The split between the two trends of Bolshevism issued from questions of a very practical nature. [Alexander] Bogdanov and his group condemned participation in parliamentary, "bourgeois" politics. [Vladimir] Lenin, on the other hand, set the struggle for political power as the main task of the party. He was not occupied with creating and implanting an idea of the future of socialism; he thought of this more as a development to be expected from the period following the revolution. Instead he was preparing the organizational and political-intellectual grounds for a revolution that would be capable of overthrowing tsarism.

We of this generation owe it to the countless dead, to the peoples now living, to our children and children's children not to let the present situation go by without attempting in good faith to establish among those nations that will tolerate neither Kaiserism nor Bolshevism such a form of international court and police power as will have for its purpose the ringing out of an age of war and the ringing in of an age of peace.

Let me ask you then, first, to consider what Bolshevism really is. Well, politically it is the usurpation of power over the whole by a small section of the community. […] The fundamental idea or principle of Bolshevism is that the proletariat, that is to say the lowest stratum of society, the most ignorant, the least educated, should be the basis of the State, should in fact absolutely control the State. Instead of the principle announced in the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created free and equal, Bolshevism proceeds upon the principle that only the proletariat has any rights or should enjoy any freedom; all other classes of the community are anathema.

You can never tell to what length of devilry men will go when, setting out to see justice done, they give rein to the spirit of vindictiveness and are bent only on revenge and reprisals. The results may be terrible when the Simeons and Levis of society take law and justice into their own hands. Often it has worked out into grossest inhumanity and vilest bolshevism.

The task of educating the workers and all toilers in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the fundamental tasks of every Communist Party. But whoever thinks that this permits him, or even compels him, to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad toiling masses is far from genuine Bolshevism, and has understood nothing of the teaching of [Vladimir] Lenin and [Joseph] Stalin on the national question.

Important for our purposes is the recognition that the proletariat could be seduced from its historic mission, at least for significant periods of time, by controlled propaganda and capitalist blandishments. The conviction, conjoined with Lenin's elitism, produced a fateful compound: Bolshevism.

[…] Stalin was never able to monopolise Marxism, and the same deficiencies in theory which facilitate the claim of Stalinism to be a Marxism, allowed alternatives – even other Bolshevisms – to become subversive doctrines in relation to the reality of Stalinist power.

You can never tell to what length of devilry men will go when, setting out to see justice done, they give rein to the spirit of vindictiveness and are bent only on revenge and reprisals. The results may be terrible when the Simeons and Levis of society take law and justice into their own hands. Often it has worked ou into grossest inhumanity and vilest bolshevism.

Bolshevism

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