One of the most acerbic reactions to the decision by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Yakov Sverdlov, and their companions to disband the remains of democracy in Russia came from the jailed Polish-German Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg in her manuscript notes on the Russian Revolution. In his trilogy, Leszek Kołakowski quotes Luxemburg’s comment: “Freedom only for supports of the government, only for members of the single party, however numerous—this is not freedom. Freedom must always be for those who think differently.” Kołakowski accurately captured the thrust of Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of Bolshevism:
Socialism was a live historical movement and could not be replaced by administrative decrees. If public affairs were not properly discussed they would become the province of a narrow circle of officials, and corruption would be inevitable. Socialism called for a spiritual transformation of the masses, and terrorism was no way to bring this about: there must be unlimited democracy, a free public opinion, freedom of elections and the press, the right to hold meetings and form associations. Otherwise the only active part of society would be bureaucracy: a small group of leaders who give orders, and the workers’ task would be applaud them. The dictatorship of the proletariat would be replaced by the dictatorship of a clique.11
The European civil war did indeed take place in the twentieth century, but its main stake was not the victory of Bolshevism over Nazism (or vice versa). It was rather their joint offensives against liberal modernity.12 Both totalitarian movements were intoxicated with “a state of expectancy induced by the intuitive certainty that an entire phase of history is giving way to a new one”—a mood of Aufbruch that became the ideological rationale for the totalist project to engineer reality.13 This explains the readiness of so many Communists to acquiesce in Soviet-Nazi complicity, including the 1939 “nonaggression” pact: the radical militants saw the “decadent” Western democracies as doomed to disappear, and they were therefore willing to ally themselves with the equally antibourgeois Fascists. This is not to say that anti-Fascism was just a propaganda device for the Comintern, or that anti-Marxism was not a central component of National Socialism. The point is that the two movements were essentially and unflinchingly opposed to democratic values, institutions, and practices. German political thinker Karl Dietrich Bracher once memorably stated that “totalitarian movements are the children of the age of democracy.”14 In their most accomplished form, in the Soviet Union and Germany, Leninism and Fascism represented “a ferocious attack on and a frightening alternative to liberal modernity.”15 Their simultaneous experiences situated them in “a ‘negative intimacy’ in the European framework of ‘war and revolution’”16—a “mortal embrace”17 that increased suffering and destruction to a level unprecedented in history.
In my view, clarifying these issues is enormously important for understanding the real political, moral, and cultural stakes of the post-Cold War order, an order that Ken Jowitt assumes to be “without Leninism,” but where Leninist and fundamentalist-primordialist legacies continue to haunt political memory and imagination. On the other hand, we live in a world in which not only do post-Communist specters keep resurfacing, but where post-Fascist exclusionary delusions (and their practical consequences) are not fully extinct. The war between liberalism and its revolutionary opponents (and their nostalgia) is not over, and new varieties of extreme utopian politics should not be automatically regarded as impossible.
In a famous scene in his novel La condition humaine (translated into English as Man’s Fate), novelist André Malraux captured the great dream of twentieth-century Communism (or at least the romantic-heroic moments associated with what the French writer once called l’illusion lyrique, the lyrical illusion). The scene takes place in China, during the failed Communist insurrection of 1926. Captured by the Kuomintang, a Communist militant is asked what he finds so appealing in the cause he fights for. The answer is “because Communism defends human dignity.” “And what is dignity?” asks the tormentor. “The opposite of humiliation,” replies the true believer, shortly before his death. I know of many former Communists who joined the cause because of this extraordinary novel, which came out in the early 1930s.
For young Malraux, Communism was a story of purity and regeneration that motivated a fanatical commitment to the still promising future and a visceral opposition to the real or imagined squalor of the old, dying order. In his memoirs, Arthur Koestler described the moral attraction of early Communism, comparing it to the asceticism and martyrdom of the first Christians. But, Koestler hastened to add, in a few short decades Communism declined from the heights of moral idealism to the horrors of the Borgias and the Inquisition. Yet even so lucid a critic of totalitarianism as Raymond Aron was not ready, until the last years of his life, to admit that Communism and Nazism were equally criminal in their very systemic nature. In his influential book Démocratie et totalitarisme, based on a course he delivered in 1957-58, Aron pointed to a major distinction between the two totalitarian experiments, referring to “the idea that inspires each of the two undertakings: in one case the final result is the labor camp, whereas in the other it is the gas chamber. In one case we deal with the will to construct the new man and possibly another man by whatever means; in the other there is a literally demonic will to annihilate a pseudo-race.” Later, however, in his Memoirs, Aron renounced this distinction and wrote an unequivocal indictment of both systems as equally reprehensible: “I abhor Communism as much as I detest Nazism. The argument I once used to distinguish the class Messianism of the former from the race one advocated by the latter does not impress me anymore. The apparent universalism of Communism has become, in last analysis, a mystification.”18 This was a harsh statement that many intellectuals and social activists today are still unready to endorse. The explanation for this reluctance lies, in my view, in the enduring mythologies of anti-Fascism, including those related to the Spanish Civil War, Communist participation in the resistance movements, and a failure to admit that Nazism was not the offspring but the entranced enemy of liberal capitalism.
THE MYTH OF THE PREDESTINED PARTY
The party as the incarnation of historical rationality, with the revolutionary avant-garde elected to lead the otherwise lethargic masses into the Communist paradise, was the hallmark of the Leninist intervention in the political praxis of the twentieth century. Without the party, there would be no Bolshevik revolution and no gulag, one can say. The myth of the party, more than the myth of the leader, explains the longevity and endurance of the Leninist project. The other side, the Fascists, while invoking the commands of historical providence, invested the ultimate center of power less in the institution than in the infallible “genius” of the leader. The party mattered, but there was never the same type of institutional charismatic magnet that Leninist formations represented, particularly in the case of Nazi Germany. In the case of Fascist Italy, when the charismatic leader was deposed in 1943, the party simply could not reinvent itself despite the fact that it successfully managed to reassert its autonomy vis-à-vis the leader by way of the Fascist Grand Council.19 In Italy proper the party disintegrated, while in the Salo Republic (the part of the country under German control) Mussolini simply became a puppet in Hitler’s hands.20 Mussolini had lost the ability to perform the role of “of a modern propheta who offered his followers a new ‘mazeway’ (world-view) to redeem the nation from chaos and lead it into a new era, one that drew on a mythicized past to regenerate the future.”21 Hitler’s myth was much more resilient. Ian Kershaw remarked that his personality cult, as the nexus of “the social expectations and motivations invested in him by his followers,”22 experienced a “slow deflation rather than the swift puncture.”23