This was not a message likely to appeal to intellectuals. And so it was no accident that Marx defeated Bakunin and had him expelled from the First International, and that in the modern world anarchism is but a faint shadow of socialism. Historical experience indicates that any movement that questions the ideology and interests of intellectuals dooms itself to defeat, and that any intellectual who challenges his class condemns himself to obscurity.
Socialism is commonly thought of as a theory which aims at a fairer distribution of wealth for the ultimate purpose of creating a free and just society. Indisputably this is the stated program of socialists. But behind this program lurks an even more ambitious goal, which is creating a new type of human being. The underlying premise is the idea of Helvétius that by establishing an environment which makes social behavior a natural instinct, socialism will enable man to realize his potential to the fullest. This, in turn, will make it possible, ultimately, to dispense with the state and the compulsion which is said to be its principal attribute. All socialist doctrines, from the most moderate to the most extreme, assume that human beings are infinitely malleable because their personality is the product of the economic environment: a change in that environment must, therefore, alter them as well as their behavior.
Marx pursued philosophical studies mainly in his youth. When, as a twenty-six-year-old émigré in Paris, he immersed himself in philosophy, he at once grasped the political implications of the ideas of Helvétius and his French contemporaries. In The Holy Family (1844–45), the book which marked his and Engels’s break with idealistic radicalism, he took his philosophical and psychological premises directly from Locke and Helvétius: “The whole development of man …,” he wrote, “depends on education and environment.”
If man draws all his knowledge, sensations, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human.… If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.29
This, the locus classicus of Marxist philosophy, justifies a total change in the way society is organized—that is, revolution. According to this way of thinking, which indeed inexorably flows from the philosophical premises formulated by Locke and Helvétius, man and society do not come into existence by a natural process but are “made.” This “radical behaviorism,” as it has been called, inspired Marx in 1845 to coin what is probably his most celebrated aphorism: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”30 Of course, the moment a thinker begins to conceive his mission to be not “only” observing the world and adapting to it, but changing it, he ceases to be a philosopher and turns into a politician with his own political agenda and interests.
Now, the world can conceivably be “changed” gradually, by means of education and legislation. And such a gradual change is, indeed, what all intellectuals would advocate if their exclusive concern were with improving the human condition, since evolution allows for trial and error, the only proven road to progress. But many of those who want to change the world regard human discontent as something not to be remedied but exploited. Exploitation of resentment, not its satisfaction, has been at the center of socialist politics since the 1840s: it is what distinguished the self-styled “scientific” socialists from their “Utopian” forerunners. This attitude has led to the emergence of what Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu called in 1902, in a remarkably prescient book, the “politics of hatred.” Socialism, he noted, elevates “hatred to the heights of principle,” sharing with its mortal enemies, nationalism and anti-Semitism, the need “chirurgically” to isolate and destroy the alleged enemy.31 Committed radicals fear reform because it deprives them of leverage and establishes the ruling elite more solidly in power: they prefer the most savage repression. The slogan of Russian revolutionaries—“chem khuzhe, tern luchshe” (“the worse, the better”)—spelled out this kind of thinking.
There are, of course, many varieties of socialists, from the most democratic and humane to the most despotic and cruel, but they differ over means, not ends. In tracing the attitude of Russian and foreign socialists toward the brutal experiments of the Bolsheviks, we will have occasion to see their inconsistencies: revulsion at Bolshevik atrocities combined with admiration for their undeviating commitment to the common cause and support for them whenever they were threatened. As we will show, the Bolsheviks could neither have seized power nor have kept it were it not for the support, active and passive, given them by the democratic, nonviolent socialists.
We have it on the authority of Leon Trotsky that the architects of the October 1917 coup d’état looked far beyond correcting the inequities of capitalism. Describing the future in the early 1920s, he predicted:
Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral reefs, but it will be built consciously, it will be tested by thought, it will be directed and corrected. Having ceased to be spontaneous, life will cease to be stagnant.
Having dismissed all of human history until October 1917 as an era of “stagnancy,” Trotsky proceeded to depict the human being whom the new regime would create:
Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest.… He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within the necessary limits, will subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become collectively experimental. The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and will become in its own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.… Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent … to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will.… Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious. The forms of life will acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.32
These reflections, not of an adolescent daydreamer but of the organizer of Bolshevik victories in October 1917 and in the Civil War, provide an insight into the psyche of those who made the greatest revolution of modern times. They and those who emulated them aimed at nothing less than reenacting the Sixth Day of Creation and perfecting its flawed product: man was to remake himself “with his own hands.” We can now understand what Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a prominent Russian radical of the 1860s and a major influence on Lenin, had in mind when he defined his “anthropomorphic principle” to mean “Homo homini deus” (“Man is god to man”).
The Russian intelligentsia made its appearance in the 1860s in connection with the Great Reforms of Alexander II. After its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the tsarist government decided it had to activate Russian society and involve it more in public life. But society proved difficult to stir: “The country, patiently trained to inertia, lost all power of initiative and when … informed that it was expected to act for itself, to settle its own local affairs, scarcely knew how to respond to the invitation, having lost the habit of action, lost interest in public life, especially in the provinces.”33 This inertia gave Russian intellectuals the opportunity to step forward as spokesmen for society, which in any event had no opportunities to express itself through elections.