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Politically, the guiding role belonged to the Mensheviks who had gone through the school of Marxism and derived from it certain procedures and habits, which aided them in finding their bearings in the political situation to the extent of scientifically falsifying the meaning of the current class struggle and securing the hegemony of the liberal bourgeoisie in the highest degree possible under the given circumstances.
Paradoxically, communism was a faithful re-enactment of pre-capitalist history. Communism should be well distinguished from Marxism. Still, it is ironic that even Marx's "scientific materialism" has an equivalent in the twilight times of feudalism.
So from the very midst of the people certain individuals appeared capable of adopting progressive ideas; Marxism awaited them, the theory which is the basis of European democratic socialism. This doctrine was nothing new in Russia. But formerly, the proletariat of the cities had been very little developed and the Marxian doctrines had been of theoretical interest only.
For what operates in history is not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in individual minds. Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful.
A striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like this: 'This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy'; 'this civic sinner, this judicial highwayman'; 'possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an honor which thieves' honor puts to shame'; 'who compounds criminality with shyster-sharks, and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and impecunious to rotting cells, and so forth and so forth, style sophomoric and devoid of the dignity and tone one would employ in a dissertation on 'Surplus Value, or 'The Fallacies of Marxism, but just the stuff the dear public likes.
So was it also with the lofty thoughts of the philosopher Soloviev, the macâbre tales of Dostoïevsky, the realistic narratives of Gogol, or the popular epics of Gorky and Ouspensky. The doctrines of Marx took some strange shapes in the Russian milieu. Eminently materialistic, they were there reclothed in an abstract and dogmatic idealism in fact, Marxism in Russia was transformed into a religion.
The Soviet Union and its East European socialist neighbors have survived the wars of 1914 and 1936; have survived the capitalist conspiracy to strangle infant Marxism in its cradle. In a remarkably brief period the Soviet Union has moved from a position of cultural backwardness to become the number two nation in productivity and perhaps even number one in fire power.
It is in the matter of industry, however, that his experiment is most interesting as showing the practical value of Marxism as a policy and the ability of the Bolsheviki to deal with delicate social problems.
But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under the direct influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned those old methods of revolutionary romanticism.
Wilson has discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the society of nations may rise again. It was open, then, to the three principal delegates to insure the peace of the world by moral means or by force.
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