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Theory January 20, 2022 Tamas Krausz

There is a great variety of theories and discussions on the views of V. I. Lenin on socialism as well as on his revolutionary praxis, which often leads to chaos and intellectual-theoretical confusions. The present paper seeks to clarify some contested issues.

Lenins theory of socialism directly derives from the views of Marx and Engels, and it is manifest in his famous work, The State and Revolution. Marx and Engels theory on socialism was so important for Lenin that he never gave it up, not even in the period of war communism, when for a short time he thought that the measures of war communism could accelerate the transition to socialism.

It is obvious that the revolutionaries, including Lenin, had to change their views after the victory of the revolution, when they had to face a changed and unforeseen political-historical situation: after a bloody civil war and a Western military intervention, the Soviet Union was alone and had to navigate under very unfavorable, objective circumstances.

Lenin outlined the whole problem of socialism through the historical development of relations of property and production, according to which the new socialist communal society comes into being in Russia and in the semiperiphery (Krausz 2020). Based on Marxs theoretical tradition, Lenins interpretation of socialism outlined a higher form of communal ownership, direct control over workplace through the soviets of workers, the first historical ancestor of which was the Paris commune closely watched by Marx.

When following Marx, Lenin posited his own three-step concept in his State and Revolution in which socialism, as the lower phase of communism, is preceded by a transitional period he could not have known that the Russian Revolution would end up being isolated. As a result, theoretical socialism as a practical issue had to be put off the agenda and history moved toward the possibility of socialism in its peculiar Russian form, something he had wanted to avoid.

Thus, theoretical considerations and practical possibilities came into inevitable conflict already on the second day of the October Revolution. Taking a long term view of history, all great conflicts and contradictions have been rooted in this fact in one way or another. Lenin was conscious of the fact that Russian backwardness (its semi-peripheral development) facilitated the cause of the revolution, but it hindered the realization of socialism.

Most scholars agree that Soviet development has to be cut up into different periods based on economic-political criteria. The three periods following the October Revolution were the following: market economy that characterized the period until spring-summer 1918, the war communism of 19181920, and the state capitalism of the New Economic Policy (NEP) from March 1921 onward. These periods shaped Lenins thought. At this point we need a short digression on the history of socialist history.

In the first half of the 1890s, Lenin, contradicting Mikhailovsky in his What the Friends of the People Are, rejected all dreamy visions of socialism (LCW, Vol. 1, 129332). He made it clear that Marxs work never painted any detailed prospects for the future: it confined itself to analyzing the present bourgeois regime, to studying the dynamic trends of development of capitalist social organization.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a young man from Simbirsk was 24 years old when he arrived at the clear exposition-interpretation of an alternative to capitalism; and it was a very important result especially if we consider that until now we still have no other, theoretically consistent alternative to capitalism.

Above all and very early Lenin outlined the whole problem of socialism through the historical development of ownership. In his analysis the new communal society appears in modern history after the dissolution of ancient communities. It was a higher form of communal ownership, the manifestation of new individual property:

The abolition of individual property, which since the sixteenth century has been effected in the way indicated above, is the first negation. It will be followed by a second, which bears the character of a negation of the negation, and hence of a restoration of individual property, but in a higher form, based on common ownership of land and of the instruments of labour. Herr Marx calls this new individual property also social property, and in this there appears the Hegelian higher unity, in which the contradiction is supposed to be sublated (aufgehoben a specific Hegelian term) (LCW, Vol. 1, 169).

Therefore, socialism as a philosophical and historical possibility has its inception with the beginning of modern capitalist society in the form of primitive capital accumulation. Lenin cited Marx at length on individual property coming into existence again, which now meant the shared ownership of the tools of production (see also Krausz 2015, 313). That is, the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community on a socialist basis, as a community of free individuals:

Capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and nourished along with, and under it. Concentration of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated (LCW, Vol. 1, 169 and 171172).

In the first volume of Capital, Marx goes on like this:

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production (Marx, 1887 C1, Ch 32).

So Lenin interpreted the developments of modern capitalism on this theoretical basis. The Taylorist system without its initiators knowing or wishing it is preparing for the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalizing all social labour. Large-scale production, machinery, railways, telephony all provide thousands of opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organized workers and make them four times better off than they are today. And these workers committees, assisted by workers unions, will be able to apply these principles of the rational distribution of social labour when the latter is freed from its enslavement by capital (LCW, Vol. 20, 154). Based on experiences from colonialism to the First World War, Lenin already knew that there is no such boundary or limit in the process of capitalist reproduction and in general, the process of the endless accumulation of capital, which could automatically lead to the collapse of capitalism. The 1917 October Revolution would have had no meaning if the workers and peasants had not seized the ownership of workplaces and means of production, including land, through their Soviets.

Central to Lenins thinking after October 1917 was how to preserve the hard-won power of the soviets. In practice this was never separate from the power of his party, which saw it as the political condition upon which continuing soviet power depended. He surveyed the practical possibility of communal-socialist proletarian ends from this point of view. The contradiction, which strained the tortuous daily battles for survival and keeping to the goals, increasingly placed the discrete problems of the so-called transitional period to the forefront. Such was the mass of problems he confronted at the first congress following the October Revolution. There, he drew attention to the particularity of their revolution: the situation was misrepresented to make believe that some wanted to introduce socialism in Russia by decree, without considering the existing technical level, the great number of small enterprises, or the habits and wishes of the majority of the population; and, over and above, what Lenin underlined many times, the fact that 80% of the population was illiterate.

In his pamphlet, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, published as a Pravda insert on 28 April 1918, Lenin once again raised these same questions, and gradually formed his own position in light of the new situation (LCW, Vol. 27). The reason he attributed such grave importance to the difficulties caused by the chaotic situation was that the military party, tempted by Russias momentary weakness may gain the upper hand at any moment in the West (LCW, Vol. 27, 237). He intended to establish a concrete economic alternative to market-dominated production in an anarchically built capitalist society and the spontaneously growing and expanding national and international market system, but which had not yet overstepped the limitations of the existing mixed market economy (LCW, Vol. 27, 238). True, he had already advocated the strictest and universal accounting and control of the production and distribution of goods. Since he spoke about setting up an extremely intricate and delicate system of new organizational relationships, whose realization was not merely a technical matter, it is natural that he did not envisage a complete and immediate termination of all market relations as time is needed to convince the people and deepen the consciousness. Lenin concluded that capitalism as a sector would have to remain standing. He said that If we decided to continue to expropriate capital at the same rate at which we have been doing up to now, we should certainly suffer defeat, and elsewhere that the expropriation of the expropriators is easier than introducing a new system. He believed that the Red Guard attacks on capital had drawn to a close and the period of utilising bourgeois specialists by the proletarian state power had begun (LCW, Vol. 27, 246, 248).

He even strayed from every theoretical premise and declared unequivocally that these specialists must be engaged in the service of the new regime with high remuneration. Lenin described this winning over the stars of the intelligentsia as a step back and a partial retreat when compared with socialist equality (LCW, Vol. 27, 248250). In the same breath and with great prescience he spoke of a certain and inevitable corruption of this system, the weakening of its moral fiber as a sort of natural concomitant of the market economy. The corrupting influence of high salaries both upon the Soviet authorities (especially since the revolution occurred so rapidly that it was impossible to prevent a certain number of adventurers and rogues from getting into positions of authority) and upon the mass of the workers is indisputable. Yet he never found a convincing solution to this contradiction, always thinking in terms of socialist and proletarian consciousness and its persuasion, because they had not been able to establish comprehensive control and accounting, and had fallen behind with the socialist reforms. We have introduced workers control as a law, but this law is only just beginning to penetrate the minds of broad sections of the proletariat (LCW, Vol. 27, 254). Essentially, the expansion of state regulation to capitalist production and turnover of goods (to the cooperatives as well) may become a fundamental question regarding financial and market conditions in the transition leading to socialism. In The Impending Catastrophe, he drew a clear line between state control of the bourgeoisie and the expropriation of private property that applied to the bourgeoisie, even arguing against expropriation in this specific case:

If nationalisation of the banks is so often confused with the confiscation of private property, it is the bourgeois press which has an interest in deceiving the public. Whoever owned fifteen rubles on a savings account would continue to be the owner of fifteen rubles after the nationalisation of the banks; and whoever had fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on (LCW, Vol. 25, 330).

The purpose of nationalization was to oversee financial and economic processes, the actual collection of personal income taxes, etc. Lenin contrasted reactionary-bourgeois regulation to revolutionary democratic regulation, with bottom-up control, with whose limitations he soon came face-to-face. He had already stipulated that the construction of the most modern heavy industry would require state-of-the-art technical-technological progress, to apply much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount of work done by the railways, the water transport system, etc., etc. Lenin thought that the feasibility of socialism depended on the successes that could be achieved in the field of combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism (LCW, Vol. 27, 259). Apart from the cooperation and competition of economic sectors and modes of production, Lenin also spoke about the competition of communes, and etched out its moral driving forces more clearly than its material and economic bases. In contrast to the allowances made to market and financial conditions and the bourgeois cooperatives, the socialist state can arise only as a network of producers and consumers communes, which conscientiously keep account of their production and consumption, economise on labour, and steadily raise the productivity of labour, thus making it possible to reduce the working day to seven, six and even fewer hours (LCW, Vol. 27, 259).

Lenin had taken note of this, and by the spring of 1918, famine ravaged the cities. In fact, a political turn was outlined in May 1918, leading from a state-supervised mixed market economy to a dictatorship of state subsistence that swept spontaneously toward war communism. The latter, in the beginning, was determined and validated by the internal armed counterrevolution and interventionist military attacks.

Left unexplained was that the matter does not simply rest on state power, for in war communism the state as a military force of authority, as a deterrent to class enemies through dictatorial power, acted as the mainspring of the economy. This had no roots in any form of Marxist theoretical tradition from Marxs own time, and even contradicted his periods idea of socialism. Lenin was not so nave as to identify war communism with complete socialism, for he continued to believe that as long as workers and peasants remain, socialism has not been achieved (LCW, Vol. 30, 506). Lenins real theoretical mistake in 19191920 was that he overestimated the possibilities of socialization, of social supervision within the framework of nationalization, and underestimated the inveteracy of the market and money in a regulating role, a fact he later recognized. The atmosphere of the epoch, the romantic attitude toward the civil war, was also expressed in war communisms compulsory egalitarianism.

War communisms focus was on the consolidation of the new military-power hierarchy under civil war conditions, even though it simultaneously exacerbated the economic situation. Meanwhile, Lenin held that socialism, as a system that had reached completion, would only be composed of voluntary associations of economically productive communities organized from below. It was still a state, though, for there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie in order to defend the equality of labour and public property (LCW, Vol. 25, 471). Lenin differentiated between state and social-community property even at its inception; before the introduction of war communism, he believed that the productive classes would themselves have to create socialist conditions.

Just as war communism was not the application of a theory, neither was the NEP the experiment or exercise of one. The Soviet government implemented both war communism and the NEP under pressure of concrete circumstances, requirements, and needs without foreseeing its internal or international effects. In both cases their ideologies the theoretical justification of the systems were developed either parallel to their introduction, or as a follow-up (though war communism incorporated a number of elements from German war economic policy, and the NEP included elements from the market economy of the winter and spring of 1918). The NEP meant substituting militarized production including the ration system, strict state distribution, and the compulsory appropriation of grain with money and market conditions, reinstituting free trade and introducing taxes in kind. Often forgotten is that, at the same time, the partial reinstatement of capitalist conditions entailed a general social transformation, a restructuring of social classes and groups, and a change in their relationships.

The introduction of a market economy and workers democracy also proved to be a contradiction that could not be bridged. Significant segments of the labouring masses became tired of the sacrifices they were called upon to make and were demanding a loosening of the bolts, but very few were in possession of the skills required for direct democracy. Lenin later expressed the necessity of the NEP, neatly and self-critically summarizing it at the 11th Party Congress in the spring of 1922: We must organize things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people (see Lenins speech at the 11th Congress in March 1922, LCW, Vol. 33, 279).

With the ascent of the NEP, the question of socialism in Lenins thinking was broadened by new elements and hypotheses. He made it clear that he was unwilling to become subject to his own partys propaganda, and he differentiated conceptually between the NEP period and socialism. The NEP came to be defined as an unpremeditated transitional phase within the transitional period. Lenin consciously took precautions not to make the same mistake, made during war communism, of attempting to give the conditions of the war economy legitimacy in socialist theory. Lenin had indeed made state capitalism central as part of the transition after the spring of 1918, but in a structured manner. The concept had an immediate political meaning. The Soviet state gave preferential treatment to organized large-scale capital and market-oriented state property rather than anarchic private property, the uncontrollably chaotic economy of the petit bourgeois (25 million small estates in place of a single large one!). The grounds for this were that a capitalism overseen by the state was the only solution for an ordered retreat, and only state capitalism could replace bureaucratic war-communist centralism, which had also begot chaos. Of course Lenin called this a retreat compared with theoretical socialism; in concrete terms, he spoke about a step forward from the practice of economic policy under war communism. Just as he had described the transitional periods state as a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie, he spoke about a state capitalism without a bourgeoisie coming into being as a consequence of the NEP, as long as (and along with other developments) the state enterprises will to a large extent be put on a commercial, capitalist basis (LCW, Vol. 42, 376).

For Lenin, Kronstadt and the peasant revolts (notably, the Antonovshchina) showed that war communism was dead. This was how the pure form of state capitalism, which the Soviet government needed to function, came to be considered the opposite of war communism. Lenin marked out the purpose of the NEP in one of his last writings, On Cooperation: to lease out concessions. In the prevailing circumstances, concessions in our country would unquestionably have been a pure type of state capitalism (LCW, Vol. 33, 472). For Lenin, as he himself stressed, the practical objectives were always of primary importance, and so he could only experiment with a theory that also reinforced the practical objective. Now what was essential to him was precisely that a special type of capitalism had come into being in Russia, one previously unknown to history: It was important for me to show the continuity between ordinary state capitalism and the unusual, even very unusual, state capitalism to which I referred in introducing the reader to the New Economic Policy (LCW, Vol. 33, 472).

The concept of state capitalism is used in two senses here: on the one hand as a sector of a mixed market economy. On the other it is a term from formation theory denoting the economic method and arrangement for the transitional period and seen as a phase of it. It is a type of state capitalism, in quotes, that cannot be found in any textbooks, nor in the writings of Marx and Engels: On the question of state capitalism our press and our Party make the mistake of dropping into intellectualism, into liberalism; we philosophize about how state capitalism is to be interpreted, and look into old books. But not a single book has been written about state capitalism under communism (Speech at the Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.), LCW, Vol. 33, 277278; Krausz 2007).

As early as in 1918, Lenin suggested that he used the term state capitalism for the relations of the transitional period. State capitalism would be for us, and for Russia, a more favorable form than the existing one. We did not overrate either the rudiments or the principles of socialist economy, although we had already accomplished the social revolution. On the contrary, at that time in 1918 we already realized to a certain extent that it would be better if we first arrived at state capitalism and only after that at socialism(LCW, Vol. 33, 420). It is not accidental that it caused a great upheaval amongst Marxists, when following Tony Cliff the term of state capitalism was transferred to the description of state socialism, which was established after the Stalinist turn.

Lenins speech at the 11th Party Congress stressed in particular that during the NEP period Russia would develop in the framework of a multisectoral mixed economy, in which the various forms of economy compete, and mobilize different social forces: When I spoke about communist competition, what I had in mind were not communist sympathies but the development of economic forms and social systems (LCW, Vol. 33, 287). These various forms small proprietors, the state capitalist, state socialist, and self-governing cooperative sectors formed a system of market economy, which meant that the direct realization of socialism as a system was taken off the practical political agenda. In other words, the goal was the survival of socialism as a sector. Lenins theory of socialism is compatible with this coherent structure, in which each social-economic sector was composed of further subsectors and organizational forms of production and consumption. This multisectoral system came to a halt with the turn promoted by Stalin, which swept away the sectors of both market capitalist and direct communal forms of production. State socialism came into being in 19291933 as a system derived from well-known historical circumstances. Then people started to call it socialism as the 1936 Constitution declared it.

During the 1920s the special characteristic of direct communal ownership and production was realized either in the form of voluntary associations or by way of state mediation, though only in a small fraction of agricultural and industrial units or fields. Lenin focused much of his attention at the end of his life on self-governing and cooperative socialism the historical possibilities of an economic system built on direct democracy which he called islands of socialism. The significance of the experiments with cooperatives was of immense importance to Lenin, because this political power owns all the means of production, the only task, indeed, that remains for us is to organize the population in cooperative societies. Socialism will achieve its aim automatically (On Cooperation, LCW, Vol. 33, 467475). Though the NEP had been made to last, Lenin never removed socialism from his agenda, even under circumstances of market restoration.

This was even though he knew that thinkers and politicians who had been nursed by the market and state looked down upon cooperatives, even from the standpoint of transition to the new system by means that are the simplest, easiest and most acceptable to the peasant. He knew that incorporating the whole population into voluntary cooperatives of production and consumption would take a longer historical period to realize precisely because of the absence of the cultural-civilizatorial preconditions and yet he insisted on posing this problem. The exact relationship between cooperatives and socialism that Lenin had in mind becomes clear in the light of his whole approach, the complete and coherent system of his thoughts.

The cooperatives, as he wrote, are the products of capitalism; they are collective capitalist institutions in which the future of socialism can be glimpsed. Producers have the opportunity to shape the cooperatives in their own image in the course of a revolutionary reform of state power, similarly to how in the NEP, when we combine private capitalist enterprises with enterprises of the consistently socialist type the question arises about a third type of enterprise, the cooperatives, which were not formally regarded as an independent type differing fundamentally from the others. He spoke about the possibility of coexisting state socialist and cooperative socialist enterprises, though a differentiation between the two forms of cooperative, state and self-governed, would soon come about (LCW, Vol. 33, 472473). By the mid-1920s, nearly 10 million people had been pooled into state-organized and state-subsidized consumer cooperatives. Lenin marked out explicitly that a shift must be made from the interpretation of socialism previously reached (war communist, state powered, and politicized) to the position of cooperative socialism.

Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation is identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, cultural work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a world scale (LCW, Vol. 33, 474).

A direct replenishment of needs had the advantage of presenting internal needs and potential output that could be calculated in advance, without employing an office to do such work. The most comprehensive modern theory of socialism has been published by Istvn Mszros (2018), entitled Beyond Capital, who ties his work on capital to the theoretical fundamentals of Marx and Lenin, and links his concept of socialism not to the concepts of market production, but both looks for and defines these concepts beyond the market and the state beyond capital, in short. After Stalins death, dogmatics and revisionists in each communist party made a compromise in order to retain power. Later, at the time of the change of regime the former revisionists, now as liberals, represented and formed the ideological mainstream of the market-capitalist restoration.

Lenins theory of socialism and the main direction of his political activity was targeted at the gradual delinking from the capital system. In East European state socialism, instead of the renaissance of self-governing, cooperative socialism, it was the power of capital that came back with its semi-peripheral characteristics. Lenins ouvre, representing and working out specific historical experiences, remains actual until we realize socialism, since there has been no other relevant alternative to capitalism over the last centuries. There is only one question remaining: how do we evaluate current attempts, what kind of socialism would be viable in replacing capitalism and how to bring it about? Whether to promote the second or updated edition of state socialism or to take the direction of self-governing socialism, the culture of workers councils, forms of cooperatives leading to the self-defense and self-organization of the working people. For me it is crystal clear that Lenin would certainly insist on the latter variant.

This article first published on the LeftEast website.

Tamas Krausz is a historian and university professor at the Etvs Lornd Universitt in Budapest. His monumental work Reconstructing Lenin. An Intellectual Biography has been awarded the German Memorial Prize, after an English translation had been published in 2015.

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Lenin's Socialism From the Perspective of the Future - The Bullet - Socialist Project

When [BR] Ambedkar and others in the anti-caste movement called attention to Brahmanic philosophy or Brahmanism, communists were uneasy with the usage. To them, Brahmanism was, at best, a historical tendency which, in the past, had sought to justify a birth-based social order, and they did not think that the term served a critical purpose in the present. By refusing to grant it analytical significance, they sidestepped questions to do with the historically specific expressions of ruling ideologies and interests in the Indian context.

To Ambedkar, their reluctance to do so was of a part with a more general reluctance to engage with the terrain of religion. His own understanding of religionwas complex and layered, but in this instance, he wished to draw attention to the role of the brahmin class in perpetuating inequality, and rendering it sacerdotal, in and through the roles they had historically assigned to themselves: they were both religious preceptors and intellectuals.

This not only rendered them self-assured purveyors of ideas and arguments, whose terms they came to set, but it also made for a static conception of knowledge, which had proved dangerously consequential: If on any point we have attained to certainty, we make no further inquiry on that point; because inquiry would be useless, or perhaps dangerous. The doubt must intervene, before the investigation can begin. Here, then, we have the act of doubting as the originator, or, at all events, the necessary antecedent, of all progress.

Ambedkars point was not that the brahmin class was not assailed by doubt, but that, in wanting to sustain their vision of the sacred and the social as enduring and timeless, they subverted changes wrought by time and history, in ways that were always already conservative. Thus, every moment of historical disjuncture for example, the revolution wrought by Buddhism was reworked as a moment of transition that only affirmed what already was. Theirs, Ambedkar warned, was an acquisitive politics that enabled them to hoard spiritual and intellectual surplus through an appropriation of diverse sorts of thought to their purpose, and in order to naturalise social inequality.

Ambedkars sorrow was that in India, the intellectual class had not only failed to lead a term that he freighted with pedagogic and political resonance but had insinuated itself into public consciousness in ways that rendered it worthy and worshipful simply because it proclaimed itself to be so: The Hindus are taught that the Brahmins are Bhudevas (gods on earth) [and] that Brahmins alone can be their teachers.

Such limitations appeared particularly acute, given that the brahmins had arranged knowledge systems within a gradation such that knowledge of the practical arts and crafts, of labour and production was not granted the same valence as intellectual and philosophical speculation. This meant that the productive and working classes that intuited these other knowledges could not aspire to produce intellectuals.

This was in contrast to societies where each strata had its educated class and to Ambedkar this was consequential for there was safety if no definite guidance, in the multiplicity of views expressed by different educated classes drawn from different strata of society. Thus, there was no danger of Society being misguided or misdirected by the views of one single educated class drawn from one single class of society This creation of different groups of organic intellectuals had not happened in India even in modern times, when learning was open, notionally at least, to all, and much of society remained bound by world views validated by the brahmins.

The Indian lefts relationship to religion and its understanding of the intellectual class were of a different order. Generally speaking, communists held religion to be a constituent of the superstructure, and an engagement with the religious realm therefore was not viewed as significant as struggles carried out on the shop floor or the field. On the other hand, the many uses of religion in the modern period Gandhis politics, for instance, or those espoused by Hindu and Muslim groups appeared to them to be politically significant, since they looked to distract attention away from the real economic struggle.

They added that they sought to combat religion by pointing out its reactionary role in political and social affairs and its historical roots in exploitation and subordination of class to class. However, this must not be taken to mean that they would not cooperate with people who hold religious beliefs or even preach religion. But, since they held the economic and political struggle to be paramount, questions relating to religion were to be subordinated to it.

In practice this meant that the CPI criticised the use of religion to further ruling class interests, and propagated for unity amongst workers on the basis of a shared experience of economic injustice, but when they encountered religion in the flesh, so to speak, they realised that it could not be easily put away. For, in many contexts, religious expressions associated with Hindu, Muslim as well as Sikh sacred and cultural narratives constituted cultural common sense, and as happened in Bengal during the agrarian struggle of the 1940s, communists ended up drawing on the rich repertoire of local cultural resources to communicate their political ideas and mobilise people into protest actions.

In urban India too, religious festivals and holidays were central to the everyday lives of workers and multiple religious and cultural organisations were active in working class neighbourhoods. Communist organising had to reckon with the workers keen interest in these matters, and as important, ensure that it did not lead to inter-religious strife. In many instances, unions did mitigate sectarian uses of religion, especially the rivalry that sometimes bedevilled Hindu and Muslim worker interactions.

The lefts understanding of Hinduism bears consideration in this regard. Very early in his political life, SA Dange sought to grapple with Hinduism critically, but apart from a few sporadic articles in the Socialist, nothing came of his efforts, until much later, when he took a historical lens to the distant past.

In the 1930s and after, in the context of fascisms advance in Europe, he wrote a great deal on the relationship between religion and the political imagination in India. Roys critique of Hinduism, in this context, was quite similar to Ambedkars: he pointed to the philosophical stranglehold exerted by Brahmanic traditions of thought on all subsequent history, the limits of Hindu moral philosophy and the unfortunate retreat of Buddhism from the role it essayed in its heyday.

He also drew parallels between Nietzsches ideas and those expounded in Brahmanical texts, and pointed to how Hindu society was fertile ground for the growth of fascist thought. However, Roy did not offer a critique of the brahmin class and its role in the modern period, though in his latter day writings, he did indict the orthodox among the nationalists for harbouring protofascist ideas.

As far as the role of intellectuals or of the brahmin class was concerned, left thinkers speculated on the intellectuals and their presence in colonial society, but not in relation to the brahmin class. For instance, in an extended note on modern intellectuals, SA Dange referred rather sweepingly to what appeared to him a putative social group that comprised salaried employees who functioned as the office machinery of capitalism in colonial India.

Comprising clerks, office workers, journalists and teachers, this educated and self-conscious group seemed an intellectual proletariat but it was yet not a class, since there was no solidarity in the very base of its economic position between the two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

As a consequence, the consciousness of its constituents was shaped by caste, community and province and in the event, these men were unable to rise beyond their immediate and often limited political and material demands. They wanted better salaries, more Indians in government and were prey to clever propaganda. Dange did not consider it germane that these men were mostly brahmins and Hindus.

Excerpted with permission from The Prerequisites of Communism: Rethinking Revolution in Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, Part of the Marx, Engels, Marxisms series, V Geetha, Palgrave-Macmillan/Springer International.

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A new book examines the role Ambedkar saw for socialism in the social transformation he fought for - Scroll.in

ByRichard Baum, Ph.D.,University of California, Los AngelesAccording to Deng Xiaoping, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Europe was due to inadequate economic reform. (Image: helloRuby/Shutterstock)The Velvet Revolution

In the late summer and fall of 1989, the entire Soviet bloc erupted in turmoil,as a massive popular revolt against communism spread like a tsunami throughout eastern and central Europe. Chinese leaders watched in morbid fascination as the aptly named Velvet Revolution swept through the region, toppling Communist governments one after the other, from Berlin and Budapest to Prague and Warsaw.

For the most part, these embattled regimes recognized the handwriting on the wall and left the stage peacefully. But there was one major exception. When the unyielding, hard-line Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu refused to relinquish power gracefully in mid-December, his government headquarters was besieged by angry mobs of Romanian citizens, forcing Ceausescu to flee for his life.

Within days he was hunted down, captured, and executed by his own army. Half a world away, within the cloistered walls of Zhongnanhai, Ceausescus execution set off alarm bells.

This is a transcript from the video seriesThe Fall and Rise of China.Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Seeking to assuage their own obvious discomfort and anxiety, Beijings hard-liners began to spin the story of east Europes collapse. According to their narrative storyline, it wasnt the failure of communism that caused the collapse, but rather the reformist liberal programs of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachevs policies of glasnost and perestroika, they argued, had fueled massive popular demands for political and economic liberalization throughout the Soviet bloc. After coming to power in 1984, Gorbachev had indeed steered SovietRussia toward becoming a more open and pluralistic society. Internationally, he ended the Cold War with the United States and pursued peaceful accommodation with China.

When Gorbachev let it be known in the spring of 89 that he would not send Soviet troops and tanks to defend embattled communist regimes in east and central Europe, those regimes suddenly found themselves powerless to resist a rising tide of popular rebellion.

Faced with a classic choice of fight or flight, most chose to flee. Romanias Ceausescu was the sole exception, and he paid for his obstinacy with his life. Following Ceausescus execution, Chinas traditionalists (conservatives) were increasingly blunt in their criticism of Gorbachevs policies.

Learn more about the birth of Chinese communism.

ChenYun charged that the weakness of Gorbachevs ideological line is that it is pointing in the direction of surrender and retreat. Our party cannot afford to stand by and watch this happen. General Wang Zhen also accused the Soviet leader of abandoning socialism.

Even the normally very cautious Jiang Zemin was moved to join the growing anti-Gorbachev chorus. Early in 1990, he claimed that the Soviet leader should be held personally responsible for the debacle in eastern Europe.

As the anti-reform backlash gathered momentum in China, it was given an enormous boost by the stunning collapse of the Communist Mother Shipthe Soviet Unionin the fall of 1991.

Gorbachev had badly underestimated the growing mood of popular disaffection in Russia, and when he tried to reassert the Communist Partys authority, he was ousted and replaced not by a communist but by a liberal democrat, Boris Yeltsin, as president. Thereafter, the Soviet Communist Party lost whatever remaining legitimacy it might have had, and the USSR simply collapsed.

Chinas diehard conservatives now drew a new lesson from the shocking collapse of the Soviet bloc. Even before the implosion oftheSoviet Union, the hard-liners had begun to draw parallels between Gorbachevs liberalization policies and those of Deng Xiaoping. Seeking to revive Mao Zedong mystique and the Maoist emphasis on class struggle, they openly attacked Dengs reforms.

Learn more about Maos alignment with the Soviets.

Early in 1991, one of Chen Yuns conservative protgs, a sharp-tongued propagandist by the name of Deng Liqun, launched a nationwide campaign to publish a new edition of Mao Zedongs works, with free copies to be distributed to every classroom in China.

Calling for a sharp increase in political and ideological education and indoctrination, Deng Liqun promised to educate all Chinese students against the lure of Gorbachev-type pied pipers of pluralism.

He joined forces with General Wang Zhen to defend Maos decision to launch the Cultural Revolution, and they applauded Maos efforts to wage a life-and-death class struggle against the enemies of socialism.

Deng hadnt been seen in public since mid-February. One persistent rumor held that Deng had prostate cancer, another (which later proved to be correct) suggested that he had advanced Parkinsons disease.

With Dengs health fading, conservatives saw an opportunity to ratchet up their attacks on his economic reforms. In journals controlled by the partys leftwing propagandists, they began to openly refer to Dengs promarket policies as capitalistic reform and opening up.

From the sidelines, an infirmed Deng Xiaoping watched uncomfortably as the hard-line offensive gathered momentum. Convinced that he had to act decisively to stem the growing leftist assault, Deng summoned his remaining energy to undertake what was to be the final, and perhaps the most important, political campaign of his entire career.

Deng Xiaoping believed that what led to the collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union was inadequate economic reform. He noted that reforms shouldnt be limited, but should have room for progress.

According to Chinas hard-liners narrative storyline, it wasnt the failure of communism that caused the collapse of east Europe, but rather the reformist liberal programs of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the final leader of the Soviet Union. He announced in the spring of 1989 that he wouldnt send troops to help the communist regimes in eastern Europe. Chinas conservatives blamed Gorbachev for being responsible for the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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China and the Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Europe - The Great Courses Daily News

In less than 40 years, the taxpayer-funded Voice of America went from exposing the crimes and economic failures of communism to in some cases glorifying communists, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

VOA is part of the federal government's $800 million (average annual budget) U.S. Agency for Global Media.

I am an Eastern European refugee from communism. Judging from what one can see online in various languages, Ive concluded that recent and current VOA and USAGM officials either do not know or have forgotten what life was like for tens of millions of people living under communism and in state-run socialist economies in the former Soviet bloc.

My observations are shared by many dissident journalists in China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Ethiopia, as well as political refugees and immigrants from these countries living in the United States, who have been criticizing the management of the VOA programs for damaging the cause of human rights. That was absolutely not the case 40 years ago when I was in charge of the VOA Polish Service, broadcasting to Poland under the martial law imposed by pro-Soviet communists on Dec. 13, 1981.

Today, USAGM and VOA press releases are full of laudatory and often misleading claims from government bureaucrats. It is true that not all of todays VOA language services are bad, and many outstanding journalists still work there. But the kind of criticism one hears now from citizens of captive nations about strategically important VOA programs would not have been ignored by any U.S. administration during the Cold War or by the commercial U.S. media.

After the VOA's management was reformed under President Ronald Reagan, to the great discomfort of many former longtime executives and some central English newsroom reporters, VOAs weekly audience in Poland increased fivefold in less than 10 years to more than 50% of the adult population. In the 1980s, VOA was finally able to contribute significantly to the fall of communism in East-Central Europe, almost as much as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In contrast, VOAs recent broadcasting in Afghanistan ended in a disaster. VOAs impact in Russia, China, and Iran is now minuscule. Independent experts question USAGMs inflated and often meaningless audience claims.

The amnesia of recent and current VOA officials about history and their failure to provide leadership are particularly dangerous at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin may be getting ready to invade Ukraine and uses Belarus in a hybrid war against the neighboring nations in the European Union.

Chinese, Cuban, Ethiopian, and Iranian government propagandists have also been given an advantage by VOA and USAGM managements failures. During the Cold War, VOA did not abandon any journalists behind the Iron Curtain. The VOA/USAGM management left behind in Afghanistan about 500 Afghan employees and family members. Senior agency executives could not see what was coming and did not order a prompt evacuation.

There are not enough VOA and USAGM managers with good judgment informed by a solid grasp of history.

A few years ago, a top VOA official seemed to question whether disinformation outlets such as Russias RT should be made to register in the U.S. as foreign agents. When the U.S. government compels RT to register as a foreign agent, then other governments consider requiring U.S. media to register as foreign agents and then, the VOA executive wrote in a 2017 Facebook post, which was later deleted. It happened at about the same time VOA's management carelessly hired several former Russian state media employees.

Foreign propaganda had found its way into VOA programs at various times. The VOA chief news writer and editor in 1943 was American novelist Howard Fast, who was later a Communist Party activist and the recipient of the 1953 Stalin International Peace Prize.

Censorship in favor of Soviet Russia has also been part of VOA history. In the early 1950s, before President Harry Truman carried out reforms, VOA censored a Polish writer and artist, Jozef Czapski, who had been a witness of Stalins genocidal crimes. In the 1970s, VOA even censored Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Such censorship ended under Reagan but has returned in recent years. Under Obama administration appointees, VOA English programs lauded American communist winner of the Lenin Peace Prize Angela Davis as a fighter for human rights, without any attempt to provide balance with information about her pro-Soviet past. Solzhenitsyn had once spoken bitterly about Davis in describing the methods of Soviet propaganda and how figures such as her were used to justify oppression.

The VOA Russian Service used recently as an on-air personality a former Russian TV anchor who, before his employment with VOA, produced anti-U.S. propaganda films with antisemitic overtones. One of his older videos on YouTube promoted conspiracy theories spread in Russia and in the West by Putins state media. The film put the blame on the U.S. government, American capitalists, and Jewish bankers for exploiting the economies of other countries around the world.

In March 2019, top USAGM and VOA officials received an email with information about this provided by opposition journalists from Belarus. A Belorussian refugee media outlet had expressed a profound shock that a person with a Russian propaganda work record could be hired by the U.S. government-funded broadcaster to host VOA programs. But nothing happened for many months, during which this journalist continued to be employed by VOA. The VOA management has since hired a few other journalists who had previously worked for Putins state media and seem particularly proud of their work in Russia.

During the same time, under the watch of recent and current VOA and USAGM executives, employees and contractors produced news reports and graphics that glorified repressive communist leaders. They did not mention the crimes of Marxist dictators and the failures of socialist state economies.

That is a far cry from how the VOA responded to propaganda from the Soviet Union and other communist states in the 1980s.

In mid-December 2021, the VOA English news website ignored the 40th anniversary of the imposition of martial law in Poland by the pro-Soviet regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The event could have provided a useful history lesson, given that Soviet threats at that time against the Polish Solidarity movement were very similar to todays Russian threats against Ukraine.

There was something else VOAs foreign and U.S. audiences could have learned from history. During martial law in Poland, we received thousands of letters from listeners with requests for humanitarian assistance. In one such letter, sent to the VOA in November 1982, a mother of three girls, ages 7, 11, and 12, asked if VOA could help her. She wanted to find an American family willing to send used clothing and shoes for her young children. All three girls signed their names. The letter came to us from central Poland.

The mother wrote that the helplessness of her situation had forced her to suppress her shame and to ask VOA for help. She wanted her girls to have something warm to wear going to school in the approaching winter months. We already have frost, she wrote. Im afraid that my children will not have anything to wear to go to school. They have outgrown what we had bought two years ago. I cant count on any humanitarian aid; I had already tried. You have to have connections. Women wrote the majority of letters sent from Poland to VOA during the Cold War with requests for humanitarian assistance.

Unfortunately, this letter did not reach VOA before Christmas. A U.S. Postal Service stamp on the envelope shows that it was received in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 27, 1982. We used to forward such letters to charitable organizations in the U.S. If any packages from America with aid had arrived at their home in Poland, it would have been long after Christmas.

In her letter to VOA, the Polish woman did not make any direct references to the political situation in her country, but she made it abundantly clear that the communist regime in power was responsible for many years of economic deprivation for her young family. The system that produced such economic misery and killed millions of people should not be promoted by VOA to the rest of the world at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and in violation of the VOA Charter.

Ted Lipien is a journalist, writer, and media freedom advocate. He was Voice of Americas Polish Service chief during Polands struggle for democracy and VOAs acting associate director. He also served briefly in 2020-2021 as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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Voice of America went from exposing the failures of communism to glorifying its dictators - Washington Examiner

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As Bernie Sanders was building his political career as a Vermont mayor, he visited the Soviet Union in 1988 for a 10-day "honeymoon" and returned to America extolling how impressive the communist state was. Just three years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president and the red Soviet flag was pulled from the Kremlin.

Decades following Sanders self-described "very strange honeymoon," his trip has seemingly continued shaping his domestic and foreign policies and moved the dial of the Democratic Party to the left.

"The fact that we were willing to be critical of the United States I think that made them maybe more appreciative of our criticisms we made of their own society," Sanders said in 88 when he returned home.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by CNN/New York Times at Otterbein University, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019, in Westerville, Ohio. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

"We were saying, Yeah, in our country, we also have a housing crisis. Our housing in general is better than yours, but people are paying 40 percent of their income for housing. The quality of your housing is not good, but we appreciate the fact that people are paying 5 percent. The quality of your health care is not good, but in the United States, believe me, we have enormous problems in terms of our health-care system."

DETAILS OF SANDERS SOVIET HONEYMOON EXPOSED, AS ENTOURAGE MEMBER RECALLS SHOCK AT BERNIES AMERICA-BASHING

He praised the USSR for its public transportation system and its "absolutely beautiful" train stations with chandeliers, culture programs, youth programs and took shots at U.S. foreign policies under then-President Ronald Reagan.

"Lets take the strengths of both systems," he added following the trip. "Lets learn from each other."

This year, negotiations over President Biden's signature legislation, called Build Back Better - which Sanders helped design - is looming over Congress, and features policies similar to those Sanders applauded when they were implemented in other nations, such as an expansion of government health care and taxpayer-funded child care programs.

Recent interviews with those who attended the USSR trip with Sanders say, however, that the group was warned by locals that the USSR was about to collapse.

"I think [Sanders] saw and we all saw the downside of the Soviet system," Howard Seaver, a Vermont businessman who was on the trip, told the Washington Post in 2019. "Yes, they may have had low-cost apartments, but things were very out of whack there were food shortages, no political freedom."

BEN SHAPIRO: BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT, HE'S A LIFELONG COMMUNIST. DEMS HAVE NO GATEKEEPERS

"I suspect that what Bernie saw in Russia probably affected his views that you see today, where he is not anti-free-enterprise or capitalism but he wants to have a safety net and give a fair shake to all, but certainly not to have a command economy we saw in the Soviet Union," Seaver said.

The warnings from locals proved true and the USSR collapsed in 1991, when Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day.

FILE - In this Jan. 14, 1991 file photo, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says in Moscow that a local military commander ordered the use of force in the breakaway republic of Lithuania, where an assault by Soviet troops on Jan. 13, 1991 claimed 14 lives. On Monday, Oct. 17, 2016, a Lithuanian court has called on Gorbachev to testify in a mass trial related to the 1991 crackdown on the countrys independence movement. (AP Photo/Boris Yurchenko, File) (The Associated Press)

IS BERNIE SANDERS 'DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM' REALLY JUST SOCIALISM?

Experts have disputed Sanders rosy depiction of the USSR, saying it's a far cry from what residents actually lived through on a daily basis.

"When I lived in the Soviet Union, everything was falling apart," Anna Borshchevskaya, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Washington Examiner in 2019. "People don't realize how many people Stalin killed by building the Moscow subway station. Sure, the trains worked, but that other factor is dismissed. I have no doubt Bernie was sincere in what he said, but there was a whole disregard for life and safety in every aspect of Soviet life, including infrastructure."

But the USSR trip was so ostensibly moving for Sanders,he planned another trip abroad - this time to communist Cuba the following year.

He returned from the trip also extolling the communist state as one that was "not a perfect society," but having "very high-quality health care" and no homelessness that he witnessed.

BERNIE SANDERS' LONG HISTORY OF PRAISING CUBA'S COMMUNISTS

"I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people," Sanders said of the trip. The country "not only has free health care but very high-quality health care The revolution there is far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values."

Just last year, Sanders again praised communist Cuba, telling "60 Minutes," "its unfair to simply say everything is bad" about the late Fidel Castro's regime. Adding that though he was "opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba," Castro implemented a "massive literacy program."

HAVANA, CUBA - MAY 1: Fidel Castro observes the May Day parade at the Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba May 1, 1998. (Photo by Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photography/Getty Images)

Sanders history with communism, socialism and Marxism has roots in his youth. In 1963 when he was a college student, Sanders was the guest of a Marxist youth movement founded by communist Yaakov Hazan. In the 70s he helped found the socialist Liberty Union Party in Vermont. By 1972 he said he didnt "mind people calling me a communist." And in 1985, he also made a trip to Nicaragua and called Marxist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega "an impressive guy."

The accolades of such regimes have earned Sanders stern criticism from those who suffered under communism and socialism, as well as from fellow politicians. But Sanders has continued pushing for the acceptance of mainstream socialism and has helped move the dial of the Democratic Party further left.

This year, Democratic in-fighting over Sanders' version of Build Back Better, which started as a $6 trillion social spending proposal, has since been whittled down to a $1.7 trillion social spending package.

BERNIE SANDERS SILENT ON CUBAN PRO-FREEDOM UPRISINGS AFTER PRAISING FIDEL CASTRO'S COMMUNIST POLICIES

Conservatives have panned the bill as the "Democrats' down payment on socialism" and shifting a massive amount of power from state and local governments to the federal government. Sen. Joe Manchin broke with Democrats last weekend, sounding the bill's death knell by saying he wouldnt vote for it.

"Radical lawmakers are looking to stuff far-left, unpopular wish-list items into this proposal, including taxpayer-funded universal pre-K, expansion of government health care, and more just as they did with special interest bailouts in the recent COVID stimulus package," David Ditch, research associate for the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Hertiage Foudation, recently said.

FILE - In this March 15, 2020, file photo, former Vice President Joe Biden, left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, greet one another before they participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate at CNN Studios in Washington. Sanders said Tuesday that it would be "irresponsible" for his loyalists not to support Joe Biden, warning that progressives who "sit on their hands" in the months ahead would simply enable President Donald Trumps reelection (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

But Sanders has only become more vocal in his advocacy for the legislation, and his comments harken back to his praise of communist nations, and his claims of their commitment to education, health care and the poor.

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"At this pivotal moment in U.S. history, its time for the Senate to vote on a bill that will substantially improve the lives of working families, the elderly, the sick and the poor, while taking on the unbridled greed of the wealthy and the powerful," Sanders wrote in a recent op-ed for Fox News.

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BBB advocate Bernie Sanders extolled the USSR in 1988, three years later the empire collapsed - Fox News