Marx or Lenin? Socialism, Democracy and the State

Marxism has evolved, not only because of a fashion for different interpretations but because of changing material realities, making large parts irrelevant or requiring radical reinterpretation. Marx was writing in the mid to late nineteenth-century a world quite different from the western world of today.

Within that nineteenth-century world, Marx saw growing economic and social injustice and whilst at times his analysis could be obscure or overly complicated the general theme of all his work is to promote four fundamental revolutionary ideas, the easiest to understand are the liberation of the working class from 'exploitation' by capitalists, equalising the distribution of wealth and time, and the withering away of the state.