ABSTRACT
A stumbling-block for Europe’s intellectual and political life both in theory and in practice, Marx’s theory was distorted by the Absolute Power Complex in what was the greatest of events in our time: the emergence of the USSR.
Marx’s analysis departs from his critique of Positivism. Abstract ideas are for him a masking of reality. Ideas must be set against the harsh power relations in which they have their origin. This is the starting point for the “new philosopher”, whose job is not to study them as absolutes, but to extract them, as the system gradually develops, from the cracks that appear under the impact of the dynamics of economic life and its underlying social relations. Far from being a vulgar version of economic determinism, Marx’s conception is holistic, having at its centre conscience.
The success of the Bolshevik Revolution was due not to the implosion of capitalist society, but to the eminently backward rural context – a complete inversion of Marxist thought: what became the triggering cause of the revolution in Russia was not the contradictions inherent in capitalist development.
In the course of time, by dispersing power among his subordinates, Stalin ensured absolute power for himself. The party became a church-like party, a model for communist parties all over the world.
The possibility of a world revolution having disappeared, the doctrine of “socialism in one country alone” concluded in instrumentalizing the Comintern in favour of Russia’s interests. Cosmopolitanism became a crime.
Until its collapse, the USSR was a system steeped in hypocrisy and founded on mutual suspicion, in which the roles of controlled and controller were superimposed. This was known of course to the leaders of the brother parties, but hidden from the masses not only of the Warsaw Pact countries, but in the area dominated by the Absolute Power Complex, Latin America, Asia, and Africa included.
