What Caused the Revolution to Fail?

In recognition of the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 (it took place on November 7 of the Gregorian calendar; according to the Julian calendar used by Russia at the time it was October 25-26), a number of articles have been written. Writing at the Washington Post Anne Applebaum, who provides a good account of what actually happened, is alarmed that Bolshevism is being embraced today:

History repeats itself and so do ideas, but never in exactly the same way. Bolshevik thinking in 2017 does not sound exactly the way it sounded in 1917. There are, it is true, still a few Marxists around. In Spain and Greece they have formed powerful political parties, though in Spain they have yet to win power and in Greece they have been forced by the realities of international markets, to quietly drop their “revolutionary” agenda. The current leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, also comes out of the old pro-Soviet far left. He has voiced anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Israel, and even anti-British (and pro-IRA) sentiments for decades — predictable views that no longer sound shocking to a generation that cannot remember who sponsored them in the past. Within his party there is a core of radicals who speak of overthrowing capitalism and bringing back nationalization.

In the United States, the Marxist left has also consolidated on the fringes of the Democratic Party — and sometimes not even on the fringes — as well as on campuses, where it polices the speech of its members, fights to prevent students from hearing opposing viewpoints, and teaches a dark, negative version of American history, one calculated to create doubts about democracy and to cast shadows on all political debate. The followers of this new alt-left spurn basic patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East. As in Britain, they don’t remember the antecedents of their ideas and they don’t make a connection between their language and the words used by fanatics of a different era.

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By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right do not want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans but radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky, they offer a false and misleading vision of the past. They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts. They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use “Christianity” as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are “Christians” fighting against “Muslims” — or against “liberals” if there are no “Muslims” available.

To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his “illegitimate” opponents. Law and Justice, the illiberal nationalist ruling party in Poland, has sorted its compatriots into “true Poles” and “Poles of the worst sort.” Trump speaks of “real” Americans, as opposed to the “elite.” Stephen Miller, a Trump acolyte and speechwriter, recently used the word “cosmopolitan,” an old Stalinist moniker for Jews (the full term was “rootless cosmopolitan”), to describe a reporter asking him tough questions. “Real” Americans are worth talking to; “cosmopolitans” need to be eliminated from public life.

The question that I think should be considered is why the revolution failed and why it failed so quickly because fail it did. Within a year it had already abandoned the principles on which it was putatively based, as noted by Jairus Banaji at The Wire:

Given the fact that Bolshevism stemmed from a tradition of revolutionary socialism, the most startling fact about the revolution itself was how rapidly the goal of workers’ control of the economy was given up. “Workers’ control had been abandoned in the winter of 1917–18,” Carr states laconically in The Interregnum 1923–1924. “The factory committees launched the slogan of workers’ control of production quite independently of the Bolshevik party”, but it was the “willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a central reason for their growing appeal”, so runs a crucial argument in Steve Smith’s book Red Petrograd. Yet Vladimir Lenin saw the factory committees “as a means of helping the Bolshevik Party to seize power”. They were, for him, simply organs of insurrection, not, as the Turin factory councils would be for Antonio Gramsci in 1919, “embryos of the proletarian state”.

or, in other words, that transition was baked in from the very beginning. At the Wall Street Journal David Satter points to the lack of acceptance of fundamental rights distinct from the state as the basis of the problem:

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

One of those fundamental rights, possibly the most fundamental, is the right to property and, obviously, the right to property is incompatible with the absolutist goals of regimes like Lenin’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, or, more recently, Castro’s or Chavez’s.

The urge to power is a universal. In Aristotelian terms it is essential rather than accidental and, consequently, is not just an unfortunate incident. And, like pride or anger, it is not self-limiting. Failures are attributed to power being not quite absolute enough.