Como ideología y práctica, fue desarrollada por Iósif Stalin en la década de 1920 basándose en su comprensión y síntesis del marxismo ortodoxo y del leninismo.[20] Después de la muerte de Vladimir Lenin en 1924, el marxismo-leninismo se convirtió en un movimiento distinto en la Unión Soviética cuando Stalin y sus partidarios obtuvieron el control del partido. Rechazó las nociones comunes entre los marxistas occidentales de la revolución mundial, como requisito previo para la construcción del socialismo, a favor del concepto de socialismo en un solo país. Según sus partidarios, la transición gradual del capitalismo al socialismo se caracterizó por la introducción del primer plan quinquenal y la Constitución soviética de 1936.[21] A fines de la década de 1920, Stalin estableció la ortodoxia ideológica entre el Partido Comunista Ruso (bolcheviques), la Unión Soviética y la Internacional Comunista para establecer la praxis marxista-leninista universal.[22][23] La formulación de la versión soviética del materialismo dialéctico e histórico en la década de 1930 por Stalin y sus asociados, como en el libro de Stalin Materialismo dialéctico e histórico, se convirtió en la interpretación soviética oficial del marxismo[24] y fue tomada como ejemplo por los marxistas-leninistas de otros países. A finales de la década de 1930, el libro de texto oficial de Stalin Historia del Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética (Bolcheviques) (1938) popularizó el término «marxismo-leninismo».[25]
La crítica del marxismo-leninismo se superpone en gran medida con la crítica al gobierno del partido comunista y se centra principalmente en las acciones y políticas implementadas por los líderes marxistas-leninistas, sobre todo Stalin, Mao Zedong y Pol Pot. En la práctica, los estados marxista-leninistas están marcados por un alto grado de control centralizado por parte del estado y el partido comunista, represión política, ateísmo estatal, colectivización y uso de campos de trabajo, así como educación y atención médica universal y gratuita, bajo desempleo y precios más bajos para ciertos bienes. Historiadores como Silvio Pons y Robert Service sostienen que la represión y el totalitarismo provienen de la ideología marxista-leninista.[30][31][32][33] Historiadores como Michael Geyer y Sheila Fitzpatrick proponen otras explicaciones y critican el enfoque en los niveles superiores de la sociedad y el uso de conceptos de la Guerra Fría como el totalitarismo que han oscurecido la realidad del sistema.[34] Si bien el surgimiento de la Unión Soviética como el primer estado nominalmente comunista del mundo llevó a la asociación generalizada del comunismo con el marxismo-leninismo y el modelo soviético,[26][35][36] varios académicos, economistas e intelectuales argumentan que en la práctica el modelo marxista-leninista es una forma de capitalismo de estado,[37][38][39] o un sistema de mando planificado o economía dirigida.[40][41]
↑Lansford, Thomas (2007). Communism. New York: Cavendish Square Publishing. pp. 9–24, 36–44. ISBN978-0761426288. "By 1985, one-third of the world's population lived under a Marxist–Leninist system of government in one form or another."
↑Evans, Alfred B. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. 1–2. ISBN9780275947637.
↑Morgan, 2015, pp. 657, 659: "Lenin argued that power could be secured on behalf of the proletariat through the so-called vanguard leadership of a disciplined and revolutionary communist party, organized according to what was effectively the military principle of democratic centralism.... The basics of Marxism-Leninism were in place by the time of Lenin's death in 1924.... The revolution was to be accomplished in two stages. First, a 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' managed by the élite 'vanguard' communist party, would suppress counterrevolution, and ensure that natural economic resources and the means of production and distribution were in common ownership. Finally, communism would be achieved in a classless society in which Party and State would have 'withered away'."
↑Andrain, Charles F. (1994). Comparative Political Systems: Policy Performance and Social Change. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. pp. 140. ISBN978-1563242809. «The communist party-states collapsed because they no longer fulfilled the essence of a Leninist model: a strong commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology, rule by the vanguard communist party, and the operation of a centrally planned state socialist economy. Before the mid-1980s, the communist party controlled the military, police, mass media, and state enterprises. Government coercive agencies employed physical sanctions against political dissidents who denounced Marxism-Leninism.»
↑Evans, Alfred (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. ABC-CLIO. p. 24. ISBN978-0275947637. «Lenin defended the dictatorial organization of the workers' state. Several years before the revolution, he had bluntly characterized dictatorship as 'unlimited power based on force, and not on law', leaving no doubt that those terms were intended to apply to the dictatorship of the proletariat.... To socialists who accused the Bolshevik state of violating the principles of democracy by forcibly suppressing opposition, he replied: you are taking a formal, abstract view of democracy.... The proletarian dictatorship was described by Lenin as a single-party state.»
↑Wilczynski, J. (2008). The Economics of Socialism after World War Two: 1945-1990. Aldine Transaction. p. 21. ISBN978-0202362281. «Contrary to Western usage, these countries describe themselves as 'Socialist' (not 'Communist'). The second stage (Marx's 'higher phase'), or 'Communism' is to be marked by an age of plenty, distribution according to needs (not work), the absence of money and the market mechanism, the disappearance of the last vestiges of capitalism and the ultimate 'whithering away' of the State.»
↑Steele, David Ramsay (September 1999). From Marx to Mises: Post Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. Open Court. p. 45. ISBN978-0875484495. «Among Western journalists the term 'Communist' came to refer exclusively to regimes and movements associated with the Communist International and its offspring: regimes which insisted that they were not communist but socialist, and movements which were barely communist in any sense at all.»
↑Rosser, Mariana V. and J Barkley Jr. (23 de julio de 2003). Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. MIT Press. p. 14. ISBN978-0262182348. «Ironically, the ideological father of communism, Karl Marx, claimed that communism entailed the withering away of the state. The dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a strictly temporary phenomenon. Well aware of this, the Soviet Communists never claimed to have achieved communism, always labeling their own system socialist rather than communist and viewing their system as in transition to communism.»
↑Williams, Raymond (1983). «Socialism». Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, revised edition. Oxford University Press. p. 289. ISBN978-0-19-520469-8. «The decisive distinction between socialist and communist, as in one sense these terms are now ordinarily used, came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) as the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of socialist from communist, often with supporting definitions such as social democrat or democratic socialist, became widely current, although it is significant that all communist parties, in line with earlier usage, continued to describe themselves as socialist and dedicated to socialism.»
↑Lisichkin, G. (1989). «Мифы и реальность» [Myths and reality]. Novy Mir(en ruso)3: 59.
↑Smith, S. A. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 126. ISBN9780191667527. "The 1936 Constitution described the Soviet Union for the first time as a 'socialist society', rhetorically fulfilling the aim of building socialism in one country, as Stalin had promised."
↑Bullock, Allan; Trombley, Stephen, eds. (1999). The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (3rd ed.). p. 506.
↑Error en la cita: Etiqueta <ref> no válida; no se ha definido el contenido de las referencias llamadas made_by_stalin22
↑Evans, Alfred B. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. 52–53. ISBN9780275947637.
↑Andrain, Charles F. (1994). "Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Systems". Comparative Political Systems: Policy Performance and Social Change. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. pp. 24–42.
↑Morgan, W. John (2001). "Marxism–Leninism: The Ideology of Twentieth-Century Communism". In Wright, James D., ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). Oxford: Elsevier. p. 661.
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↑Error en la cita: Etiqueta <ref> no válida; no se ha definido el contenido de las referencias llamadas service labor camps
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↑Error en la cita: Etiqueta <ref> no válida; no se ha definido el contenido de las referencias llamadas Geyer&Fitzpatrick
↑Ball, Terence; Dagger, Richard [1999] (2019). "Communism" (revised ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 10 June 2020 – via Britannica.com.
↑Busky, Donald F. (2000). Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. Praeger. pp. 6–8. ISBN978-0-275-96886-1. "In a modern sense of the word, communism refers to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. [...] [T]he adjective democratic is added by democratic socialists to attempt to distinguish themselves from Communists who also call themselves socialists. All but communists, or more accurately, Marxist-Leninists, believe that modern-day communism is highly undemocratic and totalitarian in practice, and democratic socialists wish to emphasise by their name that they disagree strongly with the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism."
↑Ellman, Michael (2007). «The Rise and Fall of Socialist Planning». En Estrin, Saul; Kołodko, Grzegorz W.; Uvalić, Milica, eds. Transition and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Mario Nuti. New York City: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 22. ISBN978-0-230-54697-4. «In the USSR in the late 1980s the system was normally referred to as the 'administrative-command' economy. What was fundamental to this system was not the plan but the role of administrative hierarchies at all levels of decision making; the absence of control over decision making by the population [...].»