
<div>...The early organizational history of Bolshevism has more than historical interest. The experience of the formative years stamped the character and future development of the party. The elitism which was so deeply ingrained in Lenin, the theory of the party as a dedicated revolutionary order, the tradition of highly centralized leadership, the tightening regime of party discipline, the absolutism of the party line, the intolerance of disagreement and compromise, and the manipulatory attitude toward mass organization—all these patterns of behavior were to continue to shape the code by which the party lived and the way in which its institutional structure was organized.</div>
<div>The Bolshevik victory in November 1917 may fairly be described as one of the most remarkable triumphs of revolutionary engineering in human history. On the eve of the March revolution the total membership of the Bolshevik party was generously estimated at 23,600. In the short space of eight months, this small group was able to accumulate sufficient support to seize power in a nation of over 150,000,000 people. Russia, to be sure, was ripe for revolutionary action. The war, with its vast losses of men, territory, and resources, its revelations of incompetence and even degeneracy in the very highest circles, and the mounting war-weariness, hunger, and deprivation, induced a mood of desperation. The Bolsheviks alone among revolutionary parties were able to turn the resulting disorganization to their advantage. One major source of the strength of the Bolshevik party was its highly centralized organization, its activist disciplined membership, and the determination of its leader, Lenin, to seize power at the first opportune moment. Another source of strength was its success in exploiting all of the accumulated dissatisfactions in Russian society. The provisional government that replaced the tsar was weak, vacillating, and slow to respond to popular grievances. The Bolsheviks were willing to promise what the masses wanted—land to the peasants, bread to the hungry, and peace to the war-weary army. Finally, the Bolsheviks concentrated their efforts on building power where it would be strategically effective— among the sailors of the Baltic fleet, in the Petro-grad garrison, and in the armed workers’ Red Guard in the factories. The enemies of the Bolsheviks were far more numerous, but they were poorly organized, divided, and ineffective. As Lenin subsequently observed, “The Bolsheviks did have an overwhelming preponderance of force at the decisive moment in the decisive points” (Lenin [1919] 1932, vol. 29, p. 635). Relying on these tactical advantages, they succeeded in taking power...</div>
<div>...Coincidentally with the civil war, the Bolsheviks proclaimed a state of siege, and all opposition parties were suppressed one by one. For a very brief period (from late December 1917 until March 1918), there were three Left Socialist Revolutionaries (who stood close to the Bolsheviks) in the Council of People’s Commissars, the cabinet. But they left the government in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and grain confiscations from the peasants, and the Soviet government reverted to its original exclusively communist composition, which it has since retained. Lenin at the time made no bones about the necessity for dictatorship and suppression of opposition groups. “There is no other way to Socialism,” he insisted, “but the dictatorship of the proletariat….</div>
<div>Violence, when it is committed by the toiling and exploited masses, is the kind of violence of which we approve” (Lenin 1918, vol. 35, p. 265).</div>
<h3>encyclopedia.com</h3>
<div><a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/communism.aspx">http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/communism.aspx</a></div>
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<div><br /><strong>International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 1968 | Copyright</strong></div>
<div><br /><strong>Communism</strong></div>
<div>I. Soviet CommunismMerle Fainsod</div>
<div>BIBLIOGRAPHY</div>
<div>II. National CommunismAlexander Dallin</div>
<div>BIBLIOGRAPHY</div>
<div>III. The International MovementBernard S. Morris</div>
<div>BIBLIOGRAPHY</div>
<div>IV. The International SystemGeorge Modelski</div>
<div>BIBLIOGRAPHY</div>
<div>The articles under this heading deal with the political aspects of contemporary communism. For a detailed guide to related topics, see the articles listed under Marxism.</div>
<div><strong>I SOVIET COMMUNISM</strong></div>
<div>The origins and nature of Soviet communism are, and promise to remain, a subject of debate. Some scholars emphasize indigenous formative influences, stress factors of continuity with the Russian past, and tend to regard the Soviet political system as a modern form of traditional Russian despotism. Others view Bolshevism primarily as a Western heresy, whose roots can be traced to eighteenth-century French utopianism, Messianism, and Jacobinism but which, in a more immediate sense, was an offshoot of the activist, revolutionary ingredients in classical Marxism. Those who stress discontinuities with the Russian past argue that Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was embarked on a path of constitutional development, which the Bolshevik seizure of power aborted, and that in any case, Soviet totalitarianism, with its pretensions to all-encompassing control of society and world revolutionary objectives, must be sharply distinguished from tsarist authoritarianism, which functioned as a national state and operated a much more limited and inefficient control system.</div>
<div>As is not uncommon in scholarly polemics, there are elements of truth in all these contrasting interpretations, and no measuring rod exists to give precise value to their respective contributions. Soviet communism clearly owes much to its French revolutionary and Marxist forebears, but the way in which these borrowed ideas were adapted and transformed represented a response to the urgencies and peculiarities of the Russian environment.</div>
<div><strong>Classical Marxism.</strong> Classical Marxism may itself be viewed as a response to the dislocations and suffering of the working class in the early stages of the industrial revolution in Great Britain and western Europe. In the Marxian scheme the spread of capitalism and the intensification of working class misery were the necessary prelude to a socialist revolution; Marx’s panorama of economic development clearly implied that the socialist revolution would arrive first in the most advanced industrial countries, where the proletariat or working class was expected to be most numerous, most highly organized, and ripe for the seizure of power.</div>
<div>Nineteenth-century Russia, with its overwhelmingly peasant population and low level of industrial development, hardly fit the specifications for a Marxist-type revolution. Indeed, through the 1880s the Russian revolutionary movement, which was dominated by the Narodniki, or Populists, looked to the peasant as the primary revolutionary force to overthrow the autocracy and dreamed of building socialism around the peasant commune, or mir. While Narodnik philosophers were familiar with the works of Marx and Engels and largely responsible for translating them into Russian, they regarded the evils of industrialization and proletarianization, which Marx and Engels described so graphically, as dangers to be avoided rather than stages to be traversed. Nor were Marx and Engels at first certain that Russia would have to recapitulate the economic development of the West. As late as 1882 they still thought that the mir might “serve as a starting-point for a communist course of development,” but only “if the Russian revolution sounds the signal for a workers’ revolution in the West, so that each becomes the complement of the other” (Engels [1890] 1963, pp. 264–265). By 1892, however, Engels had written off the mir as a Narodnik illusion; Russia seemed to him to be embarked on an irreversible capitalist course.</div>
<div><strong>Russian Marxism.</strong> Russian Marxism as an independent political movement originated in the split in 1879 of the Narodnik organization Zemlya i Volya (Land and Liberty). The seceders, who stood for propaganda and agitation as opposed to terrorism, established a rival organization, the Chernyi Peredel (Black Repartition), to propagate their doctrines. One of their leaders was Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov, soon to be known as the father of Russian Marxism, but then still clinging to the Narodnik belief in the peasant as the driving force of revolution. The failure of the peasantry to respond either to agitation or terror and the rapid industrial development that was beginning to take place in the last decades of the nineteenth century impelled Plekhanov to reexamine his views and to turn to the new industrial working class— the proletariat, so-called—as the revolutionary hope of the future. The search for a new faith led him to Marxism. In 1883 Plekhanov, Paul Axelrod, Leo Deutsch, and Vera Zasulich, all of whom had been members of the Chernyi Peredel, joined in establishing the first important Russian Marxist organization, known as Osvobozhdenie Truda (Emancipation of Labor). By the 1890s the works of Marx and Engels were being widely and eagerly read by the more radically inclined students and intellectuals and propagated in workingmen’s circles. One of the new converts was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), who was to change the face of world history.</div>
<div>The Russian Social Democratic Labor party, of which Lenin’s Bolshevik faction was an offshoot, held its first congress in 1898 and its second in 1903. At the 1903 congress, divisions developed within the party. The split between “hards” and “softs” centered on the character of party organization. Lenin wanted a select, closed party of dedicated revolutionaries operating in strict subordination to the center and serving as a vanguard of leadership for the masses of workers who would follow the party without necessarily belonging to it. Martov (lulii Osipovich Tsederbaum), leader of the “softs,” pressed for a broad party open to anyone who believed in its program and was willing to work under its direction. At the 1903 congress, the views of Martov on party organization registered a temporary triumph. But in the election of officers at the end of the congress, Lenin’s faction carried the majority and became known as Bolsheviks (in Russian, “majority men”). Lenin’s opponents were dubbed Mensheviks (”minority men”).</div>
<div>The differences between the two factions were not confined to organizational matters. A central issue that was to divide the party grew out of the problem of Russia’s industrial backwardness and the political consequences to be drawn from it. How should Marxism, which provided a recipe for socialist revolution in the most advanced industrial countries, be applied in the Russian setting? The Mensheviks, who prided themselves on being orthodox Marxists, saw the arrival of socialism in Russia as the climax of a long process of industrial development. Impressed by the weakness of the Russian proletariat, they concluded that a socialist Russia was a matter of the distant future and that their first charge as good Marxists was to help the bourgeoisie discharge its historical responsibility to overthrow the autocracy. Meanwhile, they could only wait for the further growth of capitalism and the proletariat to establish the conditions for a successful socialist revolution.</div>
<div>At the opposite extreme from the Menshevik conception was the theory of “permanent revolution,” developed by Parvus (Alexander Helphand) and adopted by Leon Trotsky during and after the 1905 revolution. For Parvus and Trotsky the industrial backwardness of Russia was a revolutionary asset rather than a liability. Because of the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie and its dependence on the state, they looked to the proletariat to spearhead both a bourgeois and a socialist revolution. Once the proletariat had won power, its responsibility was to hold onto power and keep the revolution going “in permanence.” The Russian revolution, Trotsky thought, would ignite a series of socialist revolutions in the West, which would in turn guarantee the success of the socialist revolution in Russia. Thus Trotsky’s prescription for Russia’s retarded economy was a new law of combined development. The two revolutions—bourgeois–democratic and proletarian–socialist—would be combined, or telescoped, into one. The working class would assert its hegemony from the outset and leap from industrial backwardness into socialism.</div>
<div><strong>Leninism.</strong> Lenin’s own views underwent an interesting transformation. He began by accepting the orthodox two-stage conception that Russia would have to pass through a bourgeois-democratic phase before it was ripe for a socialist revolution. But, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin turned his back on the bourgeois liberals and looked to the peasantry as allies of the working class. Lenin’s formula envisaged two tactical stages: first, “the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and second, an alliance of the proletariat and the village poor to initiate the socialist revolution. Like Trotsky, Lenin came to believe that the two stages of the revolution could be telescoped into one; at the height of the 1905 revolution he pronounced, “We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half way.” Despite many intervening conflicts, the bond with Trotsky was to be sealed by the events of 1917. The dialectic of backwardness was “resolved” by the Bolshevik seizure of power.</div>
<div>Out of that experience a new theory of revolution was to be developed with world-wide applications. The Leninist theory of revolution, as Stalin christened it, was a far cry from orthodox Marxism. Its prerequisites were no longer industrial development, a mass proletariat, or the completion of a bourgeois-democratic revolution. As Stalin summed it up, “The front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, … and it may turn out that the country which has started the revolution, … is less developed in a capitalist sense than other, more developed, countries, which have, however, remained within the framework of capitalism” (Stalin [1924] 1954, p. 37).</div>
<div>Thus Marx was “adapted” to the task of revolution making in the underdeveloped countries of the world. Industrial backwardness was transformed from obstacle to opportunity. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat shifted from a weapon of the majority into a tool of minorities. Consciousness triumphed over spontaneity, and the way was cleared for the organized and disciplined revolutionary elite capable of transmuting the grievances of a people into a new instrument of absolute power.</div>
<div><strong>Early organizational development</strong></div>
<div>”Give us an organisation of revolutionaries,” said Lenin, “and we will overturn Russia” (Lenin [1902] 1961, vol. 5, p. 458). Lenin forged the instrument, but the prototypes of the professional revolutionary as the strategic lever of political upheaval were planted deep in Russian history and were nurtured by the conditions of the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy. It was against this background that the organizational concepts of Lenin took shape. By 1902, with the publication of What Is to Be Done? they were fully developed.</div>
<div>Four ideas stand out in this seminal source of Communist organizational doctrine. First, there was the fear of spontaneity, the notion that the working class could not be trusted to discover its own true interests and that, if left alone, it would follow the path of trade-union bargaining rather than commit itself to a revolutionary struggle for socialism. Second, there was the unquestioned assumption that the working class had to be guided and directed by a politically conscious revolutionary vanguard possessed of a superior knowledge of the laws of history. Third, there was the idea that this vanguard should consist of a small, carefully selected party of professional revolutionaries operating under highly centralized direction and discipline. Finally, there was the concept of political monopoly, that no other organizations should be permitted to compete with the party in obtaining access to the masses and that all mass organizations, such as trade unions, must be brought under the ideological influence and, if possible, the direct control of the party.</div>
<div>Lenin sought to put these ideas into effect in his struggle with the Mensheviks for ascendancy in the Russian Social Democratic Labor party. While a façade of surface unity was at first preserved, the factional strife became increasingly bitter, and finally in 1912 Lenin and his followers broke away, organized a “pure” Bolshevik central committee, and laid claim to the party title. The name “Communist” was not adopted until 1918, after victory was won, when the designation of the party was changed to Russian Communist party (Bolshevik) to distinguish it from the socialist or social-democratic parties of western Europe, whom the Bolsheviks charged with betrayal of the revolutionary cause during World War I.</div>
<div>The early organizational history of Bolshevism has more than historical interest. The experience of the formative years stamped the character and future development of the party. The elitism which was so deeply ingrained in Lenin, the theory of the party as a dedicated revolutionary order, the tradition of highly centralized leadership, the tightening regime of party discipline, the absolutism of the party line, the intolerance of disagreement and compromise, and the manipulatory attitude toward mass organization—all these patterns of behavior were to continue to shape the code by which the party lived and the way in which its institutional structure was organized.</div>
<div>The Bolshevik victory in November 1917 may fairly be described as one of the most remarkable triumphs of revolutionary engineering in human history. On the eve of the March revolution the total membership of the Bolshevik party was generously estimated at 23,600. In the short space of eight months, this small group was able to accumulate sufficient support to seize power in a nation of over 150,000,000 people. Russia, to be sure, was ripe for revolutionary action. The war, with its vast losses of men, territory, and resources, its revelations of incompetence and even degeneracy in the very highest circles, and the mounting war-weariness, hunger, and deprivation, induced a mood of desperation. The Bolsheviks alone among revolutionary parties were able to turn the resulting disorganization to their advantage. One major source of the strength of the Bolshevik party was its highly centralized organization, its activist disciplined membership, and the determination of its leader, Lenin, to seize power at the first opportune moment. Another source of strength was its success in exploiting all of the accumulated dissatisfactions in Russian society. The provisional government that replaced the tsar was weak, vacillating, and slow to respond to popular grievances. The Bolsheviks were willing to promise what the masses wanted—land to the peasants, bread to the hungry, and peace to the war-weary army. Finally, the Bolsheviks concentrated their efforts on building power where it would be strategically effective— among the sailors of the Baltic fleet, in the Petro-grad garrison, and in the armed workers’ Red Guard in the factories. The enemies of the Bolsheviks were far more numerous, but they were poorly organized, divided, and ineffective. As Lenin subsequently observed, “The Bolsheviks did have an overwhelming preponderance of force at the decisive moment in the decisive points” (Lenin [1919] 1932, vol. 29, p. 635). Relying on these tactical advantages, they succeeded in taking power.</div>
<div>The next problem was whether they could hold onto power in the face of the successive onslaughts of the Germans, the White armies, and the Allied intervention. The first decision of the Bolsheviks was to sue for peace with the Germans. The terms were harsh, but Lenin argued that there was no alternative except to bow. In the Treaty of Brest— Litovsk (March 1918) the Bolsheviks temporarily signed away to the Germans a third of their country and more than half of their industry. But the breathing space the treaty was designed to win never materialized. Although German pressure relaxed with the signing of the armistice in November 1918, the Bolsheviks had still to cope with the White armies, the Allied interventionist forces, and a war with Poland. After three years of civil war, the Whites were defeated, the Allies (the United States, Japan, France, and Great Britain) withdrew their forces, and the Bolsheviks survived.</div>
<div>Coincidentally with the civil war, the Bolsheviks proclaimed a state of siege, and all opposition parties were suppressed one by one. For a very brief period (from late December 1917 until March 1918), there were three Left Socialist Revolutionaries (who stood close to the Bolsheviks) in the Council of People’s Commissars, the cabinet. But they left the government in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and grain confiscations from the peasants, and the Soviet government reverted to its original exclusively communist composition, which it has since retained. Lenin at the time made no bones about the necessity for dictatorship and suppression of opposition groups. “There is no other way to Socialism,” he insisted, “but the dictatorship of the proletariat….</div>
<div>Violence, when it is committed by the toiling and exploited masses, is the kind of violence of which we approve” (Lenin 1918, vol. 35, p. 265).</div>
<div>Since in Lenin’s view it was the Communist party that was the sole custodian of the interests of the masses, ...</div>
<div>...Unwilling as Khrushchev was to part with substantive authority, he did recognize that there were grievances to be remedied. His decision to mitigate Stalin’s terror and provide greater welfare benefits for the Soviet people represented an effort to establish his regime on a more rational and popular basis...</div>
<h3>Encyclopedia.com</h3>
<div><a href="http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/communism.aspx">http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/communism.aspx</a></div>
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<div><strong> </strong> </div>
<h3><strong>A History of the Young Communist League, USA</strong></h3>
<div>Author: Tony Pecinovsky</div>
<div>In 1970, as more and more young people were understanding the central role of the working class in social change, the Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL) was formed. The YWLL was based on two basic concepts. The first was the fight against oppression and a need to unify all youth, across racial and ethnic lines. The second was the strategy of organizing young workers around issues of wages, job security, discrimination in the work place and peace; and show the relationship these struggles had to the working class and socialism.<br /><br />Repression, war, militarism and the prospect of dying for US imperialist aggression in Vietnam was the only future capitalist society offered American youth. But the YWLL offered something else, a future free of poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation and war.<br /><br />Shortly after its founding the YWLL was invited, by the Ho Chi Minh Working Youth Union to visit Vietnam, see areas destroyed by US bombing and exchange experiences with Vietnamese youth. In 1970 half a million US troops were still in Vietnam. Between 200 and 400 US soldiers, and thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, were being killed every week. And the war was costing US taxpayers $30 billion a year, diverting money from social programs like education, healthcare and social security.<br /><br />The YWLL played a key role in the growing anti-war movement in the 1970\'s, always emphasizing labor\'s material interest in ending the war. In 1974, the peace majority in the US and the heroic people of Vietnam forced the US to withdraw from Vietnam.<br /><br />Under the Nixon Administration youth were branded as criminals and access to higher education was a luxury few could afford. In this period the YWLL spearheaded the struggle for youth jobs at union wages, affirmative action and academic freedom. It helped to make the connection between jobs and peace, social needs and military spending, racism and budget cuts.<br /><br />The YWLL organized among young workers, especially those in basic industry, in its ranks, and reflected the diverse, multi-ethnic, multiracial working class. A centerpiece of Marxist-Leninist ideology is internationalism and the YWLL always struggled against imperialism around the world.<br /><br />On September 4, 1970 Allende was elected President of Chile. During this period the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) held a regional youth conference in Chile. The YWLL sent a delegation and were invited to a reception with President Allende, just weeks before the US backed coup by fascist general Augusto Pinochet. After the bloody overthrow the YWLL played a leading role in campus organizing, sponsoring speakers and forming a broad-based community, religious, labor and student solidarity movement.<br /><br />During the labor and social upheavals of the 1970\'s the YWLL was a strong organizer of youth. But the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1979 marked a huge setback to youth, working people and peace worldwide. In 1983, as the Reagan Administration was cutting more and more money from social programs and diverting it into the military budget to fight the \"Evil Empire\", the YWLL set about re-organizing itself into a Marxist-Leninist youth organization, the Young Communist League (YCL).</div>
<div><strong>Young Communist League USA</strong></div>
<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/20/1/278/">http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/20/1/278/</a></div>
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<h3><strong>SOURCE: "IDEAS" WEBPAGE, YOUNG COMMUNIST LEAGUE USA (YCLUSA)</strong></h3>
<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/section-standard"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0066cc;">http://yclusa.org/section-standard</span></span></a></div>
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<div><a href="article/articleview/1998/1/6/"><img src="http://yclusa.org/ezimagecatalogue/catalogue/variations/437-150x150.jpg" border="0" width="150" height="87" /></a></div>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1998/1/6/">Attacks on protesters backfire as Occupy raises the heat on banks</a></div>
<div>by John Wojcik, 31.10.2011</div>
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<div>Outrage over a Marine who survived enemy fire only to be wounded by Oakland, Calif., police at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration has elicited more sympathy for the movement nationally as protesters turn up the heat on banks.</div>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1996/1/6/">This is Britain's zombie generation</a></div>
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<div>Ann Czernik asks why wealthy Harrogate has welcomed the new Jarrow march with as much enthusiasm as their 1936 forebears<br /><br />When the Jarrow marchers arrived in Harrogate 75 years ago it was reported that they were welcomed "like a relief column raising a siege."</div>
</div>
<img src="http://yclusa.org/images/path-arrow.gif" border="0" width="12" height="10" /><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1996/1/6/">More</a> | <a href="http://yclusa.org/article/archive/6/">Latest News</a><br /><img src="http://yclusa.org/images/1x1.gif" border="0" width="4" height="8" /><br /></td>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1995/1/6/">Over 800 youth converge in Minneapolis for AFL-CIO Next Up Summit</a></div>
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<div>MINNEAPOLIS - This year's AFL-CIO Next Up Summit, held here Sept. 29 - Oct. 2, had a very different flavor. Unlike the 2010 summit, this conference was lead and organized by young union members from across the country.</div>
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<img src="http://yclusa.org/images/path-arrow.gif" border="0" width="12" height="10" /><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1995/1/6/">More</a> | <a href="http://yclusa.org/article/archive/6/">Latest News</a><br /><img src="http://yclusa.org/images/1x1.gif" border="0" width="4" height="8" /><br /></td>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1994/1/6/"><img src="http://yclusa.org/ezimagecatalogue/catalogue/variations/435-150x150.jpg" border="0" width="150" height="84" /></a></div>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1994/1/6/">YCL calls for members to join in national actions! Find one near you here!</a></div>
<div>by YCL, 06.10.2011</div>
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<div>All over the country, youth are talking about the immediate need to redistribute wealth and political power from the hands of a few to the working class majority.</div>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1992/1/6/"><img src="http://yclusa.org/ezimagecatalogue/catalogue/variations/434-150x150.jpg" border="0" width="150" height="113" /></a></div>
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<div><a href="http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1992/1/6/">America's kids tell their stories from their Wall Street camp</a></div>
<div>by Roberta Wood, 04.10.2011</div>
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<div>NEW YORK CITY -- "I figured if I'm going to be homeless, I might as well be homeless for a good reason," said Matt Kitchens. The Alabama native is one of the hundreds of restless youth Occupying Wall Street, determined that their voices be heard.</div>
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<div>{jcomments on}</div>