VIOLENCE AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT COMMUNITY
National Socialism never achieved a level of theoretical coherence and conceptual sophistication comparable to the Marxian paradigm and its offshoots. It would be impossible to speak seriously about Nazi philosophy. Even Stalin’s thought was more intellectually structured that Hitler’s nebulous vagaries. Yet the inner core of deep anticapitalist, antiliberal, and antidemocratic obsessions could be found in both of these otherwise inimical doctrines.3 Leninism and National Socialism (or more generically, Fascism) were founded upon programs of total societal mobilization intended to achieve a radical transformation of the body politic. The first step in the revolutions promoted by Leninism and Fascism (German and Italian) was the takeover of power. The mode of takeover was fundamentally exclusionary in relation to all other political formations or adversaries. For Lenin, once imposed via the Bolshevik insurrection, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was irreversible and unrestrained by any law. In March 1933, Hitler announced, “The government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theatre, film, literature, the press, and broadcasting—all these will be used as means to this end.”4 Indeed, during the trial of the army officers imprisoned for their involvement with National Socialism in Leipzig in 1930, Hitler had declared that he aimed at a “legal revolution,” which meant entering “the legal agencies and in that way [making] our Party the determining factor.” However, like the Bolsheviks’ stance in 1917, this method only opened the gates for the Nazi Party’s absolute dictatorship. In Hitler’s words, “Once we possess the constitutional power, we will mould the state into the shape we hold suitable.”5
This approach was disturbingly reminiscent of the Bolshevik precedent. Lenin believed that any wavering in taking power was a criminal act. Political historian Stephen Cohen gave an excellent characterization of the path to government of Lenin’s party: “A minority party to the end (they received about 25 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in November), the Bolsheviks neither inspired nor led the revolution from below; but they alone perceived its direction and survived it.”6 Just like the Nazis and Italian Fascists, Bolsheviks knew that they wanted to rule because each believed in a perceived historical, transformative, and redemptive mission. And to attain this end, all means were justified. To quote Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s henchmen, “Comrades, it has long been known that for us Bolsheviks democracy is no fetish.”7 Fascists and Communists alike believed in the imperative of creative destruction of the old world in order to create new civilizations based upon new men, new social systems that in their turn would generate a new international order. To paraphrase Roger Griffin, these two political movements were utterly consumed with palingenetic, revivalist fervor.
Leninism’s belief in the purifying effect of shattering the world was founded upon the writings of the founding fathers—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Marx, what was unique about “the Revolution was not just that no further event was to follow it, but that no other event need follow it, because in the Revolution the whole purpose of History was to be fulfilled.”8 Marxism was first and foremost a Promethean attempt to get rid of an abhorred bourgeois order based on market relations (private property), transcend reified social relations, and organize revolutionary social forces for the ultimate confrontation, which would result in a “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”9 Marx’s strong demarcation of his revolutionary thought in contrast to other versions of socialism (Christian, reactionary-feudal, petty-bourgeois, critical-utopian) is intimately linked to his firm belief, especially after 1845, that he was in the know (the postulate of epistemic infallibility), and that his Weltanschauung was essentially scientific, that is, nonutopian. For Marx, the conviction that history was governed by laws, a Hegelian viewpoint that he consistently promoted, meant that once these laws were grasped, reason (thought) and revolution (action) would coincide in the global proletarian liberation.10 The understanding of social and natural forces allowed for the full realization of the transformative ethos: “Once we do understand them [social and natural forces], once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only on ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends.”11 Subsequently, in the name of proletarian (authentic) democracy, formal liberties could be suspended, even suppressed. To achieve a higher version of morality, emancipated from the bondage of bourgeois hypocrisy, traditional morality could be abrogated.12 Marxism perceived itself as science rather than ethics, and therefore the revolution it preached was “part of a historical mechanism: hence, purged of values.”13 As Raymond Aron points out:
Marxism is a Christian heresy. As a modern form of millenarianism, it places the kingdom of God on Earth following the apocalyptic revolution in which the Old World will be swallowed up. The contradictions of capitalist societies will inevitably bring about this fruitful catastrophe. The victims of today will be the victors of tomorrow. Salvation will come through the proletariat, that witness to present inhumanity. It is the proletariat that, at a time fixed by the evolution of productive forces and by the courage of the combatants, will turn itself into a class that is universal and will take charge of the fate of mankind.14
It was indeed the fate of Marxism to pretend to be in charge of the destiny of humanity by impersonating, in a simultaneously tragic and optimistic way, the solution to mankind’s millennia-long agonies, fears, and terrors. Never was a political doctrine so ambitious, never a revolutionary project so much imbued with a sense of prophetic mission and charismatically heroic predestination.
MARXIST DREAMS, LENINIST EXPERIMENTS
All its radical hubris notwithstanding, Marxism would have remained a mere chapter in the history of revolutionary ideas had Vladimir Lenin not turned it into a most potent political weapon of ideological transformation of the world. The twentieth century was Lenin’s century. In fact, Leninism was a self-styled synthesis between Marxian revolutionary doctrine and the Russian tradition of nihilistic repudiation of the status quo. Yet one should not forget that Lenin was a committed Marxist, who intensely believed that he was fulfilling the founding fathers’ revolutionary vision.15 For Lenin, Marxism was “a revelation to be received with unquestioning faith, which admits of no doubt or radical criticism.”16 This is the meaning of Antonio Gramsci’s comparison between Lenin and Saint Pauclass="underline" Lenin transformed the Marxian salvationist Weltanschauung into a global political praxis. The Bolshevik revolution was applied eschatological dialectics, and the Third International symbolized the universalization of the new revolutionary matrix. Lenin’s crucial institutional invention (the Bolshevik party) and his audacious intervention in the praxis of the world socialist movement enthused Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, one of Max Weber’s favorite disciples, who never abandoned his deep admiration for the founder of Bolshevism. Referring to Lukács’s enduring attachment to Lenin’s vision of politics, Slovene political theorist Slavoj Žižek writes, “His Lenin was the one who, à propos of the split in Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, when the two factions fought over a precise formulation of who can be a Party member as defined in the Party program, wrote: ‘Sometimes, the fate of the entire working class movement for long years to come can be decided by a word or two in the party program.’”17