In China’s Cultural Revolution, young Red Guards formed a vanguard, rooting out anti-revolutionary attitudes. Lenin believed that vanguards were needed to lead a revolution.
Labour aristocracy
Many critics have considered that when the Bolsheviks insisted that the dictatorship of the party was synonymous with a true workers’ state, they were in reality justifying their dominance over the workers. Lenin excused this dominance through his elitist belief that without the “professional revolutionaries”, workers on their own could not rise higher than a “trade union consciousness”. By this, he meant that workers would not see beyond alliances with their immediate colleagues at work to a wider class alliance.
Compounding the problem, in Lenin’s eyes, was the fact that the concessions won by the working classes in parts of western Europe had not lifted the working class as a whole. Rather, these concessions had created what Lenin called a “labour aristocracy” – a group of workers who had won significant concessions and as a result had become detached from their true class allegiance. For Lenin, the situation required a “revolutionary socialist consciousness” that could grasp Marxist principles of class unification. This could only be provided by a vanguard from within the working class – and the Bolsheviks formed that vanguard party.
Lenin held that the existence of absolute truth was unconditional, and further that Marxism was truth, which left no room for dissent. This absolutism gave Bolshevism an authoritarian, anti-democratic, and elitist nature that would seem to be at odds with a belief in bottom-up democracy. His vanguard-party revolution has since been replicated across the political spectrum, from the right-wing anti-communist Kuomintang Party in Taiwan to the Communist Party of China. Some intellectuals still describe themselves as “Leninists”, including Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who admires Lenin’s desire to apply Marxist theory in practice and his willingness “to dirty his hands” in order to achieve his aims. Contemporary Leninists see globalization as the continuation of the 19th-century imperialism that Lenin opposed, as capitalist interests turn towards poor countries in search of new labour forces to exploit. Their solution to this problem, like Lenin’s a century ago, is an international mass workers’ movement.
VLADIMIR LENIN
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who later adopted the surname “Lenin”, was born in Simbirsk, Russia, now called Ulyanovsk. He received a classical education and showed a gift for Latin and Greek. In 1887, his brother Aleksandr was executed for the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III. That year, Lenin enrolled at Kazan University to study law but was expelled for student protests. Exiled to his grandfather’s estate, he steeped himself in the works of Karl Marx. He received his law degree and began his real career as a professional revolutionary. He was arrested, jailed, exiled to Siberia, and then travelled through Europe, writing and organizing for the coming revolution. The October Revolution of 1917 effectively made him ruler of all Russia. Lenin survived an assassination attempt in 1918, but never fully regained his health.
Key works
1902 What Is To Be Done?
1917 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
1917 The State and Revolution
See also: Karl Marx • Joseph Stalin • Leon Trotsky • Mao Zedong
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Revolutionary socialism
FOCUS
The mass strike
BEFORE
1826 The first General Strike in the UK is held in response to mine owners attempting to reduce miners’ pay.
1848 Karl Marx theorizes in his Communist Manifesto that revolution and historical change are the result of class conflict between dominant and subordinate classes.
AFTER
1937–38 Stalin’s forcible transformation of the USSR into an industrial power leads to his Great Purge. Hundreds of thousands are executed.
1989 Solidarity, a Polish trade union, defeats the Communist Party with a coalition government led by Lech Walesa.
The Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg articulated the idea of the mass strike in a revolutionary way, emphasizing its organic nature. She identified both political and economic mass strikes as the most important tools in the struggle for workers’ power.
Luxemburg’s ideas were formed in response to widespread workers’ strikes and the Bloody Sunday protest in St Petersburg that mushroomed into the Russian Revolution of 1905.
"The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle at a given moment."
Rosa Luxemburg
A social revolution
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had imagined that a mass strike of the proletariat would be led by a professional vanguard outside or “above” the working class, while to anarchist theorists, revolution was sparked through extraordinary acts of destruction and propaganda. To Luxemburg, neither idea was the right way to understand or facilitate the mass strike. Rather, she saw many different dynamics working together in a social revolution.
In her work Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, Luxemburg explained that political organization would develop naturally from within, as workers learned by participating in strikes for better wages and later for political ends. Revolution would teach itself to the participating masses. She believed that leaders should be nothing more than the conscious embodiment of the feelings and ambitions of the masses, and that mass strikes would bring about a new form of socialism. The events of 1905 had shown Luxemburg that a general strike could not be decreed by an executive decision, nor could it reliably be fomented by grass roots groups, but that it was a natural phenomenon of the proletariat consciousness. It was an inevitable result of social realities, particularly the hardship of working people forced, in order to survive, to carry out onerous, underpaid work in the new industrial workplaces of Central Europe and Russia.
Lech Walesa founded Solidarity in Poland in 1980. The independent trade union used mass strikes to improve the lives of workers, and these strikes were the catalyst for political change.
The workers advance
Luxemburg believed that the pressure of proletarian discontent against the military might and financial control of the state would explode in unsuccessful and successful strikes, culminating in a spontaneous mass strike. This would bring about the workers’ objectives and transform the party leadership while advancing the revolution against capitalism. During these developments, workers would advance intellectually, guaranteeing their further progress. Vladimir Lenin objected that this “revolutionary sponteneity” took away the benefits of the inherent discipline and forward-planning of a revolution led by enlightened commanders. He assigned the leadership role to his Bolshevik party. Luxemburg saw this as conducive to dictatorship and ultimately to “the brutalization of public life”. The horrors of Lenin’s Red Terror and Stalin’s murderous trajectory were to prove her right.
ROSA LUXEMBURG
Born in the Polish town of Zamosc, Rosa Luxemburg was a gifted student and linguist, absorbed by age 16 in socialist politics. She became a German citizen in 1898 and moved to Berlin, where she joined the international labour movement and the Social Democratic Party. She wrote on socialist issues, women’s suffrage, and economics, and worked for a workers’ revolution. She met Lenin in 1907 at a conference of Russian Social Democrats in London.
After being imprisoned in Breslau in 1916, she formed the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), an underground political organization. In January 1919, during revolutionary activities in Berlin, Luxemburg was seized by army officers and shot. Her corpse was thrown into the Landwehr Canal and was recovered several months later.
Key works
1904 Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy
1906 The Mass Strike
1913 The Accumulation of Capital
1915 The Junius Pamphlet
See also: Karl Marx • Eduard Bernstein • Vladimir Lenin • Joseph Stalin • Leon Trotsky
IN CONTEXT
&n
bsp; IDEOLOGY
Conservatism
FOCUS
Non-appeasement
BEFORE
c.350 BCE Statesman and orator Demosthenes criticizes his fellow Athenians for not anticipating Philip of Macedon’s imperial goals.
1813 European powers try to settle with Napoleon, but his renewed military campaigns drive a coalition of allies to defeat him at Leipzig.
AFTER
1982 British prime minister Margaret Thatcher refers to Chamberlain when urged to compromise with Argentina during the Falklands War.
2003 US president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair invoke the dangers of appeasement in the run-up to the Iraq War.
In the mid-1930s the word “appeasement” had not yet taken on the taint of cowardice and ignominy that later events would give it. Conciliatory policy-making had become the norm after World War I, as European powers sought to ease what Winston Churchill had called “the fearful hatreds and antagonisms which exist in Europe”. But as the Great Depression took its toll around the world and Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, Churchill and a very few others saw that this policy was becoming dangerous. Defence expenditure in Britain had been greatly constrained by the economic slump. The need to rearm against Hitler came at a time of extreme financial duress for a nation that was still struggling to recover from the Great War and deploying most of its military resources in the remote outposts of the British empire. The idea of confronting Germany again to contain Hitler was dismissed by conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor, fellow conservative Neville Chamberlain. Assuaging the dictator’s mounting grievances seemed to them the moderate, practical approach.
"You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war."
Winston Churchill
Churchill’s unofficial network of military and government intelligence kept him informed about Nazi aims and movements and the unprepared state of British forces. He warned Parliament about Hitler’s intentions in 1933, and continued to raise the alarm in speeches of immense poetic power in the face of what he saw as complacency, only to be mocked as a warmonger and relegated to the back benches of Parliament.
The Munich Agreement
The appeasement mindset in British politics was firmly entrenched, and the British offered no resistance to Hitler’s systematic breach of the conditions of the Versailles Treaty they had signed at the end of World War I – including his remilitarization of the Rhineland – or to his legislation against the Jews. Emboldened, Hitler annexed Austria into the Reich in 1938, and in the same year, crudely coerced Chamberlain at Munich to trade Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland for another false promise of peace.
Hitler was bemused by his easy gains. He had planned to “smash” Czechoslovakia with a “shock and awe”-style entry into Prague and instead found her “virtually served up to me on a plate by her friends”.
Churchill denounced the Munich Agreement. He contended that to feed the Nazi monster with concessions would simply make it more voracious. Other politicians trusted Hitler, and Churchill stood almost alone, among Conservatives at least, in condemning him. He refused at all times to discuss anything at all with Hitler or with his representatives. Radical but reasoned, this non-negotiable defiance of tyranny, to the death if need be, was the core idea that would bring down the Nazis.
Churchill denounced the settlement that Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler at Munich in 1938 as “a total, unmitigated defeat”.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The son of English lord Randolph Churchill and American heiress Jennie Jerome, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill once described himself as “an English-Speaking Union”. He was educated at Harrow Public School and Sandhurst Military Academy and then served in India with a cavalry commission. During the 1890s, he distinguished himself as a war correspondent covering the Cuban Revolt against Spain, British campaigns in India and the Sudan, and the Boer War in South Africa. His career in the House of Commons, first as a Liberal MP and later as a Conservative, spanned 60 years. He took charge of a government of national unity during World War II, and served one further term as prime minister in 1951. Churchill was a prolific writer and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, largely for his six-part history of World War II.
Key works
1953 The Second World War
1958 A History of the English Speaking Peoples
1974 The Complete Speeches
See also: Mahatma Gandhi • Napoleon Bonaparte • Adolf Hitler
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Fascism
FOCUS
Philosophy of the state
BEFORE
27 BCE–476 CE The Roman empire quickly expands from Europe to Africa and Asia.
1770–1831 Georg Hegel develops his philosophy of unity and absolute idealism, later used by Gentile to argue for the all-embracing state.
AFTER
1943–1945 Allied forces invade Italy at the end of World War II, and the fascist regime surrenders.
1940s–1960s Neo-fascist movements become increasingly popular in Latin America.
From 1960s Neo-fascist philosophies become incorporated into many nationalist movements.
When World War I ended in 1918, Italy was in a state of social and political unrest. The country had been forced to concede territory to Yugoslavia and was reeling from heavy losses in the war. At the same time, unemployment was rising as the economy shrank. Mainstream politicians appeared unable to provide answers, and both left- and right-wing groups were growing in popularity among the struggling peasants and workers. The right-wing National Fascist Party, under the political leadership of Benito Mussolini and the philosophical guidance of Giovanni Gentile, used nationalist rhetoric to win over popular support. They advocated a radical new form of social organization based around the fascist state.
Unity through collectivism
The guiding principles for the new Italian state are laid out in The Doctrine of Fascism, a text that is thought to have been ghostwritten by Gentile for Mussolini. Gentile rejected the idea of individualism and thought the answer to both the people’s need for purpose and the state’s need for vitality and cohesiveness lay in collectivism.
Gentile describes the fascist conception of the state as an attitude towards life in which individuals and generations are bound together by a higher law and will: specifically, the law and will of the nation. Like communism, fascism sought to promote values beyond materialism, and like Marx, Gentile wanted his philosophy to underlie the new form of the state. However, he did not agree with the Marxist position, which saw society as divided into social classes and historical processes as driven by class struggle. Gentile also opposed the democratic idea of majority rule, which sees the will of the nation as subordinate to the will of the majority. Above all, Gentile’s fascist state was defined in opposition to the prevailing doctrines of political and economic liberalism, which at that moment in history had proved itself unable to maintain political stability. He thought that the aspiration for permanent peace was absurd, because it failed to recognize the conflicting interests of different nations that make conflict inevitable.
This new understanding of the state was designed to appeal to a confident and victorious “Italian spirit” that could be traced back to the Roman empire. With Mussolini as “Il Duce” (“The Leader”), the fascist understanding of the state would place Italy back on the world map as a great power. In order to create the new fascist nation, it was necessary to mould all individual wills into one. All forms of civil society outside the state were repressed, and all spheres of life – economic, social, cultural, and religious – became subordinate to the state. The state also aimed to grow through colonial expansion, which was mainly to be achieved through conquests in North Africa.
Gentile was the foremost philosopher of fascism. He became Mussolini’s minister of education and chief organizer of cultural politics. In thes
e roles, he played a key role in the construction of an all-embracing fascist Italian state.
Mussolini visited the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, Milan, 1932. This vast and striking propaganda event was designed by artists and intellectuals including Gentile to herald a new era.
GIOVANNI GENTILE
Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, in western Sicily. After completing high school in Trapani, he received a scholarship to the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he studied philosophy with Donato Jaja, focusing on the idealist tradition in Italy. Gentile later taught at universities in Palermo, Pisa, Rome, Milan, and Naples. During his time in Naples, he co-founded the influential journal La Critica with the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. Gentile and Croce would later fall out as Croce became increasingly critical of the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, in which Gentile had become a key figure.
As Minister of Public Education in Mussolini’s first cabinet, Gentile implemented the so-called Riforma Gentile: a radical reform of the secondary school system that prioritized the study of history and philosophy. He was the main force behind the Enciclopedia Italiana, a radical attempt to rewrite Italian history. He later became the fascist regime’s leading ideologist. Gentile was made president of The Academy of Italy in 1943, and supported the puppet regime of the Republic of Salò when the Kingdom of Italy fell to the Allies. He was killed the following year by a communist resistance group.
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