A 'Flight from Reality'?: The Bolshevik Party, The New Economic Policy and Karl Mannheim's Theory of 'Utopian False-Consciousness' (Report‪)‬

In the winter of 1923, prior to his final and inexorable fall from grace within the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky wrote a pamphlet entitled The New Course. Reflecting upon the 'problem' of the peasantry and warning of the corrupting influence of 'bureaucratism' within the Party, The New Course gave voice to Trotsky's fears for the future of the 'proletarian revolution' in Russia. (2) Chastising the Bolshevik Party's leadership for betraying its own revolutionary tradition, the pamphlet was a blunt challenge to the ruling bloc in the Politbureau. Trotsky's call for the adoption of a 'new course', however, was not indicative of a reassessment of the party's ideology or utopian aspirations. Instead Trotsky called the party to adhere more faithfully, in both word and in action, to the Marxist-Leninist theory upon which the October Revolution had been premised. Marxism-Leninism, Trotsky wrote, was 'the highest qualitative and quantitative appreciation of reality'. (3) 'It admits no fiction,' he wrote, 'no bubble-blowing, no pseudo-grandeur'. (4) It was, he claimed, 'irreconcilable with the f light from reality'. The only qualification Trotsky was prepared to admit was this: for a Marxist-Leninist, he wrote, any appreciation of reality must always be made 'from the standpoint of revolutionary action'. (5) What Trotsky did not recognise in The New Course, and perhaps did not realise himself, was that nothing less than a headlong f light from reality would allow the Bolsheviks to retain this standpoint--insofar as it was defined by their own ideology and utopian aspirations--while also maintaining the policies of the New Economic Policy that kept the Bolshevik regime in power. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY