Monday, September 23, 2013

Totalitarian Candor - Part I

“You are pitiful insolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!” – Leon Trotsky



1917 was a year full of dramatic turmoil for the Russian Empire. It was the year of the February Revolution as well as the October Revolution and the year ended with the formation of the Cheka (Bolshevik security force) in late December.[i] The Russian Empire collapsed and the Romanov Dynasty ended in February, but it was not until the October Revolution that the Bolsheviks instituted themselves as the new government. A brutal Civil War broke out in October of 1917 and lasted until 1922 when the Bolsheviks squelched the remaining opposition to Communism. It was in 1922 that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born and the world was given its first taste of Communism.  
The Bolsheviks were one of the two factions that split from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the other being the Mensheviks. The faction gained power and officially split away from the RSDLP in 1912; they were led by Vladimir Lenin. Once the Bolsheviks gained full control of the Russian Empire, they were able to form it into a Socialist Republic. This new ideology instituted by the Bolshevik Communist Party, often called Leninism, lasted until 1991 and did not follow with Marx’s original ideology of Communism. In Marxist terminology, it was an exchange of one form of exploitation for another, not the progressive step Communism was supposed to be. Marxist views were more natural and included the abolishment of the ruling class, not the exchange of exploitation that happened under Bolshevik rule.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were the founders of an economical movement that would erupt and turn civilization upside down; Communism. It was an economic and political idea created to give the working man, or the proletariat, hope in this world. Marx’s expectation was for communism to engulf capitalism and then end exploitation of the proletarians. His key writing on this was Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, translated The Communist Manifesto. In this pamphlet he outlines the problems with the bourgeois, the wealthy class, and why overthrowing them is necessary.
            The history of Marx and the birth of communism began with his research in the factories of the Industrial Revolution which began in the 1830’s. He was disgusted by the conditions of workers in the factories and blamed free buying, or capitalism, saying that this form of economics devalues the worker and turns him into a commodity to be exploited by the bourgeois. Marx was angered by what he called the “alienation of man”, the separation of man from his labor. The frustration and anger at this treatment is evident at the end of The Communist Manifesto when he writes, “…the Communists everywhere support every revolution movement against the existing social and political order of things.”[ii] His anger at the present state of the working class outweighed his plan for the perfect, utopian society of Communism.
            Karl Marx met Frederick Engels for the first time in the summer of 1844[iii]. Engels was a radical socialist proponent whose writing caught the attention of Marx. Engels wrote for Robert Owen’s publication titled, “New Moral World”.[iv] Marx and Engels became fast friends and collaborated on several publications together, including The Communist Manifesto, which they released in 1848. Within the pages they outlined the idea of reaching a utopian society in ten steps. These steps range from the abolition of private property to the abolition of inheritance rights, the centralization of communication and transportation by the State and free education.
             The predominate theme within all of this is the overthrowing of the bourgeois and abolition of man by destruction of all social classes. Marx also took great strides to show that the Communist party was not separate from the other proletarian parties, but a party that is most interested in coming to the aid of the others. He explains that the Communists are only different from the other proletarian parties in two ways, they bring the common interests of the proletarians to the forefront, “independently of all nationality”[v]; and in the stages of the proletarian and bourgeois struggles, they represent the desires of the entire proletarian movement as a whole. Marx believed that Communist desires were the exact same as all other parties, in that they want to form all the proletariats together and overthrow the bourgeois social order. The coup by the proletariats could only be achieved through Marx’s drastic steps, only then the utopian society yearned for would finally materialize.




[i] Figes, Orlando (1996). A People's Tragedy
[ii] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (Filiquarian Publishing: 2005), p. 54.
[iii] Heaven On Earth, dir. & prod. Brittney Huckabee, 2005. DVD. New River Media & BJW, Inc. 2005.
[iv] Ibid
[v] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. (Filiquarian Publishing: 2005), p. 23.

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