The Three Sources & Three Component Parts of Marxism 1¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s 1913 article, written for the thirtieth anniversary of Marx’s death, is a compact polemical exposition of Marxism’s intellectual ancestry and internal coherence. Its core argument is that Marxism is not a sectarian deviation but the direct and legitimate continuation of the highest achievements of nineteenth-century thought: German classical philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism. Lenin insists that the hostility of bourgeois science toward Marxism is inevitable, since in a society founded on class struggle there can be no impartial social science; all official and liberal learning defends wage-slavery, while Marxism wages relentless war upon it. The doctrine is omnipotent because it is true—comprehensive, harmonious, and irreconcilable with superstition, reaction, or bourgeois oppression.
Lenin divides his exposition into three parts corresponding to Marxism’s three sources and component parts. First, philosophy: Marx and Engels defended and developed materialism, taking over the consistent, anti-clerical materialism of eighteenth-century France and enriching it with Hegel’s dialectics—the doctrine of development in its fullest and deepest form. The result was dialectical materialism, confirmed by the latest discoveries of natural science (radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements), and extended to the cognition of human society as historical materialism. This replaced the previous chaos and arbitrariness in views on history with a scientific theory showing how, as productive forces grow, one system of social life develops into another—capitalism out of feudalism. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation; man’s social knowledge reflects the economic system of society.
Second, political economy: Marx took up the labour theory of value from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, proved it, and developed it consistently. Where bourgeois economists saw relations between things, Marx revealed relations between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market; money and capital represent further stages of this connection. The wage-worker sells labour power, spending part of the day covering the cost of his own maintenance and the rest creating surplus value for the capitalist—the source of profit and the cornerstone of Marx’s economic theory. Capital crushes the worker, ruins small proprietors, creates an army of unemployed, and intensifies anarchy of production, crises, and the insecurity of the mass of the population, while simultaneously creating the great power of united labour.
Third, socialism: Early socialism was utopian—it criticised and condemned capitalism but could not explain wage-slavery, reveal the laws of capitalist development, or identify the social force capable of creating a new society. The revolutions accompanying the fall of feudalism in Europe, especially in France, increasingly revealed the class struggle as the basis and driving force of all development. Marx’s genius was to deduce from this the doctrine of the class struggle and to apply it consistently. Only by seeking out the interests of some class behind all moral, religious, political, and social phrases can people avoid deception in politics. Marx’s philosophical materialism showed the proletariat the way out of spiritual slavery; his economic theory explained the proletariat’s true position under capitalism. Independent proletarian organisations are multiplying worldwide; the proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated through its class struggle, ridding itself of bourgeois prejudices and growing irresistibly.