Socialism in Russia

4 Key excerpts on "Socialism in Russia"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Society and History

  Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel

  • G. L. Ulman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This specific description of the revolutionary transformation of the Russian state and society from feudalism through a brief bourgeois-capitalist interlude to Socialism parallels the general pattern of societal development posited by the Marxists as a uni-versal process, observable in Western Europe and applicable to all societies in the rest of the world. The general assertion has been advanced in the formulations of historical materialism since the 1930's that mankind as a whole has passed through four formations, primitive-communal, slaveholding, feudal, and capitalist and is, since 1917, in the process of transition to communism, the first phase of which is called socialism. These same formulations specifically describe the Russian revolutionary experience to be a part of that process. 312 However, both as a general theory of societal development and as a specific description of Russian social transformation since the nineteenth century, this scheme has been unambiguously propounded as a universal law only since the 1930's. Previously there had been considerable doubt among Marxists, includ-ing Marx himself, about the unilinear character of societal development, and there had been considerable certainty, among Marx and some of his Western disciples, but especially among the Russian Marxists, that Russian social conditions and revolutionary prospects did not parallel those of Western European societies. This has created the problem of reconciling the formal statements of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet thought regarding historical development and Russia's place in it with the much fuller statements of Marx and the early Russian Marxists on that question. Whether or not early or later Marxist and Soviet descriptions of the historical process reflect reality, we must know what these descriptions are or were.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Managing Firms and Families

  Work and Values in a Russian City

  • Daria Tereshina(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • LIT Verlag

    (Publisher)

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of economic structures co-existed in Russia: foreign-owned oligopolies in big industries, freely competing firms producing consumer goods, landowners’ estates, small-scale artisan units and individual peasant micro-economies. The market was strongly influenced by the state, but most economic actors still produced many of the goods they consumed themselves (Davies 1998). 24 DARIA TERESHINA There is a debate among economic historians regarding the extent to which Russia could still be considered a ‘backward’ economy on the eve of the Revolution. While Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) famously argued that late tsarist Russia was on a path to becoming a modern capitalist economy and parliamentary democracy, other scholars have been more reluctant to see Russia’s delayed industrialization as economic success, stressing instead its uneven character, oligopolistic tendencies and low technological base, as well as the Empire’s growing political and social instability (McKay 1970; Crisp 1976; Shanin 1985; Haimson 1988). Discontent was widespread among the new classes that emerged with the growth of industry and the towns: factory workers were dissatisfied with their economic and social conditions, while the urban middle classes were demanding political rights. The discontent spread to large sections of the peasantry, many of whom were peasant-workers who combined seasonal work in the towns with farming. This massive discontent was greatly exacerbated during the First World War and facilitated the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Revolution of October 1917. State Socialism (1917-1991): Social Identities, Work and Labour in a ‘Classless Society’ The 1917 Revolution and the fall of the old regime opened up an era of socialism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia

  • Robert V. Daniels(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

    The Militarization of Socialism in Russia W as the Soviet Union “socialist,” as the revolution shaped it? And if so, was socialism exclusively defined by its Soviet form? The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim had a broader conception: “We denote as socialism every doctrine which de-mands the connection of all economic functions, or of certain among them, . . . to the directing and conscious centers of society.” 1 It is thus more fruitful to ask what type and degree of socialism developed in the course of the Soviet experience and what philosophical background and historical circumstances might be invoked to explain its form. If indeed the Soviet Union represented a form of socialism, it was a ver-sion governed by Russia’s particular historical traditions, its revolutionary experience, and the international trend toward managerial society. It is hard to explain the actual nature of Soviet socialism by the ideology of Marxism with which it was officially associated. On the contrary, the real character of Soviet socialism was not rule by the working class but a new form of military society, both in the structure of the regime and in its spirit and purposes. To review the distinctive features of Soviet totalitarianism—its centralized com-mand structure, its ranks and hierarchies, the manner in which it mobilized its resources, the discipline in thought and action enforced by the police and censorship apparatus, and the solidarity demanded of the nation in the face of its external enemies—is to recite the standard features of a military organi-zation. Soviet Russia became a garrison state, where everyone, in effect, was in the army. The late Cornelius Castoriadis termed it a “stratocracy,” that is, a system ruled by military interests. 2 It came close to what the Marquis 

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  No longer available |Learn more

  Russia and Its Crisis (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

  • Paul Miliukov(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Barnes & Noble

    (Publisher)

  Russian socialism met with no opposition from the individualistic spirit, and found no organized democracy. Every page of the social history of Russia explains why it is so. We have seen that the bourgeoisie did not exist in Russia, and that that country never developed such an intense social life as that which in mediæval Europe succeeded in balancing the central power of absolute monarchy, and which in modern Europe is sufficient to hold in check the absolute democracy of the socialism of today. Whatever in these conditions was unfavorable to individualism and liberalism favored, and still favors, collectivism in Russia. This also is the reason why it was not so easy for socialism itself to become a class doctrine in Russia. Socialism as well as liberalism for a long time remained “intellectual”; and if liberalism was so because it was opposed to the interests of its own class, socialism was so because — and as long as — it represented the class which was as yet unable to speak in its own name and to articulate its own demands. The next consequence of this similarity of conditions was that Russian liberalism and Russian socialism were not at all mutually exclusive. Russian liberalism was always tinged with democratism, and Russian democratism has been strongly impregnated with socialistic teachings and tendencies ever since socialism made its appearance. To be sure, the modern — and predominant — socialistic doctrine in Russia today is a strictly class doctrine — that of the German socialistic democratism of Marx; but we shall see that the other large division of Russian socialism still clings to the former Russian idea: the negation of every class distinction, rather than the self-assertion of only one class, the “proletariat.”

  The main point in the history of Russian socialism is this change from the latter point of view to the former — a transition which was only gradually taking place. We designated the modern view as that of the “scientific” socialism of Marx. We may designate the earlier view as that of “utopian socialism” — or the anarchism of Bakoonin. Bakoonin and Marx — the beginning and the end of Russian socialism! The fundamental conception of the Marxist view is that the class-consciousness of the “proletarians” is gradually and necessarily rising with the development of capitalism, and that the proletariat must take possession of the political power, in order to consummate the social revolution which had already been prepared by the whole process of economical development. The view of Bakoonin was that the masses are and always have been socialistic, and that the Russian — or rather the Slav — masses are so in particular, because they live under the régime of communal property. They need not to be taught socialism; they need only to be awakened: the whole remaining task of changing the social order will be accomplished by the masses themselves, from beneath by way of the free federation of communes.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book