Creating the Impossible: Lenin’s Legacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin provides an occasion for rethinking his legacy. Rethinking and employing it is critically to understand and change modern capitalism. The author shows that all his theoretical elaborations and practice make up an integral system of scientific achievements and political acts. Lenin’s elaboration of the development and limits of capitalism, including the contradictions of monopoly capital, allowed him to distinguish the system’s motive forces and pathways of change, and to outline the main steps of constructing a new society. His analysis of imperialism and approach to capitalism as an integrated world system is the basis for his conclusion that the initial impulse leading to a breakthrough from this system to socialism would occur at the “weakest link.” His use of the dialectical method solved Russia’s crisis in 1917 through a revolutionary course with insufficient material preconditions, but whose victory might lead to the simultaneous resolving of both bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks. His theory of social creativity helps identify the forces capable of carrying through the revolution and of retaining power. His decisiveness and responsibility in accomplishing theoretically validated actions allowed him to find the only true solutions in critical situations, and to triumph.