The “Progress” of Communism – Idealism to Solipsism to Nihilism

 

No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements... A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.

                               Vladimir Lenin, 1921

The Left’s most virulent incarnation is Communism.  Wherever it has been put into place it has followed the same trajectory: a degenerative procession that moves from an original idealism to solipsism and finally descends into nihilism, a depressing amalgam of the purest cynicism and shameless, shoulder-shrugging corruption.

The noble aspiration of resisting and then defeating the forces of human oppression was the originating ideal of the theorists who conceived of Communism as both an historically inevitable human attainment – a classless society suitably ordered to bring out the best in all and satisfy the needs and wants of everyone – and a mobilizing social force that would act to free mankind from its long history of domination and exploitation.  From division and bitter conflict, perfect harmony would emerge.

Contemplating the factories and slums in nineteenth-century England gave Karl Marx the material he needed to immortalize himself – to leave the world with Marx-ism, a contagious, sweeping view of the social world that both explained human misery and proposed its elimination. Marx the penurious philosopher became for his revolutionary progeny, Marx the Prophet, his work endowed with moral infallibility, assurance that however hard they had to be, all would be justified in the end.

With the industrial revolution unfolding and profoundly altering the social and political landscape of Europe, Marx believed he had isolated and identified the cause of misery and the instrument of human oppression – capitalism with its bourgeois overseers.  As well, Marx discovered in these factories and slums that wasted, exploited underbelly of humanity that he made into the requisite theoretical antipode to the capitalist oppressor – the proletariat, a historically determined force of fury and rectification that would permanently remove the practitioners and beneficiaries of oppression.

The vast and powerful mobilizing appeal of Marx’s philosophical-historical labor came from the congealing of its confident predictions of historical and scientific inevitability with the moral outrage that naturally arose from the contemplation of human suffering and misery that was attributed to the greed and indifference of the exploiters whom he had unmasked.  Marxism was at one and the same time, science and romance – knowledge harnessed to heroic action – “Arise…you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

What the theorists deeply coveted was power. The knowers possessed of real power would force the oppressor’s hand, turn the tables. The ideal would become real.  Power would not be handed to them in spite of the compelling demonstration of the historical laws initially grasped by the theorists and the spectacle of human misery produced by the exploiters.  It would have to be taken and by extreme force through a violent revolution that Marx and his followers would never cease to romanticize as the great and permanent historical solution to the deepest of moral problems – man’s inhumanity to man.

At the beginning of the twentieth century none of these ambitious theorists anywhere had power, but they would take it in countries large and small.  One hundred years later when the 20^th century was history it was obvious that the fruit of the massive power wielded by the proudest and most ambitious of the Communists Lords across the globe – Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot – was not, had never been, nor ever would be a classless society. They had profoundly changed the world, but not in the way they had promised.  Communists wanted power to alleviate poverty and oppression and to eradicate every barrier of privilege that separates people into haves and have-nots .  When they got it they turned their Party into a privileged clan, their lands into ghastly prisons and their people into paupers, slaves and corpses.

In power the Communist removed the capitalists even in places where there were none or very few, like China and Ethiopia. They did this on behalf of the proletariat, also in places where they were scarce.  But it really did not matter.  “Capitalist” and the “proletariat” were quite fluid, protean categories. The world they wanted to rule over simply had to be made up of oppressors and oppressed of some fundamental sort – landlords/peasants, colonialists/indigenous peoples, imperialists/conquered peoples. The essential task was to strip away the rationalizing mask of privilege and difference, identify the oppressors behind it, crush them and then make the world far better than it had ever been.

Communists in power excelled at the crushing part of the promise but never delivered on the humanitarian side of it. It was impossible, and all of the oppressed and exploited on whose behalf Communists took power witnessed the surreptitious transposition of its mobilizing ideals into stark betrayals of principle and purpose. 

The Communist presentation of their new and wonderful society was no less than a solipsistic cocoon woven by its apologists who ignored or rationalized away every untoward intrusion of fact and reality.  The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.  Communism in power became that “Self” under its own constant modification preternaturally blind to the conspicuously brutal reality of its own failures, recognizing nothing but the invented glorious movement of its own journey to perfection.   

The twentieth-century’s great Communist figures were themselves solipsists of sort.  Leon Trotsky was said by a fellow revolutionary, Milovan Đilas, to be: “an excellent speaker, brilliant stylist and skilled polemicist, a man cultured and of excellent intelligence, was deficient in only one quality: sense of reality.”* Indeed. Convinced of his own omniscience, ensconced defiantly in his hermetic Marxist world, Trotsky spent his action-packed life using his formidable intelligence to bend reality through the prism of his own imagined perfect understanding of the world. Stalin, who turned himself into the God of the Communist world, was completely removed from the people living in workers’ paradise he was so busy making and extolling.  He never visited any of the kolkhozy, the collective farms, inhabited by the tens of millions peasants he had brutally coerced into joining, spent no time with nor associated with factory workers.  He never ventured to Ukraine in the early 1930s where he might have caught a glimpse of the families he had pushed to starvation, people driven by their savage hunger to insanity and cannibalism, individuals numbering in the millions.  When his officers brought him bad news from the German front during World War II he often had them shot.   He allowed no part of the world to intrude upon or disrupt the flow of his genius.  Stalin’s entire working world was composed of himself and the conniving sycophants he retrieved from the dregs and cycled through his entourage, a grotesque, treacherous crew. Stalin trusted only himself.  Being close to him was highly precarious and frequently lethal.

The perfection of the unreal “self” of Communism’s solipsistic stage culminates with the Cult of Personality, the elevation of a single individual, morally and cognitively complete, a ludicrous phantasm whose being becomes “the Revolution,” the full expression of the goodness and humanity that Communism had promised. The Self is complete. Nothing remains to be added – “Stalin the Great Teacher” for Russian Communism was both sufficient and necessary.   

Communist solipsism gives way to nihilism. Nothing of the original ideal is left. The nihilism so conspicuous in the final days of the Soviet Union marked the final default of the ruling ideology and signaled the moral collapse of a society whose members no longer possessed any enduring principles and defensible ideas around which to organize and make sense of their daily lives. 

In the “mature” Socialist Workers Paradise no longer does anyone pretend to believe in the system except out of fear.  The ruled-over pretend to believe to avoid harassment and punishment, mainly to be left alone.  The rulers also pretend to believe the lies because they know that their power is only sustained by the persistence of the lie. They too are afraid, afraid of the people they rule over.  Everyone knows the truth and everyone knows that everyone else knows – mutual mistrust, suspicion and loathing flow.

And cynicism – the systematic, pervasive lying which sustains Communist regimes produces the purest, rawest cynicism.  Cynicism is indiscriminate revenge taken against liars and institutions and practices that are immersed in lies.  A cynic is one who has given up on the truth.  He sees everyone as a liar, a fraud or a dupe.  The cynic, unlike the skeptic, is a believer, but can only bring himself to believe the worst of others.  He concedes the entire expanse of humanity to the liar and his dupes.  There are no other categories to envision or employ.  In the cynic’s world everyone is on his own – one does whatever one has to do. The person of integrity is a dupe and a loser; corruption rules.

Cynicism and corruption are the indelible marks of mature Communist regimes.  Some, like the Soviet Union simply collapse – too sclerotic, too tired, to incompetent to continue. Others persist, their wily and intelligent leaders not willing to relinquish their power, able to adapt, reinvent themselves and keep the fiction working.   

*Quoted from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, A Reassessment, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, 9.

Century Twenty-one: the Desolate March*

Moral nihilism is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the common factor between it and Bolshevism.** 

                                                               Hugh Seton-Watson

The twenty-first century is well underway. We can readily contemplate the remarkable, socially and morally transforming effects of these powerful, intermingling forces that have come into ascendancy: personalism, a proto-modern ideological system that urges the pursuit and enlargement of the subjective self, liberated from the confines of repressive, traditional institutions; therapy, that seeks to nurture and speak reassuringly to that subjective self and that identifies what forces may impede its growth and development; and amusement (particularly in the electronic form) that conjures up for the restless subjective self, programs for stimulation, provides endless possibilities for self-expression, and  promises everyone diverse opportunities for temporary escape. The twenty-first century is the perfect time and place for the nihilist and the hedonist.

In such a volatile, connected world, with so many changes and so much uncertainty, one discovers what seems to be a persistent, devilish play of the ironic in human events. History has always been a perverse affair. It is also often cruelly ironic, as Edward Gibbon, writing of the decadence of an earlier great civilization, the Roman empire, brilliantly demonstrated over two hundred years ago. Human beings, when they come to be measured against the goodness and greatness of their Gods, can only be regarded as feeble, deluded creatures. Says Gibbon in one of his bitterest, ironic musings:

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from Heaven arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian.  He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Gibbon pits the theologian against the historian. These two classes of theorists represented for Gibbon two perennial philosophical archetypes for interpreting or understanding the deep complexities of the human condition.  Theology, understood in this context, is a theoretical dreaming, the corruption of the Christian faith by metaphysics and superstition. The “theologian” comprehends (or invents) and dwells upon the possibilities of perfection—hence perhaps the delusion-based pleasure of believing that man can achieve something approximating divinity and escape his limitations. Gibbon’s theologian was transmogrified in the twentieth into the most grotesque and dangerous of all creatures, the ideologue. The ideologue, the man of total revolution, sought to recreate society and make man perfect.

The historian by contrast is a moral pathologist, a moral philosopher, actually, grounded in the knowledge of the constraining realities of human nature. He probes reluctantly, with a “melancholy duty,” into the many human aspirations that seem to descend into folly. He measures the expressed aspirations against the actual accomplishments. In these investigations, he often discovers the processes of degradation. The historian in a way has the worst of it since what he must return to, again and again, is the stark, unavoidable reality of human arrogance, folly and corruption.

History, therefore, must often become a mocking and deeply melancholy scene. The irony of history thus is all too often cruel and wildly perverse. In the narratives of success and failure, history captures painfully the disparity between the reaches of human aspirations and the reality of their achievement, grotesque applications of the law of unintended consequence—efficiency experts who produce less work, social reformers who make peoples’ lives even more miserable than imagined, spiritual leaders who degrade their followers below the level of beasts, utopias that turn into hells. History manages to highlight the dominance of human pride and arrogance. Nowhere, I would suggest, does this observation strike with more force and vivacity than in the contemplation of the events of the twentieth century. Never has there been a time in which we have collectively possessed such immense bodies of knowledge and so much material capacity to advance it. Never before have the technologies been so powerful and so rich with potential, and the aspirations so ambitious and full of confidence. Yet with all of this, the ironic lesson is the danger of losing sight of our own limitations: and with that vital loss of moral understanding we find ourselves on a desolate march.

*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
 Complete electronic copy free on demand.

**Quoted from: Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Norton, 2000.

Lenin & the Legacy of Nihilism

And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker.

                                                                Thomas Hobbes

From the beginning, with the toppling of the Provisional Government in October 1917, the Bolsheviks never permitted a free and democratic election.  They forcefully disbanded the constituent assembly when they realized they could not control the outcome.  

Once in power Lenin began to operate as if he believed that he could build his perfect society simply by giving orders and shooting whoever was reluctant or unenthused.  His first major “accomplishment” upon taking power was the creation of the Cheka, the chief organ of repression and terror that became Stalin’s chief instrument of rule.  The second was the invention of the concentration camp, a dehumanized space deliberately created to maximize human misery and to assert the absolute power of the ruling party over whomever it cared to. Massive, unrelenting coercion was Lenin’s gift to the world, stamping itself all over the regime from its beginning and persisting to the end. “Unlimited power above all law,” as Lenin himself put it. [From Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, New York, 1994, 118] 

No one, absolutely no one, was permitted to question or resist. Lenin was a master of scorn and vituperation. Language for Lenin was not an instrument of persuasion. It was a weapon. Resisters in his expansive lexicon of abuse were “scum.”  The “bourgeois” Kulaks he marked for elimination were “blood suckers.”  “[F]rom 1920 on Lenin described enemies in terms eerily anticipating the SS: ‘bloodsuckers,’ ‘spiders,’ ‘leeches,’ ‘parasites,’ ‘insects,’ ‘bedbugs,’ ‘fleas,’ the language suggesting threatening and dehumanized enemies infecting the people, requiring cleansing.” [Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005, 322]  Oppositionists in Stalin’s world were “insects”.  Decades later in Cambodia Pol Pot identified for “liquidation” “malignant microbes” within the party.  [Robert Service, Camaradas: Breve Historia del Comunismo, 2009, 565]  The boundless intellectual conceit of the men who installed themselves as champions of the world’s oppressed people made them into ferocious haters. They were incapable of viewing those who did not share their ideas and resisted their program as human beings. Thus when their efforts to build the perfect society failed, their frustration, disappointment and fury had a perfect target, an array of “enemies” that had populated their binary, ideological world — “counterrevolutionaries,” “bourgeoisie scum,” “reactionaries,” “priests” – all the remnants of the old order and utterly debased.

The lying and the hyper- and coercive- secrecy that was necessary to rationalize the abuse of the unenthused, to sustain the lies and to insulate the Party bosses from the consequences of their failure eventually made effective governmental decision-making impossible for the Communist governments.  When no one can tell the truth, or when the truth simply becomes the official propaganda pronouncement of the moment eventually no one can trust anyone. Suspenseful anticipation of the next propaganda turn saps energy, exhausts resources. With massive, institutional lying the power brokers ultimately slide into a state of helplessness.  “Establishments that could collectivize a peasantry and nationalize an entire country subsequently found themselves unable to take the slightest collective actions when something failed to go according to plan….  Instead….all manner of incentives [were provided] for even loyalists to lie and report fairy tales.” [Stephen Kotkin, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, New York, 13-14]  

The land that would become the first Socialist Workers Paradise and the model for the Proletarian revolution, promised by Lenin in 1917 was by 1989 reduced through corruption, dishonesty and incompetence to a crummy, third world shamble whose vodka-besotted workers could not even make a decent bread toaster.

Over time the coercion necessary to perpetuate the increasingly apparent dishonesty that rationalized the coercion and violence was simply insufficient to disguise the disparity between the reality reflected by the facts all around, and the glaring absurdity of the official propaganda. 

Even the efforts of the Soviet leaders after Stalin’s passing to soften and humanize the nakedly brutal and coercive system their mentor had left them of necessity to continue the systematic lying and deception. The regime by 1955 two years after Stalin’s death was attempting the rehabilitation of victims of his terror from the previous two decades.  But it now faced a huge dilemma: it would not be good for the Bolshevik leaders’ future prospects if the people they had now ruled for a generation learned the truth about the how many innocent people Stalin and his assistants (many of whom  were now in charge) had selected over the years to be shot. As Dmitri Volkogonov reports:  “It was therefore decided that the KGB and the State Prosecutor’s office should publish ‘Instruction No. 108ss on Camps’, which stipulated that in the information given to families, for those who had been shot on non-judicial orders the date of death should be given as roughly ten years from the time of their arrest, and the cause should be fictitious.” [Victor Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders who Build the Soviet Regime, New York, 1998, 393]   Such was the staggering cynicism and dishonesty of a regime that was now hopelessly trapped in its own secretive murderous history.  Though pressed to reform and even wanting to reform, Stalin’s heirs were unable to let go of their dirty secrets. They now attempted to escape accountability through distortion and half-truths. The character of the men in charge could never be anything more than a reflection of the coercive, dishonest system they had imposed.  

The governing architecture of the Soviet Union, grounded in the Marxist eschatological promise of the end of capitalism, was put into place with the same kind of massive coercion around the world with the similar resulting waste, wreckage and misery.  The methods and practices of the Soviet masters, including the systematic dishonesty, were imitated with similar disastrous effects. The systemic, highly coerced perversion of truth-telling would with each imitative Communist dictatorship – from East Germany to Cuba to North Korea – ultimately degenerate into moral nihilism, entirely bereft of any purpose or rationale beyond the preservation of privilege and power of the ruling class – corruption and degeneracy of the masters; misery for the ruled.  Nihilism was the inevitable culmination of Communist morality. This fact, perhaps, helps to explain why the Communist leaders could sustain for decades the murder, persecution, and desolation so characteristic of these regimes and yet pretend to be virtuous. “Moral nihilism is not only the central feature of National Socialism, but also the common factor between it and Bolshevism.”  [Robert Conquest, Reflections of a Ravaged Century, New York, 2000, 64]