A Century of "Bolshevism"

Via Looking in the Mirror

Communism, for a long time, was simply “Bolshevism” in the western world. The Russian term means “majority” and it originated during the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in Brussels in 1903. Party Chairman Vladimir I. Lenin caused a procedural vote during the congress regarding who should be allowed to join the party. Lenin favored limiting membership in the party to professional revolutionaries, while his opponents favored allowing in those who generally supported the party but who were not constant agitators. Lenin won the procedural vote and so cast his faction thereafter as “Bolsheviks,” while the side which lost was called “Mensheviks” or “minority.”

All were communists. Marx himself used the term “communist” and “socialist” interchangeably. The nuanced differences that we see today between communists and socialists have nothing to do with different ultimate goals. All want to destroy free enterprise and establish control of a political party which will rule in the interest of the proletariat. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was, simply, the Communist Party of Russia, and that continued after the Bolshevik-Menshevik split.

In fact, a perusal of the names given to communist parties around the world shows that communists simply use a particular name as a way of appearing to be what they wish. The communist party in East Germany was called the “Socialist Unity Party”; in Poland it was called the “Polish United Workers Party”; in Hungary, the “Hungarian Working People’s Party”; and in North Korea, the “Workers Party of Korea.”

At the time of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, many Marxists in Europe were “Fabian Socialists” who urged their fellow ideologues to adopt the tactics of Quintus Fabius when he confronted Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Rather than try to defeat the brilliant Carthaginian general in the field, Fabius followed his army around Italy, slowing depleting Hannibal’s forces and harassing his troops until Hannibal was whittled down to nothing. The brand of Marxism we call “socialist” or “progressive” today is very much alive, advocating gradual measures which ratchet our nation toward an imagined Marxist utopia.

What was true in 1912 and in 2012 was true throughout the last century. Consider, for example, the partisan breakdown of the Chamber of Deputies in France in 1930 (other years show very similar results). These are the parties and their strength in that chamber:

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