Lenin's Revolution - Humanities-Ebooks

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Lenin’s Revolution 8 Acton (1997) and Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia edited by Ian Thatcher (2006). Other printed sources are indicated parenthetically in the text—with full bibliographical details provided in ‘Guidance on further study’. Dates are given as in the modern calendar, though ‘February Revolution’ and ‘October Revolution’ are retained. Transliteration of Russian names follows the style of Acton’s Critical Compendium except for using ‘y’ rather than ‘ii’ for final endings of surnames. Full names of the various brands of revolutionary socialists featured in Lenin’s Revolution are listed separately.
Chapter 1 Fifty Years of Marxism 1.1 The Communist Manifesto Not the least of the paradoxes implicit in Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution is its apparently un-Marxist character. Karl Marx’s revolutionary model had been formulated by analogy with the dialectical method of classical Greek and medieval philosophy for conducting oral debate. The dialectical form of disputation proceeded from major premise (thesis) through minor premise (antithesis) to conclusion (synthesis). Marx followed Hegel in applying the dialectical form to the actual unfolding of history (Wilson, pp. 179−198). For Marx, the bourgeoisie (thesis) opposed by the proletariat (antithesis) leads to the classless society (synthesis). The first section of the Communist Manifesto, headed ‘Bourgeois and Proletarian’, begins: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Communist Manifesto, p. 79). The assumptions of the Manifesto reflect its origins. Written by Marx in 1847 and published in German in London in February 1848, it was backed by evidence drawn by Friedrich Engels from the commissions of inquiry into conditions of employment in towns and factories of contemporary England⎯the most highly industrialized country of its day. Ever since the enfranchisement of the middle classes by the 1832 Reform Act it had been easy to trace the fault lines in British society, as reflected in a House of Commons increasingly representative of the commercial and manufacturing interests, and an Upper House of large landowners. In 1848 it was hardly accurate to claim that in Britain ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ The English landed interest did not surrender power so easily. But the rapid industrialization of Britain did seem to confirm the Marxist gibe that ‘the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe.’ And it was certainly true of England that ‘with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses’ (Manifesto, pp. 82–3, 89). The ‘immediate plan of the Communists’ is defined as ‘formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by
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