viewpoint of the transindividual historical subject (a Lukacsian 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 breaks 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-
