Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Because what happens is the Nazis, with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness, simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who were supposed to be waiting to take over. So that's forestalled. A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot is, couldn't the Social Democrats and the Communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power?
that's where the prior history comes into play. The very fact that the German revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative that it's nearly impossible to settle on cooperation. added to the fact that the communists see the Social Democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class.
In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt, surely the German army is going to step in. And the most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship.
It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that some people in retrospect would have felt that that military dictatorship would have been preferable if it had obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis.
I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future is going to look like. So how it would play out is,
He was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris Commune, this is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing. And then it doesn't end up happening.
So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events and We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a workers' revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers and they didn't have a lot of industry. There's a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility.
a Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development? I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme? And Marx's answer was kind of alluded, but it wasn't a no. And that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios and
I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn't match his expectations at the outset.
Well... we don't know what Marx would say if he were posed that question deliberately, but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who was, um, a prolific and celebrated British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries. And, and he was, he was put this question in the nineties after the collapse of the Soviet union. And he stated forthrightly that, um,
Because the Soviet Union failed, such sacrifices were inordinate. But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been opened for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union's success, that would lead to a different reply. And that is one person's perspective.
So Mao takes a page from the Book of Lenin by adapting or seeking to adapt to Marx's ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly. And that is not only to set the revolution in an as yet not industrialized country, but moreover to make the peasants, rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes, to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture.
That's of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology a valid adjustment that you've made or adaptation? And when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct? Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context and by implication, other non-Western parts of the world.
This was in part Mao's way, whose ambition was great, to put himself at the head of a successful international movement and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented from having to be the junior partner
To take an example of a masterwork in a major milestone in the history of communism, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kowalski, who was at first a committed communist and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought called Currents of Marxism, in that book—
When he reaches Maoism, Kowakowski essentially throws up his hands and says, like, it's hard to even know what to do with this because putting the peasantry in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design. But Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and truer version of Marxism for the Chinese context. Right.
In case after case in Mao's rise to power, we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin, right?
He works hard to gain Stalin's support because the Comintern, the international organization headquartered in Moscow, working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide, is skeptical about the Chinese communists to begin with and believes that China still has a long way to go before it's reached the stage where it's ripe for communist revolution.
And in a way, that's more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. And in 1950, when Mao goes to visit Stalin again,
in Moscow in order to sign a treaty of cooperation, he's left waiting for days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you're just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union.
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