From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-
“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
Workers Vanguard No. 937
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22 May 2009
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“The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”
By V.I. Lenin
(From the Archives of Marxism)
V.I. Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of
Marxism,” which we reprint below, was first published in March 1913 in the
Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye to commemorate the 30th anniversary of
the death of Karl Marx, who, along with Friedrich Engels, founded scientific
socialism. The following translation is taken from Volume 19 of the
Collected Works of Lenin (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow
1963).
Throughout the civilised 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 naïve 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 civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists
precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the
foremost minds of mankind. 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 men with an integral world outlook
irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois
oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the
nineteenth 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.
I
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout
the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth
century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of
medieval 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 forth. 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 every class-conscious
worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he
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, i.e., 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 the cognition 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 man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter),
which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge
(i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and
so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political
institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. 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 mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful
instruments of knowledge.
II
Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation 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, i.e.,
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: man’s labour-power becomes a
commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land,
factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day
covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other
part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist
surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of
the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s
economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker,
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 mass 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.
III
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 criticised 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 realise 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
organise 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
hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true
position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all
over the world, from America 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.
