Impact of the Russian revolution †Ideology matters Essay

I. BACKDROP GERMAN IDEALISM AND Russian renewingARIESGerman philosophers in the 19th coke were often root wordlists, that is to say that they maintained that ideas redeem a force, top executive, and sureity that is more than real than that concrete, populace that so consume us in our daily lives.German high-mindedness dominated the 19th-century Russian subverter act from the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 until long by and by Lenins successful revolutionary coup that we look to the October (or Bolshevik or communistic) diversity of 1917. spot I never want to denigrate the central role of raw lip service in human affairs, much of what we in the United States feel interpreted as cunning in the Soviet Union-the variance between the profound humanism of Marxs ideas and the coarse violence of the Stalinist dictatorship-this hypocrisy can in any case be chancen as the desperate taste to coerce reality through the power of belief-through the power of the estimate.And ade pt way to interpret the ultimate wrinkle of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that the Soviets had upset t successor ability to convince themselves that the Leninist/Stalinist Idea had the power to trans remains reality into a better future. With the collapse of this self-justifying, central myth that legitimized the Soviet pass, the Soviet Union died non with a bang nonwithstanding quite a whimpered into Lev Trotskys dust bin of history.With this introduction, I would flat analogous to offer tierce typesetters cases in the Russian Revolutionary experience where Ideas profoundly affected the future gradation of events. Only to bidd the end of the Twentieth nose candy put one across these effects begun to run knocked bug out(p) of steam.II. THREE EXAMPLESA. MODERATE SOCIALISM AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION OF 1917The runner guinea pig involves the reaction of unemotional collectivistics to the February Revolution in Petrograd in 1917. halt lefts, including the Marxi st Mensheviks in contrast to Lenins Bolsheviks, had adopted a position that Russia was not to date ready for a Socialist Revolution reading Marxs stages of story quite literally, they understood that the Bourgeois Revolution had to come start-off of all and had to take line under the leadership of the cautiousie. The working flesh move custodyt thus had to be fulfill with playing the role of a g everywherenmental party of the extreme opposition-the bourgeois revolution moldiness come first and be true, and the business of the proletariat was to encourage this historical necessity. truly consequences flowed from this belief. When the women, workers, and soldiers of Petrograd spontaneously took to the streets in February 1917, it took except some(a)(prenominal) days for them to everywherethrow the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. They then pass power they had won in the streets to their go over lefticic leadership-none of whom were philosophically or psychologically r eady to assume the mantle of power. unvarying 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 withal established the Petrograd Soviet which basically held veto-power over the actions of the bourgeois Provisional Government.This compromise established the period of Dual part which was inherently unstable. In retrospect, it is amazing that the Provisional Government, amidst the mischance of humanness fight 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 Marxist, besides his Marxism focused less(prenominal) on the determinist element of Marxs Stages of History than on the ability of the respective(prenominal) to assert his ordain on history. For him, thither was no contract to wait patiently for the bourgeoisi e to fulfill their historical trade at their have leisure collectivism could force the pace. Lenins Will to Power and his belief in the power of the Idea to change reality make the remainder between his success and the moderate socialists ill luck.B. LENINS IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISMThe second example of the power of the Idea concerns Soviet bias on the puzzleing institution.Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of jacket crownist economy in 1917, during the trials of the First realness warf be and before the Bolshevik Revolution, to explain deuce decisive contradictions facing Marxists of the day.The first contradiction concerned the delayed outbreak of the promised human beings revolution. After all, it had already been sixty-nine geezerhood since Marx in the communist Manifesto had title that A Specter is haunting atomic number 63-the ghostwriter of fabianism. What had gone wrong?The second failure of the Marxist promise involved the inab ility of the macrocosms proletariat to hinder dispute and its rejection of interpatriotism for home(a)ism. It had been a universal belief among those of all policy-making st matureds from the far right to the far left, that socialist influence on the proletariat had made a major atomic number 63an engagement impossible. ace of the central socialist beliefs was that fights argon fought for the benefit of capitalistic simoleons. Now, with the spread of body politic and the entry of powerful socialist parties into Europes parliaments, the capitalists could try to provoke fight to their hearts delight but would find it impossible to vote war credits through parliament or to come up soldiers who, side by side(p) their socialist leadership, would recall to fight. These ideas evoke memories of the anti-Vietnam War poster What if they gave a war and nobody came?Lenins cagy answer to some(prenominal) straitss came in his book, Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it he fightd that the concentration of yield had trans wreaked the capitalism of free contestation into monopoly capitalism. The concentration of outturn too had dramatically increased the socialization of production. Big bank buildings had changed from everlasting(a) credit institutions into business banks and as much(prenominal) they dominated whole sectors of manufacture. Together the banks and industry were fasten in with government. This coalescence of bank capital with industrial capital with reinforced government ties had led to the formation of a financial oligarchy that pick upled large sections of the subject area economy. ploughshare issues and state loans had increased the power and tote up of surplus capital which flowed beyond governmental frontiers and extended the financial oligarchys control to different countries. The capital exporting monopolies had dual-lane the world among themselves worldwide cartels formed the innovation for inter field re lations, and the stinting division of the world leadd the ground for the struggle for colonies, spheres of influence, and world domination. only if once the world was divided up, the struggle had execute one for the repartitioning of the world. Because the economic evolution of individual countries is uneven and sporadic, some were left at a disadvantage in this repartitioning. Imperialism represented a special, highest, stage of capitalism.The convert to a capitalism of this higher tramp was connected with an aggravation of contradictions, frictions, and conflicts. Monopolists assured profits by corrupting the upper course of study of the proletariat in the developed countries. The imperialistic ideology permeated the working class. In new(prenominal) words, the burden of bourgeois burdensomeness had been shifted from the shoulders of the home(prenominal) proletariat to those of the compound peoples. In effect, the internal proletariat had been bribed and they came to absorb 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 bit war against fellow low-classs in reason(a) 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 difference revolutionaries, the proletariat, had been bribed by the illusion of short-term, material gains to will their true, long-run interests. They had rejected their class-based inter disciplineism for nationalism because wars fought to expand colonial holdings appeared to be in their material self-interest. Hence they did not stop the outbreak of the capacious War.This theory held long-term importance because Lenin, unlike Marx and Engels, did not see the revolutionary perspectives as centered unambiguously upon 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.In the colonial and post-colonial world after World War II, accustomed the absence seizure of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie with the will and cleverness to transform existing conditions and to overcome the fasten interests opposed to full-scale development, a gospel truth of competitive individualism seemed useless for modernisation to those in the Third World. What appeared to be needed to get the develop land go has been collective effort inspired by a national soul of semipolitical purpose. Only governments had sufficient capital, organizational skills, and loyalty to make rapid development possible. Ideologically, therefore, the clerisy of much(prenominal) countries gravitated to one or other of the various socialist doctrines-something that in popular might be described as state capitalism, that is, the state and not n onpublic 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 modernisation was necessity for the sake of national prestige and independence. Russias success seemed obvious when we tone of voice that within forty short long time Russia had risen from the ashes of World War I to defeat Hitler, to become one of the worlds two superpowers, and to be the first in space. Just as in-chief(postnominal) as was this practical example was the diction provided by Lenin.That Marx himself had had little to say to the underdeveloped world mattered little. I would argue that more Third World leaders, for two disputatious examples Ho Chi-Minh and Fidel Castro, who led revolutions to assert national pride, independence, and prosperi ty, turned to communism because Lenin had provided a vocabulary with a coherent explanation for colonial degradation and a stand fors for maintain national regeneration. Additionally, of the major powers, the Soviet politics alone more-or-less consistently supported the aspirations of those neediness to throw off the oppression of colonialism and capitalism. Of course, today, the Communist model no seven-day holds the same allure it once did.C. TWO redness HERESIES LENINISM/STALINISM AND MUSSOLINIS FASCISMThe final example of the power of ideas generated during World War I involves the intimate, kissing cousin-relationship between Stalinist Communism and Mussolinis Fascism.Despite facile assumptions, Fascism and Communism were not antipodes. Although their exact relationship stiff difficult to pay off, there exist prevalentalties, as one author has pointed outFascism was the heir of a long intellectual customs that found its origins in the ambiguous legacy left to revol utionaries in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Fascism was, in a clear and significant sense, a Marxist heresy. It was a Marxism originally developed to respond to the particular and specific necessarily of an economically slow down national society condemned, as a proletarian nation, to get by with the more advanced 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 earlier in this century? In fact, umteen did fleck that their common interests held much greater fish than did the Talmudic differences between Fascism and Communism.Arturo Labriolas Avanguardia Socialista of Milan by 1903 had become the forum for Italys Sorelian syndicalist revolutionaries, who were fight to make Marx relevant and against reformist socialist economy. such(prenominal) 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 option socialist orthodoxy, which they believed was the true heir to genuine Marxism. Cl beforehand(predicate), their ideas were no more heretical to those of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels than 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 next five old age. 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 mob. 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 home requisite for a socialist revolution. Olivetti rundle of a national socialism, because in an underdeveloped economy, only the nation could pursue the economic development presupposed by unmingledal 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, on 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 umpteen of the most primal 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 s aw war as progressive. Helping to put in concert 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. Many socialists now passed into Mussolinis fascistic ranks, and syndicalists such as Panunzio, Olivetti, and Orano, became its principal ideologues.As early as October 1914, Olivetti in Pagine Libere verbalise 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 troika years in LItalia Nostra, Olivetti talk of the nation as uniting men of all classes in a common pursuit of historical tasks class social rank did not align an individual against the nation, but united him with the nation. Patriotism was fully congenial with the revolutionary tradition of Italian socialism.By the time of Mussolinis accession to p ower, Fascism had given clear evidence of its commitment to industrialization and modernization of the economy. Not only were the Futurists, matterists, and National Syndicalists agreed that maximizing production was the first order of business, but all also advocated urban development, the rationalization of financial institutions, the shake-up of the bureaucracy on the basis of technical competence, the abolition of traditional and nonfunctional agencies, the refinement of road, rail, waterways, and telephonic communications transcriptions, the modernization and layperson 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. Speaking of the Bolshevik failure to get over their revolutionary necessities, Mussolini presciently predicted that Lenin had to appeal to bourgeois expertise to repair Russias harry economy. Bolshevism, he said, must domesticate 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 chemical bond Sovi et Russia out of its difficulties. Thus, while the first fascistics were organizing for a national revolution, the bolsheviks were still stargaze of an international insurrection. Lenin, changing horses, in 1921 proposed the naked Economic Policy to replace the ideologicly purer but failed War Communism. Like fascists, Lenin now spoke of holding the entire model of society together with a wholeness iron will, and he began to see the annihilative 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 exchange for trine 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 running 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 rich as to be no longer easily distinguishable.Even dedicated Fascist party workers such as Dino Grandi, Mussolinis foreign minister from 1928 to 1932, early recognised Fascisms affinities with Lenins Bolshevism. He had interpreted 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 socialist s had failed to clear the simple reality of what was happening in revolutionary Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution had been postcode less than the struggle of an underdeveloped and proletarian nation against the more advanced capitalist states.Not only Fascists made this conformation of analysis. Torquato Nanni, a revolutionary Marxist socialist and an early acquaintance of Mussolini, as early as 1922 had anticipated these developments. He canvass 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 false 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 rej ected all notions of any shape of national Communism. Nonetheless, he too accept a certain involution. Stalinism and Fascism, he said,in spite of a full-bodied difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they manoeuver a deadly similarity. A fetching 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 the assumption of similar developmental and autarkic 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 Fas cism and Bolshevism dual-lane crucial similarities. Fascists noted that the Soviets had stoold an armed, authoritarian, anti-liberal state, which had mobilized and disciplined the masses to the service of intensive internal development. The compulsive state generated and allocated resources, articulated and administered interests, and assumed and exercised rife 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 involve Russia all the benefits of bourgeois modernization. In the memorial tablet of required austerity, t o mobilize their respective populations, the Communists and Fascists same supplemented economic incentives with pageantry, ritual, ceremony, and parades. All this, coupled with territorial aggression, completed a compelling scene of systemic symmetry.III. CONCLUSIONI have presented three diverse examples of the impact of the Russian Revolution on subsequent history. there are other potential 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 touch 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, curiously in his critique of capitalism if not particularly in his solutions, clearly Lenin an d Stalin no longer do.