Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 12
How the Alienating Features of the
Socialist/Progressive Movement Contribute to Its Failure
(page 3)

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The Influence of Bourgeois Psychology in the Bolshevik Party

The features of the herd mentality that dominates the life of the contemporary left and the socialist groups can be traced to the mass socialist parties at the early part of the century and to the Bolshevik party itself. While such mentality is deeply seated in “peaceful” times when the hope for a revolution and social change is waned, it also exists in turbulent social times — with the difference that in such times the positive energy of change and revolution can help overcome the old crap that is seated in our head. But history shows without a doubt, that a revolutionary upheaval in itself does not change the alienating psychological features of the old society. A change in the human nature needs more than a hope for a political and economical change; it needs more than the beginning of such a change by revolutionary means. A change in the human essence can occur only if the political/economic change also fosters a profound upheaval in the way humans relate to each other and themselves, that is, in a humanistic approach to life that overturns the old alienating capitalistic values in our heads and hearts. Such a change cannot take place overnight, it normally occurs few generations after a revolution.

The alienating mentality played a role even during the Bolshevik revolution. It played a considerably greater role when the revolution started to fade, after the rise of Stalin and the monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy to power in the Soviet Union. I do not minimize the validity and importance of the classic explanation for the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy as outlined by Leon Trotsky in the book The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky explains how years of war against the Western powers, the white army, and the Mensheviks caused the destruction of industry, infrastructure, and agriculture — thus enabling a bureaucracy to rise to power. He also explains how the rise of the bureaucracy stemmed from the exhaustion of the workers’ movement in the Soviet Union and the defeats of the revolutionary movement in Europe. The defeats of the European revolutions and the German revolution in particular caused the isolation of the Soviet Union, they encouraged the rise of a chauvinistic bureaucracy who proclaimed that socialism was centered around its neck.

Under these conditions of exhaustion and defeats of the European revolutions the conformist psychology became a dominant feature for most revolutionists. That was expressed by the tendency to abandon independent critical thinking, and to adhere to the herd by the blind support to the Communist Party in power. This remained the case even though the Stalinist bureaucracy was establishing a brutal dictatorship to protect its material privileges; and even when Stalin was carrying widespread executions of all the Bolshevik cadres to make sure that the process of bureaucratization would not be disrupted by the slightest memory of the past.

How do we explain that the majority of the leaders and members of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and throughout the world — including very theoretically developed and experienced Communist cadres — ignored the degeneration of the revolution? Why did they defend all the disastrous political and programmatic twists initiated by Stalin and his inner circle? These twists and changes stood in stark contradiction to the earlier program and democratic structure of the Bolshevik Party.

It is outside the scope of this book to explain the different programs and internal functioning of the Communist International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky versus their program and functioning under the dictatorship of Stalin. A lot was written about it, however. I believe that the best explanation is done by Trotsky. His best books that explain the rise of Stalin to power are The Revolution Betrayed and The Third International After Lenin. But in my opinion these books do not do a complete job, since they do not examine in depth the human factor. Trotsky may not have time because he was overoccupied with the day to day tasks of the turbulent upheavals during the first decades of the 20th century. The marxist movement after his death, however, ignored completely as irrelevant the social/psychological factors that drove thousands Communist Party leaders from the Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union and internationally into the arms of Stalin and the bureaucracy that he represented. To understand the degeneration of the Communist parties and the socialist movement in general, these social/psychological factors cannot be ignored — they must be explained.

It is very typical that when a “leader” is psychologically immature, his/her dependent personality plays a decisive rule in his/her adaptation of irrational political positions and ideology which contradict his/her principles of yesterday. As long as the crippled immature personality persists, the adaptation of political positions and ideologies always subordinate to the insecurities of the weak personality. And a weak personality always subordinate to the “stronger” personality, that is, to the personality that represents the social limitation of the dominating society and its pressure. Stalin represented a “stronger” personality to capitulate to; he also represented the worst limitation and pressure of the dominating world capitalist society; he was the best expression of the bureaucratic leaders’ provincial “socialism”; these bureaucrats were mainly interested in their material comfort and security at the expense of the world socialist revolution[1]. The thousands of Communist Party (CP) leaders possessed many of the weaknesses of the alienated persons in capitalist society. Like most people they could not stand on their own feet. They needed a crutch since they were too weak to withstand the pressure to conform to the “revolutionary” communist herd. They could not think independently and face the isolation for being a minority and consequently face squarely the ostracism from the mainstream “revolutionary” movement. Hence their subordination to Stalin.

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[1] Stalin adopted the theory of socialism in one country, with which the Soviet union became the only center of socialism. Throughout the world, the Communist Parties had to put all their energy in defending and preserving the Soviet Union at the expense of expanding the socialist revolution. This proved to be disastrous, since the Communist Parties were willing to make deals with the capitalists in their countries; that is, they were willing to betray the revolution in their own countries, in France and Spain for example, hoping that the world capitalist politicians will leave the Soviet Union alone. In reality Stalin and his cronies in the Soviet Union did not care neither about world socialism or socialism in the Soviet Union; they mainly cared about their material privileges from the expropriation and usurpation of the 1917’s revolution. The politics of the Communist Parties’ leaders, however, did not give a breathing space to the Soviet Union. The politics of “socialism” in one country at the expense of the world socialism led to the world wide-defeats of the revolutionary movement in the 1920’s and 1930’s; in the long run these politics brought the destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.