The Specter Haunting Europe

There is a specter haunting Europe—the specter of Marxism. It’s only a specter, of course, because Marxism itself is dead. Over at the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries gives us a rundown on current attempts to resurrect the corpse, whose grinning skull still catches the eye, despite his best efforts to conceal it. Twenty million deaths under Stalin? Thirty million under Mao? Two million under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? What’s your point?

The current “crisis” of capitalism—which is quite embarrassing to anyone who actually believes that efficient markets are the answer to everything—gives the Marxist misfits the opportunity to dig up poor Karl, though, to their credit, some of them at least are willing to admit that the irony cuts both ways.

“The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localized capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organization,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (aka “Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis”). “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

Of course, modern capitalism isn’t dependent on Chinese workers, and, even though China today is not exactly a worker’s paradise, hundreds of millions of Chinese today are enjoying a vastly better life than they, or their ancestors, ever enjoyed under either Mao or any of the previous emperors. But still, Jacques didn’t get it completely wrong, which, for a French Marxist thinker, is both impressive and surprising.

The great struggle for contemporary Marxist thinkers is to pretend that Marx didn’t say the things he said and didn’t believe the things he believed. Marx believed in the necessity of violent revolution? No way! And all that stuff about Hegel? Boring! You don’t have to read that shit!

In the preface to the second edition of volume 1 of Das Kapital, Marx discusses his relationship to Hegel in some detail, explaining his differences, but also affirming Hegel’s significance, saying that, at the beginning of his career, in reaction to those rejected Hegel as useless and unimportant, “I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker.”

The point, for Marx, was that Hegel grasped and understood the totality of human reality as no thinker had ever done. The fact that he had that totality “upside down” is both decisive and secondary at the same time.

“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into the forms of thought.”*

Hegel, separating himself from Kant, claimed that there was literally nothing that the human mind could not know, and that the human mind, having reached its own fullness in Hegel’s time and through Hegel’s own work, had made the human world fully rational and fully real (“the real is the rational and the rational is the real”). Contemporary European society—German society in particular—was thus legitimate in every detail. Marx, flipping Hegel on his head, “proved” just the opposite—society was illegitimate, was monstrous, was inhuman, in every detail, more monstrous than it had ever been before. It is this entire rejection of current society, which “justified” Marx’s pre-existing feelings of hatred and contempt for a society from which he felt entirely alienated, which speaks to his modern-day followers, who feel similarly alienated, and who are naturally happy to be told that their hatred is a noble one.

If we are omniscient, as both Hegel and Marx told us that we are, well, we ought to be omnipotent as well. For Marx, unlimited knowledge justified, and in fact both encouraged and gave vent to, his unlimited hatred. And hatred is the fuel of revolution.

Despite what many Marxists claim today, Marx never advocated compromise of any sort. To compromise—to surrender control of the revolution to parliamentary elections—is to acknowledge an authority other than oneself, which is exactly what Marx most detested. He was the authority. He answered to no one. On the contrary. Everyone answered to him! At least, that’s how it would be, after the revolution!

Over at the New Statesman, John Gray has a review of a new editon of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which serves as a useful corrective to the “new Marxism.” Serge was involved in the Bolshevik Revolution from the get go, and watched as thousands of innocent people were slaughtered—in the name, of course, of “the people.” Gray acknowledges the importance of Serge’s eyewitness account, but argues that Serge shrinks from drawing the true moral of his experiences.

“Totalitarian repression was not a regrettable departure from the high ideals of socialist philosophy – an unfortunate error of judgement on the part of the Bolshevik leaders. They had no alternative. Mass terror was a condition of their survival. In many ways an admirable human being, Serge refused to face the inexorable logic of revolution, summarised so clearly by Lenin in his celebrated dictum, ‘Who/whom?’: kill or be killed.”

But one can go a step beyond even Gray’s analysis. Lenin and Trotsky did have an alternative. They did not have to be the supreme, blood-thirsty egoists they chose to be. They embraced terror, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. They wanted absolute power, which would necessarily express itself through absolute terror.

Afterwords
Trotsky, so often presented as the “good” Bolshevik, was immensely proud of the Bolshevik decision to slaughter Czar Nicholas II and his entire family, women and children alike, with no semblance of legal procedure. It proclaimed to the world that the Bolsheviks acknowledged no limits on their right to do whatever they pleased, and forced temporizing “liberals” to make a choice: either for us or against us! If you are with us, you are smeared with the blood of women and children, and cannot protest against even the most heinous crimes in the name of Communism! If you are against us, well, you know your fate!