13 ms·

The great error: the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect

80 points by lermontov 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
junkscience2017 9y ago
Much of this is easily debunked in accessible books and even YouTube videos. The original Bolsheviks had indeed read their Marx. They knew that a revolution needed to happen not in Russia (which everyone knew was a pre-industrial state), but in industrialized Germany and potentially Britain. Merely decimating Russian society was never the end goal of the Bolsheviks. 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.
- Jenya_ 9y ago
  I agree, especially Stalin was fighting with Trotsky who promoted ideas of the permanent revolution.
- aqsalose 9y ago
  Does the article disagree with any of that? >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.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by 'belief in the soon-to-come apocalyptic worldwide civil war and revolution'? As a Marxist, Lenin certainly expected revolution to break out around the world, but World War 1's global scope and vast destruction were incontrovertible facts which seemed like definite evidence in support of Marx's economic predictions. 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.
polkovnikov-ph 9y ago
Such a scientific article. Marx would be much proud.
_callcc 9y ago
All these anti-Bolshevik treatises of late merely profit from the decay and ruin of Left-wing consciousness and culture that has taken place in the last century. The old Bolsheviks I once knew would have laughed at this "thesis". But who is around anymore to argue against it?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- narag 9y ago
  Against? TBH, I'm not sure there's a need to argue against a political movement with such a record. 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.
  - influx 9y ago
    For folks who don’t know and want to learn more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes 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.
    - undersuit 9y ago
      But why did you link the article. Are you asserting something?
    - geofft 9y ago
      "Whataboutism" is absolutely relevant, though. In order for the idea of mass killings under communism to be an intellectually honest one, the mass killings have to be at least correlated with communism, if not caused by it. If there's one other ideology that's committed atrocities, sure, I understand that that doesn't absolve communism. But if every ideology has, saying "We're only talking about this one" is actively misleading. 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."
empath75 9y ago
> they were the only apocalyptic sect that had ever taken over an “existing heathen empire”: they ruled over the population of the former Russian Empire, which was overwhelmingly ignorant of or unreceptive to their teachings 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.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  I really wonder why this was downvoted so much. Anyone care to elaborate?
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  According to Lichtheim's book on Marxism, Marx was inspired by the French Revolution and wanted to succeed where it had failed.
pattisapu 9y ago
Sheila Fitzpatrick's review of The House of Government is less gushing, or at least it maintains a critical distance from the work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-communist-homes https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-commun...
Feniks 9y ago
So just like any religion then ;)
Koshkin 9y ago
Calling the Bolsheviks "an apocalyptic sect" is wrong, because they were full of what we might call "the social optimism". They tried to build a "new, happier" society on the ruins of the imperial Russia which was rotten to the core. Too bad they chose the "Red Terror" as the means to that end.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  "Apocalypse" literally means "unveiling", but it refers to the biblical book of Revelation. Revelation describes the total destruction of the existing world, but ends with the creation of a new, better one. 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.
  - mamon 9y ago
    Yeah, it's funny that the world "apocalyptic" become more or less synonymous to "catastrophic", when in fact the book of Revelation is a story with happy end :)
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > which was rotten to the core 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.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  In fairness, their options in the civil war were either 'red terror' or a swift defeat, since the White forces (led by the aristocracy and financed and supported from abroad) had no qualms about initiating a 'White terror' to raise manpower. 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.
anigbrowl 9y ago
A good summary of the faults of political orthodoxy. You can safely experience the downsides first hand by hanging around with certain groups of Maoists, who are especially fond of quoting their favorite texts in lieu of developing or critiquing them. 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.
- Shivetya 9y ago
yarrel 9y ago
Religions are like political parties, you say?
- agarden 9y ago
  Politics is the opiate of the people.
ocschwar 9y ago
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had to define religion. 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.
- defgeneric 9y ago
  Sorry, this is just to easy. Bolshevism was not a religion. Not at all. It was a political party modeled on the German SPD, modified to fit the political conditions of Tsarist Russia. No serious scholar or historian would treat Bolshevism as a religion. It was always about politics.
- a-nikolaev 9y ago
  "Patriotism", "Racism", "Functional programming", and many other things will qualify too then, at least for a non-negligible number of people. We tend to get unreasonably attached and put our faith into stuff like that.
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    Patriotism: plenty of ethno-specific religions out there. I was born into one. 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.
    - drb91 9y ago
      Just a note that patriotism is typically defined around nation states, not ethnicities, although many times they may align. But the largest nations are often ethnic melting pots!
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
And don't forget that Lenin was a mushroom.
woodandsteel 9y ago
To understand why the Bolsheviks failed achieve their idealistic goals, you need to look at the larger history of Marxism. 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.
woodandsteel 9y ago
Here's another review www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/bolshevisms-new-believers/

80 points by lermontov 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

junkscience2017 9y ago

Much of this is easily debunked in accessible books and even YouTube videos. The original Bolsheviks had indeed read their Marx. They knew that a revolution needed to happen not in Russia (which everyone knew was a pre-industrial state), but in industrialized Germany and potentially Britain. Merely decimating Russian society was never the end goal of the Bolsheviks. 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.

Jenya_ 9y ago
I agree, especially Stalin was fighting with Trotsky who promoted ideas of the permanent revolution.
aqsalose 9y ago
Does the article disagree with any of that? >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.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by 'belief in the soon-to-come apocalyptic worldwide civil war and revolution'? As a Marxist, Lenin certainly expected revolution to break out around the world, but World War 1's global scope and vast destruction were incontrovertible facts which seemed like definite evidence in support of Marx's economic predictions. 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.

polkovnikov-ph 9y ago

Such a scientific article. Marx would be much proud.

_callcc 9y ago

All these anti-Bolshevik treatises of late merely profit from the decay and ruin of Left-wing consciousness and culture that has taken place in the last century. The old Bolsheviks I once knew would have laughed at this "thesis". But who is around anymore to argue against it?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
narag 9y ago
Against? TBH, I'm not sure there's a need to argue against a political movement with such a record. 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.
- influx 9y ago
  For folks who don’t know and want to learn more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes 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.
  - undersuit 9y ago
    But why did you link the article. Are you asserting something?
  - geofft 9y ago
    "Whataboutism" is absolutely relevant, though. In order for the idea of mass killings under communism to be an intellectually honest one, the mass killings have to be at least correlated with communism, if not caused by it. If there's one other ideology that's committed atrocities, sure, I understand that that doesn't absolve communism. But if every ideology has, saying "We're only talking about this one" is actively misleading. 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."

empath75 9y ago

> they were the only apocalyptic sect that had ever taken over an “existing heathen empire”: they ruled over the population of the former Russian Empire, which was overwhelmingly ignorant of or unreceptive to their teachings 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.

skrebbel 9y ago
I really wonder why this was downvoted so much. Anyone care to elaborate?
woodandsteel 9y ago
According to Lichtheim's book on Marxism, Marx was inspired by the French Revolution and wanted to succeed where it had failed.

pattisapu 9y ago

Sheila Fitzpatrick's review of The House of Government is less gushing, or at least it maintains a critical distance from the work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-communist-homes https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-commun...

Feniks 9y ago

So just like any religion then ;)

Koshkin 9y ago

Calling the Bolsheviks "an apocalyptic sect" is wrong, because they were full of what we might call "the social optimism". They tried to build a "new, happier" society on the ruins of the imperial Russia which was rotten to the core. Too bad they chose the "Red Terror" as the means to that end.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
"Apocalypse" literally means "unveiling", but it refers to the biblical book of Revelation. Revelation describes the total destruction of the existing world, but ends with the creation of a new, better one. 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.
- mamon 9y ago
  Yeah, it's funny that the world "apocalyptic" become more or less synonymous to "catastrophic", when in fact the book of Revelation is a story with happy end :)
thriftwy 9y ago
> which was rotten to the core 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.
anigbrowl 9y ago
In fairness, their options in the civil war were either 'red terror' or a swift defeat, since the White forces (led by the aristocracy and financed and supported from abroad) had no qualms about initiating a 'White terror' to raise manpower. 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.

anigbrowl 9y ago

A good summary of the faults of political orthodoxy. You can safely experience the downsides first hand by hanging around with certain groups of Maoists, who are especially fond of quoting their favorite texts in lieu of developing or critiquing them. 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.

Shivetya 9y ago

yarrel 9y ago

Religions are like political parties, you say?

agarden 9y ago
Politics is the opiate of the people.

ocschwar 9y ago

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James had to define religion. 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.

defgeneric 9y ago
Sorry, this is just to easy. Bolshevism was not a religion. Not at all. It was a political party modeled on the German SPD, modified to fit the political conditions of Tsarist Russia. No serious scholar or historian would treat Bolshevism as a religion. It was always about politics.
a-nikolaev 9y ago
"Patriotism", "Racism", "Functional programming", and many other things will qualify too then, at least for a non-negligible number of people. We tend to get unreasonably attached and put our faith into stuff like that.
- ocschwar 9y ago
  Patriotism: plenty of ethno-specific religions out there. I was born into one. 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.
  - drb91 9y ago
    Just a note that patriotism is typically defined around nation states, not ethnicities, although many times they may align. But the largest nations are often ethnic melting pots!

qbaqbaqba 9y ago

And don't forget that Lenin was a mushroom.

woodandsteel 9y ago

To understand why the Bolsheviks failed achieve their idealistic goals, you need to look at the larger history of Marxism. 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.

woodandsteel 9y ago

Here's another review www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/bolshevisms-new-believers/