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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
One was that German socialists and later communists organize in order to fulfill Marx's vision, and they produce something that leaves other Westerners in awe of in the late 19th century. And that's the building of a strong German workers' movement and a social democratic party. That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote.
And there's the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again, also goes against Marx's original vision of the necessity for a revolution. workers around the world, or rather radical socialists, look with admiration and awe at what the Germans have achieved, and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done.
The final point is, growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent, because Russia, after all, The homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union, that must be the point of origin.
Before the Bolsheviks seized power, in order to really be a serious radical socialist, you needed to read German because you needed to read Marx and you needed to read Kautsky and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition. And it's only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. So there's lots of marks of that.
Well, Bakunin, in some things, agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and revolution sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things.
Not compromise was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser.
that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies.
So Bakunin is part of a broader movement of socialists and anarchists who are demanding change and envisioning really fundamental transformation. But his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx. And he makes some prophetic remarks about – the problems with the system that Marx is proposing.
You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian kind of adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies.
And his anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx, and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from the international arena. One of the things, though, that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause.
And you have to say that in every case it ends badly for the anarchists because they The communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement.
The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, The anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution.
That's my definition. Yeah.
Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind.
You know, another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man.
Generally, except if you're talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state. and one where finally people will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy, growing out of the liberation of the human being, is seen as a positive good and peaceful.
Now, that's at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakunin for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that. But as we point out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.
It's a leap. And it points to a phenomenon that... would have enraged Marx and would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars have commented on. And that's that there is a religious element, not a vowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx's vision, to the tradition that follows Marx.
And, you know, just think of the correspondences, right? Marx himself as kind of positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven.
There's the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s had an article in The Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion. Erich Voegelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about
Showing 61–80 of 414 · page 4 of 21
← Previous
Next →