IMPACT OF THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION: IDEOLOGY MATTERS
COMMENTS TO THE MEETING OF THE WESTERN FRONT ASSOCIATION
JACKSONVILLE, FL
MAY 23, 1998
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/wizzm2.html
I.
BACKDROP: GERMAN IDEALISM AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES
German
philosophers in the 19th century were often "Idealists," that is, they
held that ideas have a force, power, and reality that is more "real" than that
concrete, reality that so consume us in our daily lives.
German idealism dominated the 19th-century Russian revolutionary movement from
the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 until long after Lenin's successful
revolutionary coup that we call the October (or Bolshevik or Communist)
Revolution of 1917.
I
never want to downplay the central role of raw hypocrisy in human affairs. We
in the United States have seen the dissonance between the sublime humanism of
Marx's ideas and the coarse violence of the Stalinist dictatorship as rank
hypocrisy. Yet, we can also see the conflict as the desperate attempt to
coerce reality through the power of belief—through the power of the Idea.
And one way to interpret the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was
that the Soviets had lost their ability to convince themselves that the
Leninist/Stalinist Idea had the power to transform reality into a better
future. With the collapse of this self-justifying, central Myth that
legitimized the Soviet experience, the Soviet Union died not with a bang but
rather whimpered into Lev Trotsky's "dust bin of history."
With this introduction, I would now like to offer three examples in the
Russian Revolutionary experience where Ideas deeply affected the course of
events. Only toward the end of the twentieth century have these effects begun
to run out of steam.
II. THREE
EXAMPLES
A.
"MODERATE" SOCIALISM AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION OF 1917
The first example involves the reaction of moderate socialists to the February
Revolution in Petrograd in 1917.
Moderate Socialists, including the Marxist Mensheviks in contrast to Lenin's
Bolsheviks, had adopted a position that Russia was not yet ready for a
Socialist Revolution. Reading Marx's Stages of History literally,
they understood the Bourgeois Revolution had to come first and had to take
place under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The working-class movement thus
had to satisfy itself with playing the role of a party of the extreme
opposition. The bourgeois revolution had to come first and be developed. The
responsibility of the proletariat was to encourage this historical necessity.
Real consequences flowed from this belief. When the women, workers, and
soldiers of Petrograd spontaneously took to the streets in February 1917, it
took only several days for them to overthrow the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.
They then handed power they had won in the streets to their moderate socialist
leadership—none of whom were philosophically or psychologically ready to
assume the mantle of power. Consistent with their beliefs, the socialists in
turn handed power to the bourgeoisie who set up the Provisional Government.
Not having the complete courage of their convictions, however, the moderate
socialists also created the Petrograd Soviet. This organization held
veto-power over the actions of the bourgeois Provisional Government.
This "compromise" established the period of "Dual Power" which was
inherently unstable. In retrospect, it is amazing that the Provisional
Government, amidst the catastrophe of World War I, managed to hold on to power
until October of 1917 when Lenin’s and Trotsky's Bolsheviks managed a coup
d'etat to take power.
Lenin, like his Menshevik cousins, was a Marxist, but his Marxism focused less
on the determinist element of Marx's Stages of History than on the
ability of the individual to assert his will on history. For him, there was no
need to wait patiently for the bourgeoisie to fulfill their historical duty at
their own leisure; Bolshevism could force the pace. Lenin's Will to Power
and his belief in the power of the Idea to change reality made the difference
between his success and the moderate socialists’ failure.
B.
LENIN'S IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM
The second example of the power of the Idea concerns Soviet influence on the
developing world.
Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917,
during the trials of the First World War and before the Bolshevik Revolution,
to explain two crucial contradictions facing Marxists of the day.
The first contradiction concerned the delayed outbreak of the promised world
revolution. After all, it had already been sixty-nine years since Marx in the
Communist Manifesto had proclaimed that "A Specter is haunting
Europe—the specter of Communism." What had gone wrong?
The second failure of the Marxist promise involved the inability of the
world's proletariat to prevent war and its rejection of internationalism for
nationalism. It had been a common belief among those of all political stripes
from the far right to the far left, that socialist influence on the
proletariat had made a major European war impossible. One of the central
socialist beliefs was that capitalists and capitalism fight wars for profits.
Now, with the spread of democracy and the entry of powerful socialist parties
into Europe's parliaments, the capitalists could try to provoke war to their
heart's delight. They, however, would find it impossible to vote war credits
through parliament or to mobilize soldiers who, following their socialist
leadership, would refuse to fight. These ideas evoke memories of the
anti-Vietnam War poster: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"
Lenin's ingenious answer to both questions came in his book, Imperialism:
The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it, he argued that the concentration
of production had transformed the capitalism of free competition into
monopoly capitalism. The concentration of production also had dramatically
increased the socialization of production. Big banks had changed from
pure credit institutions into business banks and dominated whole
sectors of industry. Together, the banks and industry built ties with
government. This coalescence of bank capital with industrial capital with
strong government ties had formed a financial oligarchy that controlled
large sections of the national economy.
Share issues and state loans had increased the power and amount of surplus
capital. This surplus flowed beyond political frontiers and extended the
financial oligarchy's control to other countries. The capital exporting
monopolies had divided the world among themselves. International cartels
formed the basis for international relations, and the economic division of the
world provided the ground for the struggle for colonies, spheres of influence,
and world domination. But once the international cartels had divvied up the
world, the struggle now became one for repartitioning the world.
Because the economic development of individual countries is uneven and
sporadic, some suffered a disadvantage in this repartitioning. Imperialism
represented a special, highest, stage of capitalism.
An
aggravation of contradictions, frictions, and conflicts accompanied this
transition to a capitalism of this higher order with Monopolists assured
profits by corrupting the upper stratum of the proletariat in the developed
countries. The imperialist ideology permeated the working class. In other
words, the burden of bourgeois oppression shifted from the shoulders of the
domestic proletariat to those of the colonial peoples. In effect, the
Monopolists bribed their domestic proletariat, who came to see that their
material interests dependent on successful colonial enterprise. Now,
successful war to repartition the world in the favor of a particular nation
made fighting war against fellow proletarians in other countries worthwhile.
With his theory, Lenin seemingly had explained those two problems with Marx.
The revolution had not yet swept the world because the potential
revolutionaries, the proletariat, bribed by the illusion of short-term,
material gains, had forgotten their true, long-term interests. They had
rejected their class-based internationalism for nationalism because wars
fought to expand colonial holdings seemed in their material self-interest.
Hence, they did not prevent the outbreak of the Great War.
This theory held long-term importance because Lenin, unlike Marx and Engels,
did not see the revolutionary perspectives as centered uniquely on advanced
capitalist countries. After the Great War, in a period of "Capitalist
Encirclement" the Soviets attacked "the weak link in the chain of
imperialism," the colonies. Political influence went to where the
oppression was—the colonies.
The colonial and post-colonial world after World War II lacked an
entrepreneurial bourgeoisie with the will and capacity to transform
existing conditions and to overcome the entrenched interests opposed to
full-scale development. In this world, a gospel of competitive individualism
seemed useless for modernization to those in the Third World. What seemed
needed to get the underdeveloped country moving has been collective effort
inspired by a national sense of political purpose. Only governments had enough
capital, organizational skills, and commitment to make rapid development
possible. Ideologically, therefore, the intelligentsia of such countries
gravitated to one or another of the various socialist doctrines. Many
have described this as state capitalism, that is, the state and not
private individuals perform the entrepreneurial duties of gathering land,
labor, and capital for productive enterprise. Socialist rhetoric disguised
this crucial essence.
For most of the twentieth century, Soviet Russia provided the model for those
in the Third World who wished to rapidly modernize their countries. And rapid
modernization was necessary for the sake of national prestige and
independence. Russia's success seemed obvious when we note that within forty
short years Russia had risen from the ashes of World War I to defeat Hitler,
to become one of the world's two superpowers, and to be the first in space.
The vocabulary provided by Lenin was just as important as was this
practical example. That Marx himself had had little to say to the
underdeveloped world mattered little. I would argue that many Third World
leaders—two contentious examples are Ho Chi-Minh and Fidel Castro—who led
revolutions wanted to assert national pride, independence, and prosperity.
They turned to Communism because Lenin had provided them with a vocabulary
supplying a coherent explanation for colonial degradation and a means for
asserting national regeneration. Additionally, of the major powers, the Soviet
regime alone more-or-less consistently supported the aspirations of those
wishing to throw off colonial and capitalist oppression. Of course, today, the
Communist model no longer holds the same allure it once did.
C. TWO
MARXIST HERESIES: LENINISM/STALINISM AND MUSSOLINI'S FASCISM
The final example of the power of ideas generated during World War I involves
the intimate, kissing cousin-relationship between Stalinist Communism and
Mussolini's Fascism.
Despite facile assumptions, Fascism and Communism were not antipodes. Although
their exact relationship remains difficult to define, there exist
commonalties, as one author has pointed out:
Fascism was the heir of a long intellectual tradition that found its origins in the ambiguous legacy left to revolutionaries in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Fascism was, in a clear and significant sense, a Marxist heresy. It was a Marxism creatively developed to respond to the specific needs of an economically retarded national community condemned, as a proletarian nation, to compete with the more advanced plutocracies of its time for space, resources, and international stature.
Was
this self-awareness present as thinkers and politicians struggled to define
these two ideologies as they co-developed earlier in this century? In fact,
many did recognize that their common interests held much greater weight than
did the Talmudic differences between Fascism and Communism.
Arturo
Labriola's
Avanguardia Socialista of Milan by 1903 had become the forum for
Italy's Sorelian syndicalist revolutionaries, who were struggling to make
Marx relevant and against reformist socialism. Such luminaries as Vilfredo
Pareto and Benedetto Croce graced its pages, followed shortly by a
second generation of Sorelian theoreticians, who came to dominate Italian
radicalism for more than a generation. Together they constructed an
alternative socialist orthodoxy, which they believed was the true heir to
classical Marxism. Clearly, their ideas were no more heretical to those of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels than was Lenin's Marxism.
By
1904 Mussolini, then a socialist agitator in Switzerland, had begun his
collaboration with Avanguardia Socialista, a relationship he kept for
the next five years. The syndicalist contributors to the journal affected the
future Duce's intellectual and political development.
Radical syndicalists like A. O. Olivetti innovatively argued that,
under retarded economic conditions, socialists must appeal to national
sentiment if their ideas are to penetrate the masses. For him, both
syndicalism and nationalism were dedicated to increasing production
dramatically. As long as Italy remained underdeveloped, the bourgeoisie
remained necessary to build the economic foundation requisite for a socialist
revolution. Olivetti spoke of a national socialism, because in an
underdeveloped economy, only the nation could pursue the economic development
presupposed by classical Marxism.
When Mussolini took over as editor of the socialist paper, Avanti!, in
December 1912, he attracted anarchists and even some rigid Marxists
like Angelica Balabanoff, whom he took on as his assistant editor.
Paolo Orano, who served on the editorial staff of Avanti! with
other syndicalists like Sergio Panunzio, set the tone of that socialist
paper. Mussolini also founded and edited Utopia from November 1913
until December of the following year. This bi-monthly review attracted many of
the most important young socialist and syndicalist theoreticians, who helped
Mussolini to develop his own ideas.
In
the final years before the First World War, many independent national
syndicalists, including Panunzio and Ottavio Dinale saw war as
progressive. Helping to put together the rationale for Fascism, they supported
Italy's fight with the Ottomans over Libya in 1911, and, with Mussolini, they
called for Italy's intervention in the First World War. Many socialists now
passed into Mussolini's Fascist ranks, and syndicalists such as Panunzio,
Olivetti, and Orano, became its principal ideologues.
As
early as October 1914, Olivetti in Pagine Libere spoke of an Italian
socialism infused with national sentiment, a socialism destined to complete
Italy's unification, to accelerate production, and to place it among the
world's advanced nations. Over the next three years in L'Italia Nostra,
Olivetti spoke of the nation as uniting men of all classes in a common pursuit
of historical tasks. Class membership did not align an individual against the
nation, but united him with the nation. Patriotism was fully compatible with
the revolutionary tradition of Italian socialism.
After
Mussolini came to power, Fascism showed its commitment to industrialization
and modernization of the economy. The Futurists, Nationalists, and National
Syndicalists, the ideologies that composed Fascism, agreed that maximizing
production was the first order of business. They also sought urban
development, rationalized financial institutions, and bureaucracy reorganized
by technical competence. They wanted to abolish "traditional" and
nonfunctional agencies, to expand road, rail, waterways, and telephonic
communications systems, to modernize secular control of the educational
system, and to reduce illiteracy.
What does this mean for Fascism's relationship with Soviet Russia? Mussolini
by 1919 was pointing out the absolute decline in economic productivity in
Russia as proving its failure to recognize its historic obligations. He
suspected the Bolsheviks eventually had to commit themselves to national
reconstruction and national defense, that is, to some form of developmental
national socialism as defined by Fascism's former Syndicalists. Speaking
of the Bolshevik failure to understand their revolutionary necessities,
Mussolini presciently predicted that Lenin had to appeal to bourgeois
expertise to repair Russia's ravaged economy. Bolshevism, he said, must
"domesticate" and mobilize labor to the task of intensive development. The
Bolsheviks should have anticipated this, because Marxism had made it clear
that socialism could be built only on a mature economic base. Russia, not
having yet completed the capitalist stage of economic development, met none of
the material preconditions for a classic Marxist revolution. Russia was no
more ripe than was Italy for socialism.
Lenin, in the practical working out of his revolutionary government, did run
headlong into many of these conundrums predicted by the Syndicalists. In the
months following his takeover, he had expected that a revolution in Germany
would bail Soviet Russia out of its difficulties. Thus, while the first
Fascists were organizing for a national revolution, the Bolsheviks were still
dreaming of an international insurrection. Lenin, changing horses, in 1921
proposed the New Economic Policy to replace the ideologically purer but failed
War Communism. Like Fascists, Lenin now spoke of holding the entire fabric of
society together with "a single iron will," and he began to see the withering
away of the state as a long way away: "We need the state, we need
coercion"—certainly a Fascist mantra.
After Lenin's death in 1924, this logic culminated in 1925 with Stalin's
"creative development" of Marxism: "Socialism in One Country," a
national socialism by any other name. Mussolini suspected that Stalin might be
abandoning true Communism. This, it seemed, might provide economic advantages
to Italy, and to Mussolini it made sense for his country to build ships and
planes for the Soviets in exchange for one-third of Italy's oil supplies.
For him the even more interesting possibility was that Stalin might be the
true heir to the tsars and an imperialist with whom Fascism could see
eye-to-eye. In 1923, the Duce predicted, "Tomorrow there will not be an
imperialism with a socialist mark, but . . . [Russia] will return to the path
of its old imperialism with a panslavic mark." Mussolini convinced himself
that Russian Communism was proving to be less revolutionary than was Fascism.
The Duce and some of his followers considered it possible that the two
movements were moving together closely enough as to be no longer easily
distinguishable.
Even dedicated Fascist party workers such as Dino Grandi, Mussolini's
foreign minister from 1928 to 1932, early recognized Fascism's affinities with
Lenin's Bolshevism. He had taken at least part of his own intellectual
inspiration from revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1914 he had talked of the
First World War as a class struggle between nations. Six years later, Grandi
argued that socialists had failed to understand the simple reality of what was
happening in revolutionary Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution had been nothing
less than the struggle of an underdeveloped and proletarian nation against the
more advanced capitalist states.
Not only Fascists made this analysis. Torquato Nanni, a revolutionary
Marxist socialist and an early acquaintance of Mussolini, by 1922 had
anticipated these developments. He analyzed the common economic foundations of
Fascism and Bolshevism, which produced the related strategic, tactical, and
institutional features of these two mass-mobilizing, developmental
revolutions. Both, he wrote, had assumed the bourgeois responsibilities of
industrializing backward economies and defending the nation-state, the
necessary vehicle for progress.
Lev
Trotsky,
the organizer of the October Revolution, consistently, even mulishly,
argued that Fascism was a mass movement growing organically out of the
collapse of capitalism. He also rejected all notions of any "national"
Communism. Nonetheless, he too recognized a certain involution. "Stalinism and
Fascism," he said,
despite a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. (that is, Stalinism)
He,
however, refused to go as far as his sometime ally, Bruno Rizzi, who
later argued that assuming similar developmental and autarchic
responsibilities could only produce social and ideological convergence. He
lamented, "that which Fascism consciously sought, [the Soviet Union]
involuntarily built." For him, the governments of Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler,
and even Roosevelt were lurching toward a global system of "bureaucratic
collectivism," a new form of class domination.
Fascist theoreticians agreed with such convergence notions. By 1925, Panunzio
claimed that Fascism and Bolshevism shared crucial likenesses. Fascists noted
that the Soviets had created an armed, authoritarian, anti-liberal state,
which had mobilized and disciplined the masses to serve intensive internal
development. The supreme state generated and allocated resources, articulated
and administered interests, and assumed and exercised supreme pedagogical
functions.
Thus,
while the first Fascists were formulating the rationale for a mass-mobilizing,
developmental, authoritarian, hierarchical, anti-liberal, and statist program
guided by a charismatic leader, events had forced the Bolsheviks along the
same course. Both intended to create a modern, autarchic, industrial system,
which would insure political and economic independence for what had been an
underdeveloped national community. With forced industrialization and "state
capitalism," the Soviets hoped to bring Russia all the benefits of bourgeois
modernization. In the face of required austerity, to mobilize their respective
populations, the Communists and Fascists alike supplemented economic
incentives with pageantry, ritual, ceremony, and parades. All this, coupled
with territorial aggression, completed a compelling picture of "systemic
symmetry."
III.
CONCLUSION
I
have presented three diverse examples of the impact of the Russian Revolution
on later history. There are other potential examples. I find it interesting
that events so important to the twentieth century, now are rapidly fading in
their influence. One real benefit of examining the Communist Revolution within
the larger question of "how best to develop" is that the Revolution loses its
sense of seminal criticality. For all the pathos surrounding the effort, it
becomes just another interesting attempt at rapid development—a failed attempt
at that. While I would happily argue that Marx still has relevance for us
today, especially in his critique of capitalism if not particularly in his
solutions, clearly Lenin and Stalin no longer do.
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