Emil Lederer’s journal article interprets Bolshevism as both a consequence of wartime disintegration and a possible passage toward socialism. Its central distinction is between the destructive methods of a movement formed by war and the historical possibilities opened by proletarian political power. Beginning with Trotsky’s conception of Russia’s revolutionary self-sacrifice, Lederer moves through the collapse of military authority, the transformation of socialist appeals, and Bolshevism’s attack on the foundations of the modern power-state. He concludes by asking whether these developments can produce a new social order, reserving their economic implications for later discussion.
The starting point is Russia’s predicament in summer 1917. Entente support depended on continuing the war, while Germany offered no prospect of a just peace. Yet the army was dissolving, and peasants wanted peace and land rather than further service to political abstractions. Lederer treats this withdrawal as a crisis of social obligation: exhausted people no longer recognized reasons to sustain the state or its collective purposes.
Eine jede Idee ist einer solchen psychischen Lage gegenüber hilflos. Sie kann nicht mit den ihr gemäßen Mitteln reagieren.
English translation: Every idea is helpless in the face of such a psychological condition. It cannot respond with the means appropriate to it.
Socialism therefore had to address dispositions that the war itself had produced. Lederer distinguishes the moral protest of early socialism from the resentments of the postwar masses. Early proletarian opposition to industrial capitalism appealed to human dignity and retained connections with an organic rural life. Wartime deprivation, by contrast, encouraged hatred, envy, and demands for immediate redistribution. The difference is not simply between enlightened theory and ignorant followers: the same socialist idea changes its practical meaning when the psychological and economic conditions of its reception change.
Economic regression reinforces this transformation. Disrupted transport and shortages of raw materials and fuel drive production toward primitive forms and increase dependence on agriculture. Cities become consumers whose productive contribution has diminished. As subsistence grows precarious, visible inequalities in available goods make mechanical equality through division appear more urgent than the reorganization of production. Bolshevik methods—taking, sharing, allocating scarce supplies, and rewarding heavy labour according to bodily need—respond to this situation. Nevertheless, Lederer sees in them an initial movement toward the social organization of production. Their connection with socialism is therefore substantive as well as historical, although they remain far from its developed form.
The article’s pivotal claim concerns war:
Der Bolschewismus entwurzelt den Krieg.
English translation: Bolshevism uproots war.
Lederer acknowledges the paradox: Bolshevism declares war on the bourgeoisie and creates substantial armies in Russia and Hungary. His argument concerns the principle sustaining modern state warfare, not the immediate disappearance of armed conflict. Bolshevik agitation turns soldiers’ suffering against military hierarchy, imperialism, and unequal possession. Its armies carry ideas capable of dissolving the obedience of opposing troops. War’s coercive organization has itself generated these resistances by consuming human beings, crushing moral independence, and imposing conspicuous distinctions on people supposedly equal before death.
Bolshevism organizes the revolt of the humiliated soldier who discovers both his weapon and his membership in the majority. In this sense, the industrial power-state undermines itself through war. Lederer’s explanation makes revolution an outcome of military mobilization rather than an external conspiracy imposed upon an otherwise stable society. The danger posed by Bolshevik armies lies partly in their capacity to activate contradictions already present within their enemies.
The final movement asks whether Bolshevism will merely liquidate wartime disorder before capitalist restoration. Earlier proletarian revolutions suggest defeat, repression, and renewed capitalist ascendancy. Lederer expressly cautions that even exact social analysis cannot predict the course of a revolution, especially given the importance of personal agency. Nevertheless, he identifies an experience that cannot readily be reversed:
Vor den Blicken aller hatte sich dieser Uebergang der Macht auf die Massen vollzogen.
English translation: This transfer of power to the masses had taken place before everyone’s eyes.
The decisive change is psychological as well as institutional. The proletariat has experienced political power as attainable through its own will, and Bolshevism supplies—or is at least perceived to supply—a system of organized proletarian rule. Even civil war cannot erase that transformation of consciousness. Lederer consequently expects no repetition of the crushing defeat associated with the June uprising; his analogy with the bourgeoisie after 1789 concerns the historical durability of a class’s emergence into power, not a guaranteed revolutionary outcome.
Ein weiter Weg aber führt vom Bolschewismus zur neuen sozialen Ordnung. Denn er ist die Anpassung der sozialistischen Idee an die Desorganisation.
English translation: A long road, however, leads from Bolshevism to the new social order. For it is the adaptation of the socialist idea to disorganization.
This closing qualification governs the whole argument. Bolshevism mobilizes and intensifies dispositions remote from solidarity and socialism’s ethical aspirations. It comes from socialism and may lead toward it, but destruction does not establish that destination. The article’s significance lies in this double interpretation: Bolshevism is a crisis of socialism under conditions created by war, yet also an irreversible enlargement of the proletariat’s sense of political possibility. Whether that possibility becomes a viable economic order remains an explicitly open question.
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