Marxism In The Early 20th Century

Vladimir Lenin believed that the bourgeoisie betrayed domestic socioeconomic interests, leading most of the working class in early twentieth century Russia to seek a governance that incorporated the peasantry and rid the Soviet Union of a selfish government. He and other Bolsheviks empowered an alliance between the working-class and semi-proletarian section of the peasantry to revolutionize against capitalism. This eventually led to boycotts against revolutionary-democratic movements, the deconstruction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, and the formation of the Russian Communist Party. He claimed Bolshevik success was due to “the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our party…[and] unreserved support from the entire mass

Americans fought the infiltration of communism (e.g. Marxist-Leninism and Stalinism) by making the word ‘communist’ synonymous with ‘criminal’. For fear of being labeled a communist and prosecuted by the U.S. court system, individuals were discouraged from sharing their radical ideas, which was a tactic Stalin used to enforce his ideas and the acceptance of socialism as the only true form of government. Stalin wrote about the downfall of capitalism in “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” stating: “These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crisis of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled…[to] destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation… because there is an overproduction of good. This means that the capitalist relations of production have ceased to correspond to the state productive forces of society… capitalism is pregnant with revolution, whose mission it is to replace the existing capitalist ownerships of the means of

This hostility toward capitalism affected the United States significantly. In America’s Cold War, the authors detail the nature of communist hostility toward capitalism - therefore the American system - and the global effects of their hostility: “... radical movements, such as Vladimir Lenin’s rising Bolshevik party in Russia, could seize power throughout the world. Either way, the system of democratic capitalism that [Woodrow] Wilson believed represented the most advanced form of political order faced a bleak future”. Although America, too, wanted to establish a new world order with democratic republic ideologies - ensuring an international check-and-balance system but displacing the existing European model - the Soviet Union wanted a new order at the expense of the existing European structure and the existing American structure under totalitarian rule. The United States became fearful that Lenin and Stalin’s ideologies would spark a revolution against capitalism among Americans. This not only increased tensions domestically but it increased tensions with communists countries like the Soviet Union. The state of constant paranoia of disassembly in both nations led to a forty-four year long geopolitical