The Russian Revolution: 100 Years After
On November 28, Mr. Obadiah Mailafia published article of the above title, which was among few articles in the Nigerian media that commemorated and reflected on the epic and momentous event of the early 20th century, the Russian Revolution of the October socialist victory of the Bolshevik party. As he rightly acknowledged, the revolution was daringly “a seismic upheaval that shook the world to its foundation.”
However, he wondered why “a backward country like Russia,” would have been the scene of the earth-shaking event, since according to him, “when Karl Marx was producing his weighty tomes urging workers of the world to unite and overthrow their capitalist oppressors, he hardly had Russia in mind.” At this point, he referred to Friedrich Engels as Marx’s “English collaborator.”
Fredrich Engels was never an Englishman. He was a German born in the Rhineland of Wuppertal, nearby the contemporary finance and fashion city of Dusseldorf on November 28, 1820. He lived in England where he ran the family cotton mill and was known best as Marx chief collaborator in elaborating the theory of scientific socialism. His insight and experience of the English industrial situation culminated in one of his major works, “The condition of workers in England.”
Mr. Obadiah Mailafia also wrote that “Stalin’s New Economic Policy forced Russia to the 20th century”. Again, Stalin was never remotely connected to the New Economic Policy (NEP), a framework of market economy introduced by Lenin in 1918. It was actually Stalin’s forced collectivisation that inspired the Stalin witch-hunt and purge of key Bolshevik figures like Leon Trotsky and especially Mikhail Bukharin, who was credited to have suggested that “peasants should get rich,” echoed many years later by the Chinese eminent reformer, Deng Xiaoping who urged the peasants that to “be rich is glorious.” And moreover, there is actually nothing in the Russian revolution that was the seed of its collapse. Hegel’s philosophical idealism to which Mr. Obadiah relied for his erroneous conclusion has been largely upturned by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feaurbach before Marx and Engels shredded it with dialectical and historical materialism.
The regime collapse of the Soviet Union could never have discredited the rigour of the scientific theory of socialism. Typical of most people with modest intellectual rigour to interrogate Marxism and the scientific theory of Socialism, Mr Obadiah claimed to have “toyed with Marxism as most young people of my time did.”
Marxism is however too serious to be merely “toyed” with, and the consequence for having to “toy” is obviously the deficiency of rigour and depth to understand. Such deficiency should never be extrapolated to the arrogance of disdain.
The rigour and discipline of intellectual depth is not necessarily acquired by sheer academic exposure to even the best universities in the world.
The credibility of Marxism and its eternal universal value is laying out the critical theoretical infrastructure which illuminates the road map that constantly search for questions – calling into questions where others only see ready-made answers and vulgar evidence. Writing in the forward of first volume of Das Kapital, Professor Enerst Mandell pointed out that, Marx’s principle aim was to lay bare the laws of motion which govern the origins, the rise, the development, the decline and the disappearance of a given social form of economic organisation and not seeking universal laws of organisation and in fact, the essential thesis of Das Kapital is that no such law exist.
Marxism is not a scheme of political project or economic organisation of any particular place and time but basically a scientific theory to unmask and interrogate social forms in any particular stage of historical development. The conclusion of each particular stage is not valid for all times and all circumstances. The profound theoretical universal insight of Marxism – Leninism bears fruit in economic and social organisation, when interrogated to the specific condition of historical context and existing situation. The Communist Party of China has been particularly adroit in this synthesis and has produced an awesome economic success and social progress that the world has never seen before. The Communist Party of China has consistently affirmed its abiding faith in the scientific and eternal value of Marxism Leninism as its practical guide. Building socialism with Chinese characteristics is the advanced development of Marxism-Leninism in the particular context of China’s existential reality. The party avows that without Marxism Leninism, it would never have found the path to advance on the road of its core national priority of modernisation and inclusive development.
At the just concluded 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, its general secretary, also the President of the country, Xi Jinping re-affirmed that the party “must uphold the four cardinal principles – keeping unswervingly to the path of Socialism, uphold the people’s democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist party of China and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.