Recently, I was reading in Richard Pipes history The Russian Revolution. Did you know that the communist revolution in Russia was not a peasant revolt? So often we learned growing up that the uprising that resulted in the Soviet Union was a conflict between the proletariat (peasants and workers) and the bourgeoisie (rich property owners). The struggle eliminated private property, and put everyone on an equal footing in a worker’s paradise.
The rise of communism in Russia, however, had little to do with a peasant rebellion. It was not the have-nots revolting against the haves. The Russian revolution was really an upper middle class coup d’état orchestrated by the intelligentsia. It was the intelligentsia that fomented the rebellion. They thought it up. They fanned it into flame, and they marketed and managed the revolt. That’s right – they managed the revolt. And in the end when the revolt was over, they became the ruling class. The intelligentsia became the communist party leadership who decided for the rest of their society what was best and what was not. Of course, after 70 years we all witnessed the train wreck that the Soviet Union became. In fact, I visited the Soviet Union twice (1983 and 1990), and saw for myself the fruits of communism.
While the communist empire has largely collapsed, Marxism still lives on. When you ask yourself where Marxism thrives today in the West, and particularly in America, the answer is eerily familiar. Most contemporary communists today are in the media, in the universities, and in organizations run by those educated in the university. In other words, the intelligentsia. Study The Russian Revolution, and you will see 21st century America. Our country is being driven inexorably toward socialism and eventually communism by the same class of people that incited the Russian revolution. I don’t know if the revolution will be as violent, but the resulting “new world” will be just as totalitarian.
What goes around comes around. Would be that we could all see what is happening around us and not just sit on it.
I only wish more people understood all this. For not only was the Russian Revolution not a “peasant revolt,” but Lenin and other communists mistakenly assumed the proletariat would fall in lock-step behind them. They were wrong, the peasants refused to rally behind “the cause,” and communist leaders were confused as to why. Among other reasons, Marxism is “inter-nationalistic” in scope, but workers in Moscow and across Russia were decidedly “nationalistic.” They felt a far stronger bond with workers in far off Vladivostok than those in Paris or London. It took the obscure Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, to instruct the Russian communists in the errors of their ways. His “Hegemony” theory was embraced not only by Russians, but by other European fascists, notably the Nazis. American Progressives took note as well, for Gramsci’s ideas have been successfully deployed here in America.