Some thoughts on “socialism,” history and the triumph of propaganda
The words “socialism” and “Marxism” have long been synonymous with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Oddly, because neither country was socialist or Marxist.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks (bolshevik means “majoritarian,” even though it was a minority party, a triumph of propaganda) crushed Marxist/socialist worker-led organizations after the 1917 Revolution (really a coup, another triumph of propaganda). Lenin was accused of right-deviation by Trotsky and others for abandoning Marxist worker-led socialism. Ultimately, Lenin seized power as a kind of holding action in the belief that the true Marxist revolution would begin in Germany, as Marx predicted. Socialism in a rural agrarian society like Russia was Marxist heresy. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took over and consolidated what was, in effect, a Tsarist dictatorship without the dynastic element. When Mao seized power in China in 1949, he followed the Stalinist model of top-down dictatorship by terrorism.
So how did the USSR and the PRC come to be called socialist/Marxist? It’s a testament to the power of propaganda. The Soviet leadership hijacked the Marxist brand to disguise what was really just bog ordinary totalitarianism; its propaganda insisted on calling itself socialist and Marxist, even though it wasn’t. And Western propaganda was happy to use those words to describe totalitarian dictatorships in order to discredit actual socialism and Marxism. Today’s GOP continues to wave the bloody shirt of “socialism”/“Marxism” decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and the morphing of China into a capitalist dictatorship in order to suppress unions, universities, liberal churches and other independent centers of thought that deviate from their agenda.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks (bolshevik means “majoritarian,” even though it was a minority party, a triumph of propaganda) crushed Marxist/socialist worker-led organizations after the 1917 Revolution (really a coup, another triumph of propaganda). Lenin was accused of right-deviation by Trotsky and others for abandoning Marxist worker-led socialism. Ultimately, Lenin seized power as a kind of holding action in the belief that the true Marxist revolution would begin in Germany, as Marx predicted. Socialism in a rural agrarian society like Russia was Marxist heresy. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took over and consolidated what was, in effect, a Tsarist dictatorship without the dynastic element. When Mao seized power in China in 1949, he followed the Stalinist model of top-down dictatorship by terrorism.
So how did the USSR and the PRC come to be called socialist/Marxist? It’s a testament to the power of propaganda. The Soviet leadership hijacked the Marxist brand to disguise what was really just bog ordinary totalitarianism; its propaganda insisted on calling itself socialist and Marxist, even though it wasn’t. And Western propaganda was happy to use those words to describe totalitarian dictatorships in order to discredit actual socialism and Marxism. Today’s GOP continues to wave the bloody shirt of “socialism”/“Marxism” decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and the morphing of China into a capitalist dictatorship in order to suppress unions, universities, liberal churches and other independent centers of thought that deviate from their agenda.