Political Ideologies in the Soviet Union: Reflections on Past Attempts to Understand The Relationship between Ideas and Politics

Abstract

For the last forty years, I have been a student of Engels and Marx, their ideas and theories, and how others have interpreted and sought to apply them. What originally attracted me to this study was, among other things, the fact that, in the United States in the period immediately following the Second World War, Marxism and its various transformations were not considered worthy of systematic exploration. My professors sought to convince me that Marx had made no significant or lasting contributions to any branch of theory and that, at best, one might study his writings as examples of the aberration of the human spirit. None the less I set out, very much without guidance and therefore in a rather haphazard fashion, to explore this body of theory, both in its original form and as transformed by Lenin. I discovered a system of thought expressed in language rather different from that used by my teachers, but very much worth studying. My writings in this field have always been a conscious attempt at translating this language, trying to communicate its meaning to the uninitiated, taking these ideas seriously, and making sense out of them. I have done this not only because Marx, Engels, Lenin and other contributors convey important insights and thus can teach us much about ourselves, but also because these ideas, in turn, have, become historic forces, impulses, guides, or constraints to action. The term ideology seems to me to carry the implication that ideas should be studied in their relatedness to action.