The great error: the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect
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It's interesting how a lot of people tries to defend the unambiguously totalitarian party and, at the same time, criticizes autoritarian trends of western democracies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communis...
Note: please no what aboutism as a response to this. I’m aware that this isn’t the only ideology that has committed atrocities, but we are discussing this one in this thread.
And the very article you link to acknowledges that, by comparing killings under communist regimes to killings under the Inquisition, to the Holocaust, and so forth, and by comparing deaths under famine in Communist countries to deaths under famine in the British empire.
Otherwise you might as well say "Look at this list of atrocities committed by men, I'm aware that women have committed atrocities too but that's not what we're discussing in this thread."
Mass killings under communism is not an idea, it's a fact, isn't it?
Was it caused by communism in general or some persons in particular is debatable.
In many cases in the 20th century (arguably including that one) disastrous economic performance was caused by incompetent and corrupt central control of the economy, and then that caused massacres, essentially from Western Europe Eastward all the way the the pacific coast.
Say, what was the basic idea behind communism again ? Yeah I'm sure that version 2.0 will "skip" the incompetent and corrupt parts. Right. Otherwise it's not real communism.
Arguably corrupt and incompetent leadership is a fact of life and is the very core of what distinguishes theory from practice.
So, it seems likely that if specifically more bolsheviks were around, they might take issues with the characterization of TFA, as grandparent says.
Work for the betterment of the community in preference to selfish ambition; from each according to there abilities, to each according to their needs; ...
These are what I think of as basic tenets of communism ... What about this is not consistent with technological progress of society?
Communism seems, to me, to be our last great hope for a long future for the human race.
I suppose some would prefer technological advancement over sustainability.
And yet people don't have issues with political movements with the same or even worse records (from colonialism to slavery), and can swipe their issues under the carpet (what does capitalism has to do with some such countries enslaving 2/3rds of the world causing untold suffering and deaths, that's just human nature, some bad apples, some greedy leaders, etc) whereas issues with other systems they present as "inherent".
It's mostly the winners getting to write history.
From the murdered native Americans (North and South), to concentration camps, mass executions, slavery work (including US blacks), huge colonial wars, all the way to human zoos...
Are you sure? For example, colonialism was a project of capitalist development and it very much involved a moral prerogative to '''civilize''' the inferior races of the world... by plundering them of their resources and subjugating them.
Bolshevism yes, the political movement it belongs in general, no. Take Zinn for example: "Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name."
>For all of its faults at least capital aggregation doesn’t have a moral prerogative behind it.
The protestant work ethic? The white man's burden? The various civic-religious views of the free-market and the invisible hand?
Or, Dr Bowring, an English economist said it in the 19th century: “Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ.”
Or maybe it's freedom itself? Friedman: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself".
-- and tons of such colonial, and neo-liberal moral justifications, from the 16th century to Fukuyama end of history with the triumph of the one true system.
You raise a very valid point. Also often disregarded are social advances from the movement.
I mean, my understanding of pre-communist Russia was that it was still basically medieval in many ways with serf/noble type relationships and very not advanced. I'm not sure it would be were it is now, nor have become a major 20'th century super power without what happened.
Not saying the end justifies the means at all, just we have to take progress into account when weighing relative merit.
Not justifying (can anyone really justify Stalin?). Just pointing out we have to take the omelet into account when pointing out a messy kitchen with roughly broken egg all over.
Because no matter who you are, no matter where you are, I assure you a lot of eggs were broken to get there. And no, the broken eggs are not OK with me. But sometimes that's how it is and we can't rewind the clock. But we should try to look at the whole story, not just the parts we find morally repugnant.
Which were dismantled in 1961.
Since then, 56 years passed before the revolution. That's a lot of time. Russian Empire was urbanizing and industrializing rapidly.
If not for communists, Russia will be more like 300 mln strong Norway today, not 140 mln strong Guatemala like it's today.
We'll never know for sure.
Moreover, Allies will meanwhile fick said Germany with rake. That's actually what got Russia, being biggest fish in a pond and unstable at the same time.
If Russia had still been at the state they were in 1912 they may well have gotten rolled by the Axis. Perhaps the appearance of the Bolsheviks saved them from that fate. We'll never know for sure.
I'm not a Bolshevik supporter btw. I'm aware they caused a lot of suffering and I don't attempt to justify that.
Wut?? They didn't the first time. What makes you think second time is the charm? Without a crippling 10 years civil war, Russia will have a huge head start.
But even if they did, I doubt it would be worse than what we have now. You can infer that what we have now is pretty bad.
They did roll Poland. Does Poland have it worse than Russia? Nope, the opposite is true. French understood that and abstained from the fight.
Today's Russia would be worse than a Nazi-occupied Russia?
It's a typical eastern European country, with the typical corruption and political power patterns that come with it. Nothing more, nothing less, except its size.
The image of Russia as some global rogue power is ludicrous, especially coming from a global rogue power itself, which has invaded, occupied, took the oil, toppled, etc, places tons of miles outside its borders for the best part of the last 30 years, creating a hell of a mess in the process.
>French understood that and abstained from the fight.
That's a novel way to look at WWII. Perhaps somebody should have told the allies that all those sacrifices and blood toll wasn't needed, because they'd win anyway.
No. Russia has it worse than any other Eastern European country. Shorter life span, worse wealth inequality, higher incidents of murder and drug use, AIDS epidemy, weaker political system. We're done pretty well. That's the result of the whole communist XX century.
And yet, a few western powers had enslaved and controlled 2/3rd of the world.
Russia is a crypto colony of UK anyway, so no way it could be worse.
Mostly because of those pesky Bolsheviks being a new worry of the colonial powers, standing in as an idea that their rule can end, and socialism inspiring all kinds of anti-colonial national revolutions (from Vietnam to China, and from Africa to Latin America). So, there's that.
Besides, neo-colonialism still dominates the developing world. It's the bigger fish like India, Japan, China, Brazil and a few others like Indonesia, that got away from it and managed (more or less successfully) to take their fate into their own hands instead of being played and meddled.
I didn't get anything for me out of this decolonization-by-communist-competition deal. Anything but humiliation.
You mean 1861 (emancipation of the serfs). That didn't prevent 1917 Russia from still being a "medieval in many ways with serf/noble type relationships" country -- like the civil war might have meant the end of slavery in the US, but it took a century for de-seggregation, and still today blacks are over-represented in poverty and prison populations (long term after-effects of starting worse than nothing -- other "white" immigrants started their US life with nothing, but blacks, until the 60s, started worse than that).
And there were several revolutions before November 1917, precisely because the masses felt the need for them. (If anything November 1917 was a party takeover of the grass-roots February revolution).
>If not for communists, Russia will be more like 300 mln strong Norway today, not 140 mln strong Guatemala like it's today.
Nobody cared for Norway. Everybody cared (had it in) for Russia (from Napoleonic France to Nazi Germany, all the way to global corporate interests today that plunder all around the world but are bitter because Russia prefers its own national class of kleptocrats to do the plundering instead of selling to the lowest bidder).
If it wasn't for the communists (not the ideology, but the hard-forced fast-track industrialization and urbanizing project) they'd be plundered all the way now, and WWII might have ended very differently.
However there's also 50 mln death toll.
Come on! Nobody pushes divisions of Poland as something positive for Poland. Revolution is tragedy, communism is failure, have the dignity and leave our corpse alone.
Forbidding diversity and giving absolute power to the leaders. What could go wrong?
I understand your complaint were it about communism, but it's hard to defend a group (Bolshevism) that was loaded with cowardly and narcissistic mass murderers. There's no one to defend them because they're all dead, in many instances killed off by each other. Their form of government collapsed. What's there to defend? Does anyone really want to associate themselves with the actions and mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Beria, etc. at this time?
Is this incorrect? Were there Bolshevik communities elsewhere that you may have been part of? I thought most of the Bolsheviks were dead by the 1950s.
Nope. It was a majority faction ("bolshevik" literally means "member of majority" as opposite to "menshevik", "member of minority") in the Russian Social-Democratic Worker Party (РСДРП). They took power during the October Revolution. Soon after the revolution the party was renamed into Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). A year later the Communist International (Commintern) was created by Lenin's order and its first congress in 1919 was attended by delegates from 21 different countries.
So, it seems to me, it was not a minor faction in a single country but a member of the international Communist movement.
I'm still not sure how the OP knew any Bolsheviks, was anyone calling themselves that in 1970?
don't worry most of the left repackaged the old communism into moral relativism and is no longer trying to win that unwinnable battle to keep communism as an ideology detached from all communist implementations.
it's mostly the older guards that still try that line.
The former were all about a minority controlling the majority, while the latter is about the majority being in control (although that does not work out all that well always either).
Note that the it is almost impossible to discuss this due to overloaded terms like liberalism which means the opposite depending on who you ask. I define leftism like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics
It's just that I've never seen it in (historical) contexts outside of describing the pre 1920s revolutionaries.
They used "bolshevik" as a term of endearment especially in reference to the old party members.
It was a relatively small group of men that ended up dominating Russia, partially due to how ruthless they were willing to be.
You mean like every other successful revolutionary party? Revolutionaries that aren't willing to be ruthless end up in prison or on the scaffold. To quote Ben Franklin as he was preparing to sign the Declaration of Independence, 'We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.'
Lenin repeatedly emphasised the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution.[252] Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want ... to organise violence in the interests of the people."[253] He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment.[254] Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky.[255]
In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a system of repression orchestrated by the Cheka.[256] Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the entire bourgeoisie,[257] Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, merely those who sought to reinstate their rule.[258] The majority of the Terror's victims were well-to-do citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration;[259] others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and perceived social undesirables such as prostitutes.[260] The Cheka claimed the right to both sentence and execute anyone whom it deemed to be an enemy of the government, without recourse to the Revolutionary Tribunals.[261] Accordingly, throughout Soviet Russia the Cheka carried out killings, often in large numbers.[262] For example, the Petrograd Cheka executed 512 people in a few days.[263] There are no surviving records to provide an accurate figure of how many perished in the Red Terror;[264] later estimates of historians have ranged between 10,000 and 15,000,[265] and 50,000 to 140,000.[266]
What did Ben Franklin do that was comparable to that?
For Lenin at least, yes, absolutely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Democratic_Front_(Kerala)
Interesting connection - Putins father was a cook for both Lenin and Stalin.
No. They were the largest left faction, and the word bolshevik translates to 'majority', while menshevik means 'minority' - so named because the Bolsheviks pursued a majority-rule policy while the Mensheviks wanted a more parliamentarian system that preserved the rights of minority parties. There were two communist revolutions in 1917; the first, in February, toppled the Tsar but the provisional government led by Kerensky didn't deliver on its promise of pulling Russia out of the war and made so many compromises with the conservative and militarist interests that eventually it lost the confidence of the working class, and the Bolsheviks were able to take power in an almost bloodless second revolution in October.
Lenin was in hiding at the time, having been accused of sedition (I think, I forget the exact charge) against the provisional government, and Trotsky's execution of the takeover went so smoothly that when Lenin turned up at the Bolsheviks' HQ a couple of days alter he demanded of Trotsky to know why they weren't fighting and was astonished to learn that they had already won. Having seized power, the Bolshevik's first task was to get Russia out of the war, and they sent Trotsky off to negotiate the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This didn't go as well as they hoped, and to get Russia out of the war they had to make huge compromises, but they succeeded in signing a peace treaty thereby fulfilling their primary objective.
The Russian civil war began after the exit from WW1, but the Bolsheviks were legitimately in power before it began and remained in power the whole time. Civil wars in any country are bitter and destructive, partly because many of the issues are personal and partly because both sides know the territory well and are able to wage war more intimately and effectively than a foreign invader, who is more constrained by logistical and infrastructural considerations.
I think the Bolsheviks and the left revolutionaries in general were quite justified in seizing power; Tsarism was dreadful and World War 1 was a horrific waste of life and treasure which the Bolsheviks were quite right to oppose (and which many socialist parties around europe cynically sold out the working class to promote). Having achieved victory and pulled russia out of the war, I don't know why you'd expect them not to defend the government they'd just established against its White Army challengers.
The Tsarists weren't much better, sure. Much of that history is covered here:
https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Revolution-New-History/dp/046...
Unfortunately, Putin is back to praising Stalinism. A free, democratic Russia would be really interesting.
Russia can and will be labeled free and democratic by outside organizations when it's not ruled by a dictator. The US did not chose Putin, though Putin might like to choose who leads the US.
unfortunately, Russians who could see past that little trick were either exterminated or emigrated long ago.
Nobody has a problem with it though since the government is eager to listen to the West so it's a proper "democracy" and things are fine.
Reasons your text is a poor attempt:
Kremlin propaganda about "democracy = subjugation" predates Ukrainian situation by at least a few decades if not a century; and then Ukraine is not the only "young democracy" Russians could check out as an example, so why do you even bring it out here? especially since attacking Ukraine themselves definitely taints "the analysis of the benefits of democracy".
Even if we take a bait with "Ukraine is a reason why Russians don't want democracy":
Ukrainian history in your post is (on purpose?) not told exactly right and some important elephants in the room (like Crimea and Russian military involvement) are conveniently ignored; subjective statement about corruption levels is thrown, what's your measurement methodology?
again, other "young democracies" might have a better situation with everything, why Russians don't look at those?
I indeed believe that you are sincere and find that because Ukraine is failing and still labeled a democracy then Russia is never going to be democratic, but it's tragic that such a shaky views are just blindly adopted by Russians.
Because it's easy to verify. Btw, I am not sure what are you even arguing here, my point and the point to the post you replied to is that "Russia will never be considered a democracy by the West" not the strawman you are so eager to burn here.
People seem to forget that ~18 million people died and >20 million people were wounded in that conflict - understandably since we have far more footage of WW2 and subsequent conflicts compared to a rather hazy conception of trench warfare and primitive tanks for WW1. Compared to this the Russian revolutions of 1917 were near-bloodless affairs. High estimates for the Red Terror in the lead up to the Russian Civil War are about 200,000 (100k is more common), a small number in that historical context, but worse because of the number and nature of the atrocities committed.
On the other hand, the White Terror to which it was a response claimed some 300,000 lives but nobody seems to care about that, which is a pretty weird double standard if you ask me. Perhaps this is because people conflate the Red Terror with the later events of the Stalinist period rather than looking at it in its contemporary context.
Unfortunately, Putin is back to praising Stalinism. A free, democratic Russia would be really interesting.
On this I completely agree, but I have to note that the West's response to the emergence of a somewhat free and democratic Russia after the collapse of the USSR was to set it up with a rudimentary market economy and milk it for profit, while keeping defense budgets in the West at about the same levels (until the early 2000s, when they almost doubled). I think Putin's rise is a direct result of our failure to invest in helping Russia to build democratic institutions.
Tambov uprising alone had 11 thousands people directly dead, many more indirectly due to hunger, etc. And that's just a tiny episode.
My point is not to downplay it but to say it should be considered in the context of everything else that was going on at that time. By all means question the historical estimates if you disagree with them, but I think you should be equally concerned by the death attributable to the anti-communist forces, no?
I don't think so; Bolshevism itself was the decay and ruin in left-wing consciousness. The emphatic rejection of Leninism and it's descendants by many on the left, even many who remain committed to Marxism and non-Leninist derivatives thereof, is a renaissance in left-wing consciousness and thought, and an escape from the swamp in which much of it was mired for much of the twentieth century.
Leninism, like traditional western capitalism, “worked” at displacing a pre-capitalist elite with a new elite and industrializing pre-industrial societies, and largely in the process replicated the key problems associated with western capitalism identified in works like Marx’s Capital, which is why post-Leninist Marxist critics of Leninism often call that system a “state capitalism”.
Leninism didn't however, “work” at solving any problem for which the Left didn't have a clear, well-established working solution before Lenin, and I don't think the Left (outside of the Leninist part, which just ignores the problem and pretends that Leninism is perfect) yet has a theory of how to move on from a Leninist society that doesn't run through capitalist democracy on the route to anything else. Leninism is an unproductive dead-end for the Left.
I'm not a Bolshevik but I am a proponent of industrial unionism if that helps.
Trade unionism and related models on the left have been incredibly successful, without radical seizure of power, in effecting change within advanced democratic capitalist societies; Leninism has had no success either in seizing power or effecting change without seizing power in advanced capitalist societies (except as part of a coalition with trade unionists and others.)
It's true that trade unionism and related models have had trouble firmly institutionalizing changes, and that the progress they've made has suffered reversed and is under constant threat, and that fundamentally upending the capitalist heirarchy remains out of reach of those models.
Which is why it's good that Leninism—as a complete failure at doing anything capitalism doesn't already adequately do—is falling out of favor in the radical Left, because for a long time it was the only theoretical model with any mindshare outside of moderate models, and if there is going to be a successful radical model (whether successful in its radical form or providing new ideas that can transform the moderate Left), it's not going to emerge with Leninism getting all the mindshare.
It is the escape from that dominance that is the Renaissance, and, yes, as a rebirth, it is naturally prefigured by conditions that existed prior to what it is an escape from.
Chomsky on Leninism:
Hint: he’s not a fan
So are you saying the thesis is wrong, but you are not going to offer us any arguments as to why?
So he defined it as "the sense that there is an unseen order to things, and that one must conform to it harmoniously."
Bolshevism obviously qualifies.
No serious scholar or historian would treat Bolshevism as a religion. It was always about politics.
We tend to get unreasonably attached and put our faith into stuff like that.
Racism: "race is our religion" - an explicit slogan for more than one neonazi movement.
Functional programming: when an advocate moves past "one must" to "you must", the allusions to religion and holy wars get pretty justified.
On the other hand, the review (and possibly the book) are a little unfair in ignoring the daunting scope of the task the Bolsheviks undertook - the transformation of a feudal kingdom with only two large industrial centers into a modern state. They were not the only party seeking to overturn that order, but took and maintained power in October 1917 because they were willing to follow through on their basic aims, such as taking Russia out of the Great War - even though they had to accept significant short-term losses like abandoning control of Ukraine.
It's absolutely true that a collectivist ethos like Bolshevism was massively destructive to the establishment of the time and resulted in an enormous loss of freedom - for them. But reading a review like this, it's easy to forget that the vast majority of the population there did not enjoy anything like the freedoms people take for granted in a developing country, but lived either in squalid urban conditions or primitive rural ones. And yet, mere decades later, it was the USSR that first ventured into outer space.
Communism, as outlined by Marx, is a philosophy of abundance - Marx imagined that everyone would work a bit, maybe half-days, to maintain society, and that the rest of the day could be given over to study and leisure. In practice, this egalitarian utopia remained a distant aspiration as countries like russia and China sought to both maintain their newly-seized economic and political independence and to reap the fruits of industrial development for themselves. As we've seen, both countries have slid back towards nationalism; Russia as an autocracy and China as a weird sort of state capitalism - Xi has concentrated power almost as effectively as Putin, but wields it through more conventional institutional channels.
It may be relevant that both countries abandoned internationalism after their Communist revolutions - Stalin to pursue 'socialism in one country' (with himself very much in charge) and China to alter pursue 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' under Deng. One could argue that today China practices a form of economic imperialism while seeking to establish a peaceful counter-hegemony opposite the United States and to a lesser extent the EU. Communism as an international movement is moribund, and left-wing Communists (ideologically democratic ones) would argue that the failure to prosecute an international strategy made such an outcome inevitable.
the issue with all ideal forms of each government type is that people in charge elevate themselves above the tenets of said government.
I think the Jacobin take over of the French Revolution was similar, both in the totalist philosophy of the revolutionaries, the apocalyptic fervor of it and in the bloody consequences of it.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-commun...
www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/bolshevisms-new-believers/
To start, in the mid-19th century Marx believed that capitalism has inherent contradictions that would lead to its weakening and being overthrown through violent workers revolution and replaced by communism, a utopia in which everyone would work together and the state would disappear. And he thought this would happen within a few decades.
But then decades went by and capitalism instead continued to grow, and this lead to a crisis in the Marxist movement. One faction, lead by Eduard Bernstein, decided revolution would never occur and decided to instead promote socialism through democratic elections and gradual reform. This group joined up with socialist democratic parties throughout Europe.
The other group, lead by Lenin, decided to double down on revolution. They thought the workers had been brainwashed and needed to be lead by a tight group of disciplined revolutionaries, a doctrine known as "vanguardism"
Lenin also believed that capitalism had escaped the consequences of its alleged internal contradictions by expanding to overseas markets through European imperialism. But he thought that this process had reached its limit and the result would be a world war, after which Europe would be ripe for communist revolution.
Finally, Lenin believed, contrary to conventional Marxism, that the peasants in agrarian, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist societies like Russia were naturally communal, and so it would be possible to go directly from feudalism to communism without having to pass through a capitalist phase.
Based on all these beliefs, Lenin lead the Bolsheviks in a successful takeover of Russia. The problem was that the communist revolutions in the rest of Europe never occurred, and so Russia found itself all alone and very vulnerable to its Western industrialized neighbors.
There followed a debate as to whether Russia should become a liberal capitalist and industrialize the traditional way,and eventually become socialist or push ahead with a dictatorial form of socialist industrialization. Stalin was initially for the first option, but after gaining power he switched to the second, with enormous brutality.
Then followed WWII, where the Soviet Union basically rescued the world from Fascism, and then Stalin's death, and a very dreary dictatorship that dragged on for decades until communism finally collapsed under Gorbachev.
In the meantime, a great many pre-industrialized countries, starting with China, were inspired by Marxism and the Soviet Union and also tried to move directly to socialism and then communism, and also failed. Even many nations that did not label themselves as communist, like much of the Middle East and Africa, still were inspired to follow authoritarian, semi-socialist paths. And all failed to achieve their goals.
Leftists say none of this matters because none of the nations were true communism. But in dozens of cases a group of smart and apparently sincere communists took power, and in every instance what they produced was not true communism, so the conclusion seems to be that true communism simply is not possible.
Wrong, he thought that capitalism would be replaced by socialism, which would itself transition over time to communism; Marx’s socialism is not a utopian state, and Marx did not see workers revolutions replacing capitlaism directly with utopian communism.
> Leftists say none of this matters because none of the nations were true communism
No, non-Leninist Leftists say none of this is relevant to non-Leninist communism and the broader non-Leninist Left, because all these systems were Leninist vanguardism, and non-Leninists on the Left reject vanguardism and generally also the Leninist deviation from classical Marxism in bypassing capitalist democracy as a necessary part of the path.
You are correct that Marx predicted a brief transition period between capitalism and true communism, which of course is not what ever happened.
>Marx’s socialism is not a utopian state.
But his communism is supposed to be a utopia, which is what I said.
Let me add that the vocabulary is not consistent here. Sometimes leftists refer to communism as a form of socialism, sometimes they are spoken of as two different systems.
>No, non-Leninist Leftists say none of this is relevant to non-Leninist communism and the broader non-Leninist Left, because all these systems were Leninist vanguardism, and non-Leninists on the Left reject vanguardism and generally also the Leninist deviation from classical Marxism in bypassing capitalist democracy as a necessary part of the path.
True, but non-Leninist communists have never come to power in a state, and as far as I can tell there is no particular reason to think they ever will. And even if they somehow did, there still remains the question of how good a society they would actually produce. Leftists have attained power (ie Labour in the UK), but have not done so well over the long term.
By the way, what are you? A non-Leninist communist or a non-Leninist socialist or what?
Also, I am going into this because when leftists say "but that wasn't true communism" they seem to be implying that it could have been if the leaders had done things right. However, when you look at the circumstances in Russia/USSR, it simply was not possible, much less for any of the other communist countries.
More generally, I went into this whole history because I think everyone should know it, but very few do. Do you agree?
No, he didn't predict (at least, not in any of his public works) that the socialism phase would be brief.
> which of course is not what ever happened.
But, then, even if that was Marx’s prediction of what would occur if his program were adopted, Marx’s programs has never been applied, only Lenin’s which, despite claiming ideological continuity with Marx, applied to different starting conditions and employs different methodologies.
> But his communism is supposed to be a utopia, which is what I said.
What you said was he predicted a rapid and direct transition from the capitalist condition to a communist utopia; both the rapid and direct parts are false.
> Let me add that the vocabulary is not consistent here. Sometimes leftists refer to communism as a form of socialism, sometimes they are spoken of as two different systems.
There are different definitions of “communism” and “socialism” that apply in different contexts, but they are pretty consistently used. There is the definition of ideologies, in which communism is a specific form of socialism, and there is the definition of politico-economic systems within the Marxist theory, in which socialism and communism are different systems.
That's interesting. I had always read it would be brief, but I am not an expert on Marxism, so I am going to assume you are right. So let me ask, how is Marx defining socialism (I am guessing he meant there was still a state), and what did he think needed to happen to move from socialism to communism?
>even if that was Marx’s prediction of what would occur if his program were adopted
Huh? Everything I have ever read about Marxism indicates that communism was supposed to be a utopia. What did Marx say that indicated that it might not be one, and in what specific ways?
Also, let me ask again, what is your political philosophy? Are you a non-Leninist communist or a non-communist socialist or what?
And do you agree that it would be good if everyone knew the history of Marxism, and that at present very few people do?
Russia was considered by Lenin to be a staging ground for the more meaningful revolutions to follow. It wasn't until Stalin emerged as the Soviet leader that this strategy was abandoned in favor of "socialism in one country", where the exploitation of pre-industrial Russia was deemed good enough.
I doubt anyone would even describe Stalin's reign in religious terms (although his upbringing was deeply religious)...but just another manifestation of history's most reliable anti-pattern: the folly of investing total power in one person.
>Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it. This intellectual framework allows him to explain the Bolsheviks’ striving to bring self and society, individual and history, into perfect alignment; their relentless study and exegesis of their own version of scripture (Marx and Engels, later Lenin); their jealous guarding of their purity and integrity; and their embrace of violence, which was a welcome sign of the apocalyptic confrontation that would herald the “Real Day”.
Maintaining ideological purity (Lenin's policy of no collaboration with any bourgeois or other leftist elements after the February revolution and the program of immediate communist revolution after the bourgeois one were considered foolish and impractical by many); the belief in the soon-to-come apocalyptic worldwide civil war and revolution (as you said yourself); and the embrace of violent narratives on how to go about it; all of this describes Lenin's policies ~1917 quite well.
I mean, the destruction of so much life and wealth in that war was fundamentally irrational; it was a bunch of opportunist colonial powers vying for dominance over each other. It seems rather cheeky to label the Bolsheviks as a quasi-religious sect for acting in accordance with an economic hypothesis with several years of evidence to back it up.
You may recall that when WW1 broke out most of the participants were (at least publicly) optimistic about it being a short honorable affair. Trotsky, who was an astute journalist, correctly predicted that the combination of trench construction and industrialization would instead lead to a long war of attrition, and was proved entirely right about this - though he did fail to predict the innovation of tank development that would eventually break the deadlock on the Western front. But I think you have to say the Bolsheviks had more evidence for their political-economic thesis going into the revolutionary year of 1917 than the 'great powers' did for their policy in 1914. Further, the Bolsheviks succeeded in taking power not by rushing into the fray at the first opportunity, but by sticking to their political position and waiting out the other parties after the February revolution. After all kerensky's government had failed to deliver on the goal of getting russia out of the war, and it seems odd to blame the Bolsheviks for sticking to their principles on this rather important issue.
Slezkine might well be right to draw his sectarian analogy based on subsequent events, but it doesn't seem fair to apply this to the 1917 policies which seem eminently rational and strategic.
In the same way, the Bolsheviks were about the total destruction of the current social, economic, and political order, in order to build the new. So "apocalyptic" is a fairly accurate term.
It was still in all senses better that anything Bolsheviks had at any point of their rule. It's too easy to kick a fallen giant.
Forced conscription and hostage-taking among the peasantry was the historical norm and the Red Guards (the all-volunteer force that was the product of the soviets and supported the Bolsheviks) was simply too small to serve as an effective defense force. I don't know what other options they had.
Mind, I'm not excusing subsequent totalitarianism, Stalinist purges etc. if you meant to include that in your post; I'm just commenting on the strategic conditions that obtained during the civil war.
But "we must either become murderous thugs, or be murdered" does at least allow the justification of self-defense...
Their attempts to defend against that quickly devolved into adopting the violent and often atrocious methods of their opponents. But what else should they have done - become martyrs and hope their defeat would induce some sort of guilt trip in others? That would have been to sell out the working class that they had taken up arms to liberate in the first place. And of course the horrific human cost of the Great War suggested that the ruling classes of the various western powers were unbound by any such moral considerations in the first place.
I don't think self-sacrifice has any actual mileage as a political strategy.