This week was the centennial of the death of Vladimir Lenin. He was the first leader of the Soviet Union and the initiator of global Communism, although it was Karl Marx that came up with the theory.
WHAT ACTUALLY ENDED THE FIRST WORLD WAR?
The series of events that brought the First World War to a close are somewhat poorly understood.
It was a military plan that was so brilliant that it worked too well. The German High Command, at war on two fronts with imperial Russia on one side and the Allies on the other, was well aware of the discontent brewing in Russia against the ruling Romanov Dynasty. They came up with a brilliant plan that would incapacitate the ability of Russia to continue the war.
In exile in Switzerland was a Russian Bolshevik agitator named Vladimir Lenin. The Romanov Tsar Nicholas II finally abdicated in February 1917, and a Provisional Government took power, which continued the war against Germany. A Swiss Communist arranged for the Germans to transport Lenin by train back to Russia. The German High Command hoped that he would incite a revolution which, whether successful or not, would make it impossible for Russia to continue it's war effort.
The plan worked absolutely brilliantly. Lenin arrived in Russia in April. Within a few months the October Revolution would bring the Bolsheviks to power, leading Russia to discontinue the war against Germany to contend with it's own civil war between the Reds and the Whites.
The trouble was that the plan worked too well.
The German population, suffering many of the same hardships as the Russians, found the revolution appealing as well. The revolution that the German High Command had so successfully brought about, and that had made it impossible for Russia to continue it's war effort, spread to Germany and made it impossible for it to continue it's war effort.
That is what brought the First World War to an end. It could be that, during the Cold War, the west didn't want to give the Communists credit for anything, but that is what happened.
DOES ANYONE MISS THE SOVIET UNION?
Let's have a look at why we might miss the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union stood for Communism and was thus an ideological competitor of the Capitalist west. The wealth gap in America, the difference between rich and poor, was at it's narrowest in 1973, at the height of the Cold War with Communism. The Communists, based on the theory of Karl Marx, gained a lot of support in the world by accusing Capitalists of allowing the rich to oppress the poor.
After the Soviet Union was gone as an ideological adversary it might have seemed like a victory but the wealth gap in America, and most of the west, began to widen. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. It culminated in the economic crash of 2008, the worst crash since 1929. Developers built vast numbers of homes in the southwest and Florida, and then sold them to millions of people who couldn't afford their mortgages. Today the wealth gap in the west generally remains far wider than it was during the Cold War.
The wealth gap is moving in the direction of what it was before Communism, led by the Soviet Union, became a major world system. Modern Communism began with the theories of Karl Marx being implemented in the October Revolution of 1917. But only a few intellectuals in the west even knew what Communism was.
The event that changed everything was the market crash of 1929. With the industrial capacity left over from the First World War factories were turning out a wide range of consumer goods, from cars to radios. This brought about that fabulous decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". But due to the wealth gap workers were unable to afford the goods that they were producing. Goods were just piling up in warehouses, leading to cutbacks in production and meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash. This is what brought Communism to the world's attention, as an alternative to Capitalism.
The Soviet Union is gone but we still have nuclear missiles pointed at us. Cold War spying and espionage has mostly moved into the realm of cyberspace. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 it was considered as the triumph of democracy. Now we see that it was actually the peak of democracy and that global democracy has been in a gradual decline ever since.
I will leave it up to readers to decide if you miss the Soviet Union.
THE REASON FOR POLITICS
Let's not forget the whole reason for politics. The real reason for politics is complexity. The primary component of politics is economics, and our economics are as complex as we are.
This makes it very difficult for any of us to see the entire economic picture. It is far easier to just see what we refer to as the "right" or the "left". The right can be said to represent the seller and the left the buyer.
Any economic transaction requires both a buyer and a seller. Both are therefore of equal importance. To say that one is more important than the other is like saying that a right shoe is more important than the left shoe.
But shoes are simple and it is easy to see that the left and right are of equal importance. Economics is not so simple and it is much easier to see either the right or left as more important than to see the reality of the entire picture.
THE MARX CLOUD
I have a new way of looking at the theories of Karl Marx. I conclude that the fulfillment of Marxist theory can be seen in, of all things, computer technology. Since the end of the Cold War, Marx has been viewed as one of the great losers of history. He was nowhere near completely right in his predictions, yet was on to something and cannot be ignored. When I was in London, I thought of visiting his grave in Highgate Cemetery but never got around to it.
The workers of the world did not unite and take over the means of production, as Marx had envisioned. But he was somewhat vindicated by the crash of Capitalism in 1929, as well as the somewhat lesser crashes of 1987 and 2008. He might have been pleased with the implementation of minimum wage and workplace safety laws, labor unions, unemployment benefits and social security, and especially mandatory public education. All of which, with the exception of labor unions, was virtually unheard of in the Nineteenth Century when Marx wrote his theories.
Samuel Gompers could be seen as America's reflection of Marx. Religion, the "opiate of the masses" certainly has not faded away as expected by Marx. But it is true that the western countries, at least, are more secular than they were in the days of Marx.
We look at the theories of Marx in socio-economic terms. But what if there was another side to the theory, that of technology, even if Marx himself did not see this? Some of the fulfillment of Marxist theory certainly was in the socio-economic sphere, as the above mentioned reforms. But the other side, the technical side and it's global social effects, had to wait for the advent of computers and the internet.
Computer and phone technology has empowered the masses like nothing else, even though it is produced by companies owned by wealthy capitalists. Wikipedia, for one, seems to be straight from the pages of Marxist theory. It is the collective encyclopedia of the masses, operated by donations and open to anyone who wishes to contribute. All shareware and free applications on the internet, open to all and not driven by profit motive, also fall into this category.
The nation-state has not faded away, at least not in the way that Marx supposedly envisioned. In the more than century and a half since the days of Marx, nationalism has been stronger than ever before. My theory is that people are designed to believe in something and if they drift away from religion, substitutes like nationalism will take it's place.
But yet national borders also mean less today than ever before. Trade and travel goes around the world. It is possible to wake up in any country one morning, and go to bed in any other country that night. You can log onto a web site, or make a call, or send an email virtually anywhere on earth, with the national borders in between being absolutely meaningless.
But the latest manifestation of Marxist theory is this phenomenon of collective global internet, known as "the cloud". The basic meaning of the cloud is that the data that you store, and increasingly the applications that you use, are not stored on your computer but are "out there somewhere" in the cloud. This blog is an ideal example of the cloud. It is not stored on my computer. I presume that the content of this blog is kept at Google's HQ in Mountain View, California, but could be on any server farm anywhere.
Marx sensed what would come. The Nineteenth Century in Europe was a time of revolution, and he presumed that the inevitable changes that he saw would be brought about in the same way. We could say that half of the fulfillment of his theory was by way of the social reforms listed above. But the communication technology of the time was limited to telegraphs relaying Morse Code. Marx could not possibly have imagined the computer revolution which would one day manifest the other half of this fulfillment.
He also did not see that while the technical side of his theory would be fulfilled, and it would greatly empower the masses that Marx saw as exploited and ill-treated, it would be brought about by very wealthy capitalists. The difference, with which Marx would be at least partially pleased, is these capitalists would not be from an entrenched upper class, but would be college kids who got an idea, quit school to work on it, and found themselves as the billionaires which would, ironically, bring about the remaining fulfillment of Marxist theory.
My observation is that the best economic model is not one that is right or left, but the one which best weaves right and left together.
For more about Lenin see the compound posting "Investigations", December 2018, section 19) THE VIENNA CAFE SCENE.
