the Leninist
system was one of the greatest blows that
socialism
suffered in the
20th Century, maybe second only to fascism.
I mean, as Lenin took power, among his first
acts, along with Trotsky's, were to destroy
the socialist institutions that had arisen in
the pre-Bolshevik period:
the soviets, factory councils,
constituent assembly, which was
dominated by left social revolutionaries,
largely peasant based;
and of course that meant a war against the
anarchists.
A major war to try to wipe them out, the Makhno's
army, and so on.
And there was a sort of a logic behind it.
They were orthodox Marxists
- unlike Marx, incidentally -
they believed in a version of Marxism that
said that
revolution can't come in a backward peasant
society, which is what Russia was.
It was what we would now call a third world
country,
an undeveloped peasant society.
With some development, but only by the west,
and so on...
I mean, a highly educated and productive intellectual
class,
but that's also true of third world societies.
So, they felt this can't happen.
So therefore, we have to drive this backward
population
through industrialization by force.
And then, later on, by the iron laws of history,
and so on and so forth,
we'll come to socialism.
Of course, it's all nonsense, but...
So they essentially laid the basis for a
totalitarian system with an ideological doctrine
behind it.
When the Soviet Union collapsed,
I actually wrote an article saying there's
a victory for socialism,
small victory for socialism.
I just couldn't get published.
Nobody knew what I was talking about.
The world's two major propaganda systems,
the West and Soviet Union they both decided,
made determined to use the word socialism
to refer to the
totalitarian system of the Soviet Union.
I mean, the West did it to discredit socialism,
the Bolsheviks did it to try to
gain the credit associated with genuine socialism.
Well, when the world's two propaganda systems
agree,
it's going to be very hard for people to extricate
themselves from it.
So, now, socialism has - the term - has been
degraded
to mean the form of totalitarianism
instituted by Lenin and carried through by
Stalin.
And it was - going back to Spain - it was
entirely natural
that they should be in the lead in destroying
the popular revolution.
Bakunin, much earlier, had predicted all of
this.
He said that, in the future it'll be two forms:
One form will be they'll take over the state,
and they will create a red bureaucracy, which
will be the most
vile and brutal regime the world's ever seen;
and there are others who will understand that
they can't take over the state,
so they have to serve concentrated private
power and state power.
And they'll be the technical intelligentsia
who implement the policies of the masters,
and
what we now call the world democracies
It was a very good prediction.
It's one of the few predictions in the social
sciences that actually came true,
which is one of the reasons why nobody ever
studies it.
It's much too dangerous and too insightful.
