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Marxist-Leninist Ideology A root feature of communist states has been their subscription to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. As fashioned by Lenin, building on the earlier works of Marx and Engels, it is the belief that history advances by means of class struggle, always nudged in a benign direction by the leadership of a communist party. The theory foresaw that in capitalist societies, a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries was necessary to infuse the working masses …

…their work to advance the revolutionary agenda of Marxism (see Marx, Karl), achieved a brief but spectacular prominence in these years. Although much of their output was later dismissed as heavy-handed propaganda, the proletarians produced some memorable pieces, including Kobayashi Takiji's Kanikōsen (1929; The Cannery Boat, 1933), which centers on the abuses suffered by workers aboard a floating crab cannery. Government repression crushed this movement in the 1930s; Kobayashi died while in police custody in 1933.