Abstract
What, to repeat, are the broad and key conclusions to be drawn from the four real-time politics comparisons? How do the claims, again, that Marx, Engels and Lenin made about the historical moments under examination, the French edition of the European Spring, the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and end to World War I, compare and contrast to those of Tocqueville, Mill, Weber and Wilson? What about the events with which I’ve supplemented the Marx-Mill and Lenin-Weber comparisons, respectively electoral reform in Britain and the consequences of the October 1917 Revolution for Germany? To what extent are the readings of the protagonists of the events in agreement and disagreement? Which of them had a more accurate reading and made better forecasts? How did their theoretical/political views influence their responses? How do the four comparisons reveal key differences between Marxist and different varieties of liberal real-time politics? Most important, to what extent did their actions advance the democratic quest that was posed in all four moments? Can, lastly, a case be made for a superior theoretical purchase of either perspective for doing real-time politics? These are the questions to interrogate the four comparisons.
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Notes
- 1.
MECW, 11, p. 79.
- 2.
See my Marx and Engels, chapter 4, for details.
- 3.
Tocqueville continues to get an undeserved free pass for his all so consequential counterrevolutionary actions. In what is otherwise a good overview of the 1848–1851 events, Rosenblatt, pp. 129–41, makes not even a hint about how he enabled the overthrow of the Second Republic.
- 4.
See Chap. 2 for details.
- 5.
My “Marx and Engels on the US Civil War: The “Materialist Conception of History’ in Action,” Historical Materialism, vol. 19, no. 4 (2011), provides details.
- 6.
Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 300.
- 7.
Wells and Baehr, “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 24–8, Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions; Mommsen, 1997. pp. 13–17; Mommsen, 1984, pp. 278–80; John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996, p. 239; Paul Honigsheim, The Unknown Max Weber (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2000), p. 13.
- 8.
See Tooze’s chapter 3, “The War Grave of Russian Democracy” for details. Also, Herman, pp. 303–11.
- 9.
John Reed’s articles “How Soviet Russian Conquered Imperial Germany” https://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/reed/1919/conquered/conq2.htm is an insider’s account of the Bolshevik efforts to either win or neutralize German soldiers and sailors. For an informative overview of the mood of German armed forces in the war see Steffen Bruendel’s “Between Acceptance and Refusal: Soldiers’ Attitudes Towards War (Germany)” https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/between_acceptance_and_refusal_-_soldiers_attitudes_towards_war_germany.
- 10.
See Mommsen (1984), chapter 8, for details on Weber’s complicated opinions on the monarchy and the final days of the regime.
- 11.
See Herman, pp. 337–45, and Tooze, chapter 11, for details.
- 12.
Wall Street Journal, Jan. 23, 2019.
- 13.
Often forgotten today is that parliamentary democracy as the paragon of liberal democracy is largely a post-World War II phenomenon. James Bryce’s 1923 classic Modern Democracies makes that clear in its final chapters—far from a celebration of the institution; uncertainty, rather, as if in anticipation of World War II, is the tone.
- 14.
Tooze, pp. 84–6.
- 15.
PWW, 53, p. 352.
- 16.
For a useful and recent introduction to both questions, see Margaret Macmillan, “The Treaty of Versailles and Its Impact on WWII” https://www.c-span.org/video/?455201-5/treaty-versailles-impact-world-war-ii.
- 17.
MECW, 46, p. 198. See my Marx and Engels, pp. 245–8, for details.
- 18.
MECW, 27, p. 433.
- 19.
LCW, 10, p. 280.
- 20.
LCW, 31, p. 21.
- 21.
LCW, 33, p. 431.
- 22.
For details, see V.I. Lenin, Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922–1923. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2010.
- 23.
Again, see my two-volume Lenin’s Electoral Strategy for details about his well-deserved democratic credentials.
- 24.
See the five volume Comintern project of Pathfinder Press and the two volumes of Haymarket Press.
- 25.
Trotsky’s, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971, collects his key writings on the topic.
- 26.
Leon Trotsky, “Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International,” The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol 1 (New York: Monad Press, 1972), pp. 174–237.
- 27.
The most egregious rendering of that portrait has to be Bertrand Wolfe’s utterly blatant sleight of hand in Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York; Stein and Day Publishers, 1984), a text—originally published in 1948—upon which generations of post-World War II graduate and undergraduate students were introduced to the Bolshevik leader. What he did to Lenin is unparalleled even in the annals of the Lenin-bashing enterprise. As I detail in my Lenin Electoral Strategy, vol. 1, pp. 190–3, he performed a cut and paste job on something Lenin wrote in 1904 that transformed it into its opposite; possibly the origins of the Cold War image of Lenin-the-ogre. Because Wolfe had once been a functionary in the Stalinized Comintern, it is hard to resist employing what Trotsky once wrote about its modus operandi—“the Stalinist school of falsification”—in explaining what he did to Lenin; in other words, Wolfe had been well trained to do his fabrication. Two subsequent and very influential text-book portraits of Lenin built off Wolfe’s legerdemain: Alfred G. Meyer’s Leninism (New York: Praeger, 1957), and Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U.P. 1968), specifically, “Leninism and Political Development,” pp. 334–44.
- 28.
Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), p. 112.
- 29.
Castro’s younger brother Raúl had been a member of the youth wing of the Stalinist party—for reasons that seemed more opportunist than anything—but was expelled because he participated in the Moncada attack.
- 30.
Read his multi-hour speech at the University of Havana, November 17, 2005, about half way into it: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0512/S00120.htm.
- 31.
For the most up-to-date details in a book, see William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
- 32.
Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC: The U of NC Press, 2002), p. 26.
- 33.
“The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” October, 2018, is a seventy-page report of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (www.whitehouse.gov/cea) that informs Trump’s diatribes.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
In chronological order: “A black socialist in Trump country,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 29, 2016; “The Graveyard of Progressive Social Movements: The Black Hole of the Democratic Party,” MR Online, May 9, 2017; “The Meritocratic Myopia of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” MR Online, Nov. 17, 2019; “Why do Republicans behave the way they do?” Minnpost, January 26, 2018; “Bourgeois Fear of Revolution Means Disowning the Civil War,” MR Online, April 3, 2018; “From a Constituent of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Anti-Semitism,” Tikkun, May 8, 2019.
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Nimtz, A.H. (2019). Conclusion. In: Marxism versus Liberalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24946-5_6
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