Mehring
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Flaviusx
Mehring, the world is still waiting for an actual successful example of a socialist revolution. All the ones to date have gone to hell, more or less. After a while, you begin to wonder if the whole idea is half baked to begin with. If it is so hard to pull off, we may be better off without any more such future political experiments.
The actual, realizable goal for progress in Russia lay not in revolution, but evolution. What Russia needed was peace and time for the old czarist system to yield way to constitutional monarchy and a more liberal order. The country was already developing rapidly economically as it was.
But World War 1 ruined all of that and delivered the country to the hands of gangsters. The stupidity of the ancien regime didn't help here, to be sure, as they themselves were a primary agent in starting the war in the first place. They would have been better off doing whatever they could to avoid it.
Flaviusx, firstly, let me define what I mean by 'socialist revolutions'
I don't judge a revolution or uprising by what it calls itself but by its social make up and program. If you want to discuss the varius nationalist revolutions that have been brought about by peasant movements under communist or socialist flags, that's for other posts. If by socialist revolution we share an understanding of 'working class', ie, brought about predominantly by and for the working class, people who make a living predominantly by selling their labour, we have maybe two examples in history.
The Paris commune was crushed by the French ruling class. The latter are not portrayed as gangsters because they won and our countries essentially see nothing wrong in what they did. They would do the same. Workers were rounded up and shot in cold blood, in their thousands.
We have the Russian Revolution which on a continental level, triumphed militarily against opponents, domestic and external, no less ruthless and brutal than its exponents. Interestingly, and since JAMiAM was talking about context, one BBC documentary a few years back told how Lenin had ordered the hanging of 100 rich peasants. Oh! What a gangster! What it left out was that it was a deterent in response to a plan hatched by a French interventionist general- he confirmed it in his autobiography, to create a famine in Bolshevik held territory and starve the revolution to defeat. How many would that have starved to death? Who has the moral high ground? Who are the gangsters?
The Russian revolution triumphed in such inauspicious circumstances that capitalism re-emerged almost immediately, actually within and around the leading revolutionary party. This serves to remind me, though others may draw different conclusions, that no ideology or political party is stronger than the economic base upon which it rests. What emerged was a nominal 'workers state' but with a working class that had all but disolved and an atomised economy of predominantly small peasant proprietors. It was, in fact, a resumption of a dual power between the working class and middle class, in which the working class temporarily held sway only because the middle class is organically incapable of doing so. It can only hand power to one of the primary classes.
We have the Hungarian uprising of 1956 which was working class and socialist at its core, and crushed by Russian tanks before it could unfold. Likewise the various soviet type councils that controlled regions at various places and times, particularly Germany and Hungary after WW1, never became workers' states, let alone socialist.
That leaves us, at best, with one example of a militarily successful revolution and establishment of an actual workers state. That is insufficient evidence, particularly given its circumstances, that the socialist project is congenitally flawed. Further, though the time in question is long, and might feel quite total in relation to a human life, it is really very short in historical terms. It does point to difficulties, I grant you, but what developer worthy of the name abandons a project when the first prototype fails?
I don't believe for a minute that Russia, whose economy was indeed unfolding, could have developed into a democracy. Indeed, even after mass industrialisation and tens of millions dead, it still isn't a democracy in the classical western sense. Had October not occured, the provisional government would undoubtedly have been crushed by a fascistic reaction. The provisional government was unable even to convoke the Constituent Assembly and was saved once from counter revolution by the Bolsheviks.
Whether or not the Czar had been reinstated, without the state as a barrier to foreign economic predation, Russia would have most likely fragmented into a number of western economic dependencies, only to be overrun by the nazis in 1941 or earlier.
Of the infinite counterfactuals, the only one that looks half promising for Russia, to me, was a successful socialist revolution followed by its linkeage with one or more in a technologically advanced country. That was the Bolshevik program. Either way was a path to millions of dead and terrible suffering of hundreds of millions more. Mynok believes this is because humans are evil. I believe it is because nature has no morals and in humanity's efforts to gain control over, and harness nature, it must resort to natural means. A tragedy for sure, but you can't turn your back on truth because you wish existance was otherwise.
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“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.”
-Leon Trotsky
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