Why did modern socialism come first in a Russia where capitalism was
in its infancy and there were no large corporations to ease the transition to
state control? Centuries of peasant poverty and reams of intellectual revolt
had prepared the way, but the peasants had been freed from serfdom in
1861, and the intellectuals had been inclined toward an anarchism antipodal
to an all-absorbing state. Probably the Russian Revolution of 1917
succeeded because the Czarist government had been defeated and disgraced
by war and bad management; the Russian economy had collapsed in chaos,
the peasants returned from the front carrying arms, and Lenin and Trotsky
[Trotsky, Leon (1877-1940)] had been given safe conduct and bon voyage
by the German government. The Revolution took a Communistic form
because the new state was challenged by internal disorder and external
attack; the people reacted as any nation will react under siege–it put aside
all individual freedom until order and security could be restored. Here too
Communism was a war economy. Perhaps it survives through continued
fear of war; given a generation of peace it would presumably be eroded by
the nature of man.
Socialism in Russia is now restoring individualistic motives to give its
system greater productive stimulus, and to allow its people more physical
and intellectual liberty. Meanwhile capitalism undergoes a correlative
process of limiting individualistic acquisition by semi-socialistic legislation
and the redistribution of wealth through the “welfare state.” Marx was an
unfaithful disciple of Hegel [Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-
1831)]: he interpreted the Hegelian dialectic as implying that the struggle
between capitalism and socialism would end in the complete victory of
socialism; but if the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is
applied to the Industrial Revolution as thesis, and to capitalism versus
socialism as antithesis, the third condition would be a synthesis of
capitalism and socialism; and to this reconciliation the Western world
visibly moves. Year by year the role of Western governments in the
economy rises, the share of the private sector declines. Capitalism retains
