Edmund Burke had some superb insights on the idiocy of revolutionary ideology and its dangers to human civilisation. His Reflections on the Revolution in France contain some superb insights and salutary observations on the disasters that befall a commonwealth when abstract ideals of equality and democracy dreamed up by some guru take centre stage and displace plain old, undialectical ‘common sense’ government, and the institutions that have developed on the basis of centuries trial and error, adaptation and experiment.
‘The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes — a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be — it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.’
The Bolsheviks, having stepped into the vacuum left behind by the collapse of centuries of Tsarist depotism, had no ‘models and patterns of approved utility’ to hand. They had only their idiotic dreams of world revolution, which were soon proven to be complete and utter buffoonery. They quickly realised that in order to have any hope of governing the country, the very institutions they had rubbished would have to be quickly rebuilt, but in an even more despotic form as befitted the totalitarian ideology that was communism. No one can seriously argue that harebrained schemes like War Communism or forced collectivisation did a better job of running the economy and feeding the population than the mechanisms which the peasantry themselves had devised over centuries for securing their livelihoods. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the ‘reactionary’ Russian muzhik was in the right, and the Bolsheviks, with their utopian delusions of rebuilding society wholesale, were in the wrong.
Burke also has some wonderful words for those extremist cranks who always anticipate with bated breath the collapse of the existing order in the hope that they can seize power. The all-or-nothing attitude of these people leads them to veer from one extreme to another. When not in power, they promote the most extreme, anarchistic attitudes, but once in power, they will support murderous tyranny.
‘Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations, for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been much the same. These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified or, as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such cases employ no resistance at all. It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their schemes of politics not adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they often come to think lightly of all public principle, and are ready, on their part, to abandon for a very trivial interest what they find of very trivial value. Some, indeed, are of more steady and persevering natures, but these are eager politicians out of parliament who have little to tempt them to abandon their favorite projects. They have some change in the church or state, or both, constantly in their view. When that is the case, they are always bad citizens and perfectly unsure connections. For, considering their speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation, they are at best indifferent about it. They see no merit in the good, and no fault in the vicious, management of public affairs; they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or any political principle any further than as they may forward or retard their design of change; they therefore take up, one day, the most violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from one to the other without any sort of regard to cause, to person, or to party.’
Burke, in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, had some harsh words for those Marxists who sing the praises of the so-called ‘workers’ states’ on the basis that they were evolving towards socialism despite their ‘degenerated’ aspects:
The English admirers of the forty-eight thousand republics which from the Frenhc federation praise them nto for what they are, but for what they are to become. They do not talk as politicians, but as prophets. But in whatever character they choose to found panegyric on prediction, it will be thought a little singular to praise any work, not for its own merits, but for the merits of somethign else which may succeed to it. When any political institution is praised, in spite of great and prominent faults of every kind, and in all its parts, it must be supposed to have something excellent in its fundamental principles….