Marx observed further that shifts in the control of economic goods do not follow a straight-line pattern. One social class gets control for a while. Then another rises, clashes with the old, dispossesses it of its control, and takes over. In imitation of Hegel, Marx continued to call that movement of history—that seesaw pattern of shifting control—a dialectic.
Unlike Hegel, of course, Marx continued to insist that the motor of this struggle was not anything outside or above or transcending the social classes themselves. Within the vast proletariat of the world, there was only that inner power, that immanent force, blind and materialistic, driving the vast basic “structure” of society—the proletariat—to overthrow and cast off the oppressive superstructure of capitalism. It was that force, in fact, that created a solidarity between all the proletariats of the world. Through the unceasing dialectic of the class struggle, that blind and material force immanent to the masses was driving them inexorably forward to the proletarian revolution.
Never a consistent and logical thinker, Marx waffled about some of the basic properties of this dialectic. It was true, he said sometimes, that there could be no peaceful shift of control from one class to another, no movement through a process of democratic reform and renewal. The old class is destroyed through the sacrifice and suffering of the new class. Hence the sacrosanct position and exalted function in Marxism of violent revolution. Violent revolution is as natural to mankind’s totally material condition as the pangs of childbirth to a mother.
On the other hand, Marx allowed for the possibility of democratic change. He did believe that matter was eternal, but he wasn’t so sure about the struggle. He left open the point, in other words, of whether or not the struggle between the classes would be unending.
Whatever the reason might have been—perhaps because he was too much of a student to indulge in poetic fanaticism, perhaps because his ideas were adaptations of the ideas of others, perhaps because he was too afflicted with painful and seemingly endless carbuncles and other physical ills to indulge in violent revolution, perhaps for all these reasons and others besides—the fact remains that Marx did not exclude peaceful change, or improvement through democratic means, as possible elements in his dialectic.
While such credulous errors and inconsistencies in abstract theorizing can be readily forgiven a pioneer such as Marx, his gross errors in analysis of the concrete data at his hand’s reach are unforgivable by history. Even taking Marx on his own ground of atheism, virulent opposition to religion and deep hatred of capitalism, it is impossible to justify his unfounded assumption that between “structure” and “superstructure” everywhere, there was and can be no homogeneity—no commonality in matters cultural, religious and philosophical.
In examining the conditions of the social classes of his day, Marx unequivocally divided the society of all the nations around him into the structure of the proletariat and the superstructure of the dominant capitalist classes. He cast the entire world along the lines of his native Prussia and of Russia, a society in which the state and its apparatus were predominant and stood in opposition to a civil society that was leaderless, spineless and primitive.
True enough, in that society there was no cultural cement between the classes. There was no organic connection, no cultural relationship, no mutual loyalties, no shared commonality of daily life between the powerful and the powerless. And true enough, in that situation, if the proletariat were to rise up, it would sweep the superstructure of power away, and never look back.
Myopically, however, Marx applied this analysis to everyone. To European and North American countries. To China and Africa. To all the nations of the earth without exception. In that sense, Marxist theory, errors and all, was a geopolitical mandate.
It was all wrong, however. Wrongly based, wrongly analyzed, wrongly applied. Marx’s theories were not merely colored by, but dependent upon Marx’s out-of-hand rejection of man’s religious striving, and of any possibility of the Heavenly Father’s spirit among his children on this earth. Beyond that, his theories were spun out from the historical myopia that enveloped him in his exile’s existence.
The England where he lived was still resplendent with the glory of the Raj and the appanage of a long-reigning queen whose navies laid claim to the world. It was a place where Disraeli could remark fatuously that English currency and honor were both “just as acceptable in Piccadilly as in Shanghai and, I am sure, at the Gates of Heaven.” In such an atmosphere, Marx was virtually doomed to play out Kafka’s nightmarish concept of a privatdocent, a penniless tutor living in a garret, his days filled with his own imaginings and with jealousy of the university professors who had the benefit of preferential honors, and a good living besides.
Effectively isolated by his overriding personal bias and by physical circumstance, Marx simply did not see that in Italy or Spain or Ireland or China—even in England, in fact, where he labored over his flawed worldview—there was no frontal opposition at all between his hated “superstructure” of the bourgeoisie and the basic “structure” of the proletariat. What there was instead was a considerable homogeneity between all the classes in those countries, as in most others. There was what could loosely but accurately enough be called a common philosophical culture, a common outlook concerning human life, activity and destiny.
Believing that all religion was trash and that spirit was an opiate invented by the bourgeoisie to keep the proletarian masses drugged in their serfdom, Marx was literally unable to see that between a plowman in Donegal, a count in his Venetian palazzo, a weaver in Manchester and a miner in Poland’s Silesia, the selfsame spirit he rejected so roundly could blow gently, firmly, binding them all, and all their fellows, in the grace of their common Savior, Jesus Christ, and in the love of their common Father.
It can hardly be surprising, therefore, that not one of Marx’s political forecasts was fulfilled in later history. His adaptations of the ideas of men such as Hegel and Darwin did not benefit from his own a priori bias. His grasp of monetary, fiscal and financial matters was as skewed and primitive as his grasp of religion. His demographic studies proved to have no practical application over time.
For religion, therefore, Marx amounted to no more than another thumb-mark of the Fallen Archangel consecrated to his own dreadful oath: “I will not serve.” For politics, he was no more than a cog in the developing machine of human relations, a character thrown up by circumstances he dreamed of mastering but never understood. For human intellectualism, he was a mental flatulence; and for human culture, he was no better than Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, shrieking, “Nevermore! Nevermore!” at the dawn of a new day.
Doubtless, in a much later and more tranquil age than this era of Gorbachevism, Marx’s proper epitaph will be written. But in the meantime, even in this middle period of the Marxist interlude of history, there are already generations of witnesses—hundreds of millions of witnesses, living and dead—to the judgment that he would have served the world better by far had he joined his father probating wills in the courts of Trier, or peddled ties and laces on a busy city street of Königsberg.
For now, however, the bespectacled bust atop his grave at Highgate Hill Cemetery stands as a monument to perverse propaganda and puffery. It gives no hint of Karl Marx, renegade Jew, renegade Christian, halfhearted Satanist, pseudo-intellectual, whose life effort gave birth to the most antihuman ideology our world has ever known. The flowing locks, the ample beard, the bespectacled look of intense concentration are meant to convey the impression of the professor he so longed to be and of the sage he never truly was.
11
V. I. Lenin
Had Marx and his ideas not been swallowed head, tail and entrails by the political founders of world Communism in the twentieth century, beginning with Lenin, there need never have been a Marxist interlude in the progress of human society. For what Marx poured out in ink on paper, Lenin successfully institutionalized.
Lenin was as different from Marx as chalk is from cheese.
True, he too borrowed all his ideas from others—chiefly from Marx and Engels. And true, he too was driven by one all-consuming goal—the worldwide proletarian revolution Marx and Engels had predicted. But, unlike Marx, Lenin was a doer of deeds of the first order. He never coveted a place of honor in a university, and he despised the “socialists of the salons.”
A flawless genius when it came to organization, an utterly unscrupulous maneuverer for whom any means were acceptable for success, Lenin adapted Marx’s social engineering theories holus-bolus to his own revolutionary needs. He was never saddled with any of Marx’s moral scruples or intellectual waffling about the violence of that revolution. The fire that burned in Lenin’s fanatical mind illumined for him a world already on the threshold of a bloody social and political upheaval on a universal scale.
Nor did Lenin pause over the question, so troubling to Marx, of whether there would ever be an end to the violent class struggle. He was convinced that once he, had established the “Paradise of the Workers,” the struggle would be finished forever, swallowed somehow in a self-governing Utopia.
In retrospect, it is possible to envision the mind, the character and the intentions of this man of destiny waiting and working for his day. Marx’s dry discussions and the touch of poetic pretense in his forecasts contrast with the bloody realism of Lenin, whose predictions were far from idyllic. His plans all were aimed at a complete and bloody break with the past, and at the violent death and final entombment of capitalists and capitalism.
Lenin spent thirty years of his life fomenting those plans. When he did effect the break with Russia’s past, he had a mere seven years in which to create the geopolitical instrument necessary for the worldwide revolution that he believed would surely follow as the hinge event of world history.
In essence, Lenin’s vision was of another 1848—that “year of revolutions”—in which Marx had defiantly published his foundational Communist Manifesto. But this time, the institutional organizations designed and put into place by Lenin would ensure revolution on a world scale.
The one poetic touch in Lenin’s otherwise abrasive mind, in fact, concerned that almost dreamlike “Workers’ Paradise” he foresaw at the end of the proletarian rainbow. To find a parallel, you would have to go back to the early Hebrew prophets and their forecast of the Messianic Age. Hills flowing with must wine; fields dotted with livestock; children playing with lions and snakes; men and women, workers all, living in a “stateless” society under conditions of endless plenty, absolute justice and perpetual peace among all nations: that was the Leninist Utopia at the end of the revolution’s rainbow.
On the near side of that rainbow, however, the reality Lenin foresaw and worked so feverishly to bring about was the grinding tyranny that has been witnessed by the world for seventy years and more.
Lenin began his life on April 22, 1870, as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He was born into a far different world than Karl Marx’s well-groomed, urbanized, middle-class family cradled in conventional European society. According to his contemporaries, he was reared in “conditions of indescribable filth” at a place called Simbirsk—later renamed Ulyanovsk in his honor—on the Volga River, about six hundred miles southeast of Moscow.
In a youthful brush with destiny, he attended the local school directed by Fedor Kerensky, whose son, Aleksandr, would later become prime minister in the only democratic government Russia has ever known, the government that would be overthrown in 1917 by Lenin’s armed coup d’état.
It was, at least partly, due to the execution of his older brother, also named Aleksandr, that Vladimir took to the idea of revolution while still in his early teens. Marx’s theories and predictions about the proletarian revolution took fire in this young man, as in so many others, because a fire of undying hate already burned within him.
By the time he graduated with a law degree in 1891, Ulyanov had become an authority on Marx. And from the beginning, his vision and his intentions were geopolitical. “The victorious Communist revolution,” he wrote as early as 1894, is “the historic mission of the Russian worker,” who “will lead the Russian proletariat, side by side with the proletariat of all countries … to a victorious Communist revolution.” The whole world of mankind—“all this, nothing less than this, nothing more than this”—was his focus and his intended terrain. World history, not merely Russia’s story, was the deliberately chosen backdrop for his revolutionary undertaking.
Ulyanov was then twenty-four years old.
In that same year, he met another revolutionary spirit, a young woman named Nadezhda Krupskaya. When, predictably enough, he ran afoul of the Czarist authorities and was sent to Siberia, Krupskaya followed him there. The two were married in 1898 and were never separated until he died twenty-six years later. It was at about that time, too, that Ulyanov changed his name to Lenin. The new name had no meaning as a word; but as a symbol, it stood for his total break with the past.
From the time he left Siberia until he acceded to full power over Russia in 1917, Lenin was constantly on the move. He shuttled back and forth between his homeland and Germany, Switzerland and France, Belgium and England, Sweden and Austria. Always he was writing and talking. Always he was contending for primacy in the leadership of the socialist international fraternity. Always he was maneuvering and plotting, organizing his own political party, the Bolsheviks. And always he was fully persuaded that his day was just around the corner.
That day dawned in the spring of 1917.
The Russian middle class was being impoverished by taxes and by the destructive onslaught of the Kaiser’s Germany in World War I. Workers were not being paid. The police were corrupt. Landowners had carried rule over their serfs to terrible extremes. The Russian Orthodox Church was a slave of the Czarist monarchy. And the monarchy itself, officially in the hands of Czar Nicholas, was actually in the hands of his German-born wife, Queen Alexandra, and of her adviser, the pseudoprophetic monk Grigori E. Rasputin.
The total military defeat of Russia by the Kaiser’s forces blew the lid off the cauldron. In February and March of 1917, the long-simmering discontent of the Russian people boiled over into the streets. Czar Nicholas abdicated in favor of his uncle, the Grand Duke Michael. But Michael, who saw the handwriting on the wall and preferred life to what he saw written there, refused the crown.
In the vacuum, a popular government was hastily set up by the main political parties, based on the collaboration of councils (or soviets) of Russian workers who elected delegates to a central national assembly. Those delegates from the soviets formed a Constituent Assembly, or Duma, which was eventually headed by Lenin’s boyhood schoolmate Aleksandr Kerensky.
It was specifically in regard to that Constituent Assembly that Lenin committed his first major crime against the Russian people. For seventy years, the formation of just such a governing assembly had been the aim of every political party in Russia. “All the best people,” wrote Maxim Gorky, “had lived for the ideal of a Constituent Assembly.” Democracy of some viable kind now had a fragile chance.
Lenin had been in Switzerland before these early volatile events took place in his homeland. But he was quickly conveyed back to Russia in a sealed train by the Germans, whose motives were simple and clear enough: Lenin and his Bolsheviks would help cripple Russia. Unlike Kerensky, Lenin was predisposed toward Germany by his affinity for the German-born Marx, but his motives were far more interesting than that. He had always seen a Russo-German alliance as the key to his domination of the whole of Europe. Not to put too fine a point on the matter by any means, this was Lenin’s early vision of what, in a much later day, Mikhail Gorbachev would call “our common European home.” Once back in Russia, Lenin threw all his skills as an agent provocateur, as a redoubtable politician and as a plotter into making this brief democratic day fruitful for his own plans.
By November 6, his Bolsheviks—who had already formed and armed their own military units, subverted police and government troops, and assassinated the more dangerous o
f their opponents—had moved into attack positions in the capital, Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Deputies arriving at the Tauride Palace, which was to function as parliament house, found their path blocked by Lenin’s troops. By the evening of November 7, Petrograd—later renamed Leningrad—was in Bolshevik hands. Kerensky, who only narrowly escaped death, later fled Russia and eventually made his home in the United States.
Late in November, 42 million people voted in the only free elections Russians have ever been allowed. Lenin’s party, the Bolsheviks, polled 24 percent of the vote. The non-Marxist Social Revolution Party emerged with a solid 58 percent. Lenin would have none of it. “We made the mistake,” he said, “of promising that this talk shop [the Constituent Assembly] would open up … but history has not yet said a word about when we will shut it down.”
Lenin quickly made up for history’s lack.
Before Lenin’s ring of steel closed down all hope, one soviet deputy, S. A. Sorokin, faced the Bolshevik leader with the enormity of his crime. “Now,” he screamed at Lenin in public session, “when the great dream [of a truly constituent assembly of free Russians] is about to come true, you dally with the idea of a Bolshevik Paradise. You refuse to do your duty…. By clinging to this mad delusion, you will reap its certain fruits: starvation, tyranny, civil war and horrors which you cannot even imagine.”
Sorokin’s was the prophetic voice of blame not only for that first crime against the great Russian dream, but for all of Russia’s subsequent ills and all its subsequent crimes against humanity. For Lenin’s “mad delusion” of the violent destruction of all things past, and of absolute power in his own hands, held him fast. The smashing of the Constituent Assembly by an armed minority was purely and simply the first essential step.
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