Vladimir Lenin - Not a Socialist but an opportunistic member of the Intelligentsia

Historybluff wrote: »

I agree with you to a large extent but I think you miss the more fundamental problem: Marxism itself.

The 1917 October Revolution was more of a coup d'état than a revolution, as you say. The Bolsheviks promised the masses peace and bread, two things which the Provisional Government had failed to deliver. They withdrew Russia from the Great War and attempted to implement socialist ideas to get the economy off its knees. As you say, they shut down the democratic assembly, banned all other political parties, hobbled the workers' councils and centralized power in their own hands.

You think that this was a perversion of Marxist thought. I think it was a predictable product of Marxism. Fundamentally, Marxism is a totalitarian philosophy. Marx and Engels might talk of freedom and self-actualisation under communism, but the achievement of communism - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - demands complete government control of society. As power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, no one can be trusted with such control. In Marx's own day, the anarchist Bakunin criticised this. 'If the proletariat is to be the ruling class, one may ask whom will it govern?' he wrote. 'There must be yet another proletariat that will be subjected to this new domination, this new state.' He concluded: 'the instinct of liberty is lacking in him [Marx]; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian'. The Bolsheviks were like fanatical religious fundamentalists. They believed that they knew the real truth, revealed in Marx's writings: class conflict, the labour theory of value etc. Therefore, to tolerate opposition was out of the question. After all, civil liberties, such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, were mere bourgeois baubles disguising capitalist oppression. Under the benevolent rule of the Bolsheviks, the proletariat would not need these gimmicks. Therefore, critics of any Bolshevist government, as the Socialist Revolutionaries and other groups were likely to be, were demonised as capitalists, enemies of the people etc. and subjected to vicious repression.

Unlike you, I believe that the Bolsheviks genuinely believed in socialism. And they did implement socialist ideas. Contrary to your assertion, 'War Communism', introduced during the Civil War, contained some genuinely socialist policies, such as the nationalization of industry and the introduction of centralized economic management; the prohibition of private entreprise; and the rationing of food. It was the dreadful consequences of these measures that forced a reluctant Lenin to allow the return of private capitalist entreprise under the New Economic Policy. This concession was a major factor in allowing the Bolshevik regime to win the Civil War. Therefore, the problem was not that the Lenin & Co. were faithless to Marx's ideas but that they were all too faithful. Fundamentally, Marx's economic ideas are wrong. Centrally-commanded economies do not work. They cannot work because it is impossible for a government, however sincere or powerful, to gather all the information that is necessary for the smooth working of an economy. Today, no serious economist takes Marxist economic ideas earnestly: the labour theory of value etc. Even in Lenin's day, it was realised that Marx's predictions, such as the ever greater immiseration of the workers, were proving wide of the mark. Cocooned in their Marxist dream world, Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades ignored this reality, instead repeating to themselves the pseudo-science of Marx and Engels.

Therefore, the Bolsheviks were faithful followers of Marx.

The old term for the remuneration of the mechanic was 'price'. It referred to his product rather than to his labor, for it was his product that he sold. When the producer, whether master or journeyman, sold his product, he retained his person. But when he came to sell his labor, he sold himself. The term 'wage' that displaced 'price' as the Industrial Revolution advanced had formerly applied only to day labor, and the extension of the term to the skilled worker was regarded by him as a symbol of a deeper change

it has very strong roots in the American working class movements. So if you go back to, say, the 1850s, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, right around the area where I live, in Eastern Massachusetts, in the textile plants and so on, the people working on those plants were, in part, young women coming off the farm. They were called "factory girls," the women from the farms who worked in the textile plants. Some of them were Irish, immigrants in Boston and that group of people. They had an extremely rich and interesting culture. They're kind of like my uncle who never went past fourth grade -- very educated, reading modern literature. They didn't bother with European radicalism, that had no effect on them, but the general literary culture, they were very much a part of. And they developed their own conceptions of how the world ought to be organized.
They had their own newspapers. In fact, the period of the freest press in the United States was probably around the 1850s. In the 1850s, the scale of the popular press, meaning run by the factory girls in Lowell and so on, was on the scale of the commercial press or even greater. These were independent newspapers -- a lot of interesting scholarship on them, if you can read them now. They [arose] spontaneously, without any background. [The writers had] never heard of Marx or Bakunin or anyone else; they developed the same ideas.