Well, it does, and it always did. Not only Stalin but Lenin and Trotsky were hungry for absolute power from the get-go. Trotsky bragged about the murder of the Romanov family, when the Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and five children and a handful of servants were shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by a Bolshevik gang. The Soviets lied about the murders for eight years and then claimed that they had not been responsible for the deaths, but Trotsky, writing about it years later, hailed at as masterstroke, letting everyone know that the Bolsheviks meant business, that they would accomplish their goals by any means necessary, that they would stop at nothing, and that those who supported them must be willing accomplices in what W. H. Auden, to his subsequent regret, once called “the necessary murder.”1
Yet, as New York’s Jonathan Chait notes, in his piece “100 Years After the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism Hasn’t Changed”, somehow the romance of the “revolution” never quite fades away:
“To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Soviet experiment, the New York Times op-ed page has been publishing a regular series on communism. The overall tone of the essays runs toward wistfulness, and the latest contribution, by Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing journal Jacobin, presents communism as tanned, rested, and ready. Sunkara sees a new future for Marxism, only this time without the purges, gulag, mass starvation, and other unpleasant features.”
Chait sportingly reads through back issues of Jacobin, a task I would not wish on anyone, and dutifully reports all the lame moral evasions, the championing of that pathetic monster Hugo Chávez, and stentorian cries of “forward!” “What is needed today, and what is more urgent than ever, is not dialogue or reconciliation, not harmony and understanding, but a radical commitment to press decisively forward.”
Chait does agree with Sunkara on one point, that the threat to democracy today comes from the right rather than the left, at least in the U.S. “That is correct,” Chait counters, “but only because in the United States today, Marxism represents a minuscule faction with no plausible opportunity to obtain national-scale power.”
Chait is quite correct that these columns have a “wistful” tone,2 though I can only make my judgments based on the first paragraph, since I find Marxian apologists as tedious as Christian ones. The fantasy of the Marxists is that “people like us” will be in power—the noble, unselfish people—who will only act for the good of everyone, and who, because they are acting on behalf of all the people, must have all the power. Today’s “real left” in the U.S. is, of course, not the “Workers Party” but the “Not the Straight White Guys Party”. There is the same longing for absolute power, the same sense of grievance, but, springing as it does largely from issues of racial and sexual identity, the “new rage” lacks the coherence of the old one, leading to long arguments over whether it’s okay for white girls to twerk, for example. Long may its divisions prevail!
- In his poem “Spain”, written just after his return from that country during its civil war, once a holy conflict for the left. Auden was “writing left” but, at least as he remembered it, starting to turn right, claiming that the sight of the Spanish cathedrals, pillaged and looted by communist and anarchist mobs, sparked an eventual spiritual transformation. ↩︎
- How silly is it for the New York Times to “commemorate” an event that ultimately subjected the human race to more horrors than any event other than World War II—and that by only a little? Pretty fucking silly. ↩︎
