Marxism–Leninism

Peak influence 1917–1989

Core claim

History moves by class struggle, the working class cannot reach revolutionary consciousness unaided, and so a disciplined vanguard party must take and hold state power on its behalf.

What it wants the state to do

Wants the entire commanding economy in state hands, planned by directive rather than price; a single party fused with the state; and no organised opposition, on the argument that opposition parties represent classes being abolished.

Historical success case

The Soviet industrial and literacy transformation between 1928 and 1960, and the war production that defeated the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front — the cases its defenders cite, achieved at costs its critics count in the same paragraph.

Historical failure mode

The famines of 1932–33 and the Great Terror: a system with no independent press, no courts and no ballot had no mechanism to register that its own policy was killing people, and did not stop.

Nearby traditions

Maoism, which relocates the revolutionary subject to the peasantry; democratic socialism, which shares the economic goal and rejects the political means outright.

Common mix-up

The name of a party is not a description of its programme. The National Socialist German Workers Party privatised state assets, destroyed independent trade unions and killed communists; the argument that it was socialist because of the word in its title is a reading of a label, not of a policy record.

Coordinates