bolshevism

[Dddddd0814 at aol.com]

"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