The Devil in History
Page 18
In opposition to those authors who are still ready to grant Marxism and even Leninism a certain legitimacy in their claims to liberal-democratic pedigrees, it is essential to recognize (together with Lefort)153 that Bolshevism was inherently inimical to political liberties. It is not an accidental deviation from the democratic project but its logical, direct and unequivocal antithesis. Thus Lefort quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “To grant the epithet of democratic to a government that denies political freedom to its citizens is a blatant absurdity.” The annihilation of democracy within Leninist practice is determined by the nature of the party as a secular substitute for the unifying totalizing mystique in the political body of the absolute sovereign (the medieval king). In other words, the Leninist model breaks with the Enlightenment tradition and reasserts the integral homogenization of the social space as a political and pragmatic ideal. According to Lefort, the fundamental organizational principle of Communism was “the People-as-One”—the golden rule of unity of the new society: “It is denied that division is constitutive of society. In the so-called socialist world, there can be no other division than that between the people and its enemies: a division between inside and outside, no internal division. After the revolution, socialism is not only supposed to prepare the way for the emergence of a classless society, it must already manifest that society which bears within itself the principle of homogeneity and self-transparency.”154 Under the circumstances, it is difficult to see a way to democratize Leninist regimes, precisely because the doctrine's original intention was to organize total domination. Communism was indeed a deviant, though very real, version of modernity, an attempt to realize a new world-space (espace-monde) where the difference between I and Thou dissipated into the party, “the only concretion of the social” (to quote Lefort).
Here lies the essence of the Leninist (or Communist) question: the institution of the monolithic, unique party that emerges as a “besieged fortress” after 1903 (the great schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) acquired planetary dimensions after 1917. Marxism, converted and adjusted by Lenin, ceased to be a revolutionary doctrine intended to grasp or conceive (begreifen) reality and became an ideological body that requires from militants a discipline of action that makes them “members of a collective body.” Thus Bolshevism added to nineteenth-century revolutionary mythologies something new: the inclusion of power in a type of representation that defines the party as a magical entity. It is thus important to keep in mind the significance of the political and symbolic structures of Leninism, the underpinnings that ensured its success as an ideological state (Weltanschauungstaat). No matter how we look at it, Lenin's celebration of the party's predestined status, together with his obsessive insistence on conspiratorial forms of organization (revolutionary “cells”) and the cult of fanatic regimentation, have initiated a new form of political radicalism, irrevocably opposed to the Western individualistic liberal tradition or, for that matter, to antiauthoritarian, democratic (liberal) socialism. Leninism's Weltanschauung was as intolerant and exclusivist as that of Fascism: it demanded “complete recognition as well as the complete adaptation of public life to its ideas.”155 In the twentieth century, Leninism and Fascism brought about an unprecedented “enlargement, intensification, and dynamicization of political power”156 with the purpose of radically transforming the world.
With this in mind, I would conclude that Slavoj Žižek's proposed “return to Lenin” means simply a return to a politics of irresponsibility, the resurrection of a political ghost whose main legacies are related to the limitation, rather than the expansion, of democratic experimentation. After all, it was Lenin who suppressed direct democracy in the form of councils, disbanded the embryonic Russian parliament, and transformed terror into a privileged instrument for preserving power. Žižek seems to adopt, and truly enjoy, the role of Thomas Mann's character, the Jesuit dialectician Leo Naphta: an oracle of the resurrection of what one might call le désir de révolution. In his defense of Leninism, Žižek actually advocates the rehabilitation of chiliastic experiences, secular soteriologies, and visionary messianism, all for the sake of regaining the “authentically apocalyptical Paulinian atmosphere.” Simultaneously, though, he (and others who imitate his plea) does not seem to mind the mass graves that people keep discovering wherever the Leninist ideal, in one form or the other, has been implemented. When Hitler destroyed the Weimar constitutional system and abolished all “bourgeois freedoms,” he imitated the Bolshevik precedent of the permanent emergency as a justification for legitimizing the destruction of legality and eliminating (including physical annihilation) all those regarded as “objective” obstacles to building a perfect, organic community. Despite their pretense of rationality, the Bolsheviks, “unconstrained by concerns of legality or any usual checks on executive power, were particularly prone to resort to naked force.”157
In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, the abolition of the prerevolutionary state created “the institutional precondition for cumulative radicalization. Flexible, extra-legal; and extra-bureaucratic agencies institutionalized the terror against fictitious enemies; the fiction of a future civilization and a new moral sense that legitimized it.”158 The new order of the utopia in power opened the door to a sort of “institutional Darwinism” defined by “political activism occurring on its own, or at least without immediate direction” from the power center (the leader or party).159 This process can account for both the escalation of terror and the organizational corruption and ultimate demise of these totalitarian political movements. The fundamental difference with National Socialism (but not so much with Mussolini's Fascism, considering that it did survive for at least two decades) was that Lenin and Stalin “achieved not only a social revolution but the conditions of a stable political order.”160 Bertrand Russell in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, written upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1920, diagnosed the murderous reality lying at the heart of Lenin's political invention, the specter that contemporary prophets of irresponsibility such as Žižek choose to ignore: “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.”161 Once victorious in 1917, Lenin opened a Pandora's box. By the end of the twentieth century, all we found was tyranny and bloodshed anywhere his world-historical exploit was emulated, from Shanghai to Rostock.
CHAPTER 4
Dialectics of Disenchantment
Marxism and Ideological Decay in Leninist Regimes
The Western system may be flawed in many social respects, but it is, after all, a fully operational democratic system, not a dictatorship. I would certainly agree that the Western democracies, too, are now without a universally accepted value-system, but whereas the loss of such a system in a live democracy is balanced by the interaction of a broad variety of democratic institutions, the loss of ideology in a totalitarian society means the complete collapse of the morale of that society, because the sole justification of totalitarian rule is the ideology on which it rests.
—Zdeněk Mlynář (in George Urban, ed., Communist Reformation)
Communist regimes were partocratic ideocracies (as discussed by authors such as Leonard Schapiro, Alain Besançon, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes, and Stephen Kotkin). Their only claim to legitimacy was purely ideological, that is, derived from the organized belief system shared by the elites and inculcated into the masses that the party benefited by special access to historical truth. If this interpretation is correct, then deradicalization, the decline of self-generated energy, primarily in the field of ideological monopoly, leads to increased vulnerability. The demise of the supreme leader (Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxha, or Tito) has always ushered in ideological anarchy and loss of self-confidence among the rulers. Kenneth Jowitt correctly pointed out that “there is a constant tendency in Leninism toward strong executive leaders.”1 Sometimes, though, Communist parties invoke also the l
eadership of a messiahlike prophet, a charismatic guide.2 The cases of Stalin and Mao are the most obvious, but Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and others come to mind as well. Building upon Jowitt's argument, we can observe the following trend: in an attempt to permanently confirm and sustain the “charismatic impersonalism” of the party under Communism (particularly in its Stalinism avatars), magic, miracle, and mysticism blended in totalitarian regimes that were apparently scientifically justified. In fact, they were chiliastic ideologies, redemptive doctrines shrouded in rationalistic disguise, political religions based on their own sense of original sin, the fall of mankind, historical torment, and final salvation. Attempts to restore the “betrayed values” of the original project (Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev) resulted in ideological disarray, a change of mind among former supporters, desertion of critical intellectuals from the “fortress,” criticism of the old dogmas, awakening, a break with past, and eventually apostasy. If we compare the Leninist experiments with Fascist revolutionary utopias, the absence of a revisionist temptation within Fascism is striking. With very few exceptions, like the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser (early Nazis who broke with Hitler's regime soon after the takeover), there were no disenchanted Nazis. The plot against Hitler in 1944 was fomented by conservative aristocrats and military luminaries who wanted to avoid a crushing defeat by the Allies and a much feared occupation by the Red Army.3
This chapter looks into the adventures of critical Marxism in Soviet-style regimes and its corrosive impact on the Moscow center during the 1970s and particularly the 1980s. Furthermore, I conceptualize the Gorbachev phenomenon as a culmination of the revisionist ethos in the socialist bloc, which implicitly turns the focus of my contribution on the inherent paradoxes and fallacies of perestroika. The latter is perceived to be inherent in the incompleteness of East European Marxist revisionism's promise for change. Nevertheless, by no means do I deny the role of this fascinating period of intellectual and political history in providing a fundamental lesson about the role of ideas in the disintegration of authoritarian regimes of Leninist persuasion. Such a self-critical development would have been unthinkable under the Nazi regime, as already shown in previous chapters.
My point is that the impact of Marxist revisionism and critical intellectuals can hardly be overestimated and that this impact is one of the main distinctions between Communism and Fascism. The adventure of revisionism led these intellectuals beyond the once-worshipped paradigm, critical Marxism turned into post-Marxism and even, as in the case of Kołakowski, into liberal anti-Marxism. In his gripping book about the postwar Soviet intelligentsia, historian Vladislav Zubok concludes that the story of this group, which is crucial to understanding the fate of Leninism in the twentieth century, was about “the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people.” He emphasizes that “the children of Zhivago spent their lives on ‘a voyage from the coast of Utopia’ into the turbulent open sea of individual self-discovery.”4
Among Soviet and Eastern European intelligentsia, Marxism was found wanting in its most powerful ambition, to respond in a positively engaging way to the challenges of democratic modernity, to restructure democratic imagination itself:
With one resolute gesture of contempt, therefore, Marx swept away all particularities: the interests of the peasants, of middle classes, of nations, and of colonialism. This absolute universalism made Marx particularly insensitive to political questions in general, and to democratic politics in particular. Democratic politics is one of the basic components of modernity, and, when Marx failed to cope with this problem, his pioneering theory of modernity was drastically curtailed. One could only speculate as to why a man of genius, who discovered and analyzed so many basic features of modernity, was not to the slightest degree superior to any of his socialist contemporaries whenever he embarked in discussing political problems. When it came to politics, his genius invariably failed him. The bombastic style of his political writings, the vagueness of his political ideas, the open bias of his judgments, and the mythologization of his favorite heroes shift Marx back to a period and its guises, the epoch of the French Revolution and Bonapartism, precisely that period the ideological customs of which Marx had so vigorously sought to debunk.5
I argue that only the reinvention of politics operated by the dissident movement could offer the possibility of achieving genuine democracy and full liberty in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The proposed analysis represents a revisiting and development of my theses on the role of ideological disillusionment in the ultimate decline (deradicalization) of Leninist regimes as formulated in the 1980s and early 1990s.6
Several generations have come of political age in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by assimilating a radical promise of universal redemption, genuine equality, and emancipation. The civilization built and exported by the Bolsheviks had a totalizing ambition encompassing all spheres of life. In the early 1980s, exiled dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky argued that this alternative illiberal modernity was “a durable, stable … structure, … [which] arouses the interest and attention of the world as, perhaps, the most unusual and awe-inspiring [groznoe] phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is awe-inspiring because it makes claims to the future of all mankind and … considers itself as an ideal and as the logical conclusion of the development of world history.”7 This construct of Leninism was first and foremost erected on faith. Emancipation from such radically transformative conviction became an odyssey synonymous with the history of Communism. As one Soviet philosopher put it, “I resisted long and fiercely, until I had to surrender before … life itself [my emphasis].”8
Marxism in its Leninist avatar was imposed as the philosophy par excellence, the unique scientific worldview, the spiritual complement of the technological-industrial evolution of the society. It jealously guided, inspired, and motivated the political-intellectual development of East European societies. It regulated their main political, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic corpus of hypotheses, theses, values, norms, and opinions. Moreover, under the specific circumstances of the Stalinist period, Marxism was converted into dialectical materialism (Diamat), a simulacrum of dialectical jargon combined with pseudoscientific claims. The latter was gradually instituted into a monopolistic orthodoxy imagined according to the requirements of self-sufficient, noncontradictory, and a priori infallible religious dogmas. Conceived as such, it brought about a continual stiffening of spiritual life in Eastern European countries, as well as a normal, absolutely logical counterreaction of refusal and dissatisfaction with the prevalent ideas.
The Stalinist functionalist-pragmatic Weltanschauung succeeded in emphasizing as altogether certain and genuinely axiomatic a number of theses from Karl Marx's early writing, The German Ideology (such as economic determinism and the assumption that the dominant ideas within a social organization are the ideas of the hegemonic group). It also took on several naive materialist positions defended and promoted by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, above all Lenin's vulgar representation of the philosophical parties. Under Stalin, dialectics suffered a strange metamorphosis, a process of refunctionalization, the result of which was its transformation into a mere ideological weapon, a mythological instrument supporting each political step of the regime, each tactical turning. Robert C. Tucker, in his attempt to understand Stalin's urge to master the supposedly objective laws of socioeconomic development, pointed to his adoption of “a legislative attitude toward reality…. [W]hat he referred to as ‘objective scientific laws’ were an externalization of his inner policy dictates; they were a projection upon Soviet history of the formulas for socio-economic development generated in his own mind. His own ideas appeared to him as natural necessities governing the development of society [original emphasis].”9