The Historical Role of Marxism and the Soviet System

Abstract

NO analyst of Soviet Communism has failed to express surprise that a Marxist movement should have triumphed in a prevailingly agrarian society. Equally trite has been the observation that the Russian Marxists have not been able to solve the problem of the peasant and his full integration into their socialist system. Marx was a city boy, we are told, and that is why Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, has to spend his time discussing the failure of Soviet agriculture to keep up with the industrial sector of the economy. We are left with a truly confusing picture. Marxism, on its own premises designed as a movement for fully industrialized societies, comes to power or is a serious contender for power in societies that are mainly agrarian, while mature industrial countries adhere perversely to something (but something that is definitely non-Marxist) variously described as “the social welfare state,” “liberal capitalism,” and the like. Perhaps Marx was wrong and—for reasons unforeseen by him—his system is peculiarly suitable to what we now term “backward” countries, with predominantly agrarian economies and a low standard of living. Then why cannot Marxism solve its central problem of the agrarian economy? Or is it perhaps merely one form of Marxism—Soviet Communism—which is thus incapacitated? No wonder that scholars, first secretaries, and the rest of us tend to become confused.