The Devil in History

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 Besancon, Robert Conquest, Leszek Kolakowski, 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, Czeslaw Milosz, 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 Ceau?escu, these authors— and more contemporary ones, such as Francois Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, the Praxis group, the Budapest neo- Marxist School, (Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Markus, 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 Feher 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 Vaclav Havel’s still cogent characterization of what he called the post-totalitarian order:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why the life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.²⁸

THE SHIPWRECK OF UTOPIA

The revolutions of 1989-91 dealt a mortal blow to the ideological pretense according to which human life can be structured in accordance with scientific designs proposed by a general staff of revolutionary doctrinaires. These movements countered the apotheosis of bureaucratic domination with the centrality of human rights. “Seeing like a state” (to use James C. Scott’s formula) turned out to be a strategy with catastrophic consequences.²⁹ Some acclaimed these revolutions precisely because they were non-Jacobin, nonteleological, and nonideological. They were anti-utopian precisely because they refused to pursue any foreordained blueprint. In emphasizing the non-utopian character of Charter 77, Havel tellingly described the foundation upon which the resistance that fueled the 1989 upheaval was built: “An essential part of the ‘dissident’