Impact of the Russian revolution - Ideology matters Essay Example for Free

Impact of the Russian revolution Ideology matters EssayI. BACKDROP German IDEALISM AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIESGerman philosophers in the 19th century were often Idealists, that is to say that they maintained that ideas meet a king, power, and reality that is much real than that concrete, reality that so consume us in our day-by-day lives.German idealism dominated the 19th-century Russian revolutionary move custodyt from the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 until long after Lenins triple-crown revolutionary putsch that we call the October (or Bolshevik or Communist) variety of 1917.While I never indispensability to downplay the central role of raw hypocrisy in human affairs, much of what we in the coupled States have interpreted as hypocrisy in the Soviet Union-the dissonance amidst the profound secular humanism of Marxs ideas and the coarse violence of the Stalinist dictatorship-this hypocrisy can also be countn as the desperate enterprise to coerce reality through the power o f belief-through the power of the Idea. And whizz way to interpret the ultimate weaken of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that the Soviets had lost t successor ability to convince themselves that the Leninist/Stalinist Idea had the power to alter 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 entirely rather whimpered into Lev Trotskys dust bin of history.With this introduction, I would now like to allow three examples in the Russian rotationary experience where Ideas profoundly affected the future course of eveningts. plainly toward the end of the Twentieth Century have these effects begun to run step to the fore of steam.II. THREE EXAMPLESA. MODERATE collectivism AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION OF 1917The initiative example involves the reaction of moderate socialisticics to the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917.Moderate socialistics, including the b olshie Mensheviks in contrast to Lenins Bolsheviks, had adopted a position that Russia was not thus far ready for a collectivist Revolution reading Marxs Stages of biography sooner literally, they belows in additiond that the Bourgeois Revolution had to come first and had to affect place under the leadership of the middle class. The working class movement thus had to be satisfied with performing the role of a per centumy of the extreme opposition-the bourgeois revolution must come first and be developed, and 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 single several eld for them to over take for the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. They then(prenominal) handed power they had won in the streets to their moderate socialist leadership-none of whom were philosophically or psychologically read y to assume the mantle of power. Consistent with their beliefs, the socialists in turn handed power to the bourgeoisie who established the Provisional Government. Not having the complete courage of their convictions, however, the moderate socialists also established the Petrograd Soviet which essentially 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 humankind War I, managed to hold on to power until October of 1917 when Lenins and Trotskys Bolsheviks managed a coup detat to take power.Lenin, like his Menshevik cousins, was a red ink, only when his Marxism focused less on the determinist element of Marxs Stages of History than on the ability of the individual to assert his will on history. For him, there was no need to rest patiently for the bourgeoisie to fulfill their historical du ty at their own leisure Bolshevism could force the pace. Lenins Will to Power and his belief in the power of the Idea to change reality made the dispute amidst his success and the moderate socialists failure.B. LENINS IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISMThe 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 creation War and forrader the Bolshevik Revolution, to explain deuce crucial contradictions facing Marxists of the day.The first contradiction concerned the delayed extravasation 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 mired the inability of the worlds proletariat to prevent war and its rejection of transpatriotism for themeism. It had been a unwashed belief among those of all semipolitical stripes from the far right to the far left, that socialist influence on the proletariat had made a major European war impossible. genius of the central socialist beliefs was that wars are fought for the benefit of capitalist profits. Now, with the dissipate of democracy and the entry of powerful socialist parties into Europes parliaments, the capitalists could try to provoke war to their hearts delight but would find it impossible to vote war attributes through parliament or to mobilize soldiers who, followers 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?Lenins ingenious dish 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 costless competition into monopoly capitalism. The concentr ation of production also had dramatically increased the socialization of production. Big banks had changed from pure credit institutions into business banks and as such they dominated whole sectors of industry. unitedly the banks and industry were tied in with government. This calculus of bank capital with industrial capital with strong government ties had led to the formation of a monetary oligarchy that controlled large sections of the peopleal economy.Share issues and state loans had increased the power and amount of surplus capital which flowed beyond political frontiers and extended the financial oligarchys control to former(a) countries. The capital exporting monopolies had divided the world among themselves international cartels formed the basis for international relations, and the scotch division of the world provided the ground for the struggle for colonies, spheres of influence, and world domination. scarce once the world was divided up, the struggle had become one for the repartitioning of the world. Because the economic development of individual countries is nettlesome and sporadic, some were left at a disadvantage in this repartitioning. Imperialism represented a special, highest, stage of capitalism.The vicissitude to a capitalism of this higher order was connected with an aggravation of contradictions, frictions, and conflicts. Monopolists assured profits by degrading the upper stratum of the proletariat in the developed countries. The imperialist ideology permeated the working class. In other words, the burden of bourgeois conquest had been shifted from the shoulders of the domestic proletariat to those of the colonial peoples. In effect, the domestic proletariat had been bribed and they came to recognize that their material interests were tied up with 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 h is theory, Lenin seemingly had explained those two problems with Marx. The revolution had not yet swept the world because the potential revolutionaries, the proletariat, had been bribed by the illusion of short-term, material gains to block their true, long-term interests. They had rejected their class-based internationalism for nationalism because wars fought to expand colonial retentivitys appeared to be in their material self-interest. whence they did not prevent the out(p)break 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 upon innovative 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.In the colonial and post-colonial world after World War II, given the absence of an entrepreneurial bourg eoisie with the will and capacity to transform existing conditions and to overcome the entrenched interests opposed to full-scale development, a gospel singing of competitive individualism seemed useless for modernization to those in the Third World. What appeared to be needed to get the develop country moving has been collective effort inspired by a national sense of political purpose. Only governments had sufficient 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-something that in general might be described 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. Russias success seemed distinct when we note that within forty short years Russia had risen from the ashes of World War I to vote out Hitler, to become one of the worlds two superpowers, and to be the first in space. Just as important as was this practical example was the vocabulary provided by Lenin.That Marx himself had had little to say to the developing world mattered little. I would argue that many Third World leaders, for two contentious examples Ho Chi-Minh and Fidel Castro, who led revolutions to assert national pride, independence, and prosperity, turn to Communism because Lenin had provided a vocabulary with a coherent explanation for colonial degradation and a bureau for asserting national regeneration. Additionally, of the major powers, the Soviet regime alone more-or-less consistently supported the aspirations of those wishing to th row off the oppression of colonialism and capitalism. Of course, today, the Communist model no long holds the corresponding allure it once did.C. dickens MARXIST HERESIES LENINISM/STALINISM AND MUSSOLINIS FASCISMThe final example of the power of ideas generated during World War I involves the intimate, kissing cousin- kind between Stalinist Communism and Mussolinis Fascism.Despite facile assumptions, Fascism and Communism were not antipodes. Although their exact relationship remains tricky to define, there exist commonalties, as one author has pointed outFascism was the heir of a long sharp 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 particular and specific needs of an economically retarded national community condemned, as a proletarian nation, to compete with the more advanc ed plutocracies of its time for space, resources, and international stature.Was this kind of self-awareness present as thinkers and politicians struggled to define these two ideologies as they co-developed front in this century? In fact, many did recognize that their common interests held much greater weight than did the Talmudic deviations between Fascism and Communism.Arturo Labriolas Avanguardia Socialista of Milan by 1903 had become the forum for Italys 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 tha n was Lenins Marxism.By 1904 Mussolini, then a socialist agitator in Switzerland, had begun his collaboration with Avanguardia Socialista, a relationship he maintained for the succeeding(a) five years. The syndicalist contributors to the journal affected the future Duces 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 speak of a national socialism, because in an underdeveloped economy, except the nation could pursue the economic development presupposed by classical Marxism.When Mussolini took over as editor of the socialist paper, Avanti, in December 1 912, 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, along with other syndicalists like Sergio Panunzio, set the cantillate 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 one-year-old 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 precept for Fascism, they supported Italys fight with the Ottomans over Libya in 1911, and, along with Mussolini, they called for Italys intervention in the First World War. legion(predicate) socialists now passed into Mussolinis 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 Italys unification, to accelerate production, and to place it among the worlds advanced nations. Over the next three years in LItalia Nostra, Olivetti spoke of the nation as uniting men of all classes in a common pursuit of historical tasks class membership did not queue up an individual against the nation, but united him with the nation. Patriotism was fully compatible with the revolutionary tradition of Italian socialism.By the time of Mussolinis accession to power, Fascism had given clear evidence of its commitment to industrialization and modernization of the economy. Not only were the Futurists, Nationalists, and National Syndicalists concur that maximizing production was the first order of business, but all also advocated urban development, the rationalization of financial ins titutions, the reorganization of the bureaucracy on the basis of technical competence, the abolition of traditional and decorative agencies, the expansion of road, rail, waterways, and telephonic communications systems, the modernization and secular control of the educational system, and the reduction of illiteracy.What does this mean for Fascisms 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 that the Bolsheviks ultimately had to commit themselves to national reconstruction and national defense, that is, to some form of developmental national socialism as defined by Fascisms former syndicalists. public speaking of the Bolshevik failure to comprehend their revolutionary necessities, Mussolini presciently predicted that Lenin had to appeal to bourgeois expertise to repair Russias ravage economy. Bolshevism, he said, must domesticat e and mobilize labor to the task of intensive development, something which could have been anticipated, because Marxism had made it quite clear that socialism could be built only upon 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 the 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 untested Economic Policy to replace the ideologically purer but failed War Communism. Like Fascists, Lenin now sp oke of holding the entire fabric of society together with a single iron will, and he began to see the crushing away of the state as a long way away We need the state, we need coercion-certainly a Fascist mantra.After Lenins death in 1924, this logic culminated in 1925 with Stalins 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 supercede for one-third of Italys 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 nice as to be no longer easily distinguishable.Even dedicated Fascist party workers such as Dino Grandi, Mussolinis foreign minister from 1928 to 1932, early recognized Fascisms affinities with Lenins 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 hap 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 sort of analysis. Torquato Nanni, a revolutionary Marxist socialist and an early acquaintance of Mussolini, as early as 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 reason 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 sort of national Communism. Nonetheless, he too recognized a certain involution. Stalinism and Fascism, he said,in spite of 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, b ut Soviet Bonapartism. (that is, Stalinism)He, however, refused to go as far as his sometime ally, Bruno Rizzi, who later argued that the assumption of similar developmental and autarchic responsibilities could only generate social and ideological convergence. He lamented, that which Fascism consciously sought, the Soviet Union involuntarily constructed. 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 similarities. Fascists noted that the Soviets had created an armed, authoritarian, anti-liberal state, which had mobilized and disciplined the masses to the wait on of intensive internal development. The supreme state generated and allocated resources, articulated and administered interests, and assumed and exercised paramount pedagogic al 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 require 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 stimulate picture of systemic symmetry.III. CONCLUSIONI have presented three diverse examples of the impact of the Russian Revolution on subsequent history. There are other pot ential examples. I find it interesting that events so crucial to the twentieth century, now seem to be fading so rapidly 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.