Accelerating history's predetermined course through deliberate political organization, without changing where it is ultimately headed.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
For Marx history can only move forward, through stages, toward communism; what he leaves open is the timetable, how long each stage lasts.
In the text In his letter to Vera Zasulich of March 8, 1881, Marx writes that the "historical inevitability" of capitalist development is "expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe".
Leninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside.
Put simply Lenin: history's destination is fixed, but it can be sped up. Workers are slow to grasp their situation as a class on their own, so that understanding must be brought to them from outside.
Other readings Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.
Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Put simply Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
Against Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself.
The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 formed a tiny minority acting not for Russia's few actual workers but for a proletariat that rushed industrialization would later create.
Put simply Lenin's Bolsheviks, who seized power in October 1917, were a tiny minority. They acted not for Russia's few actual workers but for the working class that rushed industrialization would later create.
A lesson in contingency: had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, Shore thinks, there is arguably no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.
Put simply Shore: history can turn on chance. Had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, she thinks there would arguably have been no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.
The Russian futurists' 1912 manifesto would throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others off the "steamship of modernity"; Shore glosses this as sweeping the past away to usher in the future.
3 links between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
MarxFor Marx history can only move forward, through stages, toward communism; what he leaves open is the timetable, how long each stage lasts. L8 · 2:50
LeninLeninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside. L8 · 18:14
Lenin fills Marx's silence on the timetable of history's stages by proposing an active method — the vanguard — to shorten it.
MarxFor Marx history can only move forward, through stages, toward communism; what he leaves open is the timetable, how long each stage lasts. L8 · 2:50
LeninThe Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 formed a tiny minority acting not for Russia's few actual workers but for a proletariat that rushed industrialization would later create. L8 · 46:01
Lenin reinterprets Marx's stages: the proletariat becomes a future class the revolution will create, not the small class that exists in 1917 Russia.Our inference
LeninLeninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside. L8 · 18:14
LuxemburgAgainst Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself. L8 · 30:00
Luxemburg rejects Lenin's vanguard mechanism, insisting real revolutionary energy must come from the trusted proletariat itself, on its own timetable.
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.