Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

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, 13prevented 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.” 15It 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