Totalitarianism is the form of government whereby the state exerts power over all aspects of the lives of its citizens, thereby limiting all personal freedom. Communism, as founded and established by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, was the first form of totalitarianism. This extremely tyrannical form of government has no similarity whatsoever with the harmonious classless communist society proposed by Karl Marx. (I’ve written about the other totalitarianism, Fascism, and will write more about it).
The fundamental premise of Marx’s communism is for the proletariat to remove the bourgeoisie from power and exploitation of the proletariat and eventually create a communist society with no class distinctions. In terms of implementing a new economic or political system liberating the workers from their capitalist exploiters, Lenin was no socialist, and certainly no communist. His version of Marxism, called Marxism-Leninism, is the quintessence of propaganda used to conceal the true nature of his totalitarianism, a mode of government executed by the dictatorial clique of Communist Party apparatchiks. Leszek Kolakowski clarifies in his analysis of Marxism its belief that “capitalism will finally be swept away by revolution, when economic conditions under capitalism and the class-consciousness of the proletariat are ripe for this”. The revolution was to be a mass movement of the proletariat, not a coup d’etat, as was undertaken by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in October 1917. The submission of the workers’ movement to a cadre of Bolsheviks is the path to totalitarianism, not to socialism nor “communism”
Prior to Lenin’s rise to power, Marxism had already split into reformist and revolutionary camps. Marx’s cynical view of the state reduced it to the bourgeoisie’s organ of exploitation of the proletariat. Democratic socialists achieved a prominent role in Germany, enacting socialism within parliamentary democracy. In 1875 the General German Workers’ Association and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party merged to become the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Otto von Bismarck outlawed socialist meetings and publications and dissolved socialist political parties. Upon the repeal of the anti-socialist law in 1890, the 1891 Congress at Erfurt enacted a new program, reflecting Marxist doctrine in legislative form, the basic blueprint for the social welfare state, social democracy.
The 2nd International which commenced in 1889, was the assemblage of the world’s social democratic parties and adhered to Marxist ideas. It was not a uniform, centralized organization with an elaborate body of doctrine acknowledged by all its members, but rather a loose confederation of parties and trade unions, working separately though united by their belief in socialism. It was a marriage between socialist theory and the worker’s movement. Upon Engel’s death in 1895, Marxism splintered into what A James Gregor called “heterodox Marxisms”. Darwinism, racist pseudoscience, even proto-fascist ideas created new ideologies that eventually spawned totalitarianism in both fascist and communist forms. For all its idealism, Marxism degenerated into totalitarianism, and in this essay we explore Lenin’s fraudulent regime which presumed to serve the proletariat.
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split due to disagreements between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Julius Martov’s Mensheviks. Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks persisted. The Bolsheviks condemned their rivals as opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Lenin’s path to Bolshevik totalitarianism consisted of using all the instruments of czarist repression to set up a totalitarian capitalist state. The term “communism” served merely to separate his Bolsheviks from social democrats.
Lenin’s totalitarian proclivities were revealed in his vanguardism, stressing the tight organization of the (Communist) Party and its independence from momentary desires of the proletarian masses. The professional revolutionaries had scientific knowledge possessed by the Party elite, acting as a vanguard to lead the Proletariat. Lenin rejected all major trends in Western Social Democracy, true to Russia’s czarist anti-democratic authoritarianism. His betrayal of socialism, even the Marxist form thereof, came long before the Revolution. In 1899, his Development of Capitalism in Russia falsely claimed that Russia had attained a relatively advanced state of capitalism development, meaning a significant proletariat class emerged, and was therefore ready for a proletarian revolution. Such was not the case in backward agrarian Russia. The Marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat was intended as a transitional phase or mechanism to create the classless Communist society, which is the opposite of what happened in the totalitarian Bolshevik regimes of Lenin and Stalin. Marx wrote of a supercession of the state while Engels wrote of the withering away of the state. This is very odd given how Marx ridiculed “utopian” socialists and deemed himself “scientific”.
In the summer of 1914, the socialist movement suffered the greatest defeat in its history when it became clear that the International solidarity of the proletariat — its ideological foundation — was an empty phase and collapsed in the face of the Great War, much to the despair of the socialists believing in the strength of their movement. Having promulgated defeatism against the imperialist powers, Lenin initially refused to believe that the German social democrats had obeyed the fatherland’s call to arms. In every European country the great majority had instinctively adopted a patriotic attitude. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, felt Russia must be defended against invasion, and all the Mensheviks thought likewise. The workers’ movement organized into parties adhering more or less strictly to Marxist ideology, had obtained real successes in the fight for labor legislation and civil rights. This seemed to show that existing society was reformable, whatever the doctrine might say and thus knocked the bottom out of revolutionary programs. Revolutionary socialism, based upon a radical break of the current regime was more natural in Russia, the Balkans, and Latin America, where there was no liberal democratic tradition. In Western Europe the proletariat had been developed along with capitalism, and the bourgeois democracies with reforms which had lifted the proletariat out of misery. Marxism had in fact brought about its own dissolution as an ideological force by contributing to a workers’ movement. Lenin’s usurpation of power was based on his fraudulent ideology, Marxism-Leninism, which exploited and abused workers, the opposite of actual socialism.
Lenin was in Switzerland during the March 1917 Revolution. Much to his chagrin there was an all-Russian conference of Soviets with much agreement between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. A joint meeting of these factions began discussing unity between them. Lenin stopped these negotiations. The authoritarian Lenin’s aim in the Russian Revolution was not only to destroy all organs of socialist self-administration, but also all other socialist parties and organizations except his own. Towards this goal he employed falsehoods, slander, and brutal force against all opponents, among whom he counted socialists, except those willing to submit to him. He finally succeeded in smashing his opponents via his coup d’etat in Oct. 1917. Other prominent Bolsheviks (Zinoviev, Rykov, Rjazanov, Lozowski) demanded the formation of a socialist government composed of all Soviet parties. They declared that the formation of a purely Bolshevik government would lead to a regime of terror and to the destruction of the revolution and the country. Lenin’s hopes for a Bolshevik victory in elections were dashed when the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had the overwhelming majority. In making a despotic Bolshevik regime, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly which they had previously championed. Lenin said the elections were invalid. On December 7, 1917 the Cheka was established, precursor to the K.G.B. It was the Soviet secret police force, operating outside the law. Lenin established an authoritarian police state, called “state capitalism” by Kautsky.
The Bolsheviks’ concept of dictatorship was actually contrary to Marxist theory, which posited a historically necessary link between development and socialism. Bolshevism did not provide for a healthy gestation of the proletariat’s maturation in the context of adequate capitalist development and the experience of struggle seasoned by the exercise of political and civil liberties. Without adequately developed capitalism and the proletariat within it, there is no proletariat strong and intelligent enough to build a socialist state. The Bolsheviks calling themselves the Communist Party comprised an absolutist-despotic system antithetical to proletarian liberation and empowerment.
The Greek-French philosopher-economist-psychoanalyst, Cornelius Castoriadis remarked that the Soviet Union was dominated by a militaristic, bureaucratic institution which he called total bureaucratic capitalism (TBC). This name implies that the principle of the social order in the USSR is truly an analogue—albeit a more centralized analogue—of the Western capitalist order, which Castoriadis called fragmented bureaucratic capitalism (FBC). He then argued that both TBC and FBC were rooted in a common “social imaginary”, which was expressed as a desire for rational mastery over self and nature. Both capitalist and Marxist theory assumed that capital has enormous power over humanity. This results in an excessive desire by both the TBC and FBC to control this capitalist force. The Leninist version of “Marxism”, whatever its pretensions of proletarian governance may have been, created a totalitarian bureaucratic system that could theoretically gain “mastery over the master”. Yet, the exploitation found in Western society was not solved by this system of control; it was instead rendered more total and crushing. The managerial, bureaucratic class became a unified, oppressive force in itself, pursuing its own interests against the people.
Lenin’s socialist facade hid his admiration of the American capitalist managerial system, Taylorism: His essay, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” asserted it was necessary to “take a lesson in socialism from capitalism’s big organizers.” In 1918, Lenin wrote that while Taylor’s system may be a product of the brutality of capitalist exploitation, it is also admittedly one of the greatest scientific achievements of its kind. He could not help but praise its effective analyzation of mechanics, motions, and work methods
“…the Taylor system, properly controlled and intelligently applied by the working people themselves, will serve as a reliable means of further reducing the obligatory working day for the entire working population, will serve as an effective means of dealing, in a fairly short space of time, with a task that could roughly be expressed as follows: six hours of physical work daily for every adult citizen and four hours work in running the state.”
As American capitalism was soaring in 1895, Frederick Winslow Taylor gave a speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This was the formal public birth of Taylorism or Scientific Management, the new way to organize factories. By subjecting workers to machines and submerging individual choice beneath systems, Taylor’s new system would produce “a conflict free, high consumption utopia based on mass production”. When Russia was reduced to humanitarian and economic ruins from the 1918-22 Civil War, Lenin structured his economic reforms on his version of Taylor’s hypercapitalist Scientific Management. Trotsky militarized Scientific Management during the Civil War in his transportation policy. Stalin turned it into a “Communist” truth. The first Soviet Five-Year Plan was drawn up with the help of leading Taylorist advisors imported from the United States. As a result two thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans. The same principles were adopted by Albert Speer in his economic organization of the Third Reich under Hitler. With a few adaptations, Taylorism was used to run military production, forced labor, and racial genetics programs.
Lenin’s propaganda for “communism” fooled not only common citizens in the Soviet Union but leftist intellectuals worldwide. At various stages, the veil was lifted exposing the sham of communism. Nikita Khrushchev blew the whistle on (the safely deceased) Josef Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party on February 25, 1956, and the ripples quickly spread. As historian John Lewis Gaddis puts it, the speech “pulled down the façade – the product of both terror and denial – that had concealed the true nature of the Stalinist regime from the Soviet people and from practitioners of communism throughout the world.” Leftists around the world holding communism sacred became increasingly disillusioned as the Soviet communist facade crumbled. The Left’s intellectuals veered into postmodernism and “identity politics” in the attempt to create intellectual and/or political relevance. As postmodernism rose in prominence, so did neoliberalism, global despotism by transnational corporations which dismantled the social welfare functions of government.
SOURCES:
The Betrayal of Marx by Frederic L Bender
Lenin | Taylorism in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (osu.edu)
Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism by A. James Gregor
Castoriadis, Cornelius | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (utm.edu)
Castoriadis and Critical Theory: Crisis, Critique, and Radical Alternatives by Christos Memos
Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2 by Leszek Kolakowski
Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938 by Massimo Salvadori
Social Democracy vs Communism by Karl Kautsky
When Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin’s crimes • Troy Media
Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul