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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Appearances
And that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites. more generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization, but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies.
And the sense that here's a doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being cutting-edge science, I think, allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in
in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes, the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan.
So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that Governments will essentially be able to run themselves. And the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices.
Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office. And he thought... Why can't you organize governments like this where you don't need political leaders? You don't need grand visions. You have procedures.
You have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good. You know, it... When you think of the experiences with the bureaucracy in the 20th century, one's hair stands on end to have the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that.
But it derives from that confidence that it's all going to be okay because we understand, we have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity. Yeah.
It is. I mean, at the same time, though, it kind of points to a further problem, and that's the identity of the revolutionaries.
It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the Industrial Revolution firsthand. I mean, there's a special role here for intellectuals.
And when Marx and Engels write into the Communist Manifesto the notion that certain exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can't and transcend their class,
earlier role, their materially determined role, in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals, because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to intellectuals. That gap
That frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the civil war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism and splits followers of Marx.
And that's in the aftermath of the First World War in particular, or during this traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin encourages the foundation of radical parties that will break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like Germany,
scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore, professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that a mere trade union movement couldn't. And what this speaks to is, you know, a fundamental tension in radical movements, because the
Left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on their reality, their families, their workplace, want better working conditions, unionize, and then aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve their living conditions. And then they're happy for the advances that they have won.
And for Lenin, that's not enough because that's a half measure. That's the sort of thing that leads you into an accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. So there's a real, there's a constant tension in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul.
It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was created by the First World War and the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone.
And for this reason, communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected in the wreckage of the Russian empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation because he's the one who presses the process forward. Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the
key to history, just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire, in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back.
And when he does get back as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they'll later live very much to regret, He is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement, to power and then to build the Soviet Union.
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