Socialism - Part 3

Socialism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Revolutions of 1917–23

Vladimir Lenin (background) and Joseph Stalin.

By the year 1917, the third year of a ninety-day war, the patriotism propelling the First World War metamorphosed to political radicalism in most of Europe, the United States (cf. Socialism in the United States), and Australia. In February, popular revolution exploded in Russia when workers, soldiers, and peasants established soviets (councils) wielding executive power in a Provisional Government valid until convocation of a Constituent Assembly. In April, Lenin arrived in Russia from Germany, calling for All power to the soviets. In October, his party (the Bolsheviks) won support of most soviets while he and Trotsky simultaneously led the October Revolution. On 25 October 1917, at the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin declared "Long live the world socialist revolution!"

On 26 October, the day after assuming executive power, Lenin wrote Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, which granted workers control of businesses with more than five workers and office employees, and access to all books, documents, and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises". Immediately, the Bolshevik Government nationalised banks, most industry, and disavowed the national debts of the deposed Romanov royal régime; it governed via elected soviets; and it sued for peace and withdrew from the First World War.

Despite that, the peasant Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party won the Constituent Assembly against the Bolshevik Party, who then acted resolutely the next day. The Constituent Assembly convened for thirteen hours (16.00 hrs 5 Jan – 4.40 hrs 6 Jan 1918). Socialist-Revolutionary Leader Victor Chernov was elected President of a Russian republic; next day, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik Russian Revolution of October 1917 engendered Communist parties worldwide, and their concomitant revolutions of 1917-23. Few Communists, then, doubted that the Russian success of Socialism depended upon successful, working-class socialist revolutions effected in developed capitalist-economy countries; thus, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky organised the world's Communist parties into a new international association of workers – the Communist International, the Comintern, also denominated the Third International.

In November of 1918, the German Revolution deposed the monarchy; as in Russia, the councils of workers and soldiers were comprised mostly of SPD and USPD (Independent Social Democrats) revolutionaries installed to office as the Weimar republic; the SPD were in power, led by Friedrich Ebert. In January of 1919. the left-wing Spartacist Putsch challenged the SPD government, and President Ebert ordered the Army and Freikorps mercenaries to violently suppress the Workers' and Soldiers' councils. In the event, Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were captured and summarilly executed. Also that year, in Bavaria, the Communist régime of Kurt Eisner in Bavaria was so suppressed. In Hungary, Béla Kun briefly headed a Hungarian Communist government. Throughout, popular socialist revolutions in Vienna, Italy's northern industrial cities, the German Ruhr (1920) and Saxony (1923); all failed in spreading revolutionary socialism to Europe's advanced, capitalist countries.

In Russia, Socialist circumstances were desperate; in August of 1918, assassin Fanya Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin in the head, rendering him moribund. Earlier, in June, the Soviet Government had implemented War Communism to manage the foreign economic boycott of Russia, and invasions by Imperial Germany, Imperial Britain, the U.S., and France, interfering in the Russian Civil War beside royalist White Russians; to control starvation, private business was outlawed, strikers could be shot, the white collar classes were forced to work manually, and, from the peasantry, they required grain for workers in cities.

By 1920, as Red Army commander, Trotsky had mostly defeated the royalist White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and, under the New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was allowed for small and medium peasant enterprises; industry remained State-controlled, Lenin acknowledged that the NEP was a necessary capitalist measure for a country mostly unripe for Socialism, thus, the existence of NEP businessmen and NEP women (NEP Men) flourished, and the Kulaks gained capitalist power as rich peasants.

In 1923, on seeing the Soviet State's greatly coercive power, the moribund Lenin said Russia had reverted to a bourgeois tsarist machine . . . barely varnished with socialism.[30] After his death (January 1924), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – then controlled by Joseph Stalin – rejected the theory that socialism could not be built solely in the U.S.S.R., and declared the Socialism in One Country policy. Despite the marginal Left Opposition's demanding restoration of Soviet Democracy,[31] Stalin developed a bureaucratic, authoritarian government, that was condemned by Democratic Socialists, Anarchists, Trotskyists, et alles, for undermining the initial Socialist ideals of the Bolshevik Russian Revolution.

The inter-war era and World War II

Joseph Stalin

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital "C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The Left Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to Trotskyism which was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years, except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party.

In 1922, the fourth congress of the Communist International took up the policy of the United Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they criticized for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution, and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties. When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.

Socialism after World War II

In 1945, the world’s three great powers met at the Yalta Conference to negotiate an amicable and stable peace. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. With the relative decline of Britain compared to the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, however, many viewed the world as "bi-polar" – a world with two irreconcilable and antagonistic political and economic systems. Many termed the Soviet Union "socialist", not least the Soviet Union itself, but also commonly in the USA, China, Eastern Europe, and many parts of the world where Communist Parties had gained a mass base. In addition, scholarly critics of the Soviet Union, such as economist Friedrich Hayek were commonly cited as critics of socialism. This view was not universally shared, particularly in Europe, and especially in Britain, where the Communist Party was very weak. In 1951, British Health Minister Aneurin Bevan expressed the view that, "It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds."

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I thought a few lessons on Socialism would be a good thing. The above is copied directly from the Wikipedia page on Socialism. I did remove the footnote indicators. The links provided on Wikipedia did not translate (of course), and there are a lot of them! So I elected to not spend an hour or more adding all the links. I suggest you go to Wikipedia (link provided) and read it yourself.