THE BOLSHEVIKS’ IDEOLOGY

Marxism

Marx developed an ideology which explained all aspects of social life and thought in terms of basic principles and laws:

  • He asserted that all societies passed through historical stages. One of these was capitalism. Its role was to industrialise society and create wealth.
  • Marx believed that socialism was historically inevitable, due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism.Capitalism could create wealth, but not could distribute it to the workers (the proletariat), who would continue to experience low wages and bad working conditions. Eventually, they would become radicalised and stage a revolution, ushering in what Marx called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – a system in which only the workers would have power. (Marx envisaged that under socialism, all members of society would be workers. No one would be allowed to live off the toil of others.) Wealth could then distributed more evenly in society. Hence, socialism would emerge.
  • Marx believed that socialist revolutions could only occur in the industrialised nations, where wealth had already been created. This was because there was no wealth to redistribute in poor countries. If they were to move directly to socialism before completing their capitalist phase, then equality would be based on poverty, not wealth. Marx did not see any point in this.

Leninism

Lenin was a practical revolutionary who was concerned with achieving power in Russia. To do this, he made two significant changes to Marx’s theories:

  • In his ‘April Theses’ of 1917, he asserted that nations in the early stages of capitalism were also ripe for socialist revolution; the industrialisation process could be completed once socialism had been achieved. He justified this change by asserting that once Russia had experienced its revolution, developed nations would have revolutions of their own. The nations would then help Russia develop. The Bolsheviks could speed up the process by sponsoring revolution in Germany and other European nations. (This theory was developed by Trotsky, and was known as ‘permanent revolution’.)
  • Lenin also argued that revolutions could be staged not by the working class, but by a professional band of revolutionaries. Their commitment would make up for the lack of a large working class in Russia. This meant that the Communist Party would have to rule Russia dictatorially until a large working class support base could be created.