The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism

#PUBLICATION NOTE

This edition of The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism has been prepared and revised for digital publication by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism under the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland on the basis of the edition published in the Collected Works of Lenin, Fourth English Edition, Volume 19, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.

#INTRODUCTION NOTE

This is an article written by Comrade Nikolaj Lenin in Cracow, Poland in March 1913. It was first published in the Prosvesenie, No. 3 (March 1913).

#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!

#THE THREE SOURCES AND THREE COMPONENT PARTS OF MARXISM

#Nikolaj Lenin

#March 1913

#★

Throughout the developed world, the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of «pernicious sect». And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no «impartial» social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers' wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling «sectarianism» in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilization. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of humanity. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy, and Socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides people with an integral worldview irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that humanity produced in the 19th century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy, and French Socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts, that we shall outline in brief.

#1. PHILOSOPHY

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the 18th century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of mediaeval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science, and hostile to superstition, cant, and so on. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to «refute», undermine, and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for all class-conscious workers.

But Marx did not stop at 18th-century materialism: he further developed philosophy to a higher level. He enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel's system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, that is, the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest, and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science — radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements — have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx's dialectical materialism, despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their «new» reversions to old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include recognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops — how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as people's knowledge reflects nature (that is, developing matter), which exists independently of them, so people's social knowledge (that is, their various views and doctrines — philosophical, religious, political, and so on) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic basis. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European States serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx's philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided humanity, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

#2. POLITICAL ECONOMY

Having recognized that the economic system is the basis on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx's principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, that is, capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another), Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: people's labour power becomes a commodity. The wage-workers sell their labour power to the owners of land, factories, and instruments of labour. The workers spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining themselves and their families (wages), while the other part of the day, they work without remuneration, creating for the capitalists surplus value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus value is the cornerstone of Marx's economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the workers, crushes the workers, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social — hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism — but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets, and the insecurity of existence of the masses of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

#3. SOCIALISM

When feudalism was overthrown and «free» capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various Socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early Socialism, however, was Utopian Socialism. It criticized capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But Utopian Socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political, and social phrases, declarations, and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can — and, owing to their social position, must — constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organize those forces for the struggle.

Marx's philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have until now languished. Marx's economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organizations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from the United States to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.