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The Deradicalization of Marxist Movements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert C. Tucker
Robert C. Tucker*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Marxism-Leninism, as the Soviet Marxist ideology is called, has never been wholly static; it has evolved over the years by a process of accretion, elimination and redefinition of dogma. But in the first post-Stalin decade, there were changes of unusual scope and significance in this sphere, accompanying and in some ways mirroring the general processes of systemic change which Stalin's death precipitated in Soviet society. This paper seeks to interpret the post-Stalin Soviet ideological changes, especially as they bear upon the politics of world revolution. In doing so, it attacks the broader theoretical problem of what goes on in radical political movements and their ideologies as these movements settle down and accommodate themselves to the existing world. For some such tendency appears to be involved in the Soviet case.

The year 1956 was the watershed of post-Stalin ideological change in the U.S.S.R. In the Central Committee's report to the Twentieth Party Congress—the first congress held after Stalin's death—Nikita Khrushchev announced a series of doctrinal innovations affecting particularly the line of Communist Marxism on international relations and the further development of the world Communist revolution. One was the revision of the Leninist thesis on the inevitability of periodic wars under imperialism. On the ground that the world-wide forces for peace were now unprecedentedly strong, it was proclaimed that wars, while still possible, were no longer fatally inevitable even though “imperialism” continued to exist in large areas. Not only could the antagonistic socio-economic systems peacefully coexist; they could and should actively cooperate in the maintenance of peaceful relations. At the same time, coexistence was a competitive process, economics being the principal arena of competition.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 1967 , pp. 343 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967

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Footnotes

*

This is a revision of a paper delivered at the 1966 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. I am grateful to John Armstrong, Henry Bienen, Stephen Cohen, Alistaire McAuley and Daniel Tarschys for helpful comments on the original version.

References

1 Pravda, February 15, 1956.

2 Gruliow, Leo (ed.), Current Soviet Policies III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 214Google Scholar.

3 For details, see “Dialectics of Coexistence,” in the writer's The Soviet Political Mind (New York: Praeger, 1963).

4 Speech to the Third Congress of the Rumanian Workers' Party, June 22, 1960 (New York: Crosscurrents Press, 1960), pp. 27, 28.

5 “The Leaders of the C.P.S.U. Are the Greatest Splitters of Our Times: Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (VII),” People's Daily, February 4, 1964.

6 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, n.d.), p. 21.

7 The Class Struggles in France (1848–1850) (New York: International Publishers, n.d.), p. 126.

8 Political Parties (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), pp. 370, 371, 372–373.

9 Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Boob, 1961), pp. 197, 199.

10 Quoted by Joll, James, The Second International 1889–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicoleon, 1955), p. 90Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., pp. 93–94.

12 Leser, Norbert, “Austro-Marxism: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1966), at p. 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910), pp. 196, 197.

14 Kautsky, Karl, The Social Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1913), pp. 79–82, 88Google Scholar. All this bears out the comment of Meyer, Alfred that “Kautsky still spoke about the proletarian revolution but demanded that it be a tame and civilized revolution.” Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 135Google Scholar. A detailed and useful discussion of trends in Social Democratic Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century is contained in chapters 5 and 6 of this book.

15 Marx, , The Class Struggle in France, pp. 27, 28Google Scholar. Michels suggests that this influential endorsement by Engels of parliamentary methods for attaining socialism did not give expression to his true opinions. In this connection he quotes from a letter that Engels wrote to Kautsky saying, with reference to the preface: “My text had to suffer from the timid legalism of our friends in Berlin, who dreaded a second edition of the anti-socialist laws—a dread to which I was forced to pay attention at the existing political juncture.” Michels concludes on this basis that “Engels would seem to have been the victim of an opportunist sacrifice of principles to the needs of organization, a sacrifice made for love of the party and in opposition to his known theoretical convictions”: Political Parties, p. 370 n.

16 Joll, op. cit., p. 100. On the radicals' rebellion against the tendency of deradicalization, see Meyer, op. cit., pp. 136–139. He writes of Rosa Luxumburg, in particular, that “her entire political life was one momentous attempt to reunite the theory and practice of Marxian socialism in the radical spirit of its founders” (p. 137).

17 Lenin, V. I., Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), Vol. II, p. 359Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 163.

19 I refer to the analysis by Kennan, George in his article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs (07, 1947)Google Scholar.

20 In the Hungarian intervention, the Soviet motivation was probably mainly defensive, since the preservation of the Soviet position in Eastern Europe was threatened by Hungarian departure from the Warsaw Pact. In the Cuban missiles episode, the Soviet aim may have been to redress an adverse balance of nuclear power inexpensively.

21 Mendel, Arthur (ed.), Essential Works of Marxism (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), p. 468Google Scholar. It may be noted that Khrushchev's phrase, “We will bury you!,” was widely misunderstood abroad. In colloquial Russian, the words carry the meaning: “We will be present at your funeral,” i.e., we will outlive you. The flamboyant statement was not, then, a threat to destroy but rather a boast that Soviet Communism would outlive the non-Communist system in the long-range competition of systems that Khrushchev called “peaceful coexistence.”

22 Mendel, op. cit., p. 402.

23 See, for example, Khrushchev's, public speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, Pravda, February 15, 1956Google Scholar.

24 Inozemtsev, I., “Leninizm—nauchnaia osnova sovetskoi vneshnei politiki,” Kommunist (No. 7, 1966), p. 23Google Scholar.

25 Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. (New York: International Publishers, 1952), pp. 27–28, 30.

26 See, for example, Shulman, Marshall D., Stalin's Foreign Policy Reappraised (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. For a fuller presentation of the evidence against the view that Stalin was preparing a realignment of foreign policy, see this writer's The Soviet Political Mind, ch. 2.

27 The Origin and Development of the Differences Between the Leadership of the C.P.S.U. and Ourselves (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), pp. 11, 12, 59, 61. Soviet sources have asserted that the possibility of a parliamentary path of transition was mentioned in the 1952 new program of the British Communist Party on the suggestion of Stalin. It should be observed, however, that he did not at that time make a corresponding general revision in Soviet Marxist doctrine.

28 Fu, Li, Ssu-Wen, Li and Fu-ju, Wang, “On Kautskyism,” Hung-ch'i, Nos. 8/9, April 25, 1962Google Scholar. Quoted in Dallin, Alexander (ed.), Diversity in International Communism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 277–278CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 “Chinese Communist Party Cannot Send Delegation to C.P.S.U. Twenty-Third Congress,” Peking Review, March 25, 1966, no. 13, p. 5.

30 Yinger, J. Milton, Sociology Looks at Religion (New York: Macmillan 1963), p. 70Google Scholar. See also Kautsky, John H., “Myth, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and Symbolic Reassurance in the East-West Conflict,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 9 (03, 1965), at pp. 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of particular relevance to my argument is Kautsky's statement: “One may expect that the more the Soviet government changes its policies from those that were once associated with the goal of World Communism, the less can it afford to stop insisting that it continues to stand for this goal.”