The historic task of the working class in the socialist revolution is to eliminate all oppression. This includes the liberation of women and LGBTQ people from the shackles of patriarchy.

The Russian Empire under the Tsar was rightly called a “prisonhouse of nations,” because it oppressed, within its borders, whole nations of people. The Bolsheviks saw that it was a principal task of the socialist revolution to dismantle national oppression and support self-determination for the oppressed nations.

Contradiction is inherent in everything and is what causes things to change qualitatively. In socialist society there are also contradictions. Socialism is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class uses its state power to take society out of capitalism and towards the classless and stateless society of communism.

The task of socialism is to transition from capitalist society to communist society, from a society ruled by and for the rich, based on exploitation and oppression, to a society without classes and without exploitation and oppression. When the working class takes power and expropriates the wealth and power of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of the proletariat will have to eliminate the contradictions carried over from capitalist society in a planned, thoroughgoing, and step-by-step way. One of the most important tasks of the socialist state is the elimination of what Marx called “bourgeois right.” We already touched on bourgeois right in our previous article, “What is Socialism?” but it is a very important subject and needs to be understood clearly.

In our previous article on the relationship between the superstructure and the economic base in historical materialism, we explained that the superstructure is basically the cultural, ideological, political and legal aspect of the mode of production, which arises from the economic base and, in turn, supports and helps reproduce the economic base. We also looked at how ideology arises from class struggle. Both bourgeois ideology and proletarian ideology arise from the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production, and, since the capitalist class is dominant and controls the superstructure under capitalism, their ideology is likewise dominant.

Marxism isn’t just a philosophical and analytical framework based on dialectical and historical materialism, or a critique of political economy. It is also a theory of revolutionizing society and building socialism. Based on the laws of motion of the capitalist societies that precede it, and the experiences of socialist construction from 1917 until today, Marxism-Leninism is able to give us a vision and roadmap for the socialist transformation of society. Of course, every country has its own concrete path to follow, based on its own time, place and conditions, but we can still draw some lessons from those experiences.

Communists have a proud history of fighting on the front lines of the resistance to fascism, from the International Brigades in Spain, to the Antifascist Resistance in occupied Europe, to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to defend the USSR and defeat Nazi Germany. The Soviets liberated the survivors of the death camps and led the assault on Berlin. From that practice, theory has been developed to analyze what fascism is, how it develops, and how it should be fought.

Our enemy is monopoly capitalism, the capitalist and imperialist system that exploits the working class here in the United States and oppresses whole nations of people, here and around the world. The monopoly capitalist class, the imperialists, are well organized, and control both the legal and political institutions of the government as well as the military and police. It will take the masses of the people in their millions to overthrow them. We can’t do it alone. The working class must be organized, and it must organize together broadly with its allies. This “united front” against monopoly capitalism is the revolutionary strategy that will carry us forward toward being able to overthrow the imperialists.

Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution. The purpose of revolutionary theory is to guide revolutionary practice. Nevertheless, since Marxism was young, there have always been opportunists and revisionists who tried to distort its revolutionary essence. The leading edge of this attack on Marxism – from the misleaders of the Second International, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky in the early 1900s, to Khrushchev’s modern revisionism, beginning with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 – has been the advocacy of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.

The central point of the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state is that it is always and everywhere the product of antagonistic class contradictions. It arose from such contradictions, and as long as classes exist, so too will the state. Marx and Engels were the first to understand the state in this way, and it was Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, who did the most to develop the materialist understanding of how and why and the state arises in human history.

In order to have a successful revolution that can overthrow the capitalist ruling class, put the working class into power, and build socialism, we need to be organized in the way that is best suited to that task. The great leader of the Bolshevik revolution, V.I. Lenin, took up this question of Marxist revolutionary organization in 1902 in his book, What is to be Done? In this book, Lenin for the first time gives us the theory of the “Party of a new type.”

In the previous two articles in this series, we’ve discussed imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, which Lenin called “the last stage of capitalism.” We explained how imperialism and monopoly capitalism are synonymous, the laws of motion inherent in capitalism that lead to imperialism, how imperialism means war, and how imperialism has affected the national question. In our last article, we talked about how and why the contradiction between imperialism and the national liberation movements is the principal contradiction on a world scale.

Imperialism means monopoly capitalism, but it brings along with it war and national oppression. Because of the peculiar dynamics of imperialism in the era of proletarian revolution, the national question takes on a particular importance, and, concretely, must be understood and dealt with practically in ways that differ from the pre-imperialist period of competitive capitalism.

Now that we’ve spent some time looking at the basic concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy, let’s move on to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. Toward the end of the 1800s, the internal laws of motion of capitalism caused it to enter a new and final stage in its development – monopoly capitalism. In the essay “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin defines it like this:

It is a fact of historical materialism that the development of the productive forces reduces the amount of labor required by production. As technology and techniques improve, the amount of work required to meet human needs is reduced. This should be a fact that liberates humanity from toil, freeing us to pursue our interests, hobbies, goals of self-development, and so on.

When we enter into employment, our bosses are trying to play a trick on us. They want us to understand the process one way, when, in fact, something else is happening. They want us to think that we have agreed, as equals, upon a deal, where they pay us an agreed upon hourly wage, and we, in turn, do some agreed upon labor for them. They make a profit and we get paid, and everyone gets what they agreed upon. At least, that’s how they want us to understand the process.

To understand Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is essential to understand capital dialectically. We see again and again in Capital itself that Marx breaks things down into their contradictory aspects. We’ve already seen this with value, which considers both use-value and exchange-value. Now, as we look at capital itself, we will see Marx’s dialectical method of analysis at work again, as Marx shows how capital is divided into constant and variable capital.

In our previous article we looked at what a commodity is and examined use-value and exchange-value. This discussion of value is a cornerstone of Marx’s critique of political economy. The value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. This is the Law of Value, and it is essential to understand if we are to really grasp what is revolutionary about Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Karl Marx begins his critique of political economy in the great work, Capital, with an analysis of commodities. He writes, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” So, what is a commodity, and why is it that Marx begins here?

As we have seen in our previous article, capitalism’s origins are largely based upon “primitive accumulation” – the theft of land and resources during the colonial period. This theft helped to jumpstart the original accumulation of capital. In the U.S. this began with settler colonialism, whereby colonizers from Europe settled in the Americas, bringing with them terrible violence and oppression of indigenous and other oppressed peoples.