Thursday, October 29, 2015

Bolshevists versus Mensheviks

Did you know what Ted Cruz was talking about when he referred to the Democrats as being divided between the Bolshevists and Mensheviks? I didn't. So, two clicks of the mouse brings us the answers:
The Mensheviks (sometimes called Menshevists Russian: меньшевик[1][2]) were a faction of the Russian socialist movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, leading to the party splitting into two factions, one being the Mensheviks and the other being the Bolsheviks. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues of party organization. Martov's supporters, who were in the minority in a crucial vote on the question of party membership, came to be called "Mensheviks", derived from the Russian word меньшинство (men'shinstvo, "minority"), whereas Lenin's adherents were known as "Bolsheviks", from большинство (bol'shinstvo, "majority").[3][4][5][6][7]

The Mensheviks subscribed to an Orthodox Marxist view of social and economic development, believing that socialism could not be achieved in Russia due to its backward economic conditions, and that Russia would first have to experience a bourgeois revolution and go through a capitalist stage of development before socialism was technically possible and before the working class could develop the necessary consciousness for a socialist revolution.[8] Thus, the Mensheviks were opposed to the Bolshevik idea of a Vanguard party and pursuit of socialist revolution in Russia.
Read more here.

And thank you, Ted Cruz, for enabling me to learn something new! Wouldn't that be a nice change in a president?

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