Cold War: Bolsheviks' Ideology

Now it is time to address the political group and ideology which led to the rise of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks:

• The Bolsheviks were known as the Bolshevists (or 'the majority') in English. It was led by Marxist socialist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. As mentioned before, the Bolsheviks joined with other socialist groups during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Bolsheviks were highly centralized and disciplined as a political party. They obtained funding by many avenues (including robbing the rich, which was found upon by the Mensheviks and the Esers). The group formed an official political party in 1912.

  

• The Bolsheviks considered the Mensheviks soft and to moderate in terms of their Marxist socialist beliefs to truly take charge of the proletariat revolution. The word Mensheviks literally meant 'minority' as in they only represented a small minority that couldn't truly represent a Marxist revolution. The Bolsheviks became increasingly popular among urban workers and soldiers following the February Revolution of 1917, especially after Lenin demanded that the workers' councils, or Soviets, assume power over the government on behalf of the common worker.

• The reason why there were two different Marxist socialist groups with different ideas of how to achieve Communism is because Karl Marx mentioned multiple ways to achieve socialism (which Karl Marx called the lower-stage of communism) and the final stage of communism. As socialist writer Philip Gasper described it in The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document, "Marx and Engels never speculated on the detailed organization of a future socialist or communist society. The key task for them was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. If and when that movement was successful, it would be up to the members of the new society to decide democratically how it was to be organized, in the concrete historical circumstances in which they found themselves.". So, the Mensheviks and Esers had one way to achieve socialism while the Bolsheviks had another.

• Ultimately, the Bolsheviks went with the mention for achieving lower-stage communism described by Karl Marx in his work Critique of the Gotha Program, where the socialist revolutionary stated "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." The dictatorship of the proletariat would be a form of socialism that represented the transition phase between the abolition of capitalism and establishment of communism, the Marxist definition of socialism. So the Bolsheviks experimented with achieving this form of socialism where a council of proletariat members and a potential leader of the council own the means of production on behalf of the common worker with the state. Personal property would be given out to workers based on the principle of  "each according to his contribution" , a principle originally created by socialist thinker and Menshevik Leon Trotsky, but accepted by Karl Marx as acceptable for lower-stage communism: "accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. However, all utilities, land, and means of production would be owned by the state on behalf of the common worker. Marx and Vladimir Lenin grew to believe the dictatorship of the proletariat version of socialism would be the only way to achieve true communism, especially in places like Russia which had not fully industrialize, and could oppose capitalist nations that would seek to stop the revolution. " "The dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless society", from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat." -Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution).

• Marx believed that even if the dictatorship of the proletariat was literally authoritarian, it would eventually lead to the final stage of communism: a system where all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs instead of according to their contribution like in socialism. This is because the dictatorship of the proletariat would directly compete with capitalism and to do that, it was reasoned that it would have to provide education, technological development, and standards of healthcare. One society got advanced enough or defeated capitalism, which could take any length of time since Marx didn't put any specific time interval for when this should be accomplished, the state would erode away through a final revolution or natural human development to create a clean stateless society.

Now that we talked a lot about the specific philosophy of the Bolsheviks, we can talk about the philosophy of American-style capitalism in the Cold War next.