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Lenin and the Total Critique of Society A Study in Ideological Activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gerhart Niemeyer
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Extract

Modern Totalitarianism has often been grouped with various forms of authoritarianism in a genus characterized by excessive discipline. Is it not true, though, that the typical totalitarian motivation of our times can be described as revolutionary rather than authoritarian? Is it not a spirit that sees in revolution a vocation, an end in itself, a way of life? A faith in the creativeness of total destruction can be found in Bakunin, Goebbels, and Lenin. Their will to revolution stems not from an identification with the grievances of a suffering class, but from an ideological rejection of everything that exists.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1964 , pp. 473 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1964

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References

* This article was written under a grant from the Hoover Institute for War, Revolution, and Peace.

1 “Ansprache der Zentralbehorde an den Bund” Marx-Engels Werke, VII (Berlin, 1960), 254Google Scholar.

2 “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie”, Ibid., I (1958), 379.

3 Ibid., 390.

4 The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899).

5 Quotations from Lenin's writings in these pages use the English text of the Selected Works, 12 vols. (New York, 1935–1938)Google Scholar except where no official English translation of a given passage is available. In these cases, quotations are from the Sochineniia (4th ed.; Moscow, 1952–1957)Google Scholar.

6 The text of the Credo is found in Lenin's Sochineniia, IV, 153–156; Lenin's “Protest of Russian Social Democrats” is published in the same volume. “What Is To Be Done” can be read in English in Lenin's Selected Works, II.

7 For representative examples, cf. Sochineniia, IV, 191, 343.

8 Sochineniia, X, 137 f.

9 Sochineniia, VIII, 353.

10 “When the democratic bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie has moved a step higher, when not only the revolution by the full victory of the revolution has become a fact, when we shall ‘replace’ … the slogan of democratic dictatorship with the slogan of the socialistic dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the complete socialist transformation”. “The Two Tactics” in Sochineniia, IX, 109.

11 Die Diktatur des Proletariats (3rd edition; Vienna, 1918)Google Scholar.

12 Selected Works, VII.

13 Kautsky, , op. cit., p. 4Google Scholar.

14 For one of Lenin's clear statements of this point, see Selected Works, VII, 144.

15 Ibid., 75.

16 Ibid., VI, 277.

17 Ibid., 74.

18 Published in Sochineniia, XXVII and XXXI, and in Selected Works, VII and X.

19 Sockineniia, XXXI, 345.

20 Selected Works, X, 84.

21 Selected Works, X, 137.

22 Ibid., X, 61.

23 Ibid., X, 84.

24 Ibid., X, 103.

25 Ibid., X, 92.

26 Ibid., X, 94.

27 Sochineniia, XXVIII, 410.

28 Sochineniia, XXVII, 123.

29 Sochineniia, XXVII, 82 f., 90.

30 Sochineniia, XXVII, 398.

31 Ibid., 313.

32 Ibid., 306.

33 Ibid., 307.

34 Selected Works, IX, 475, 477.

35 Sochineniia, X, 26 ff.

38 Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Cf. also Communist Manifesto (1848).