Applying some rules to a more accurate history
In the last century, the critical rationalists laid out influential rules for how scientists should update or replace theories. As an example of bad behavior, they used the Marxists' reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But their intellectual history of the period from 1848 to ~1925 was comically incomplete. Last time, I added back great swaths of history that they’d ignored.
But it’s still possible they came to a correct conclusion for invalid reasons. Given my more complete history, do I nevertheless agree Marxist theorists behaved badly?
The critical rationalists seem to assume Marxist theory didn’t change between 1848 and 1917. In fact, it did. Whereas the earlier Marx predicted the worldwide revolution would start in a highly industrialized state such as Germany, by 1877 he was predicting it would start in barely-industrialized Russia. Since that’s what happened, the revolution did not falsify contemporary Marxist theory.
Marx also predicted that a Russian revolution would trigger revolutions in other European states. That happened. The revolutions didn’t succeed, but neither had the revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune of 1871. As far as I know, Marxists never predicted any given revolution would inevitably succeed, only that one day some revolution would.
Once the industrialized states succeeded in flipping to socialism, Marx expected they would help out their disadvantaged comrades in Russia. Given that all the other revolutions failed, I think it’s plausible Marx would have predicted it would also fail in Russia. I haven’t seen any such claims by Marx, but others said it. For example, Rosa Luxemburg in 1918:
She believed the Bolsheviks' errors were a product of the fatal isolation of their revolution, and that its only salvation lay in a successful proletarian revolution in the West, especially in Germany.
That didn’t happen. It was touch-and-go, but the revolutionaries pulled it off and maintained power for 74 years. So we can say the 1917 Russian revolution falsified Marxism.
However, if you take that view, you have to consider that Stalin behaved as a good Popperian scientist. He revised Marxism with the new hypothesis of socialism in one country, predicted how it would play out, and put it to the test. The new theory survived the experiment.
Now, Stalin didn’t say Marxism had been falsified and he was replacing it with a modified theory. Marxist theorists have a weird cultural norm against saying Marx (or, later, Lenin) got it wrong. “Oh no, it’s just that all those previous idiots have been misreading him. What he really meant was… <my new hypothesis>.”
Since I’m not in that culture, I can echo a joke supposedly told by Abraham Lincoln:
L: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
A: Five.
L: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
If Einstein had said his general relativity was really correcting past physicists' misunderstanding of Newton, people would have thought that more than merely odd. Stalin’s revising Marxism while proclaiming it had been right all along should (and sometimes did) produce the same reaction.
Marxists predicted that a solitary Russian revolution would not succeed. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin claimed it had. To judge who’s right, more needs to be said about what success means.
At a bare minimum, a successful revolution requires that the form of government change. But that’s not enough, since – by that metric – the Paris Commune of 1871 succeeded. For two whole months. So it’s counted as a failure.
The French revolution of 1848 succeeded in the sense that it established the French Second Republic. But that Republic lasted only four years. Does that little hiccup on the way from Emperor Napolean Bonaparte to Emperor Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte count as a success? (My impression is the consensus is: no.)
But there must be some period of longevity that allows you to say a given revolution is a success. The 74 years from the Russian revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union certainly seems to count.
But just replacing the form of government doesn’t seem enough. It should matter whether the stated goals of the revolution were met. So what were Marxist goals?
According to Marx and Engels, a successful proletarian revolution would result in a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” That would be a transitional period between capitalism and true communism. It would have these characteristics:
“Dictatorship of the proletariat” sounds ominous, but they were using the word “dictator” in the Roman sense of a legally-sanctioned grant of temporary powers in an emergency.
But, in a “call a tail a leg” move, Lenin in 1906 redefined the dictatorship of the proletariate:
[The] scientific term ‘dictatorship’ means nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. Stalin was so bad that Lenin looks good in comparison, but Bertrand Russell was being charitable when he described Lenin as having a “distinct vein of impish cruelty.”
In Lenin’s system, government wouldn’t be run by the proletarians but rather for them, specifically by a vanguard Party that would guide society. Supposedly, this dictatorship would be composed of the most politically aware and disciplined workers. In practice, the dictatorship was centered on Lenin, whose class was somewhere around or above petty bourgeois. He trained in university as a lawyer, a classic education and occupation for the petty bourgeoisie. And the biography of most proletarians does not include text like “[Lenin’s mother], who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to […]” or “Wary of [Lenin’s] political views, his mother had previously bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture.” (My emphasis.) Democratic governance and universal suffrage were right out, though they did nail the separation of church and state.
I think it’s not ridiculous to say that the Russian revolution replaced one form of despotic personalist rule (the Tsar) with another (Lenin, and then Stalin) and thus failed in Marxist terms. It’s trite to say “Marxism hasn’t failed; it’s never really been tried,” but that doesn’t make it false. If you’re an inductivist, it – together with the failed revolutions of 1948, the Paris Commune, the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, and the various failed revolutions of 1917-1923 – should increase your suspicion that next time won’t be different, but critical rationalists explicitly deny the value of induction. So the claimed refutation is without force.
Since she was shot in the head by a German paramilitary person in 1918, we’ll never know what her hindsight judgment on the revolution would have been.