Right Left Dictators

The American progressive magazine Salon has a wonderful text, explaining why dictatorships are only right-wing, not left-wing. The author's logic is simple: the left are those who are for 99%, the right are those who are for 1%; if the left is for the people, then the left cannot be for a dictatorship, and any dictatorship is always right. Checkmate, capitalists! In the episodes, a little bit of our national history also got: you can find out that the Bolsheviks united the working class and overthrew Nicholas 2. In reality, the Bolsheviks, of course, overthrew the Provisional Government, and Nicholas 2 was overthrown almost a year before - and not by the Bolsheviks, but by his own military. However, with the working class and the revolution, it turns out even more interesting.

According to Marx, the revolutionary transition to communism required, first of all, the awareness of the working class of its own class interests. After that, everything further becomes a technical issue. the overwhelming majority of proletarians against the minority of capitalists. In the "Communist Manifesto" Marx generally wrote that the proletarian revolution would happen in a democratic way - that is, the proletarians who realized their interests would outvote the bourgeoisie and use the state to socialize the means of production. Therefore, most Marxists still preferred to rely on party building and propaganda. But only Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who literally believed that the working class was too stupid and ignorant, would never arrange any revolution, so specially trained people who came from bourgeois intellectual circles should arrange it. With the help of violence, and not some kind of voting. Lenin defended this point of view in disputes with other Marxists - for example, with Rosa Luxemburg, who drowned for the enlightenment of the proletarian masses. Ironically, Luxembourg perished after an unsuccessful uprising staged by her colleagues. But Lenin is one of the few who managed to take power. Largely due to the mistakes of the Provisional Government, which no one wanted to defend, but also due to the pragmatic and cannibalistic strategy chosen by Lenin.

Thus, where the Marxists managed to make a revolution, they abandoned Marxist populism. In favor of the idea that the working class, in principle, cannot become subjective, therefore, small groups of "professional revolutionaries" who know better what and how should bring happiness to it. But what to do next? Well, yes, to destroy everyone who, with their bourgeois values, interferes with the awakening of class consciousness - the revolutionaries are switching to terror (Marx also did not have it, but it turns out to be an effective means of retaining power). Then it turns out that even after the "revolution" and terror, the working class for some reason does not wake up class consciousness - no matter how much you feed the proletarian with socialism, he still looks into the bourgeois forest. To keep their gains, they have to make the terror permanent. Therefore, the rise to power of big autocrats like Stalin or Mao is not a sudden deviation from the socialist course, but its logical continuation. Lenin was a pragmatist compared to Luxembourg. And Stalin was a pragmatist compared to Trotsky. Just as the Leninist group of professional revolutionaries turned out to be more effective than populist going to the people, so the Stalinist authoritarian state was more effective than the "International" and the "world revolution" (which is essentially the same populism, only on a global scale).

What is all this for? To the fact that ignorance is, of course, a mandatory requirement for columnists of progressive publications. But the main thing is that the labels "left" and "right" are actually poorly applicable to states and regimes. Left or right can be ideologies within which you can fantasize whatever you want. But political practice has its own logic, within the framework of which it turns out that only the Marxist who has become authoritarian survives, and he can survive 70 years only if he builds something suspiciously reminiscent of Marx's "Asiatic mode of production".

Mihail Pojarsky 2021-08-17