Juraj Benko: On a Border of Paradigms: Orthodox Marxism and its Bolshevik Revision

This study deals with Marxist political ideology transformations at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It focuses on a crisis of the Orthodox Marxism and its revision.
The paper concentrates on the politically most successful intellectual derivative of Marxism which had emerged from the above mentioned revisions – the Bolshevik ideology. Its emergence evinces features of both continuity but also significant discontinuity within the process of an orthodox doctrine transformation. An essential turning point which determined key differentiation features of the Bolshevik ideology was represented by a change of the viewpoint on a human being, options of a proletarian identity formation as well as on political organisation´s tasks within this process. On one hand, the change reflected a shift in the intellectual climate at the end of the 19th century which can be characterized as an onset of the new "pessimistic" paradigm as far as a view on the man in social sciences, politics and art was concerned. On the other hand, it also reflected older, pre-Marxist approaches in the Russian political thought of the 19th century. An anthropological turn may include also an ideological code which could determine specifications of Bolshevism in comparison with other radical socialistic movements in the West which later became the base for a universalised Communist doctrine in the 1920s. This doctrine was developing in a sharp contrast to a social democratic one which kept sticking to old, orthodox ideological basis as far as this issue was concerned at that time.

othodox marxism, bolshevism, political ideology, revisionism, paradigm shift