A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism
V.I. Lenin

A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism

AUD20.00

Availability: In stock

Written in 1897, “A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism” is Lenin’s rigorous polemic against the ideas of the Swiss economist Sismondi whose critique of capitalism the Russian Narodnik economists took up and applied to Russia. “Economic Romanticism” sought to defend small-scale peasant and petty-bourgeois production against the encroachment of capitalism. Rather than treating this current as an obscure academic dispute, Lenin identifies it as a political tendency with real consequences for the revolutionary movement in Russia, one that romanticised pre-capitalist socio-economic forms and misunderstood the objective laws governing the development of capitalism itself.

Lenin dissects Sismondi’s confusion between the “realisation” of surplus value and its “production”, showing how Romantic economists mistook underconsumption for the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, and consequently looked backward toward small production rather than forward toward the socialisation of labour under the working class. In doing so, Lenin sharpens the analytical tools first developed by Marx in “Capital”, applying them concretely to the specific conditions of Russian economic development and demonstrating that the growth of capitalism in the countryside, however harsh and painful, was an objective and historically progressive process that could not be wished away by moral appeals to a peasant economy.

The work’s importance lies precisely in this, by refuting the Narodniks and their romantic economics, Lenin was clearing the ground for the argument that Russia’s revolutionary future lay not with the peasantry as an independent force defending small property, but with the industrial proletariat created by capitalist development itself. This was a conclusion with direct bearing on the strategic orientation of the revolutionary movement that would culminate two decades later in October 1917.

Pages: 159

Weight 147 g
Dimensions 230 × 147 × 7 mm
Author

Format

Paperback
Publication Type

Publisher

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and a central figure within the Marxist movement from the end of the 19th century until his death in 1924. In October 1917 he, along with Leon Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and established the first workers’ state.

In 1902 Lenin published What is to be Done?, a major theoretical work which critiqued the trade unionist perspective that sought to limit the struggles of workers to economic questions. He insisted on the necessity of a political solution to capitalist exploitation and outlined a theory of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class.

Lenin led the split with the Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, maintaining that the forthcoming revolution in Russia could not be of a solely bourgeois-democratic character. Over the course of the next 14 years he fought a long struggle against Menshevism. This ultimately culminated in his issuing in April 1917 of a set of political theses that unequivocally called for a proletarian socialist revolution in Russia.

Lenin was an ardent defender of internationalism. In 1914, when the German Social Democratic Party, the leading section of the Second International, abandoned Marxism by supporting German imperialism in World War I, Lenin fought against this national chauvinist perspective. In defense of the outlook of world revolution, he advocated the founding of the Third International. His Imperialism, published in 1917, identified the origins of the bloodbath engulfing Europe at the time in the inner workings of capitalism.

Lenin made major contributions to the development of Marxist philosophy, leaving behind a voluminous body of writings. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was his defense of dialectical materialism and a withering critique of efforts by figures with ties to the Bolshevik Party to substitute idealist forms of thinking for materialist philosophy.

Lenin died in January 1924 after a series of strokes, which had left him incapacitated for many months prior. In his Last Testament, suppressed for many years by the rising Soviet bureaucracy, he called for the removal of Joseph Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Scroll to Top