uneven development among capitalist countries in the imperialist epoch, Lenin derived the possibility that the socialist revolution might triumph initially in a few countries, or even in one country alone.

4. Proletarian Power​

The question of the state distinguishes Marxism from reformism. It determines whether the task is to gradually improve the existing system or to replace it through revolution. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in the summer of 1917, restoring the conclusion that the bourgeois state machine must be smashed, a conclusion opportunists had expunged from Marxism.

The Marxist Theory of the State​

Origin. The state has not always existed. It arose at a certain stage in the development of production, when society was divided into classes with irreconcilably opposed interests. Engels showed this in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884): the state is a product of the irreconcilability of class contradictions and an instrument of rule by the economically dominant class.

Essence. The state does not stand above society or reconcile classes. It is a special organization of force – an apparatus for the suppression of one class by another, with a standing army, police, bureaucracy, courts, and prisons. Bourgeois democracy, despite the breadth of its formal rights, remains a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: actual power is determined by ownership of the means of production, not by voting procedures.

Smashing the old machine. Drawing on the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx concluded that the working class cannot simply take hold of the ready-made state machine and set it in motion for its own purposes. It must be smashed and replaced by a state of a new type – Soviets, which combine legislative and executive work, with all officials elected and subject to recall.

The dictatorship of the proletariat. Between capitalism and communism lies a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other, and the state of this period is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. It means suppressing the resistance of the overthrown exploiting classes, the working class leading the working masses, and building a new economic order. For the working majority it means the broadest democracy; for the exploiting minority, coercion.

The withering away of the state. The state is neither abolished by decree nor simply done away with. It withers away as classes disappear and the need for suppression falls away. The proletarian state withers away; the bourgeois state is overthrown. Stalin clarified the question in light of practice: as long as capitalist encirclement persists, the socialist state does not grow weaker but stronger, retaining its function of defending the country.

Administration and workers' control. Lenin's mechanism for the state's withering away is to reduce the functions of accounting and supervision to operations within the capacity of anyone who can read and write, and to have everyone perform them in turn. For a time, everyone becomes a "bureaucrat" – and therefore no one can become a bureaucrat. Hence the election and recall of officials, workers' control over production, and the requirement that a manager be paid no more than a worker.

The Party, Strategy, and Tactics​

The working class cannot take power without organization. The spontaneous workers' movement develops only trade-union consciousness: the desire to improve the terms on which labour-power is sold within the framework of capitalism. Socialist consciousness is brought into the movement through the organized work of the party; otherwise bourgeois ideology takes its place, since there is no third ideology in a class society.

Hence Lenin's theory of a party of a new type: a disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries, built on democratic centralism – election and accountability of bodies from the bottom up, the binding force of majority decisions on the minority and of higher bodies' decisions on lower ones, and unity in action alongside freedom of discussion before a decision is made.

Strategy determines the main blow at a given stage of the revolution and the alignment of class forces: who is an ally, who can be neutralized, and who is the opponent. Tactics concern forms of struggle and organization over a shorter period. Lenin insisted that a revolutionary must master every form of struggle, including parliamentary work and work in reactionary trade unions, and know how to make compromises without surrendering principles. He examined the rejection of this approach in the name of intransigence in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920).

The Historical Analysis of Revolutions​

Marx and Engels analyze events as they unfold, identifying the movement of real class forces behind the political struggles of parties and slogans. The Eighteenth Brumaire offers a classic analysis of Bonapartism. The Civil War in France examines the experience of the Paris Commune, the first attempt in history to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, from which Marx concluded that the working class cannot simply take hold of the ready-made state machine.

5. Socialism​

Socialism is the first, lower phase of the communist socio-economic formation. Marx distinguished socialism and communism as two phases of the new society in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875); all subsequent development of the question rests on this text.

Socialism and Communism: What Is the Difference?​

Both phases share the absence of private ownership of the means of production and of exploiting classes, as well as the planned organization of the economy in the interests of society as a whole.

Socialism emerges from capitalism and bears its birthmarks. The means of production have been socialized, but the productive forces are not yet developed enough to satisfy every need. Distribution according to work therefore persists: from each according to their ability, to each according to their work. Those who work more and better receive more. Marx calls this equal right applied to unequal people; in essence, it is still bourgeois right, although exploitation has already ended. Differences between town and country and between mental and manual labour still persist. Classes remain – the working class and the friendly, non-antagonistic collective-farm peasantry. The state also persists.

Communism presupposes such a level of development of the productive forces that labour ceases to be merely a means of life and becomes life's prime want, while the springs of social wealth flow more abundantly. The principle then becomes possible: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Classes disappear, the opposition between mental and manual labour disappears, and the state withers away.

The transition from the first phase to the second takes place through the gradual maturation of the necessary conditions: the growth of the productive forces, a change in the character of labour, and the education of a new person.

The Transitional Period and the Building of Socialism​

Between capitalism and socialism lies the transitional period: the period in which the proletariat, having taken power, expropriates the bourgeoisie, socializes the means of production, and lays the foundations of a planned economy. The state of this period is the dictatorship of the proletariat. In a country where small-scale peasant production predominated, millions of small proprietors had to be drawn into socialist construction. Lenin developed this approach in his cooperative plan and the policy of the alliance between town and country.

From the law of uneven development under imperialism, Lenin derived the possibility that socialism might triumph initially in one country. This conclusion became the subject of a sharp inner-party struggle in the second half of the 1920s.

The political economy of socialism has been developed less fully than the political economy of capitalism. The principal text is Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952), which examines the operation of the law of value under socialism, the persistence of commodity production in a particular form in the absence of private ownership, the relation between the two forms of social ownership, and the fundamental economic law of socialism.

6. The Struggle Against Hostile Currents​

Marxism took shape and developed through struggle. Every one of its propositions met opposition: bourgeois scholarship attacked it from without; opportunism arose from within, among currents calling themselves socialist. Lenin pointed out that the struggle against opportunism within the workers' movement is a necessary condition for the struggle against the bourgeoisie outside it.

What Is Opportunism?​

Opportunism is the adaptation of a workers' party's policies to the interests of the bourgeoisie, sacrificing the class's fundamental tasks for immediate gains. Lenin showed its material roots: imperialist superprofits enable the bourgeoisie to bribe the upper stratum of the working class, and this labour aristocracy becomes opportunism's social base within the movement. The collapse of the Second International in 1914, when socialist parties voted for their governments' war credits, was a direct consequence of this accommodation.

Main Forms of Opportunism​

Revisionism is the revision of Marxism's fundamental propositions while formally professing allegiance to it. Its classical form was set out by Bernstein at the turn of the twentieth century: rejection of dialectics in philosophy, of the theories of impoverishment and collapse in economics, and of revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in politics. It came down to the formula: "The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing."

Reformism denies the necessity of revolution, holding that the accumulation of piecemeal improvements within capitalism will lead to socialism. Marxism rejects turning the struggle for reforms into an end in itself, or a substitute for the struggle for power.

Social-chauvinism is the abandonment of proletarian internationalism and support for imperialist war under the slogan of "defence of the fatherland." It is the extreme form of opportunism, an open defection to the side of the bourgeoisie.

"Left" opportunism means rejecting compromises and work in reactionary trade unions and parliaments, and replacing analysis of the situation with revolutionary phrase-making. Lenin examined it in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920).

Trotskyism diverges from Leninism on the possibility of building socialism in one country, the alliance of the working class with the peasantry, and the character of party discipline. The theory of permanent revolution was set against Lenin's theory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution growing over into a socialist revolution; Stalin's works Trotskyism or Leninism? (1924) and Concerning Questions of Leninism (1926) address the dispute.

Revisionism, reformism, and social-chauvinism are grouped under the term "Right opportunism." The Russian historical form of right opportunism is Menshevism.

Critique of Anarchism​

Anarchism retains influence in contemporary protest movements. While it shares with Marxism a rejection of the bourgeois state, it differs on what should follow its overthrow. Anarchists demand the immediate abolition of every state and all authority. Marxism holds that the proletariat cannot do without a state in the transitional period: the resistance of the overthrown classes must be suppressed, and the economy organized centrally. The state withers away as classes disappear.

Behind this political disagreement lies a philosophical one. Anarchism starts from the individual: the individual's emancipation is declared a condition for the emancipation of the masses. Marxism starts from the masses: their emancipation is a condition for the emancipation of the individual. Stalin develops this argument in Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–1907).

7. The National Question, the Woman Question, War, and Religion​

Bourgeois thought treats each subject separately and, in essence, outside society. Marxism approaches them differently: none of these questions has an independent solution; all are resolved as part of the question of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marxism and the National Question​

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people that arose on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup, expressed in a common culture. This definition, from Stalin's Marxism and the National Question (1913), was an answer to the Austro-Marxists and their project of cultural-national autonomy.

The proletarian approach includes recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including secession and the formation of an independent state, alongside the struggle to unite workers of all nations in common organizations. The right to secede is defended against the great-power chauvinism of the oppressor nation, while unity is a requirement of proletarian internationalism. Lenin insisted that a socialist of an oppressor nation must fight first and foremost against the chauvinism of their own bourgeoisie.

The Woman Question​

Marxism traces the oppression of women to the emergence of private property. According to Engels, the overthrow of mother right by father right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. Emancipation requires not merely, or even primarily, legal equality, but the involvement of women in social production and the socialization of domestic labour, which under capitalism remains small-scale, exhausting, and invisible.

War and Militarism​

Marxism distinguishes wars by their political content. An imperialist war is fought over the redivision of the world among groups of the bourgeoisie, and the working class has nothing to defend in it. Hence Lenin's position in 1914–1916: turn the imperialist war into a civil war and work for the defeat of one's own government. Wars of liberation, revolutionary wars, and defensive wars waged by a socialist state are assessed differently.

Religion​

Religion is a reflection of people's helplessness before the elemental forces of nature and society and, at the same time, an instrument of spiritual enslavement: Marx's "opium of the people" and Lenin's "a kind of spiritual booze." This does not mean declaring war on believers. The party propagates a scientific world outlook, but demands separation of church and state and freedom of conscience. Lenin explicitly considered it harmful to put the struggle against religion in the foreground and divide working people along confessional lines.

8. Complete List of Works​

Works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in chronological order. Essential texts for study; supplementary and draft material is marked separately, along with study guides (links point to the English-language texts at marxists.org).