From the outset, the Manifesto announced what the influential Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov called a “monist view of history,” according to which all historical conflict is reducible to class conflict and all political debate is reducible to the question of which class you represent or support.58 In History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukács reads the thought of Marx as an “expression” of ‘the standpoint of the proletariat.’ Lukács offers an ingenious interpretation of Marxism as the unfolding ‘truth’ of the class struggle. And in reducing questions of truth or falsity and right or wrong to questions of “class standpoint,” he is simply following the lead of the Manifesto. For it was Marx himself who declared, “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer…. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”59 The intellectual distance separating this formulation from the Bolshevik idea that the Communists are in possession of “politically correct” insight into the movement and the meaning of history is not far. Moreover, Marx himself consistently showed an obvious unwillingness to tolerate those socialists who did not agree with him or questioned his authority. The energy he spent denouncing such “heretics” indicates the presence of an authoritarian personality.
In the passionately incandescent lines of the Communist Manifesto, one can decipher the whole tragedy that was to follow: Lenin's forcing of the pace of history, the genesis of Bolshevism as a matrix for generalized terror, the Stalinist horrors, and the universe of the concentration camp. Nations were murdered to carry out Lenin's utopian desiderata. Social classes were victimized in the name of his abstract speculations and moral revolt. The question, therefore, is what connection exists between the Leninist exterminist project and the original Marxian salvationist fantasy. In retrospect, one can argue that Marx's oracular monism, defined by his hyperdeterministic approach, scientism, and positivism, took revenge on the ethical-libertarian dimension and laid the foundation for intolerance and repression. To elaborate on a dichotomy proposed by Karl Popper, it can be said that the moral radicalism of Marxism survived in contemporary varieties of democratic socialism. Political radicalism, with its mixture of historicism and positivism, culminated in Leninist conspiracy and dictatorship.60 Essentially, the Bolsheviks' revolutionary subjectivism was defined by the conception of parties as “oligarchies of scholars and organizers, assemblies of people who change the world through their wills, while constantly obeying the laws of history.”61
REDEMPTIVE MYTHOLOGIES
Is this all over? Far from it—and this applies not only to the countries once ruled by Leninist parties, but also to nationalist-socialist parties like Baath and charismatic fundamentalist, neototalitarian movements, including Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.62 The Leninist (Bolshevik) mental matrix was rooted in a political culture suspicious of open dialogue and democratic procedures, and hostile to spontaneous developments from below. Leninism was not only an ideology but also a set of precepts and techniques meant to inspire revolutionary global activism and militantism opposed to bourgeois liberalism and democratic socialism. Both Leninism and Fascism were discourses of domination that achieved effectiveness by functioning as “closed rhetorical systems that determined content as well as limits of political consciousness.”63 This is precisely the similarity but also the main distinction between these two onslaughts on liberal individualism: Fascism was a pathology of romantic irrationalism, and Bolshevism was a pathology of Enlightenment-inspired hyperrationalism. I don't want to be misunderstood: as an offspring of nineteenth-century antibourgeois, often antimodern, ideologies of resentment, Fascism did not need Bolshevism in order to emerge and mature (as demonstrated in Isaiah Berlin's fascinating essay on Joseph de Maistre and the origins of Fascism).64 The cult of race, the blending of pseudo-scientism (social Darwinism) with the neopagan worship of blood and soil, and the resentful rejection of liberal values as “soulless arithmetic” predated Leninism. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that the triumph of Bolshevism and the intensity and scope of the Red Terror, together with the traumatic effects of World War I and the widespread sentiment that “the world of yesterday” (to quote Stefan Zweig) had irretrievably come to an end, mobilized the Fascist offensive against the universalistic traditions of the Enlightenment.
Fascism was no less a fantasy of salvation than was Bolshevism: both promised to rescue humanity from the bondage of capitalist mercantilism and to ensure the advent of the total community. Fascism was a type of hysteria rooted in pseudopoetic heroic nostalgias, in militant collectivism, and above all, in the programmatic abhorrence of the fundamental values of liberal democracy. Its potential for emotional identification originated in myth, in the obsessive invocation of supposedly pristine origins, in the excessive cult for what Sigmund Freud once called “the narcissism of small differences.”65 Fascism aimed at homogenization through the sublimation of the body politic to the common denominator of its imagined genetic bedrock. Its fundamental nature is expressed in the principle that “in order for the national phoenix to arise, everything and everyone that stands in its way first has to be brunt to ashes, literally if necessary.”66 In the aftermath of the First World War, Italo Balbo, one of the main ideologues of Italian Fascism, expressed the ethos of this new political movement by contrasting it to the old order, which he deemed effete, corrupt, degenerate, and decaying. Rather than helping to restore prewar society, Balbo emphatically declared, “No, better to deny all, destroy all, renew all, from the base.”67 Contempt for the old bourgeois order and fascination with the utopian new one were attitudes shared by Communists and Fascists.
Both Leninism and Fascism were creative forms of nihilism, extremely utilitarian and contemptuous of universal rights. The essential element of their modus vivendi was the “sanctification of violence.”68 They envisioned society as a community of “bearers of beliefs,” and every aspect of their private life and behavior was expected to conform with these beliefs. Upon coming into power and implementing their vision of the perfect society, the two political movements established dictatorships of purity in which “people were rewarded or punished according to politically defined criteria of virtue.”69 Dario Lupi, an undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Fascist Italy, warned menacingly that “he who joins us either becomes one of us in body and soul, in mind and flesh, or he will inexorably be cut off. For we know and feel ourselves in possession of the truth…. [W]e know and feel ourselves to be part of the only movement in marvelous harmony with the history time…. For ours is the only movement that faithfully reflects the innermost layers of the souls and feelings of our own kind.”70 Similarly, Hitler considered that the movement he led was a necessary creative destruction generated by the imperative of reestablishing the chosen community on the right track of history. On July 1934, Hitler stated that “when a deathly check is violently imposed upon the natural development of a people, an act of violence may serve to release the artificially interrupted flow of evolution to allow it once again the freedom of natural development.”71