Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

So, why did Communist regimes collapse? The answer is multicausal and requires grasping the many origins and implications of the world-shattering events of 1989–91. If I were to start the list of causes, however, I would say that Communist regimes disappeared because they lost their ideological self-confidence, their hierocratic credentials. Their ritualized hegemony was successfully challenged by the reinvention of politics brought about by dissent. The existence of an alternative in a space previously imbued with myth and ideology triggered a process of individual and collective self-determination. The logic of consent, of emancipation within “ideocratic” limits, was replaced by the grammar of revolt, self-affirmation, and freedom. The Communist project of modernity oriented toward “an integrated accumulation of wealth, power, and knowledge” while relying on the “embedded phantasm of a shortcut to affluence through total social mobilization” 124was rejected on moral grounds. The crystallization of a critical theory focusing on subjectivity and negativity reasserted the central position of the human being in the symbolic economy of Central and East European politics. Ironically, the Soviet warning, “Either we destroy revisionism or it will destroy us!” seems now stunningly prescient. Thanks to critical intellectuals relying upon the tradition and grounds established by revisionist Marxism, revolts ultimately morphed into revolutions.

More than in any other period of human history, individuals in the twentieth century were tempted by the promises of revolutionary messianism rooted in grandiose teleological fantasies imagined by prophets who mostly wrote their manifestos during the previous century. 1Or to use the formulation of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka, the last century experienced the rise of “radical super-civilizations” that sought forms analogous to that of a “universal church.” According to him, they were “geared toward the totalizing of life by means of rationalism; we deal with a yearning for a new center, ‘from which it is possible to gradually control all layers all the way to the periphery.’” 2From both extreme left and right, the quest for an absolute reshaping of the human condition inspired frantic endeavors to transcend what appeared to be the philistine carcass of liberal institutions and values. 3Many Bolsheviks, including Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and quite likely even Lenin found Nietzsche’s proclamation regarding the advent of the Übermensch (superman) exhilarating or at least intriguing. This type of influence “touched a deep chord in the Russian psyche that continued to reverberate long after his [Nietzsche’s] initial reception…. Ideas and images derived from his writings were fused, in various ways, with compatible elements in the Russian religious, intellectual, and cultural heritage, and with Marxism.” 4

In Communism and Fascism, ideology was there to justify violence, sacralize it, and to discard all opposite views as effete, sterile, dangerous, and fundamentally false. In the ideological binary logic (Lenin’s kto-kogo , who-whom principle) there was no room for a middle road: the enemy—always defined by class (or race) criteria—lost all humanity, being reduced to the despicable condition of vermin. Stalinists and Nazis proudly avowed their partisanship and abolished human autonomy through loyalty to the party/leader/dogma. The main purpose of revolutionary ideological commitment was to organize the mental colonization (heteronomy) of individuals, to turn them into enthusiastic builders of the totalitarian utopia. In brief, totalitarianism as a project aiming at complete domination over man, society, economy, and nature, is inextricably linked to ideology. 5The ideologies of Communism and Fascism held in common a belief in the plasticity of human nature and the possibility of transforming it in accordance with a utopian blueprint: “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.” 6Ideology cut across all regime dynamics, “grounding and projecting action, without which governance, violent action, and socialization were impossible.” 7Both Leninism and Fascism have inspired unflinching loyalties, a fascination with the figure of the perfect society, and romantic immersion in collective movements promising the advent of the millennium. 8

Despite Leninism’s decline, the utopian reservoir of humanity has not been completely exhausted: refurbished ideologies have resurfaced, among them populism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism of different shades. The ghost of the future conjured up by young Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto has been replaced with revamped specters of the past, summoned into the present by disconcerted political actors unable to come to terms with the hardships of the democratic project and the challenges of (post)modernity. To the soulless “Europe of butter” lambasted and decried by various neoromantics, they often contrast the myth of the original communal democracy of the agrarian societies. In short, the end of Communism, the revolutions of 1989, and the disturbing Leninist legacies have created a world full of dangers, in which traditional lines of demarcation have completely disintegrated and new forms of radicalism simmer under the carapace of pseudostability. With the breakdown of Leninism a crucial threshold was crossed, but the readiness to indulge in ideological fallacies is not totally extinct. This is the reason for Kołakowski’s wry conclusion to the new epilogue of his masterful trilogy: “No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-globalist,’ and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.” 9

Marxism was a protean political movement, but what distinguished it as a movement were its grandiose and ideologically driven political ambitions. 10According to Jan Patočka, the systematization of man and history, culminating in Marx, made evident “that, in a full working out of the spirit of metaphysics that means man, as historical and as social, placing himself in the position once reserved for the gods and for God, myth, dogma, and theology were reabsorbed into history and flowed into a philosophy that discarded its time-honored name of a simple love of wisdom in order to become a scientific system.” 11Once this scientific pretense ceased to inspire genuine commitment, the spell of Marxism as a promise of earthly salvation started to dissipate. The eclipse of Marxism as a strategy for social transformation ended an age of radicalism and justified a number of reflections regarding the destiny of utopian thought in this century. One can agree with Ferenc Fehér’s masterful obituary of “Marxism as politics,” but we still need to discuss Marxism’s utopian component, which Marxism has never acknowledged. 12On the contrary, Marx and his followers were convinced that they possessed access to the hidden laws of historical development and that their historical waver was meant to result in an immanent kingdom of freedom.