The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  With characteristic nineteenth-century hubris, Marx declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula, as exact and precise as the algorithms of mathematics or the demonstrations of formal logic. Not to recognize their validity was for Marx, as for his successors, evidence of historical blindness, ideological bias, or “false consciousness,” which were characteristic of those who opposed Marxist solutions to social questions. Prisoners of the bourgeois mentality, alienated victims of ideological mystifications, and non-Marxist theorists—all purveyors of false consciousness—were scorned and dismissed as supporters of the status quo. At the opposite pole, the proletarian viewpoint, celebrated by Marx and crystallized in the form of historical materialism, was thought to provide ultimate knowledge and the recipe for universal happiness. Thanks to proletarian class consciousness, the doctrine maintained, a revolution would occur that would end all forms of oppression. Mankind would undertake the world-historical leap from the realm of necessity (scarcity, injustice, torments) into the realm of freedom (joy, abundance, and equity). This would end humanity's prehistory and begin its real history. All human reality was thus subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond human questioning.

  Here lies a fatal methodological error in Marxism: its rendering of history as a gesetzmässig (law-governed) succession of historical formations, and the corollary of this rendering: the dogma of class struggle as the engine of historical progress. In this theory, individuals are nothing more than hostages of forces whose workings they can scarcely understand. This combination of philosophy and myth, so persuasively explored by Robert C. Tucker,13 prevented the German radical philosopher and his disciples throughout the decades from grasping the subjective dimension of history and politics. The main difficulty with the Marxian project is its lack of sensitivity to the psychological makeup of mankind. This obsession with social classes—what French sociologist Lucien Goldmann once referred to as the viewpoint of the transindividual historical subject (a Lukácsian formulation, to be sure)14—the failure to take into account the infinite diversity of human nature, the eagerness to reduce history to a conflict between polar social categories, this is indeed the substratum of an ideology that, wedded to sectarian and fanatic political movements, has generated many illusions and much grief throughout the twentieth century. With its cult of totality, this social theory, which purports to be the ultimate explanatory archetype, set the stage for its degeneration into dogma and for persecution of the heretics that were to punctuate Marxism once it was transfigured into Leninism.

  An example of this dogma is the Communist Manifesto's thesis of the inherent internationalism of the proletarian class, that famous assertion according to which proletarians have no fatherland. In this thesis, metaphysically deduced from the proclamation of the proletariat as the social embodiment of Hegelian reason, Marx bestows on the working class a universalist mandate with no empirical validity (as it was borne out in the outburst of nationalism during World War I, to the dismay of the Zimmerwald Left and other Marxist internationalists). Marx imagined an ideal proletariat, ready to renounce all social, communitarian, and cultural bonds. What really happened was precisely the opposite of Marx's prophesy: the proletariat failed to initiate the apocalyptical breach, the cataclysmically chiliastic cleavage so powerfully heralded in the Manifesto.

  The Communist Manifesto was perhaps the most inflammatory and impassioned text ever written by a philosopher. In this scathing, vitriolic, and incandescent pamphlet, Marx (in coauthorship with his loyal friend Friedrich Engels) at once pilloried and glorified a whole social class—the bourgeoisie—and a whole social order—capitalism—and prophesied the objective, inexorable necessity of their overthrow by a higher form of society. Written in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Manifesto became in the twentieth century the charter of the Bolshevik oracular creed. Marxism, for all its scientific aspirations, from the beginning represented a secular substitute for traditional religion, offering a totalizing vocabulary in which “the riddle of history” was solved, and envisioning a leap from the realm of oppression, scarcity, and necessity to a realm of freedom. Its chiliasm helps to explain its magnetism, its capacity to elicit romantic-heroic behavior, to generate collective fervor, to mobilize the oppressed, to incite political hostility, and to inspire both social hope and mystical delusions. Precisely because of its deliberately simplified rhetorical devices, the Manifesto became the livre de chevet for generations of professional revolutionaries. It was the political counterpart to the eleventh of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, in which he assigned philosophy an urgent transformative task by proclaiming that the issue was not how to interpret the world but how to change it.

  The Manifesto does more than articulate a grand historical narrative of the progressive rise and fall of classes. It designates the proletariat as the ultimate collective agent, destined to bring the story of class struggle to a close. At the same time, it reduces all questions of morality to questions of class power. The story of capitalism is a story of how the bourgeoisie expropriated feudal property, made the modern “bourgeois” state its own, and wielded political power to enhance the process of capital accumulation, unwittingly calling into existence its own “grave-diggers”—the industrial proletariat. As the proletariat evolves, it comes to an increasing awareness of its “mission” as the only “really revolutionary class,” to abolish—indeed, to “destroy”—not simply private property but human oppression itself.

  The Manifesto presented proletarian empowerment and human emancipation not as contingently related but as essentially the same thing. And it described this empowerment in strikingly Manichean terms, complete with “decisive hours” of conflict, “despotic inroads” on property, and the “sweeping away” of outmoded historical conditions. In their frantic opposition to the bourgeois status quo and its ideological superstructures, including forms of false consciousness, Marx and Engels underrated the persistent power of traditional allegiances, including the potential of nationalism: “The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the world. National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing…. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.”15 It could be said that in laying out this historical trajectory Marx intended merely to describe and not to prescribe. And yet the pamphlet was laced with moral outrage and denunciation, buoyed by a vision of ultimate liberation (“the free development of each … the free development of all”). More to the point, it heaped scorn on any reservations on the part of other Communists or Socialists—much less “the bourgeoisie”—regarding the morality or justice of class struggle. According to the Manifesto, “the Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!”16

  To identify these texts in the Manifesto is not to imply that this is all that is there, but these are central texts, and they articulate what Marx maintained was most distinctive about “Communism” as a political formation distinct from the socialists and utopians that he disparages—that it unsentimentally, resolutely, and presciently both comprehends and apprehends the “real movement” of history, a movement heretofore marked by exploitation, expropriation, and violence, at the same time that it now, finally, stands at the threshold of a new dispensation. “In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat,” Marx and Engels wrote, “we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war brea
ks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”17

  Marx did not articulate a “Leninist” theory of the “vanguard party.” Indeed, he insisted that “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.” But he also emphasized that the Communists alone possess a proper and historically privileged understanding of the total interests of the proletarians as a class:

  They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The communists are distinguished from other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole…. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered, by these or that would-be universal reformers. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existent class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very ideas.”18

  For Marx, communism united ideological superiority, political militancy, and an unflinching and resolute appreciation of historical tasks. The distance separating Marx from Lenin on this score was barely perceptible. It is thus easy to see how Lenin later could claim that the Manifesto contained the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat even though Marx and Engels had yet to name that idea. For Lenin, the book's central theme was clearly “the proletariat organized as the ruling class.” Because political power was the organized power of one class or another, and because the state “is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class,” for Lenin it made perfect sense that the proletariat must seize state power and use it “to crush the resistance of the exploiters.” Such a politics, he insisted, was absolutely irreconcilable with Menshevik-style reformism. And there is more. For the “truth” of this perspective is only manifested by radicalized, uncompromising Communism. In her prescient critique of Lenin's neo-Jacobin, potentially dictatorial organizational philosophy, Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1904:

  Ultracentralist tendency … the central Committee is the only active nucleus in the party and all the remaining organizations are merely tools for implementation … absolute blind submission of the individual organs of the party to their central authority … a central authority that alone thinks, acts, and decides for everyone. The lack of will and thought in a mass of flesh with many arms and legs moving mechanically to the baton…. Zombie-like obedience [kadavergehorsam] … absolute power and authority of a negative kind … sterile spirit of the night watchman … strict despotic centralism … the straight-jacket of a bureaucratic centralism that reduces the militant workers to a docile instrument of a committee … an all-knowing and ubiquitous Central Committee.”19

  And thus the foundation for a violent tutelary dictatorship was laid. Stalin would extend the premises put forward by the founder of Bolshevism, exalting party-mindedness (partiinost') as an antidote to “bourgeois scientific neutrality” and other such illusions: “The omnipotence of the Lie was not due to Stalin's wickedness, but was the only way of legitimizing a regime based on Leninist principles. The slogan constantly met with during Stalin's dictatorship, ‘Stalin is the Lenin of our days,’ was thus entirely accurate.”20 Reviewing The Black Book of Communism, Anne Applebaum judiciously noted that “it is possible now, in a way it would not have been a few years ago, to trounce once and for all the myths of a more promising ‘early period’ of communist history, or of ‘better’ regimes which deviated from the general rule…. Without exception, the Leninist belief in the one party state was and is characteristic of every communist regime, from Russia to China to Cuba to Mozambique. Without exception, the Bolshevik use of violence was repeated in every communist revolution.”21

  The revolutionary subject refused to perform its allegedly predestined role. The proletariat, in this soteriological vision, was the universal redeemer or, as the young Marx put it, the messiah class of history. The concept of class struggle, as elaborated in the Manifesto, was foundational for the whole Marxian revolutionary cosmology. And as Raymond Aron, Alain Besançon, Robert Conquest, Leszek Kołakowski, and Andrzej Walicki have shown, in its emphasis on struggle, the Marxian project sanctified historical violence (a viewpoint unapologetically affirmed by a range of Marxist texts, from Leon Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror). In the Marxian perspective, violence of the oppressed against the oppressors was justified as a means to smash the bourgeois state machine and ensure the irreversible triumph of the proletariat. Marx drew this conclusion from the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, which he attributed to the lack of determination on the side of the Communards to establish their own dictatorship of the proletariat. Later, Leninism used and abused this philosophy of revolutionary historical Aufhebung, celebrating the role of the vanguard party and deriding concerns about the absence of a mature proletariat in industrially underdeveloped Russia. For Lenin, the Bolshevik regime had to resort to any means, including mass terror, to “form a government which nobody will be able to overthrow.”22 In his 1972 address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stressed the upward spiral of degeneration involved in the Communist project: “At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride, [but later] it cannot continue to exist without a fog of lies, clothing them in falsehood.”23

  There are two trajectories laid out in the Communist Manifesto, foreshadowing further elaborations in mature Marxian theory. On one hand there is the emphasis on the self-development of class consciousness, which lends itself to a more or less social democratic politics of proletarian self-organization and political empowerment—what the American Socialist Michael Harrington called “the democratic essence.” On the other hand, there is the privileging of an ideologically correct vanguard committed to a totalizing revolution by any means necessary (for, in the words of Leon Trotsky's famous aphorism, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs). Yet even the more “humanistic” version of Marxism was deeply Manichean, centering on capitalist exploitation as the fundamental injustice and on proletarian counterhegemony as the agent of its transcendence. This dialectic of class struggle—what C. Wright Mills ironically called a “labor metaphysic”—is the core principle of all versions of Marxism. And its prominence explains why the more elitist and violent form of Marxism that came to dominate the politics of the twentieth century—Bolshevism—can be seen as a legitimate heir of Marxism's emancipatory project, even if it is not the only legitimate heir.24 We can perhaps imagine other worlds in which a different realization of Marxian ideas might be possible. But in the real world of historical actuality, there was only one successful effort to “overthrow the bourgeoisie” and institute the “sway of the proletariat.” And it laid waste to the eastern half of Europe.

  A range of political intellectuals writing in the 1940s and 1950s first identified a “totalitarian temptation” within Marxism. Authors such as Boris Souvarine, Czesław Miłosz, Karl R. Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus hardly converged on a single political perspective. But they shared a sense that Communism was “a God that failed” miserably, and that in important respects this failure could be traced to deficiencies in the thought of its humanistic founder, Karl Marx. The intellectual history of the twentieth century can be written as a series of political disenchantments with a doctrine that promised universal emancipation and led instead to terror, injustice, inequality, and abysmal human rights abuses.25 In this reading, the main weakness of Marxist socialism was the absence of a revolutionary ethic, the complete subordination of the
means to the worshipped, nebulous end. The numerous traumatic breaks with Communism of some of the most important European intellectuals of the twentieth century did not necessarily imply a farewell to Marxism. They were nevertheless most exacting emotional experiences. In the words of Ignazio Silone, “One is cured of communism the way one is cured of a neurosis.”26

  As I came of age politically in the Romania of the “Great Helmsman,” Nicolae Ceaușescu, these authors—and more contemporary ones, such as François Furet, Leszek Kołakowski, the Praxis group, the Budapest neo-Marxist School, (Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus, Mihaly Vajda)—helped me understand the genealogy of the Leninism that held my country (and the whole region) in thrall. While some left-wing critics might argue that this antitotalitarian critique of Marxism is simply an artifact of Cold War liberalism, I would remind them that the Cold War liberalism with which I identified centered not on the foreign policy of the United States but on the challenges of trying to live freely as a subject of an ideologically inspired dictatorship. This is the thrust of the argument made by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér in the 1980s when they insisted on the need to discover a common language between critical intellectuals of the East and the West. In other words, in spite of the real uses and manipulations of the term totalitarianism during the Cold War, for East European neo-Marxists this was a sociologically, politically, and morally adequate concept.27 To get a better sense of how such authors perceived the realities of the politics of utopia instrumentalized by Communist regimes, one should remember Václav Havel's still cogent characterization of what he called the post-totalitarian order: