Helmut Wagner : "Theses on Bolshevism" (1934)
Article mis en ligne le 2 juillet 2020

par Eric Vilain

Theoretically, Bolshevism has by no means developed a thought structure of its own which could be considered a closed system. It has, rather, taken over the Marxist method of looking at classes and adapted it to the Russian revolutionary situation, i.e., basically changed its content while maintaining its concepts.

The one ideological achievement of Bolshevism is the connecting of its own political theory as a whole with philosophical materialism. As a radical protagonist of the bourgeois revolution, it falls upon the radical philosophical ideology of the bourgeois revolution and makes it the dogma of its own view of human society. This fixation upon philosophical materialism is accompanied by a continual backsliding into philosophical idealism which considers political practice as in the last instance the emanation of the action of leaders. (Treason of reformism ; idolatry of Lenin and Stalin.)

The organization of Bolshevism arose out of the Social-democratic circles of intellectual revolutionists and developed through factional struggles, splits and defeats into an organization of leaders with the dominant positions in the hands of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Its further growth., favored by the continuously illegal situation, established it as a political organization of military character, based on professional revolutionists. Only through such a straight-laced instrument of leadership could the Bolshevik tactic be carried through and the historical task of Russia’s revolutionary intelligentsia be fulfilled.