Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, during the reign of these totalitarian movements, conscience broke down. Furthermore, “the insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed.” 3Communism was a radical economic, moral, social, and cultural doctrine centered upon the accomplishment of radical transformative ends. Fascism appeared as its arch rival, yet it shared with Communism the collectivistic, antiliberal, anticapitalist approach, the neoromantic dream of the total community, and the longing for a completely purified existence. 4With its universalistic goals, eschatological promises, and totalizing ambitions, it was often described as a political or secular religion (and so was Fascism in its Italian, German, and Romanian incarnations). The ultimate purpose of Communism was to create a new civilization founded upon a New Man. Two factors were fundamental for this doctrine: the privileged role of the party and the revolutionary transformation of human nature. One of the main distinctions between radicalism of the extreme Left and the extreme Right is the emphasis the former placed on the institution of the party as an immanent incarnation of absolute, transcendental historical knowledge. In the words of historian Walter Laqueur,

The Fascist experience in Italy and Germany has shown the crucial role of the Duce and the Führer. Hitler and Mussolini created their parties in their image, and it is perfectly legitimate to talk about the Hitler and the Mussolini “movement,” for theirs were not political parties in traditional sense…. But Stalin’s role in the Soviet Union was initially less decisive. Communist power was already firmly established. There is every reason to believe that if Stalin had been shot or died of a disease or had never existed, the party would have still remained in power in the 1920s and 1930s. 5

Communism advanced a new conception of human existence (society, economy, social and individual psychology, art). According to this conception, building the New Man was the supreme goal of political action. Communism’s ambition was to transcend traditional morality, yet it suffered from moral relativism. It assigned to the party-state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. Through the cult of absolute unity on the path to salvation by knowledge of history, Communism produced a new, total social and political project centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell under its ideological spell. Its revolutionary project was total and totalizing. As a potent political myth, Communism promised immanent deliverance, the chance to achieve prosperity, freedom, and equality. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, the Communist Weltanschauung was the foundation for ideologically based totalitarian political experiments with terrible human costs.

As for Fascism—and especially its paroxistic version, National Socialism—it emphasized the lack of equality between biologically defined groups and a predestined mission for the Aryan nations. At the same time, it praised heroism, youth, and valiance and despised bourgeois modernity as much as the Communists did. Placing Fascism at the right end of the political spectrum masks the strong socialist origins of these movements based on ethnic ressentiment. 6

Marxism’s fundamental thesis was the centrality of class struggle (historical violence) in the development of society. For Marx (and later for twentieth-century Marxist philosophers Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukács), the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for grasping historical truth. In the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be curtailed, even suppressed. Marx’s myth of the proletariat as the messiah class, the heart of Communism, nurtured a revolutionary project imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatic-heroic predestination. This became an immensely appealing mythological matrix embraced by intellectuals worldwide. 7Marx gave an ultimate apocalyptic verdict: since the bourgeoisie is guilty of the barbarous distortion of human life, it deserves its fate. 8Marx viewed the social universe primarily (but not only) in terms of social and economic determinism. Freedom meant for Marx and his disciples “understood necessity,” that is, efforts to carry out the presumed goals of history. All human reality was subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond any human questioning. He declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula.

The ingredient that allowed the realization of the revolutionary mission was revolutionary class consciousness. 9Through it, mankind’s pre-history would end and its real history could begin. According to the young Marx, the revolutionary intellectuals were those who created the doctrine, but the proletarians were not perceived as an amorphous mass into which a self-appointed group of teachers had the duty of injecting the consciousness of the historical truth. Nevertheless, Karl Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach best expressed the revolutionary mission of critical thinking: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” 10With the rubble of the past cleared away, the chosen agent of history would point the way to a new society that would bring about the complete fulfillment of the human spirit.

Communism was simultaneously an eschatology (a doctrine of mundane salvation) and an ecclesiology (a ideology of the revolutionary party or movement). Reality as it stood was fatally reified; it was to be superseded, on the one hand, by the emancipation and revolution of the proletariat, and on the other hand, by the utopia of the classless society. Subsequently, Communism’s vision of the future society relied upon a “dictatorship over needs” (Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, and György Márkus). It presupposed the dissolution of the autonomous individual within the all-devouring framework of total control, the disastrous politicization of the psyche, the manipulation of the subjective field, the attempted obliteration of the private sphere as an ultimate sanctuary of the ego. It was a total experiment in social engineering. Once it constructed its vision of modernity on the principle of a chosen, socially homogenized community crossing the desert of history from darkness into light, there could be only one solution for those who failed to qualify to their inclusionary criteria: stigmatization, elimination, and eventually, extermination

The Marxist eschatology was a rationalized theodicy: history replaced God, the proletariat was the universal redeemer, and the revolution meant ultimate salvation, the end of human suffering. History had only one direction, as it unfolded from scarcity to abundance, from limited to absolute freedom. Freedom, in turn, was understood as overcoming necessity via revolutionary praxis. Hegel had said that all that was real was rational. For Marx, all that was real was historical, and history was governed by dialectical laws. The kingdom of necessity was the realm where economy could not ensure full equality among human beings, where the political was dependent on partisan interests and the social sphere was painfully atomized. In contrast, in the kingdom of freedom there was an identity between existence and essence, antagonism disappeared, men and women recovered their lost sense of work as joy, as unfettered creativity. In this context, human existence could fully reach its development, and the condition for the freedom of all lay in each individual’s liberation. At the basis of Communism, therefore, lay a teleological fundamentalism. Its final station was the City of God on earth, that is, the triumph of the proletariat.