Leninsim vs Maoism

Podcast Transcript

Communism is an ideology that millions of people had to live under during the 20th century.

Despite the communist label many nations adhered to, there were often vast differences in how they practiced communism or even what they considered communism to be.

In fact, Karl Marx would have probably been shocked to see where Communist governments were established.

Learn about the differences between Maoism and Leninism on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

In a previous episode, I discussed the differences between Italian and German fascism.

In this episode, I want to turn the lens on the other great “-ism” of the Twentieth Century: Communism.

At a very high level, the biggest difference between fascism and communism is that fascism wasn’t a developed political theory created before it was implemented.

Communism, on the other hand, was an established political ideology with a following before it was ever put into practice.

In this episode, I want to focus on the two largest countries to have had communist revolutions, Russia and China, and the two guiding philosophies that governed each country: Leninism and Maoism.

The theory of communism was developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx.

Marx viewed society as a class-based system. This was first outlined in the now-infamous book The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. Within it he and his co-author, Friedrich Engels, described their idea of “class-conflict theory” and revolution.

The ideas explored in The Communist Manifesto were further developed in Das Kapital, published in 1867. In this work, Marx critiqued Capitalism through a Marxist economic lens, providing the technical arguments to support his earlier theories.

Regardless, a central theme in both works is that capitalism, as an economic system, is flawed and will inevitably fail.

According to Marx (and this is a vast oversimplification), within Capitalism, there are two primary groups: the proletariat, aka the workers, and the capitalists. The capitalists owned the means of production, whereas the workers only engaged in labor for wages and shared none of the profits.

This dynamic presents a problem: workers are typically paid less than the value of their labor to the owner. Such a relationship creates an ongoing class struggle between the owner and the worker, or between capital and labor.

Marx, like other classical economists, was a strong believer in the “labor theory of value”. This theory was used to explain differences in market prices across goods. This theory basically says that the longer a product takes to make, and the more labor that is put into it, the more value it should have.

Taking this idea a step further, Marx argued that the value of the labor required to produce these products exemplified the exploitation of workers.

Additionally, Marx saw a key aspect of Capitalism as the drive for efficiency, extracting the maximum wealth from workers. This emphasis led to changes in the work process to streamline and make it more cost-effective, eliminating positions that were no longer profitable or viable.

The exploitation of workers and the eventual surplus of labor within the market were two major problems Marx found with Capitalism. He believed these two issues would eventually compound, ultimately destroying Capitalism.

This destruction would result from rising inequality between workers and from the capitalist no longer making a profit.

This contradiction would naturally lead to a workers’ revolution, where production would be handed over to the working class.

Marx wasn’t necessarily calling for the immediate overthrow of Capitalism, but rather was describing Capitalism as a natural and necesary step in the evolutions of economic systems.

According to Marx, and this is key to the purpose of this episode, to reach Communism it was necessary to pass through all the stages of Capitalism, which create inherent conflicts he believed capitalsm contained.

It is through this that Capitalism destroys itself and becomes a socialist, and eventually a Communist society.

In Marx’s perspective, Communist society was a utopia, a place where class conflict could no longer exist. This is what he viewed as the final step in human social development.

Marx assumed that the only way a communist revolution could occur was in a fully industrial, capitalist economy.

While Marx’s theories gained many adherents in the early 20th century, they didn’t necessarily want to wait for a communist revolution in a country they probably didn’t live in.

They wanted communism NOW.

Russia was the first country to undergo a Communist Revolution. This revolution began in 1917.

While Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks were influenced by Marx’s economic and social theories, their interpretation, which later became known as Leninism, diverged from strict Marxism by emphasizing the need for a vanguard.

Lenin argued that the working class on its own would develop only a limited revolutionary consciousness, so a disciplined, educated, and elite vanguard party was needed to lead, organize, and guide the proletariat, seize state power, and direct society through the transition to communism.

Lenin basically thought that it was possible to completely bypass many of the stages that Marx outlined.

The development of Leninsm had to do with the experiences and background of Lenin himself.

Lenin became invested in revolutionary politics following his brother’s execution in 1887. To Lenin, this made Russian politics personal, and he began to read more radical political literature during his stint in law school. Shockingly, Marx’s work was the most influential.

After officially proclaiming himself a Marxist in 1889, he moved to St. Petersburg, the Russian Capital at the time, and began working with other Marxists to build a revolutionary movement. His interest in communism was intrinsically tied to his desire to overthrow the tsarist Russia.

When the Revolution finally happened, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took over the government. Lenin was the leader of the country for the next seven years, and he implemented many of his ideas.

Under Lenin’s leadership, Russia began to usher communist ideology into Russian society. He began to form “soviets,” which were councils of peasants that were supposed to govern themselves.

In theory, this should have been similar to other democracies, but these councils never operated as intended.

The reality was that, instead of the Soviets holding real power, it was the loyal Bolsheviks within Lenin’s party who held all the power, aka the vanguard.

Karl Marx expected socialist revolution to arise in highly industrialized capitalist societies with large, politically conscious working classes, such as Britain or Germany.

Late-imperial Russia was largely agrarian, economically underdeveloped, and dominated by peasants rather than industrial workers, which is why Marx himself viewed it as an unlikely candidate for a proletarian revolution.

The Soviet Union was officially formed in 1922, and Lenin served as its leader for two years. Following his death, Joseph Stalin took power and fully transformed the country into a totalitarian state.

Stalin was the first person to coin the term “Leninism,” and this ideology governed Soviet society until its fall in 1991.

The theoretical justification for the totalitarian nature of Soviet communism rested on Lenin’s theory of a vanguard to accelerate the path to a true communist society.

Of course, the vanguard never gave up its power, and the entire notion of an elite to usher in communism was never anything that Marx advocated.

If Karl Marx would have been surprised by a communist revolution in Russia, he would have been downright flabbergasted by the idea of one in China.

Maoism, like Leninism, was a derivative of Communist ideology. However, instead of adopting Marx’s focus on an industrial proletariat, Mao Zedong prioritized the revolutionary role of the rural peasant class.

Maoism dominated China from the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 until his death in 1976.

Mao Zedong had grown up a peasant in rural China. His upbringing in the peasant class played a fundamental role in developing his later political beliefs.

Mao first became aware of Marxism while working as a library assistant at Peking University. After learning about Communist ideology, he dedicated himself to his beliefs and quickly founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

His past as a peasant led Mao to believe that a Communist uprising was achievable only if he had an elite revolutionary unit of peasants, not of industrial workers.

During the Chinese Civil War, the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong drew most of their support, recruits, and legitimacy from rural peasants, with only a small proportion coming from urban industrial workers, reflecting China’s overwhelmingly agrarian society.

In contrast to Leninism’s emphasis on the urban working class, Mao frequently prioritized poor agricultural laborers over industrial workers.

Two of Mao’s most controversial policies were centered on rural areas: the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward, as I covered in previous episodes, was focused on agricultural productivity and small-scale iron production.

The Cultural Revolution, which was also a previous episode, saw the large-scale transfer of millions of people to rural areas for reeducation.

Both of these policies led to massive amounts of death. The Great Leap Forward saw millions of people starve to death through inept agricultural policies, whereas the Cultural Revolution saw the country descend into chaos, with anyone not deemed “Maoist” enough being targeted.

Chinese society and the Chinese economy were not even remotely close to what Marx envisioned. They were even more agricultural than Russia was and had a tiny industrial base.

Maoist and Leninist ideologies do share some similarities.

Both systems accepted the need for a Communist Party acting as a vanguard to lead society, rejected the idea that socialism would emerge automatically from capitalism, and endorsed a revolutionary state that would suppress counterrevolution while transforming society.

Each emphasized strict party discipline, ideological conformity, and the legitimacy of violence in achieving and defending revolutionary goals.

They differed primarily in social base and strategy. Leninism was oriented toward the urban industrial working class and envisioned revolution as a rapid seizure of state power centered in cities, followed by centralized control from above.

Maoism adapted Marxism–Leninism to a predominantly agrarian society, placing peasants at the center of revolution and relying on prolonged guerrilla warfare, rural base areas, and gradual encirclement of cities.

Ideologically, Maoism also stressed continual class struggle after the revolution and mass mobilization campaigns to prevent bureaucratic stagnation, whereas Leninism emphasized consolidation of power and administrative control once the state was captured.

In both Maoism and Leninism, the theories can be thought of as being created to justify their seizure and retention of power under the name of communism.

While China and Russia were the most prominent examples of this, almost every communist country put its own spin on things, which deviated from Karl Marx’s theories.

In Yugoslavia, communism under Josip Broz Tito diverged from Soviet Leninism by rejecting strict central planning, introducing “workers’ self-management,” giving enterprises and local councils greater autonomy, and pursuing an independent, non-aligned foreign policy.

In North Korea, communism evolved into Juche under Kim Il-sung, an ideology centered on national self-reliance, extreme centralization, and a personality cult, with Marxism largely subordinated to nationalism, militarization, and dynastic rule.

All of these countries claimed to be Marxist and communist, even though they all deviated significantly from what Marx had outlined and what he thought communism would be.

Of the highly industrialized countries that Marx thought would be ripe for revolution, none ever had one, because his theories never played out as he predicted.

The one thing that communist and fascist countries have in common is that their political theories were developed to justify their governments’ power and existence.