The Power of Ideology: From the Roman Empire to Al-Qaeda by Alex Roberto Hybel

Author:Alex Roberto Hybel [Hybel, Alex Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415504065
Google: iovjXwAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13711207
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Soviet Marxism–Leninism

The forefather of Marxist–Leninist ideology did not posit a theory of world politics. Marx focused, instead, on the nature of social change within societies. Social change, he contended, was the result of struggles between classes. Every society has its haves and have-nots. The ruling class uses the government, laws, and society in general to protect its property rights.11 Capitalism reflected the culmination of different forms of class struggles that had been ensuing throughout history. Like previous forms of economic arrangements, capitalism would in turn be destroyed by its own set of internal contradictions. “The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor,” wrote Marx, “reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capital husk. This husk bursts asunder. The knell of capital private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”12

Russia’s 1917 revolutionary spirit was born a number of decades earlier. During the 1860s and 1870s, Russia’s Left repeatedly attempted to restructure society according to the tenets of utilitarianism, positivism, materialism, and realism. Its members hoped to create a society based on knowledge and reason rather than on metaphysical, religious, aesthetic, and historical approaches to reality. By the 1870s, the Left stopped emphasizing individualism and personal emancipation and began to advocate populism. It assumed that by turning to the peasants it would uncover the purity and probity it had not found within its own environment.13

Though the masses did not respond to the populist crusade, the flames of insurgency remained alive. As Russia continued its rapid development into a capitalist society, the need to defend the afflicted peasant community gained moral stature. This drive provided Marxists their rationale. They presented themselves as a “tough” alternative to the “soft” vision of the populists, claimed to offer an objective perspective on history, and promised that the practice of their dictates would bring about victory.14

Russian Marxists failed to maintain a united front. In 1903, the Russian Social Democrats split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The breakup was set off by differences in party strategy. The Bolsheviks advocated the establishment of a party with well-defined lines of command, guided by professional revolutionaries committed to imposing military discipline, while the Mensheviks favored a larger and less structured organization.15 This is not the place to discuss the domestic and international conditions that enabled the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, to stage a successful revolution in Russia in 1917. It suffices to say that upon assuming power they sought to gain complete control over Russia’s political, economic, and social affairs. A brief discussion of three of Lenin’s written works should help clarify their rationale for action.

In What is to Be Done, published in 1902, Lenin argued that the proletariat needed a revolutionary party to lead them. Without leadership, the proletariat, instead of pursuing its historic revolutionary mission, would give in to limited gains. Politically, however, Lenin needed an alternative justification to rationalize the extraordinary power he claimed the revolutionary party should assume. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, published at the height of the First World War, he forwarded a series of interrelated arguments.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.