Bootstrapping Marx With the Peasant Masses
17th July 2021
One of the great ironies of 20th century history: Marxist revolutionaries could only ever seize power in the wrong countries. Marx imagined a revolution of industrial proletariat; he expected that this proletariat would at first achieve its aims in highly industrialized nations like England and Germany. His theory of socialism presupposed that a successful transition from autocratic “feudalism” to a liberal bourgeois socio-economic system had already occurred. But of course, all of the world’s Marxist regimes were established in very different circumstances. The communist parties that successfully seized authority built their power in rebellion against non-democratic regimes, in countries where industrialization still lay far on the horizon. They justified their power in the name of an ideology whose own precepts predicted they should not exist.