(1870-1924) Russian philosopher, sociologist, and statesman. Lenin studied law at the Imperial University in Kazan but was expelled from the faculty for illegal student organizing. He continued his law studies in Samara, where he graduated and began his legal career. Lenin moved to St. Petersburg in 1893, where he worked as a lawyer, but due to the formation of a Marxist organization in that city, he was arrested in 1895 and sentenced to exile in Siberia. After returning from Siberia, Lenin left Russia in 1900 and went to Munich. During that period, he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party and began writing for the party magazine Iskra. At the Second Congress of the party, which was held in London in 1903, there was a big conflict in the party, so the members of the group headed by Lenin were called "Bolsheviks", while the members of the second movement were called "Mensheviks". Lenin continued his political and ideological activities outside Russia, often moving to different European countries, until the outbreak of the revolution in Russia in 1917. Upon his return to Russia, Lenin succeeded in bringing his Bolsheviks to power, and in the civil war that lasted from 1918 to 1920, the Bolsheviks defeated all their opponents and established complete power. After that, until the end of his life, Lenin was the sovereign and dominant political leader of Russia, and later of the newly formed Soviet Union.

Throughout his entire intellectual work, Lenin developed the ideas of Karl Marx and put them into practice. The first significant work in which he uses Marxist theory is the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which Lenin wrote during his exile in Siberia. In the nineteenth century, Russia represented a feudal society in which the peasantry continued to live in serfdom, while at the same time, the cooperative form of ownership persisted. However, Russian feudalism is not characterized by only one form of production (agricultural-feudal), but it forms a "social formation" that includes other forms of production, and above all, the beginnings of the capitalist form of production.

Russian feudalism, as an economic order, operates within a strong and centralized absolutist state. Lenin concludes that Russia is going the "Prussian way", that is, it is going through the same form of transformation that happened in Prussia. As in Prussia, in Russia, the feudal lords slowly became an agricultural bourgeoisie (similar to the Junkers in Prussia) as they began to employ workers to produce goods for the market. This path of development leads to the breakdown of rural cooperative life and rapidly divides the peasantry into several strata. At the top is the agricultural bourgeoisie, in the middle is the middle peasantry, and at the bottom of the pyramid are the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians. In Lenin's opinion, this stratification is positive because it creates natural allies for the industrial workers from the rural proletarians and semi-proletarians, to carry out the communist revolution.

Lenin in the book What is to be done? (1902) presented his view of the best practical strategy for revolutionary Marxists to come to power. He decisively rejects all strategies of gradual or evolutionary implementation of socialism and resolutely defends, revolutionary strategy as the only correct strategy for socialism to come to power. Lenin believes that ordinary workers are often only interested in short-term economic improvements to their position and that they, therefore, develop a self-awareness that supports the union's goals. To develop a true class consciousness among the workers, and overcome the divisions that exist between the workers, an organized, disciplined, and centralized party must be formed in all capitalist societies, which will be led by the most militant and class-conscious members, and which will strictly adhere to orthodox Marxist principles and then transfer those principles to the entire proletariat. A centralized revolutionary party is the best way to carry out a successful socialist revolution and then introduce the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

In the book, The State and Revolution (1917) Engels sees the inherent nature of the State to be a tool for the capitalist class to oppress other classes. Even in democracies with universal suffrage capitalist class retains its power. Engels, unlike anarchists, opposes the immediate abolishment of the state after the socialist revolution, because the proletariat would need state mechanisms to crush any bourgeois resistance that is left after the revolution. When the dictatorship of the proletariat is fully implemented then the state will wither away on its own, as state institutions begin to lose their capitalist and political character.

In the book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), Lenin strongly criticizes empiriocriticism and subjective idealism, and their relationship to the possibilities of scientific cognition, and develops his own Marxist theory of cognition.

The book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) is Lenin's most famous work. In this book, he analyzes the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. Western capitalism postponed the anti-capitalist revolution by starting the exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies. The imperialist expansion of the world's largest powers, at the end of the nineteenth century, resulted from the development of monopoly capitalism, in which the economies of rich countries were increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of large firms, while at the same time the merger of industrial capital with large banks, as well as the growing integration of interests between private companies and the state, took place.

Such development of capitalism leads to a competition of capital to conquer new markets. "The more capitalism develops, the more there is a shortage of raw materials, and a fiercer competition and race for raw materials around the world leads to an increasingly desperate struggle to conquer new colonies." (Lenin, 1916). The newly formed financial capital increases the already existing rivalries between the capitalists of different countries, and therefore also between the countries themselves. The rivalries and wars between the great powers were the product of the very dynamic of capitalist development, especially the new stage in the development of capitalism dominated by financial capital and the monopolization of the economy. This is precisely why Lenin defined imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism.

This kind of imperialism is characterized by six main features: 1) concentration and centralization of capital into large monopoly cartels; 2) the increasingly pronounced merging of banking and industrial capital into parasitic oligarchic "financial capital"; 3) the export of capital itself begins to become more important than the export of goods; 4) the emergence of international capitalist monopolies that divide the entire world between them; 5) completion of the territorial division of the planet between the capitalist powers; 6) since capitalism develops with different dynamics in different capitalist countries, those countries that have rapid economic development, but have a lack of colonial territories, tend to implement a new territorial division of the world. It was precisely this development of the situation that led to the outbreak of the First World War. The most important engine of the race to conquer new colonies is the need to export capital because there is a surplus of capital that cannot be profitably invested in one's own country.

Lenin believed that it was necessary to form an international anti-imperialist alliance that would fight both against capitalism and against imperialism. The end of imperial rivalries can only come about through a radical reorganization of the economic system of the entire planet, whereby capitalism would be replaced by socialism. The fall of capitalism has become necessary to ensure the survival of the human species. Due to the similarity between Lenin's interpretation of imperialism and the theory of imperialism given by John Hobson, this interpretation of imperialism is often called the "Hobson-Lenin theory of imperialism" in science.

Main works

Что такое „друзья народа“ и как они воюют против социал-демократов? (1894);

Развитие капитализма в России (1899);

Что делать? (1902);

Шаг вперёд, два шага назад (1904);

Материализм и эмпириокритицизм (1909);

О праве наций на самоопределение (1914);

Социализм и война (1915);

Империализм как высшая стадия капитализма (1916);

Государство и революция (1917);

Апрельские тезисы (1917);

Великий почин (1919);

Детская болезнь „левизны“ в коммунизме (1920);

Задачи союзов молодёжи (1920);

О погромной травле евреев (1924);

Собрание сочинений, 20 tomova (1920-1926);  

Философские тетради (1933).

Works translated into English:

State and Revolution (1932, in Russian 1917);

Essential works of Lenin (1987, in Russian 1899, 1902, 1916, 1917).