Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (April 22, 1870- January 21, 1924), one of the greatest of the proletarian revolutionaries, an outstanding thinker, founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state, and leader and educator of all working people of the world. He began his political and theoretical revolutionary activity at the turn of the century, when the transition to the new, imperialist stage in the development of capitalism was nearing completion and when the world revolutionary movement, which then had its centre in Russia, was confronted by complex new political and theoretical tasks. Lenin’s works had a decisive influence on how these tasks were resolved. In the struggle against the various currents in 202 bourgeois and opportunist ideology, Lenin upheld the revolutionary content of Marxism, summarised the new experience gained during the class struggle, and enriched political economy and the other basic components of Marxism, putting it on a new and higher level, which marked the beginning of the Leninist stage in the development of Marxism. Political economy was a special theme in Lenin’s early works of the 1890s, when the question of "the destiny of capitalism in Russia" became the focus of the Russian Marxists’ struggle against the liberal Narodniks and " legal Marxists”. Lenin’s major works, such as "The Development of Capitalism in Russia”, "The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book”, "A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism”, etc. furnished a detailed Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia. He refuted the liberal Narodniks’ concept of the country’s “peculiar” road of development. Lenin demonstrated that the coming revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, that the proletariat would be its hegemon, and that the proletariat could and must-unite with the peasantry. Not only did Lenin thus brilliantly apply the theoretical formulations of Marx’s Capital to reality—and in doing so confirm their validity—but he also enriched and developed the method and the main ideas of his work. Lenin said that a Marxist approach had to be taken to the historical nature and content of political economy; he criticised the methodology of petty-bourgeois subjectivism and bourgeois objectivism, introduced the principle of a politically committed approach to science, gave concrete expression to the Marxist theory of material social relations, of the essence of the social and economic formation, of the relationship between base and superstructure, of the specific nature of the economic laws governing social development, etc. His contribution to the development of the Marxist theory of capitalist reproduction and crises is of special importance. In polemics with the liberal Narodniks and "legal Marxists”, Lenin revealed the genuine significance of the theory of capitalist reproduction, substantiated its initial methodological premises, and developed Marx’s ideas on the laws of the emergence and development of the domestic and external markets under capitalism. Lenin elaborated Marx’s ideas by studying the laws of capitalist reproduction under the existing conditions of technological progress, evolved the law of the priority growth of production of the means of production, and revealed the correlation between production and personal consumption under capitalism. He demonstrated that one-sided attempts to explain capitalist overproduction crises by inadequate mass consumption were totally fallacious and developed Marx’s and Engels’ tenets of the decisive role of the basic contradiction of capitalism as one of the principal reasons for crises and their inevitability, as well as their significance in the process of capitalist reproduction. In the early 20th century, when the agrarian question was the key economic question of the first Russian revolution and when the revisionists everywhere challenged Marx’s economic theory, Lenin produced several important works in which he consistently defended and further developed Marx’s agrarian theory, analysed agrarian relations in Russia, and laid the foundation for the Bolsheviks’ agrarian programme; among them are "The Agrarian Question and the ’Critics of Marx”’, "The Agrarian Programme of Social- Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907”, and "New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture”). The thrust of these works was directed against bourgeois-revisionist concepts about the "non-capitalist evolution of agriculture" and the “stability” of small-scale peasant holdings in bourgeois society. Lenin revealed the methodological errors and theoretical incorrectness of these concepts, to which he opposed a scientific method of analysing agrarian relations. Proceeding from the ideas of Marx, he outlined the laws and forms of capitalist development in agriculture and evolved the theory of the two types of bourgeois agrarian evolution. Lenin indicated the similarities between the economic evolution of industrial production and 203 agriculture, revealing the specific features of this process in agriculture, and theoretically substantiated Marx’s tenets of the socio- economic roots of revolution in the countryside. Lenin’s works also examined and summed up Marxist reasoning in respect to the socalled law of diminishing returns, which the revisionists attempted to use to refute Marx’s theory of ground (land) rent. Lenin’s defence and further development of this theory is a great scientific achievement. Lenin criticised the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik agrarian programmes, outlined the Bolshevik programme for the nationalisation of land, and revealed its significance in furthering bourgeois progress which, in turn, would promote the development of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution on the basis of his tenets on two monopolies in capitalist agriculture. These tenets concretised Marx’s ideas on the nature of land rent and the reasons for, conditions and sources of the appearance of its various forms, as well as on the existing capitalist barriers to the rational organisation of agriculture. Lenin’s theory of imperialism, which crowned his 20-odd years of study of the economic evolution of modern capitalism, is an important contribution to the Marxist political economy of capitalism. In his " Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”, "The Collapse of the Second International" and other works, Lenin summarised the fifty years of capitalist evolution since the publication of Volume I of Marx’s Capital. Proceeding from Marx’s theory and method, Lenin revealed that new phenomena occurring in the development of the capitalist economy, politics and ideology marked the evolution of capitalism to its very specific, highest and last stage of development: imperialism. Lenin provided the first genuinely Marxist analysis of the economic and political essence and place in history of imperialism as a monopolistic, parasitic or decaying and moribund stage of capitalism, i. e., the eve of a socialist revolution. Lenin traced and scientifically generalised the unfolding concentration, centralisation and monopolisation of capitalist production during World War I and laid the foundation for the theory of state-monopoly capitalism as the highest stage of imperialism, characterised by the coalescence of the power of the monopolies with state power into a single machine of the supremacy of the financial oligarchy over society. He demonstrated that the all-encompassing progress of the socialisation of labour which accompanies this coalescence signifies completion of the material base of socialism. Lenin also stressed that imperialism in the state-monopoly form does not eliminate the basic trends and contradictions of capitalism, such as the exploitation of hired labour, exchange, competition, anarchy, crises, etc.; on the contrary, it only complicates and accentuates these contradictions “confusing” the opposing principles of monopoly concentration and unfettered competition, and thus bringing social revolution closer. His scientific analysis of imperialism provided solid guidelines for correctly dealing with the key problems of war and peace and of the international workers’ movement, for understanding the nature of the motive forces and prospect of a world social revolution, the possibility of bringing together, within a single anti-imperialist movement, proletarian revolutions, national liberation and other democratic movements, and also for revealing the economic roots and the reactionary role of opportunism. Lenin concluded from his study of the uneven ’economic and political development of capitalism under imperialism that socialism could initially triumph in several or even in one country. This became the cornerstone of his concept of the general crisis of capitalism and its disintegration and collapse as a social system. One of Lenin’s most outstanding achievements was to set forth the fundamentals of the political economy of socialism. In The State and Revolution and in other works, he waged a struggle against Kautskyism and Trotskyism, "left-wing communism" and anarchosyndicalism. He armed the proletariat with a profound theory on the transition period from capitalism to socialism, and on its necessity, content and historical role. Lenin elaborated Marx’s and Engels’ idea 204 that the bourgeois state machine had to be smashed and replaced by a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, revealing its class essence and major tasks, and the decisive significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an organiser of the economy. He highlighted the leading role of the Communist Party in the political rule of the proletariat. Lenin was the first to study the question of the essence and contradictions of the economic system during the transition period from capitalism to socialism, and the corresponding structure of society. He drew up the economic programme for the socialist revolution, he gave an outline of the basic principles and trends of the economic policy of a proletarian state, and specified the role of a planned economy in carrying out this policy; he posed and elaborated questions of the necessity and possibility to use commodity-money relations in the process of building socialism, and devised a concrete plan for building socialism in the USSR. He further developed Marx’s and Engels’ ideas and showed that economically backward countries could move forward to socialism without having to first go through the capitalist stage of development. Lenin extensively developed the theory of socialism and communism of Marx and Engels. He analysed socialism’s property relations, class structure and objectives, dealing with a wide range of problems pertaining to the socialist organisation of social labour and the principles, methods and forms of a socialist economy. Lenin concretised the Marxist concept of equality under socialism, indicated the necessity for using material incentives along with moral stimuli in the work process, and substantiated the Marxist principle of distribution according to work done and the necessity for instituting this principle in the form of wages. Lenin thoroughly expounded the economic role of the socialist state, its inevitable existence up to the highest phase of communism, and grounded the need for a systematic organisation of social production on the principles of democratic centralism, cost accounting and personal responsibility. Lenin also elaborated Marx’s and Engels’ ideas on the nature and conditions of the transition from socialism to communism, and put forward and substantiated the tenet on the stages of socialist development. What he had to say about the international significance of the Soviet experience in building socialism is especially important. Basing on these ideas, he created his concept of the correlation of the common and the specific in the process of the transition of different countries to socialism and communism. The CPSU and the fraternal communist parties proceed from Lenin’s economic ideas, which have proved their correctness over time, in their struggle for the triumph of communism around the world.