Lenin's lifework is a totality, in which theory and practice cannot be separated from each other. Lenin himself stated: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice. No serious person today could deny the historic significance of the socialist October Revolution or the creation of the Soviet state: these events have indelibly marked the history of our centuryand of the century to come. But the theoretical insight which made these great events possible is as important, if not more important, from the long-term point of view, than these events themselves. For that insight will in the long run make possible a world-wide extension of the October Revolution, an endeavour which temporarily faile luring the life-time of Lenin and Trotsk: themselves.
Seven main pillars constitute the body of Leninism, an extension of Marxism in the imperialist epoch. These seven main parts of Leninism continue to hold true today as they did forty-six years ago when Lenin died-nay, their full significance is only coming to be understood today by larger and larger masses of workers and poor peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and students, in several important parts of the world:
1. Imperialism: Last Stage of Capitalism The theory of imperialism as the supreme phase of capitalism, in which free competition leads to the creation of great monopolies (trusts, holdings, cartels, combines; we would add today: multinational corporations), that is to say the domination of a tiny handful of finance groups over the economy and society of the imperialist countries and their colonial and semi-colonial satellites. Imperialism doesn't mean necessarily the end of economic growth, a final stop to the growth of the productive forces. But it means that capitalism has fulfilled its historically progressive task of the creation of the world-market and of the introduction of an international division of labour, and that an epoch of structural crisis of the capitalist world economy is opened. This structural crisis, while coinciding sometimes with deep conjunctural crises of overproduction (as it did in 1929-33 and during the subsequent so-called "recessions"), is marked by two decisively reactionary traits: in the under-developed parts of the world, it impedes those very processes of national liberation and unification, of agrarian emancipation and industrialisation, which the great bourgeois revolutions of the past realised in the West. In the imperialist countries themselves, it is marked by a growing and frightful parasitism (large-scale waste of material and human resources, not only through wars, unemployment, overcapacity, ete., but also through massive increases of the selling and distribution costs, systematic degrading of the quality of products, threats against the ecologic equilibrium, and threats against the very physical survival of mankind).
2. Revolutionary Character of Our Epoch The theory of the revolutionary character of our epoch, of the "up-todateness" of socialist revolution, which flows directly from the structural crisis of world capitalism. While that crisis is permanent (although knowing ups and downs, periods of temporary stabilisation and periods of great instability of capitalism in key countries and continents), there are from Lenin's point of view, no "permanent revolutionarv situations": if the working temporary comeback of the capitalist class. The socialist world revolution, which has been on the agenda since World War I, takes the form of a process. The chain of countries subjected by imperialist capitalism breaks first in its weakest links (these can be underdeveloped countries like Russia and China, but there is no law in Lenin's thought which says that they have to be such). For Lenin, while the workers of each country where a favourable revolutionary situation occurs should by all means seize power, they should consider this as a means to trengthen the revolutionary forces in leighbouring countries and on a world scale, and should consider themselves always a detachment of the world revolutionary communist movement.
3. The Party The theory of the revolutionary vanguard party, which is based upon a correct, dialectic, understanding of the interrelationship between objective mass struggles and subjective class consciousness under capitalism. Defending and expanding Marx' and Engels' concepts of historical and dialectical materialism, Lenin rejected the mechanistic and naive belief that class struggle in itself gives to the exploited class-cut off from all the main sources of science the power to pontaneously reconstruct Marxist heory, the highest product of centuries of intellectual and scientific developments of mankind. Marxist theory, socialist consciousness, must be introduced from the outside in the class struggle, by conscious efforts of a revolutionary vanguard. Without such a constant effort, the overwhelming majority of the working class remains subjected to the prevailing influence of. the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideology. But without a successful fusion with a large working-class vanguard, the revolutionary minority is not yet a party; it is only an attempt to build such a party. Lenin rejected all ideas of self-proclaimed vanguards. For him, the proof of the pudding was in the eating, .e. in the capacity of the vanguard to actually lead large working-class struggles. And the supreme test of the party-the leadership in the struggle for power presupposes the conquest of the conscious support by the majority of the working class and the toiling masses.
4. Workers Couneils The theory of workers councils (soviets) as power instruments of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and as higher forms of democracy than parliamentarian bourgeois democracy. Lenin believed, as Marx did, that between capitalism and socialism there is a transition period called the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. No more than Marx did Lenin believe that vou could overthrow capitalism along the road of gradual reforms, parliamentary elections, or legislation in the framework of bourgeois institutions. The victory of socialist revolution presupposes not only collective ownership of the means of production, but also destruction of the ourgeois state apparatus-i.e. of the ipparatus of repression directed against he great mass of the people. The essence of a workers state, i.e. of a dictatorship of the proletariat, is for Lenin not any "totalitarian" nightmare of the 1984 ype, but, as described in State and evolution, a democratically-centralisec system of freely elected workers councils, which exercise simultaneously all legislative and executive functions, as the Paris Commune had done. For Lenin,