bolshevism

Dddddd0814 at aol.com Dddddd0814 at aol.com
Sat Aug 24 10:57:16 PDT 2002


"I was speaking very generically, of course. I have read that prior to 1917, some of the Bolsheviks thought that, once the Tsar was overthrown, ordinary capitalism would have to be instituted in Russia to provide the basis for building socialism (following Marx's concept of stages of economic organization). And we know the Lenin described what he was doing at one point as "state [i.e. government] capitalism". Why not liberal capitalism, then? Guided of course by the Party.... So I'm not the only person to have such ideas -- I'm in Bolshevik company. No need to get excited, it's just another what-if. The events that happened were once as improbable as the ones that didn't."

This was prior to Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917. The idea that Russia could survive as a bourgeois democratic state was relegated to the Mensheviks. The point was that Russia would have been left behind economically by the capitalists because it was so large. If it was a small, developed country in northern or western Europe, well, that would have been another story. Full bourgeois capitalism would have relegated Russia immediately to the third world. The events since 1990 have borne this out almost a century later.

In the "April Theses," Lenin characterized Russia as, among other things, "state capitalist" because he understood that Russia could not develop to true socialism without the aid of socialist revolution in other countries, especially the developed ones. Stalin, of course, overturned the concept of permanent revolution as "Trotskyist" and instead promoted the revisionist notion of "socialism in one country."

Best, David



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