You Won't Have to Follow Me, Only You Can Set You Free

PART TWO OF A PROLOGUE TO A SERIES.

Nelson Mandela, Frames-of-Mind, 2007

The Marxism essay for politics class was a by-the-numbers 'name the core aspects of theory-x' test like most class assignments. There were a few reasons I bothered to finish and hand in that particular essay - setting it apart from all the others due at the same time. I really enjoyed the politics class - the lecturer, the free flow of the classes (compare the rigidly planned psychology class, which I hated) and the subject matter.

The essay was also an opportunity to coherently express my knowledge and ideas on the subject and perhaps gain a greater understanding through arranging it on paper. Though discussing Leninism and identifying the Russian Revolution as a keystone event of the movement were explicit requirements of the essay, I can't recall whether determining an initial cause for the eventual failure of the Soviet Union was part or something I threw in to show off. Based on the conclusion I reached, that the implementation and continuation of War Communism undermined the revolution's own internal support and led to increased centralisation of power, I wonder whether the latter was true. Having stated that Imperial Russia was still a largely feudal state, only to then dismiss the idea that this was why the Soviet Union could not make the transition to socialism by leap-frogging the capitalist epoch, I perhaps wrote myself into a corner and then wrote back out of it in order to increase the word count. The essay also got a straight A!

I have never been an "orthodox Marxist" - the very use of a religious term in this context aptly conjures images of church dogma, which flies in the face of the scientific rational claimed by the social sciences. I'm a contrarian and self-professed free-thinker and I baulk at prescribed doctrine, preferring to arrive at my weltanschauung independently. Before I had even finished school I was already aligning with the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers' state. Whilst older Russians may blame Gorbachev for it's demise (try Yeltsin), even at sixteen reading Orwell and 20th Century history I had concluded that it's failure as a socialist state was its hijacking by Stalinism. The more you compare Stalin with Hitler, the more you wonder whether there was really any difference in sides. With further reading, via the material available in college, I was pursuing the idea that the long term failure of the USSR lay in its authoritarian and centralised character, contrary to socialism, which itself was the result of an incomplete or subverted revolution. For whatever reason I never fully explored this line of thought and instead cited War Communism as a return to authoritarian government, probably because I put off writing the essay until the last minute. Now with five more years of knowledge I'm going to lay out my ideas about the failure of all the communist states.

It should go without saying that there have been no communist states and that those words in combination are paradoxical. Simply skimming the lay persons introduction, The Communist Manifesto, should reveal this. As I explained at the beginning of the month; Marxism categorises history into six economical epochs, from primitive hunter-gatherer society to modern capitalism. Two further epochs lie beyond which have not yet occurred in any nation-state: socialism and communism, which require a proletarian revolution - the factors of which are detailed in the aforementioned essay. The Marxist theory of history is linear. Ancient Greece, for example, could not go from slave economy directly to market capitalism - there are necessary developments that must occur through time. By analogy, Tsarist Russia could not leap from feudalism directly to socialism. The intervening Capitalist stage had not yet been reached outside the major population centres where the majority of the populace were still labouring in an agrarian economy at the turn of the century.

If Russia was capitalist, it was weakly so at best. The success of the Bolshevik revolution lay more in the exploitation of contemporary unrest, than sufficient economic development. Germany, by contrast, was on par with the United Kingdom in levels of industrialisation and the prime candidate in the Western world for a socialist revolution. Indeed, it was hoped that by driving the situation in Russia toward revolution, the efforts in neighbouring Germany would be bolstered, in turn strengthening Russia. When the German Revolution failed (along with other movements in Central Europe in 1919), the new Soviet state was left isolated. The Soviets were well aware of their own economic developmental retardation, no better demonstrated than through its extremely rapid industrialisation in the decade preceding the Second World War.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.
-Joseph Dzhugashvili, 1931

Strong, centralised, authoritarian government made this sudden leap possible. The industrial revolution was driven by such exploitation of the new working class, except that had been in the name of money rather than the motherland. Trotsky's prediction that the Soviet Union would fail if not rescued by a second revolution and be replaced by capitalism turned out to be true - though he predicted a restoration of capitalism in Russia. The same prediction is true of China. Though, again, not a restoration as China was even more undeveloped than Imperial Russia. Given developmental gaps with Western Europe; if the Russian Revolutions (1905, February and October 1917) were delayed 1848 revolutions, the Chinese revolution in 1949 was a massively delayed peasants' revolt far behind the West's in the 14th to 16th centuries. The "capitalist restoration" should in fact be understood as history snapping back into the linear progression - for those states were never capitalist to begin with.

If conditions in Russia, China and elsewhere were not sufficient for socialist revolution, how is it that they all succeeded in overthrowing governments? None of those countries have been developed first world nations - they were all states in various crises that happened to be channelled into upheaval by cadres of professional revolutionaries. These Vanguards are integral to post-Marx Marxism. In order to overcome the resistance (false consciousness) of an undeveloped state and generate revolution, these core party members must go out into the fields and factories and effectively convert the proletariat. This is the model that has been exported around the world since 1917. It is this that clashes with Marxism, as what set Marxism apart from the socialism that proceeded it was the condition that the proletariat free themselves rather than be led by a group of intellectuals in a top-down revolution. The proletariat would conduct their own spontaneous movement because the conditions that would support its emergence would exist in the contradictions of a properly developed state.

In entrusting the revolution to, what is essentially an intellectual elite, the structures of the new socialist state will not be the natural products of spontaneous revolution, rather the imposed deformations of one predicated on charismatic authority. Following leaders easily descends into autocracy and totalitarianism (Stalin, Mao, et al). Perhaps later the revolution is institutionalised creating a new elite class who use the state to enrich themselves.

I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I lead you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.
-Eugene Debs

A revolution should be conducted on these principals: for the people, of the people, by the people. If it is not genuine and free, it will not work and there is no point. The belief in charismatic leaders is that history is driven by 'great men' and that revolutionary figures will draw the masses and direct them into deliverance. The Great Man Theory is now considered obsolete. History changes when the masses move together, but how can they move in unison without leadership? If it is up to the individual to understand their situation and act on it as an reasoned individual, not to be subsumed into some impersonal collective, can that unity be accomplished without centralised command? If it is inevitable, yes. If it is to happen soon, then it must be with some form of command and that entails charismatic power. If personae could be obfuscated, the dangers of personality cults can be limited or eliminated. This would require the co-ordination of many independent cells through emergent communications technologies. Anonymity could be the solution. We could all wear Guy Fawkes masks.

To summarise, the Soviet Union failed and all socialist states (actual and purported) will fail because they are founded on revolutions conducted in economic and social conditions not conducive to progression to a socialist state. To overcome the barriers to revolution that necessarily exist at this point, a core of full-time revolutionaries direct the masses into revolt. The resultant state is generated on this elite's intentions rather than the masses', eventually forming new social strata from this division - by definition making them bourgeois revolutions.

[1522]
Drafted November 3rd and November 28th.