Securing the revolution

State socialism provided the second major alternative to democratic capitalism. As we saw in Chapter 6, the Russian Revolution was caused by uneven economic development, repressive but vacillating state intervention in class relations, and – above all – defeat in total war. The Bolsheviks, armed with a revolutionary ideology, seized the state, killed the ruling family, sidelined religion, abolished capitalism, introduced one-party rule, and pushed through many other changes – truly a revolution. The Soviet system is generally called “Communism,” and although that term is inaccurate (for Marx, communism was a future society and Soviet leaders considered communism to be their eventual goal rather than their present), I will retain that conventional term.

The Soviet Union presented a viable alternative to democratic capitalism, a radically different way of bringing the masses onstage in industrial society. It claimed to provide a global future, and this diffused across the world, but when it shifted from the project of world revolution to socialism in one country, it erected barriers against globalization. It developed an industrial economy, if at enormous human cost, to the point whereby in World War II it could outproduce Germany in all spheres of armaments. In the postwar period, the country then became one of the world’s two Superpowers. Against this, the Soviets abandoned their initial democratic ideals. Weber had predicted this, arguing that if economic and political bureaucracies were conjoined under the same state power, personal freedoms would die, unlike countries in which capitalism and the state are separated. A person living under state socialism would have no more power than the ordinary fellahin in ancient Egypt, said Weber. He was right. Weber further argued that it was a more rational bureaucracy than that in ancient Egypt, so was less breakable (1978: 1402–3, 1453–4). This proved only half-right. The communists held onto power for more than half a century, seemingly invulnerable, but they finally collapsed in the 1980s. Throughout the century, the Soviet Union represented the main example of revolutionary change, the main alternative to capitalism and liberal and social democracy, admired or hated throughout the world.