Part VI: SOVIET RUSSIA
XXXV
The philosophers have only
The conception of a community as an organic growth, which the statesman can only affect to a limited extent, is in the main modern, and has been greatly strengthened by the theory of evolution… It might, however, be maintained that the evolutionary view of society, though true in the past, is no longer applicable, but must, for the present and the future, be replaced by a much more mechanistic view. In Russia and Germany new societies have been created, in much the same way as the mythical Lycurgus was supposed to have created the Spartan polity. The ancient law giver was a benevolent myth; the modern law giver is a terrifying reality.
Communist ideology, the Communist party, and Communist direction have constituted the outstanding characteristics of Soviet Russia, that is, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. To be sure, other factors, ranging from the economic backwardness of the country to its position as a great power in Europe, Asia, and the world, have proved to be of major importance. Still, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, whereas other elements in the situation have exercised very significant influences on Soviet policies, without communism there would have been no Soviet policies at all and no Soviet Union. Moreover, it is frequently impossible to draw the line between the communist and the noncommunist aspects of Soviet Russia and between communist and noncommunist causes of Soviet behavior because the two modes have influenced and interpenetrated each other and because Soviet leaders have viewed everything within the framework of their ideology.
The doctrine of communism represents a variant of Marxism, based on the works of Marx and Engels as developed by Lenin. Working for several decades, beginning in the 1840's, Marx and Engels constructed
* Italics in the original.
a huge and comprehensive, although not entirely consistent, philosophical system. The roots of Marxism include eighteenth-century Enlightenment, classical economics, Utopian socialism, and German idealistic philosophy - in other words, some of the main traditions of Western thought. Most important, Marx was 'the last of the great system-builders, the successor of Hegel, a believer, like him, in a rational formula summing up the evolution of mankind.' While an exposition of Marxism would require another book, certain aspects of the doctrine must be constantly kept in mind by a student of Soviet history.
Marxism postulates dialectical materialism as the key to and the essence of reality. While applicable to philosophy, science, and in fact to everything, dialectical materialism exercised its greatest impact on the study - and later manipulation - of human society, on that combination of sociology, history, and economics that represented Marx's own specialty. 'Materialism' asserts that only matter exists; in Marxism it also led to a stress on the priority of the economic factor in man's life, social organization, and history.
In the social production of their means of existence men enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of these productive relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.
The fundamental division in every society is that between the exploiters and the exploited, between the owners of the means of production and those who have to sell their labor to the owners to earn a living. A given political system, religion, and culture all reflect and support the economic set-up, protecting the interests of the exploiters. The base, to repeat, determines the superstructure.
'Dialectical' adds a dynamic quality to materialism, defining the process of the evolution of reality. For the Marxists insist that everything changes all the time. What is more, that change follows the laws of the dialectic and thus presents a rigorously correct and scientifically established pattern. Following Hegel, Marx and Engels postulated a three-step sequence of change: the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. A given condition, the thesis, leads to opposition within itself, the antithesis, and the tension between the two is resolved by a leap to a new condition, the synthesis. The synthesis in turn becomes a thesis producing a new antithesis, and
the dialectic continues. The historical dialectic expresses itself in class struggle: 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.' As an antithesis grows within a thesis, 'the material productive forces of a society,' always developing, 'come into contradiction with the existing productive relationships,' and social strife ensues. Eventually revolution leads to a transformation of society, only to become itself the new established order producing a new antithesis. In this manner the Italian towns and the urban classes in general revolted successfully against feudalism to inaugurate the modern, bourgeois period of European history. That period in turn ran its prescribed course, culminating in the full flowering of capitalism. But, again inevitably, the capitalists, the bourgeois, evoked their antithesis, their 'grave-diggers,' the industrial workers or the proletariat. In the words of Marx foretelling the coming revolution:
The expropriation is brought about by the operation of the immanent laws of capitalist production, by the centralization of capital… The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This husk bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
Interestingly if illogically, the victorious proletarian revolution would mark the end of all exploitation of man by man and the establishment of a just socialist society. In a sense, humanity would return to prehistory, when, according to Marx and the Marxists, primeval communities knew no social differentiation or antagonism.
Lenin's theoretical contribution to Marxism could in no sense rival the contributions of the two originators of the doctrine. Still, he did his best to adapt Marxism to the changing conditions in the world as well as to his own experience with the Second International and to Russian circumstances, and he produced certain important additions to and modifications of the basic teaching. More to the point for students of Soviet history is the fact that these amendments became gospel in the Soviet Union, where the entire ideology has frequently been referred to as 'Marxism-Leninism.'
Among the views developed by Lenin, those on the party, the revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, together with those on the peasantry and on imperialism, deserve special attention. As already mentioned, it was a disagreement on the nature of the party that in 1903 split the Russian Social Democrats into the Lenin-led Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks. Lenin insisted on a tightly knit body of dedicated professional revolutionaries, with clear lines of command and a military discipline. The Mensheviks, by contrast, preferred a larger and looser organization. With characteristic determination and believing in the imminent worldwide overthrow of the capitalist system, Lenin decided in 1917 that he and his party could then stage a successful revolution in Russia, although at first virtually no one, even among the Bolsheviks, agreed. After the Bolsheviks did seize power in the October Revolution, Lenin
