Although it is traditional to describe the political system set up after the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917 in Russia as a Marxist society, it should, more properly, be described as Marxist-Leninist. Marxist-Leninism was the phrase coined by Stalin to describe the conflation of basic Marxist theory with the ideas of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, which guided the revolution and became the justifying creed of the post-revolutionary state. The need for additions to the Marxist canon primarily came from the fact that Marx had little to say of a concrete nature about the post-revolutionary society, or, indeed, about how the revolution itself should be organized and guided. His thoughts stressed the very long term, and what he described was essentially an anarchist society with little need for politics or the state, arrived at after the inevitability of history had run its course. Lenin, in his long career as an exiled revolutionary leader, had written at length on the conduct of the revolution and on the immediate post-revolutionary society.
His contribution to the theories centred on the role of the communist party as the vanguard of the proletariat, which would not only lead the revolution but also control society during the intermediate phase while true socialism was being built. It was this justification for the rule of the party that was particularly valuable to the Bolsheviks, because it legitimated their rule. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately allowed Stalin and his successors a way of refusing to grant either basic democratic rights, or even basic consumer satisfaction, on the grounds that the mass could not be ready for freedom until the Soviet state had fully rescued them from the false consciousness they had been trained into by the previous regimes. As Marx himself had viewed Russia as a very unlikely place in which to have a proletarian revolution, because the industrial revolution there had hardly started, Lenin’s additions were all the more necessary. The role of the party has been so central to communist politics that it would be fair to say that most of the Western communist parties have also been Marxist-Leninist rather than purely Marxist, unless they have taken the route of Lenin’s rival, and become Trotskyist, or of Stalin’s rival and become Maoist.
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