Salus revolutiae, ultima lex
Salus revolutiae, ultima lex

Summary/Abstract: The Russian Bolsheviks and their leader Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin altered the fundamental Marx’s supposition that the socialist revolution would be carried out by the industrial proletariat once it was numerous enough and as soon as it achieved class consciousness. The Bolshevik guideline was that a small, tight-knit centrally-organised political party could replace the proletariat in the realisation of a revolution. The Bolsheviks fetishized the Revolution. At their congress in London in 1903, they included a very unfortunate thesis in their resolution – “salus revolutiae, ultima lex” – allowing for the restriction and breach of the fundamental citizens’ rights, freedoms, and inviolability of human life in the name of the revolution, should the Party leaders so decide. This would eventually have severe consequences for socialism. On such ideological grounds, in 1917 the Bolsheviks took over the power. The Bolshevik regime could be labelled, in short, as universal revolutionary voluntarism carried out by a single political Bolshevik party. All other parties were forbidden. After the uprising of sailors and workers in Kronstadt had been stifled in March 1921, the Bolshevik regime only represented the bureaucratic elite of the Party, even though it attempted to present itself, by means of cunning and intense propaganda, as a government of workers in a state of workers. Many leftist revolutionary workers as well as leftist intellectuals organised in the Communist Parties fell for it, and kept believing in the workers’ nature of the Soviet system as well as adhering to the Soviet Union politics.

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