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.7 Marx gave an ultimate apocalyptic verdict: since the bourgeoisie is guilty of the barbarous distortion of human life, it deserves its fate.8 Marx 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.9 Through 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.”10 With 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.
Marxian social theory's cult of totality as the ultimate explanatory archetype set the stage for its degeneration, in Bolshevik (Leninist) terms, into dogma and the ruthless persecution of heretics. Marx's emphasis on human emancipation as the conscious absorption of society by the individual and his equation of social conflict with class antagonism resulted in advocacy of the elimination of “superstructural” intermediaries (laws, institutions, etc.) regulating the relationship between civil society and the state. Marx failed to give instructions on the achievement of social unity. The utopian, eschatological vision of Marx's body of political thought was translated into a revolutionary program of action by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (born Ulianov). Lenin operated a creative understanding of necessity that led to the Bolshevik version of man's salvation. In Lenin's vision, the monolithic vanguard party became the repository of human hope, a tightly knit fraternity of illuminated militants, and therefore the true vehicle of human freedom. The combination of Marxism with party/power set the Communist body politic on the path to self-purification (permanent purge and revolutionary offensive).
For Lenin, the fate of the Communist revolution predicted by Karl Marx depended on the maturity and political will of the revolutionary party. His vision of the new type of party was formulated in the pamphlet What Is To Be Done (1902), which articulated the Leninist concept of revolutionary practice in the twentieth century. Lenin's notion of the party led to the split within Russian social democracy between moderates (Mensheviks) and radicals (Bolsheviks). Leninism consists fundamentally of Lenin's theory of the vanguard revolutionary party, the doctrine of proletarian revolution in the age of imperialism, and the emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new type of state emerging from the collapse of the old, bourgeois order. From the outset, the Leninist regime in the Soviet Union was based on abuses, violence, and repression directed against any form of political opposition. Bolshevism was the opposite of a rule-of-law state.11 These authoritarian features of Leninism were further exacerbated by Stalin, who transformed the Soviet Union into a totalitarian state. Bolshevik humanism was conditioned only by the success of the cause it was engaged in. The individual's existence maintained its weight in the world insofar as it contributed to the construction of social utopia.