From The Decisive Battles of the Western World
by Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (1954-6)

When the nineteenth century opened, all the leading nations had changed from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and the progress made was so startling that it seemed to industrialized man that the new dispensation to which steam power had given birth made archaic all that had preceded it. Material progress was equated with happiness, and economic determinism accepted as the new religion. �The machine and the universe,� writes Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization,¹ �were identified, lined together as they were by the formulae of the mathematical and physical sciences ; and the service of the machine was the principal manifestation of faith and religion : the main motive of human action, and the source of most human goods.� Man, who in the Age of Faith had been looked upon as only a little lower than the angels, was reduced to the status of an economic animal — �the beast of prey� of Oswald Spengler. For capitalist and socialist alike the worship of Mammon replaced the worship of God, and as it led to class-war, the socialists propounded the falsehood that classes could be extinguished, and thereby introduced a contradiction in the mammonic creed, because economic determinism leads to diversity and not uniformity of social status.

    ¹ Published by George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., London, 1934.

 

The contradiction was seized upon by Marx, who set out to do for the proletariat — the industrial workers — what Calvin had done for the elect, for his apocalypse gave them, as it has been well said, �the certainty of triumph predestined by the majestic laws of the universe itself.� The social world was not to be readjusted or reformed, but instead to be turned upside down, for according to his dialectics the new gospel was to be associated, not with amity but with enmity, not with charity but with violence. The whole Christian order was to be reversed ; the principle of hate one another was to be substituted for that of love one another, and not until war on behalf of the proletariat had been made total — that is, world-wide — would the gates of his material paradise open to the elect. Because, as Mumford has pointed out in The Conditions of Man, Marx believed �that material conditions and technical inventions were self-created entities, [?] existing in and by themselves: prime movers, original sources of social power . . . he accepted the machine process as an absolute, imagined that the proletariat would simply take up capitalist production at the point that capitalism left off,� and step straight into the social Eldorado. To Marx the proletariat was the new messiah and the organizer of an earthly kingdom in which the spiritual had no place.

Lenin accepted Marx�s interpretation of the �dictatorship of the proletariat� and so became as much the victim of a theological obsession with doctrine as Luther and Calvin had been in their days. The process was simplicity itself. Through revolution the proletariat would become the governing class, and in the guise of a transitional state it would overthrow the bourgeoisie, wrest from it all means of production, exchange and distribution, and by centralizing them in its own hands would develop them for its own benefit until, after victory had been won and the entire people had been proletarianized, the State would die away into a self-sufficing and self-operating classless society.

This simplification was accepted by Lenin. Like Marx, he had never soiled his hands with a day�s manual labour and knew nothing of the human side of the worker�s life. Also like Marx, his views on national and industrial administration were na�ve. He declared that �we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the rich [i.e., the educated] can administer the State,� since �every rank and file worker who is able to read and write can do organizational work.� That �under Socialism all will administer in turn and will quickly become accustomed to nobody administering.� Blindly he believed that �electrification plus socialism� was the highroad to the Communist New Atlantis, and was oblivious of the self-evident contradiction in Marx�s gospel. Because everyone would own everything, nobody would own anything, and as this carried with it the elimination of individual incentive, who would keep the proletariat at work ? This demanded the creation of a new class of taskmasters, which meant that the assumption that the proletariat could become the governing class was nonsense.

When, on November 7, 1917 (the October Revolution), Lenin, thanks to Trotsky�s abilities as an organizer, began his struggle for power, he was almost unknown. But as everybody in Russia knew of Esser, the leader of the radical semi-socialist party which had great influence with the peasants, he entered into coalition with him, and between November 8 and December 31 issued 193 decrees. On November 9 he decreed that the property of the landlords was to be distributed among the peasants, and though this had nothing to do with Marxism, for Marx looked upon the peasants as �the barbarians of civilization,� Lenin thereby gained the support of 80 per cent. Of the Russian people. Little did Esser and the peasants suspect at the time that Lenin�s motive was to use the peasants to liquidate the bourgeoisie, and then in turn to liquidate them.

Later, on November 27, by another decree all industry was transferred to the workers, who became the governing class, and the Soviet of People�s Commissars became their form of government, the task of which was to organize production and direct Communist affairs. The immediate result was that because the workers were incapable of organizing and directing anything, industry came to a standstill, factories were turned into debating clubs, and as the workers had nothing to exchange for food, the peasants ceased to cultivate the land, except for themselves. Thus the Marxian experiment was proved to be an illusion ; it created nothing but confusion, and this because of its omission to take into account human nature. Yet it did prove something of inestimable future value — that the most certain way to wreck a potential enemy�s economy is to plant Marxiam communism in his realm.

London : Eyre and Spottiswoode 1956, Vol. III, pp. 331 - 333.

Fuller, J. F. C. (John Frederick Charles), 1878-1966. Title(s) A military history of the Western World. Publisher New York, Funk & Wagnalls, 1954-56. Paging 3 v. illus., maps. 24 cm. Notes London ed. (Eyre & Spottiswoode) has title: The decisive battles of the Western World and their influence upon history. Bibliographical footnotes.

Fuller, J. F. C. (John Frederick Charles), 1878-1966. Title(s) The decisive battles of the Western World, and their influence upon history. Publisher London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954-56. Paging 3 v. Illus., maps. 23 cm. Notes Bibliographical footnotes.