Zhelyu Zhelev’s “Fascism”: Introductory Remarks

November 2, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ Leave a comment

With apologies for how long it’s taken me to translate this bit of text, I present you the introductory remarks of Fascism

Introductory Remarks

Contrary to expectation, interest in the topic of fascism has not lessened as the time between the end of the second world war and the present day has increased. We are witness to this fact. As an ideology, political system, and social practice, fascism still provokes scholars’ attention. The literature on this topic amounts to a massive mountain.

Clearly, the reason for this strange phenomenon cannot be found in a general historical interest. On all accounts it looks as though a series of supplementary social and political reasons, rooted in the complex circumstances of the 20^th century, also fuel this interest: 1. The majority of people who were contemporaries of and/or participants in the events in question are still alive; the war either changed and altered the fate of each and every one of them, or else permanently left them somehow marked. For these people, every serious investigation of fascism is taken as a kind of reflection on their life, struggle, and suffering. 2. Occasionally, in many different places, military-political regimes arise which willingly borrow in both form and method from the battle arsenal of fascism (the physical extermination of Pinochet’s political enemies, the Cambodian genocide, etc.). These regimes also fuel interest in that phenomenon called fascism. 3. The current complex international relations and the occasionally increased tension and threat of confrontation between the nuclear superpowers also remind us of the lessons of the second world war which was sparked by fascist countries. Once again, we’re forced to return to and to reconsider fascism. 4. Finally, every attempt to interpret the value of cultural heritage and to appraise the complex trajectory of the movement and development of culture and civilization brings us, again and again, to the possibility that all culture and all civilization is threatened and may be ultimately destroyed unless the presuppositions of fascism are once and for all removed.

There are probably a number of other reasons in addition to these. But whatever the reasons for the continued interest in fascism may be, they only remind us that it’s time to provide a proper theory of fascism which naturally and organically unites all of the studies about its disparate aspects.

The truth is that this theory doesn’t yet exists despite the fact that there have been mountains of books and articles written on the topic examining this or that element of fascism. In a sense, this creates a paradoxical situation in which all the necessary methods and preconditions for the building of such a theory are readily available, and yet the theory itself has yet to crystalize. On its face, these are: a) the methodology of Marxism—historical materialism—that most solid and fruitful theoretical base of studying history and society; b) the mass of factual and documentary material (and more); c) the presence of a deep theoretical study of different aspects of fascism: economics, political structure, ideology, propaganda, terror, etc.

It’s apparent to all contemporary scholars that a singular unifying theory of fascism must not only account for the economical and political aspects, but must also find a place for the psychological, socio-psychological, and culturo-logical elements of this phenomenon. And in order to avoid eclecticism and achieve an organic unity of these elements, we need a theoretical base that can only be supplied by historical materialism. As deterministic as it may seem at first glance, the truth is that no other method in contemporary sociological thought other than historical materialism could successfully solve the large and complex task of building up a single theory of fascism since it alone provides: 1. An explanation of the link between the economic base of fascism—financial capital—with its political superstructure, and above all within a specific country’s system; 2. The means to show the opposite in an already constructed superstructure—namely, the influence of the fascist country’s foundational institutions on the economy. The latter is also very important with an eye towards a wholistic understanding of the subject. Sadly, the current historiography, and to that extent, Marxism, too, is very weak on this point. As with all other social phenomena, despite the fact that the economic base plays a definitive role on the superstructure, the latter can also have a strong effect on, and, sometimes, can play a decisive role with respect to the economic base. From this point of view, the attempts of the fascist regimes to regulate their economic development is of great interest: the Third Reich’s attempts to control and plan its industrial and agricultural production, to regulate the proprietary relationships in the village, etc.; or the attempts of the Italian fascists to control and regulate the contradictions between the industrial workers and mercenary hires through the corporation.

Precisely from this point of view, fascism presents not only the means by which the proletarian revolution is prevented, but also the attempt to offer an alternative.

The Relevance of the Topic

It’s been 36 years since the end of the second world war. In that time, two new generations have been born. They don’t have personal acquaintance with fascism. Their impressions of it are fueled by the many books and films on the topic. For that reason, to many of them fascism looks more exotic than terrifying. The struggles, the suffering, the grievous and countless sacrifices that fascism inflicted on the old generation are not, in their imaginations, as alive and vivid as they are in that which experienced it. Time has done its work.

This is only natural. All events one day become history. And new generations are not bound to live with history, nor with the grief and suffering of their ancestors. They have new tasks and pursue their own ends. If it weren’t the case, they wouldn’t differ from the old generations.

But it is precisely this fact that obscures a great danger. Because it is this that leads to a magnanimous attitude and a lack of political vigilance towards the era’s biggest dangers, while, at the same time, fascism remains more than mere history.

The potential danger of fascism exists even today.

Nearly daily we are reminded of this. The most recent event was the failed right-wing pro-fascist coup attempt in Spain, executed by the National Guard through an armed invasion of parliament.

Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, too, turned out to have had organizational ties to the American National Socialist party which exists freely in that country.

National Socialist and neo-fascist parties and groups exist in a number of countries in Western Europe as well. Currently they’re a minority and don’t have any serious influence over political life, but they’re no longer harmless.

Some of them conduct military trainings with their members in the field, while others dare to hold international meetings and conferences, to march in the streets and sing fascist songs, to deface monuments dedicated to the anti-fascist struggle, to attack synagogues or to organize racist protests against people of color. The bombing of public places– the victims of which are completely innocent people—has become a common occurrence. Here and there, in different places in Western Europe, either Hitler’s mustache, or his haircut has once again become fashionable.

The most disturbing thing about this whole neo-fascist bacchanalia is the sympathetic attitude of some of the governments of these Western nations towards these events. They view them as a kind of harmless reliving of the past that doesn’t pose any real danger. But it goes without saying that in the beginning, Hitler’s party was also seen as a motley gathering that no one even conceived could come to power.

It is only in this way that we can explain why, even now, Hitler is considered an honorary citizen of 179 West-German towns; why there are so many numerous biographies of him, published in large numbers and distributed freely on the open market; why there are so many political relics of the Third Reich listed at fabulous prices which today constitute a veritable Hitler reliquary; why so many official bodies or national institutions are falling over themselves to declare the limits of Nazi crimes, etc.

This tolerant attitude towards the most criminal national-political phenomenon of the 20^th century—fascism—appears in other guises as well. On December 15^th, 1980 the regional courts of West Berlin decided to pardon Van der Lubbe.[1] The verdict handed down by the Imperial Court in 1933 was recognized as constituting an “apparent perversion of the law.” Van der Lubbe should have only been tried as an arsonist. Nothing is said about the fact that he was a patsy for the real arsonists. What’s said about the main defendant—G. Dimitrov—is so modest that it amounts a perversion of historical fact.

Dimitrov is presented as an ordinary defendant, acquitted due to lack of evidence. About his titanic fight against the ascending “brown plague”[2], about the heavy moral and political blows he delivered to National Socialism from the very beginning, about his heroic example, as well as his insight into future developments which were subsequently confirmed by history, nothing at all is said.

It’s as though the Leipzig trial of 1933-1934 was merely a criminal trail, and not as a clash between two ideologies and two political systems.

Even more alarming are the cases of sympathetic attitudes towards the budding fascist movements whom the official state police of some countries, led by formally democratic considerations, provides protection to from…the democratic antifascists.

It doesn’t need to be proven that the sympathetic and conciliatory attitude towards the fascist threat, as well as a general underestimation of that threat, makes it more real.

But, on the other hand, to the extent that the reality of this threat is determined to be purely psychological and socio-psychological factors, and to an even greater extent by economic, political, and historical causes, it deserves a closer look.

We believe that the question of the possible rebirth of fascism must be posed and answered solely scientifically, and not empirically or by way of propaganda.

What’s needed first of all is a distinction between the historical and the political manifestation of fascism. As with all social phenomena, it, too, is subject to two forms of negation.

In the first sense—the historical—fascism has already been experienced and it can never return. This means that as an idea and a political practice that claims to have discovered a new path for humanity, a new world order, and a different, higher meaning for human life, fascism has irrevocably failed.

After the revelations at the end of the Second World War, and especially after the Nuremberg Trials which provided massive documentation of the monstrous criminality of fascism, it can no longer appeal to any nation. For humanity, it has become a spent idea.

Furthermore, in the political consciousness of 20^th century people fascism is a completely odious phenomenon, which is why every time regimes are forced to quietly resort to its political methods, they’re also quick to distanced themselves from it, and to deny any connection or similarity to its practices. This is indirectly evidenced by the fact being accused of fascism is today tantamount to being completely discredited in a moral-political sense.

It’s precisely these considerations that give us grounds to claim that historical fascism has been fully overcome.

However, it doesn’t follow from this that it has also been politically overcome; i.e. that under certain circumstances the ruling arm of one country or another will not resort to borrowing various elements from fascist practice or to take up arms from its political arsenal.

Nobody can guarantee this won’t happen. Moreover, each of us following political events, has had multiple opportunities to observe how easily tempted by this is every military junta that comes to power through a coup. Pinochet’s regime is the most recent example in this respect.

The political defense of fascism has its own deep foundations in economics—in those processes involved in centralizing and concentrating capital and property which are deeply inherent in imperialism. This isn’t a matter of anachronistic phenomena, but of the objective tendency that maintains state capitalism. The larger the centralization and concentration of the means of production in the hands of the monopolies and the state, the larger their economic power, the greater the ability to destroy liberal democracy, to liquidate the civil and political liberties of individuals, and, following that, to bring about fascist totalitarianism.

As far back as sixty years ago Lenin was already turning his attention towards this and other phenomena in his “Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism”: the replacement of free competition with a state monopoly in the economy (in the base) corresponds to a replacement of a bourgeois democracy with political reactionism in the superstructure. (According to Lenin the political superstructure under imperialism “presents a reversal of democracy towards political reactionism. Free competition corresponds with democracy. Monopolies correspond to political reactionism.”) Or, to say the same thing, a monopoly of the economy necessarily grows into a monopoly of politics, and from there spreads into all other spheres of public life. And it’s well known that a monopoly of politics always has one singular form: dictatorship.

Of course, the possibility of a fascist dictatorship is not always a reality in politics, but it exists as an ordinary possibility which can threaten us during periods of significant social crisis characteristic of our century. In any case, the tendency towards totalitarianism in the current world is so strong that even traditional bourgeois democracies aren’t as idealistic as they were in the 19^th century; quite frequently, one can observe in their political life certain steps and actions that reminds one more of dictatorship than of democracy.

The relevance of the topic has another side: the necessity of clarifying the structure, laws, and the hidden mechanisms and levers of the fascist state. Until this is done it will always remain a mystery how fascism—and especially the German kind—with its anti-scientific and reactionary ideology could have dragged along the nations of Europe and used them as tools for its criminal aims; what was the system of “barbarization”, stupidity, numbing, corruption, demoralization and dehumanization that turned millions of burgers, philistines, and loyalists into a modern version of Tamerlane’s Horde, threatening all civilization with destruction?

We know too much about the crimes of fascism (the burning of books, the concentration camps, the gas chambers, etc.), but know far too little about that machine called “the fascist state” that committed those crimes.

We know too much about what we call “bestial fascism” and almost nothing about the “ordinary”, every day fascism from which the bestial kind grows.

This is why it’s not enough to say that fascism is the dictatorship of the most reactionary imperial cliques (which, of course, is perfectly true) as an answer to these questions. It’s necessary to go further: to study in detail the fascist dictatorship as a system and a form of state power.

2. The Numerous Definitions of Fascism

Many different definitions from many different perspectives have been given during the different periods of fascism. Every one of them, to a certain extent, uncovers the political reality of that contradictory and culturally mysterious 20^th century phenomenon. After the famous 1921 “March on Rome” when the Italian fascists come to power, many Marxists began to think of fascism as a peculiar petit-bourgeois revolution. As early as 1923 S.M. Bronsky describes fascism as a “petit-bourgeois revolution” and “a struggle of the middle classes for self-preservation” in The Communist Revolution (6-25).[3] In the beginning that’s how the Italian Communists, who were the first to feel the blows of fascist dictatorship on their backs, thought of it too. As L. Longo describes the discussions among the Italian Communists and Socialists, the fascist movement was understood as “the result of a revolt of the petit-bourgeoisie, trapped between large capital and the worker’s movement” (64-199).[4]

This was also the understanding of the entire social-democratic population of Europe during the 20’s and 30’s.

That was also A. Gramsci’s understanding. But attached to his name is a different definition of fascism as “extrajudicial violence on behalf of the capitalist class.” (23-471)[5]

Later, after 1926, when Italian fascism begins to build its own specific state system and when the more aggressive German Nazi movement appears on the horizon, the counterrevolutionary nature of fascism begins to come to the forefront. At that point new definitions arise which underline precisely this characteristic. In 1932 E. Tellmann characterizes fascism as an “armed counterrevolution, presented as a mass movement, as embodied in Hitler’s organizations” (115-33). At the same time the Italian historian Delle Piane called fascism a “preventative counterrevolution”, and L. Longo described it as “one form of preventative counterrevolution.” (64-114)

At the start of the 40’s, the French communist, G. Politzer, engaging in a polemic with the Nazi ideologue A. Rosenberg once again defined fascism as “the most reactionary counterrevolution in history” and as “the counterrevolution of the 20^th century” (160-41, 44).[6]

In his attempt to discover the contradictory nature of fascism and, specifically, the contradiction between its mass social base, between its mass national movement, and its deeply reactionary program it executes, Eugene Cox called fascism a “reactionary revolution” (52-136).

Erich Hess, led again by the desire to express the paradoxically contradictory political nature of fascism, and especially the contradiction of his business organization, defined fascism as “industrial feudalism” (127-8), as a system that unites in itself all capitalist industrial development with pre-capitalist forms of extra-economical coercion.

Hermann Rauschning—former party leader of Danzig who saw the adventurism of national socialism even before the war and escaped across the ocean—defined German fascism as a “nihilistic revolution”, “a revolution of negation.”[7] In his singular book The Revolution of Nihilism, published in 1938, he constantly highlights the destructive character of the fascist ‘revolution’: the struggle to destroy all moral, political, and artistic values, acquired in the slow and difficult development of human civilization. (160a-26).

Winston Churchill his unique genetic definition of fascism by linking it with the appearance of communism. In his own words, “fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism.” (136a-13)[8]

It must be noted that this idea is widely shared among the bourgeois democracies and the liberal intelligentsia in the West. It’s shared with the acolytes of ‘official historiography’, for whom it’s become almost a dogma. Its typical expression is like that of philosophy professor Luigi Sturzo:[9] “In reality, between Russia and Italy there only one true difference—namely, that Bolshevism, or the communist dictatorship, is left-wing fascism, while fascism, or conservative dictatorship, is right-wing bolshevism. Bolshevik Russia created the myth of Lenin, Fascist Italy that of Mussolini” (172a-221).

There are also numerous definitions of fascism which don’t take into account its social and class content. The American psycho-historian, R. Binion, for example, looks at the spread of fascism into Germany as “an epileptic seizure of the German people” and as a “schizophrenia of the nation.” (6-167)

L. Mumford claims that the real roots of fascism must be sought “in the human soul, not in the economy.” In clarifying this claim, he says: “In overweening pride, in the delight in the cruel and neurotic disintegration—in this, and in the Weimar contract, or in the incompetence of the German republic lies the explanation of fascism.” (155a-118).[10]

Wilhelm Reich, in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”, doesn’t deny the role of the economic factor in the appearance of fascism, but attempts to explain its rise entirely through psychological causes.[11] Fascism is “a statement of the irrational structure of man, modeled on the crowd…Its sadism seeps from the nostalgia or an unsatisfied organism.” (162-176).

Since fascism can’t be explained through the pathology of the Fuhrer or the general stupidity of the nation, we won’t busy ourselves with these kinds of pure psychological definitions. At the same time, it should be noted that without the contributions of social psychology, include those of the aforementioned authors, many things in the fascist phenomenon could not be fully understood.

It must also be said that all of the definitions and characteristics mentioned above contain part of the truth. They simply represent different sides of the actual political phenomenon we call ‘fascism’. Because fascism is at one and the same time both “a mass movement”, and “a petit-bourgeoisie counter revolution”, and, in a sense, even an ideological “schizophrenia of the nation” and an “epileptic seizure” of an entire people.

But none of them uncovers the deepest foundation and specific reality of fascism. The latter was more or less fully express in the definition given to fascism by the 7^th Comintern Congress as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of financial capital.” (33-29).[12] Namely, financial capital is that which stands at the base of fascism and determines its program. Without financial capital, fascism could never become a national movement and take control of state power. It’s no coincidence that fascism appears during the era of imperialism, in the midst of a deep social crisis that threatens the very existence of the capitalist system. History has known other mass movements of the petit bourgeoisie which were able to birth Bonapartism, but none that could birth fascism.

It doesn’t matter at all that fascism began as a revolt of the middle classes, of the petit bourgeoisie against the monstrous pressure of a social crisis (unemployment, inflation, tax burdens; etc.); it doesn’t matter either that the vast majority of participants in the fascism movement is not subjectively serving finance capital in order to act as its agent and guard. Objectively, due the power of the historical circumstances during imperialism there are only two primary figures that can resolve the great problems of the age: financial capital and the proletariat.

That’s why the social crisis can, in principle, be solved either with a proletarian revolution, or with a fascist dictatorship. The latter represents precisely the solution of financial capital.

Despite its plurality, the petit bourgeoisie cannot offer its own solution to these problems which give rise to the social crisis. Therefore, it does belongs neither to the financial power of big capital, to the monopolies of trust, nor to the desperate determination and revolutionary energy of the proletariat.

For the same reason every mass movement that arises from it, every one of its revolts or revolutions will, in due time and by necessity comes under the ideological leadership of one of the primary figures mentioned.

It’s interesting to trace how the social knowledge of fascism has moved from appearance to reality. First, one looks at the social makeup of the fascist movement—the petit bourgeoisie as the major element in the mass social base of fascism. The very appearance, however, is not yet fully developed. Precisely at that point is fascism defined as a petit-bourgeoisie revolution.

Later, when the fascism movement directs its blows against the parties and organizations of the left—the communists, the socialists, and the social-democratic parties, the independent trade unions of the proletariat, their rallies, strikes, and demonstrations – then its counterrevolutionary contents is revealed. The fascism movement is uncovered through its actions. Its counterrevolutionary nature becomes apparent. This appears as the most important thing. At this stage we see the new definitions of fascism as “a right-wing revolution”, “a reactionary revolution”, “an armed counter-revolution”, “a preventative counterrevolution.”

Later, when the fascism movement has taken control of the state machinery and has begun to establish its dictatorship on the path towards a violent destruction of all other political parties and organizations (both right and left-wing); when it removes the institutions of liberal democracy, and the civil and political freedom of individuals—it becomes possible to pose the question: whom does the fascist dictatorship serve? As long as the petit bourgeoisie by itself, by the power of its own social nature and its own social interests cannot birth such a reaction, such a reactionary energy, to carry such a concentrated counterrevolution, this becomes the fundamental question.

And here is precisely where we begin to see the figure of financial capital which in the crisis it finds itself in is truly in need of that kind of state power, but which remains in the shadows, hidden behind the exterior appearance of the fascist system.

Somewhere at this stage in the understanding of the social nature of fascism we get the definition given by the Comintern as rule by the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most aggressive elements of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

The definition of fascism provided by G. Dimitrov during the 7^th Comintern Congress in 1935 remains to this day the best insight into the scoi-class nature of this phenomenon. Because of this, even today, when Marxists scholars turn towards the study of this or that problem in the history, sociology, social psychology of fascism, or of some even more specific problems of its practice such as its propaganda, state terror, concentration camps, etc., they invariably call upon this definition and, to one degree or another, use it as the starting point of their scientific analysis.

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to think that the Comintern definition fully captures and exhausts all the features of fascism. It lacks an explanation of the specific political system of fascism, of its unique form of dictatorship without which we could never explain the demonic power of the fascist countries which ignited the bloodiest world war and reached a monstrous scale of terror and criminality against humanity, unprecedented in history.

It’s true that fascism is, primarily, rule or dictatorship of financial capital—and that is the most significant of its socio-class characteristics—but it’s also true that every contemporary late-stage capitalist government power is likewise rule of financial capital with its corresponding limitations of democracy, civil and political freedoms, etc. The same applies to the same extent to all developed capital countries in the world today. However, nobody has allowed themselves on this basis to claim that those countries are fascist ones, or that the form of their political rule is a fascist dictatorship.

It is precisely this that shows that the definition of fascism as the rule or dictatorship of financial capital, despite picking out the most significant of feature of this concept, does not exhaust its whole being. It must be supplemented by specifying its particular political system, its unique form of dictatorship which crystalizes the power of financial capital under the unique critical conditions between the two world wars. Here not only the class content, but also the form which it takes, is a significant part of this phenomenon. The organic unity of the two express the specific reality of fascism.

The absence of this “formal” moment in the Comintern’s definition became a reason for some authors to eliminate it altogether, to engage themselves only in the study of political structures without taking account of their real contents. Others, staying dogmatically faithful to that definition, claimed that it represents the whole truth of fascism and that there was simply nothing more to be said on this question. They were usually satisfied with repeating this definition while lacking any ability to apply it creatively to the concrete sociological analysis of the studied phenomenon.

The absence of this “formal” moment in the Comintern’s definition is a little strange because every visible actions of the Comintern took seriously this side of fascism.

As we will see in our forthcoming exposition, even as far back as the Leipzig trial G. Dimitrov paid special attention to the political structure of the Nazi state and its totalitarian character. P. Togliatti’s detailed analysis of the architecture of the fascist system in Italy as outlined in his “Lectures on Fascism”, finds fascism’s specific reality precisely in its totalitarianism.[13] To one degree or another, this feature of fascist dictatorship was also noted by E. Tellmann, L. Longo, V. Pick and others. Namely, it is through it that they tried to explain this or that phenomenon in the political life of the fascist states which, outside of the full context of the system, would appear strange and unfamiliar.

To jump ahead, this is why we claim that that totalitarianism is such a significant part of the fascist dictatorship, of the fascist state, so fully and wholly expresses its political nature, that it must necessarily be included in the definition of fascism. In that respect, the Comintern definition should treat fascism as the totalitarian rule, the totalitarian dictatorship of financial capital and of its most reactionary and aggressive elements. It is precisely a totalitarian—not military, not authoritarian, but a totalitarian dictatorship. What is a totalitarian dictatorship and a totalitarian fascist state is the subject of the following exposition.

3. The Concept of the Totalitarian State

Those who speak of the totalitarian state are, first and foremost, the very creators of fascism itself. In listing the three main conditions for creating the corporate system, Mussolini puts the creation of the totalitarian state second after the creation of a single party system. He characterizes the totalitarian state as “a state, which incorporates within itself…the whole energy, all interests, and all hopes of a nation” (10-37).

Paul Raterbusch, one of the theorists of Nazism, in decisively opposing “the pluralistic multiparty state” of Western Democracy defines the totalitarian state thus: “…the totalitarian state is that which with the help of a certain single party or ideology has elevated itself to a totality and has claimed the exclusive political right in constructing national life…The totalitarian state represents a fundamental break with relativism, with the notion that every party contains only relative truth.” (101-61 and 62).

The German envoy to London, Von Dirksen[14], also speaks about the fascist state. With this term he refers to both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (39-110, 115, 308, 420).

Finally, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, Speer[15], in his deposition in the Nuremberg trail emphasized the totalitarian state as the most important reason for the catastrophe that befell the German nation: “The great danger to be found in this totalitarian system became apparently clear at that moment in which we approached the end…Allow me to explain like this: near the end it became apparent what kind of great danger is hidden in systems of this kind even if we set aside the Fuhrer principle. It was the combination of Hitler and this system that brought forth the horrific catastrophe into this world.” (99-48)

During the Nuremberg trial the English prosecutor Shawcross[16] called Hitler’s cabinet a “totalitarian government” because it “doesn’t tolerate any opposition” and destroys civil and political freedoms (90-50 and 60). Able Plehn presents the “Spanish Phalanx” which builds the country in its own image as “war-loving” and “totalitarian” (93-261). Curt Reiss[17] describes the “totalitarian form of government” as one “in which freedom of the press and parliament are destroyed…” (102-202). A. Manhattan[18], in quoting a report of Mussolini’s envoy to Madrid on March 25^th 1939 also speaks of a “inter-European fascist block of totalitarian states throughout the whole continent.” (71-329)

The term “totalitarian state” is used also by Marxist authors in characterizing the fascist system, especially during its final years. Indeed, Georgi Dimitrov, during the Leipzig trial in the “Ten Questions to the Criminal Police Officials” used this term, precisely in this sense. But because the text has the form of a question which can’t be separated from its context without distorting the author’s intentions, we present the tenth question in its entirety: “10. Is it true that in this tense situation the Reichstag fire serve as a signal to begin the campaign against the labor movement and to overcome the difficulties within the ‘national coalition,’ to exercise national-socialist ‘unity, and to organize the so-called ‘totalitarian state’, i.e. to the forcible destruction of all other parties and organizations, to the ‘unification’ of the state, economy, culture, military, sport, youth, church, and the other organizations of the press, propaganda, etc.?” (58-202).

In the “Sentencing Notes” which are a synopsis of a speech never delivered to the court dated December 23, 1933, G. Dimitrov once again returns to this question, noting: “For the creation of a ‘totalitarian state’, the national-socialist ‘sole-rule’!” (34-186).

In short, according to G. Dimitrov the totalitarian state is the kind of state that aims first “towards the violent destruction of all other parties and organizations”, and second, towards “the unification of the state, economy, culture, military, sport, youth, church, and the other organizations of the press, propaganda, etc.”, in a word, unification of all social life.

P. Togliatti in his infamous “Lectures on Fascism” read during the spring of 1935 in Moscow’s Lenin Academy before the Italian communist party functionaries working illegally against Mussolini’s regime, also looks at the Italian fascism as a “totalitarian regime,” “a totalitarian state.” He even classifies Italian fascism in terms of its totalitarian elements: “I would divide this subject in three periods: the first period—fascism until the “March on Rome”, until the end of 1922; the second period—from 1922 to 1925, can be characterized as an attempt to create a non-totalitarian fascist regime; finally, the third period covering 1925-1930, is the period of the creation of totalitarianism and of the beginning of the greatest economic crisis” (116-33).

Even at the beginning of his lecture Togliatti explains that “Italian fascism wasn’t born totalitarian, but became such at that moment when the ruling powers of the bourgeoisie reached the maximum level of economic, and, consequently, political unity…totalitarianism is the consequence of the dominance of financial capital” (116-44).

From the very titles, and even more so from the content of the separate lectures it can be seen that it is through the concepts of “totalitarian system”, “totalitarian regime”, “totalitarian dictatorship” that the true nature of Italian fascism is revealed. Togliatti presents the following table of contents: a) the construction of the ‘singular rule’ or the single party system of fascism through the violent destruction of all other political parties and mass organizations—left and right—without exception; b) taking control of the country by the fascist party, the transformation of the state machinery into its own tool; c) the construction of a comprehensive system of mass organizations through which the fascist party guarantees control of the civilian population (trade unions, youth organizations”, the “Dopolavoro” organization[19], etc.); d) the creation of the corporate systems as an economic base of the fascist nation and the future “fascist order” (Mussolini).

L. Longo, in the book Between Reaction and Revolution defines the fascist dictatorship in Italy as the “undivided, totalitarian rule of fascism.” (64-271). He doesn’t make it his aim to offer a special analysis of the concept of “totalitarianism”, but much as can be judged form the context, he gives it very much the same meaning as Togliatti.

In his own deep study of Italian fascism (“Italian Fascism and its Collapse”) the Soviet author S.M. Slobodskoy also looks at Mussolini’s regime as a totalitarian one. Chapter five of this monograph is called “The Establishment of a Totalitarian Regime.” According to the author “Italian fascism entered its ‘totalitarian’ phase of its development during November of 1926.” (110-65) when it liquidates the last remains of bourgeois democracy—political parties and organizations, civil and political freedoms—and the fascist party establishes its absolute monopoly.

Without clearing up the special meaning of the term ‘totalitarianism’, Santiago Carrillo[20] characterizes the fascist system in Spain in his book After Franco—where? as a “totalitarian power” and a “totalitarian dictatorship” (76-19).

The Spanish Marxist Jose Garcia proceeds in the same manner.[21] In his Spain in the 20^th Century we can find descriptions of fascism like “a centralized totalitarian fascist dictatorship” (20-279), a country with “a totalitarian character” (20-280), “totalitarian order from top to bottom” (20-282), “fascist totalitarian regime” (20-287), or “totalitarian fascist state” (20-322) etc.

Since there is no specialized study in Marxist literature of the totalitarian fascist state and its unique structure and laws, yet, at the same time this term is used, a systematic and detailed study is needed, starting, of course, not from the understanding of individual statements, but from a strong analysis of the main fascist nations (Hitler’s Germany, fascist Italy, and Franco’s Spain)—an analysis that seeks the most general laws that appear in each of them.

In this way the concept of a “totalitarian fascist state” can allow us to make sense of an ideal, perfected fascist state, with respect to which the separate fascist countries constitute only approximations or modifications that contain, to a certain extent, its core element.

In reality this is the goal of every scientific study—to provide an ideal, clean model of some defined phenomenon so that this model can be used as the basis to understand some specific or particular event.

The creation of a model of the ‘idea’ fascist state also has a great practical significance to the extent that it can provide us with the ability in every separate case to understand whether a given country can be treated as a ‘fascist state.’ In this way we can overcome that vulgar political approach in which the label of ‘fascist state’ or ‘fascist regime’ is treated as synonymous with political stigma but is not the result of an objective scientific analysis.

The construction of a model of the totalitarian fascist state has a principally methodological significance for not only everyday political life, but also for historiography. It is impossible, for example, to distinguish between a military dictatorship from the fascist one without appealing to such a model that serves as a criterion. That’s why all too often every military regime that comes to power with the help of the military is presented as a fascist dictatorship.

In connection to this it’s appropriate to recall the words of P. Togliatti, spoken over four decades ago: “The term ‘fascism’ is often used imprecisely, primarily as a synonym of reaction, terror, etc. That definition is incomplete. Fascism does not signify only a fight against bourgeois democracy and it’s not right to use this expression as soon as such a struggle has been identified” (116-11).

For example, it’s impossible to uncover the ‘peculiarities’ of Bulgarian fascism without such a general model of the classic fascist state. Before we establish the national peculiarities of a given fascism (Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, and English), we must first establish what fascism is, and what the general necessary characteristics of the fascist state are.

As can be seen from what has been said so far, the best hope for constructing a model of the ideal fascist state is to learn the structure of the classic fascist states, and to discover those general features without which it is impossible to think of any concrete fascist state. In keeping with this fundamental method, we are lead to the following general traits of the totalitarian state: a) the forced establishment of a single-party system or “single-rule” of fascism through the destruction of all other parties; b) the fusion of fascist party with the state; c) the unification of all social life; d) an authoritarian way of thinking with a cult of personality surrounding a national leader; e) concentration camps.

Of course, it goes without saying that the present study has no pretentions in being the final word on the topic. The aim of this study is much more modest: to point to another aspect of fascism which seems promising and relevant; to aid in the building of a singular theory of fascism that can spare one of the endless aimless wanderings through the details of this or that national fascism.

[1] [Translator’s Note: Where I’m able to, I’ll include little footnotes about the characters that Zhelev is referring to in the text. However, the file I’m working with doesn’t have a bibliography or a reference page, and my transliterations don’t’ always result in me finding anyone identifiable. When that’s the case, I won’t make a footnote saying I haven’t found anything. Regardless, here, Zhelev is referring to the Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe who, along with three Bulgarian members of the Comintern, was put on trial for setting the Reichstag Fire of 1933. He was the only one who was found guilty and was put to death by the state. Although Van der Lubbe’s role in the fire is historically contested, it is generally held that he was used as a scapegoat by the Nazis to justify further repression of the Communists. In 1980, as Zhelev says, van der Lubbe was pardoned by West German courts, but that appeal was overturned in 1983. In 2007 he was fully pardoned by German courts.]

[2] [Translator’s Note: this is referring to the SA’s brown shirts]

[3] [Translator’s note: I’ve left the page references that are in the original text that I have only to demonstrate that Zhelev wasn’t pulling things out of thin air. As noted, however, the copy I have does not have a bibliography section, so the page references remain completely cryptic to me.]

[4] [Translator’s note: Luigi Longo was the secretary of the Italian Communist Party in the 60’s and mid-70’s]

[5] [Translator’s Note: This is, of course, referring to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist philosopher]

[6] [Translator’s Note: The former is most likely Georges Politzer, a Marxist philosopher arrested, tortured, and put to death by the Nazis in France in 1942. The latter refers to Alfred Rosenberg, head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and key developer of Nazi ideology. He was tried at Nuremberg and put to death for war crimes.]

[7] [Translator’s Note: Hermann Rauschning was briefly a Nazi party member before renouncing his membership in the early 30’s and emigrating to the US. From there, he spoke strongly against Nazism.]

[8] [Translator’s Note: Winston Churchill was, of course, the British Prime Minister during WWII]

[9] [Translator’s Note: From what I could find Luigi Sturzo was not a philosophy professor, but an anti-fascist priest and politician. Why Zhelev credits him as a philosophy professor is a mystery to me.]

[10] [Translator’s Note: This is most likely referring to Lewis Mumford, the American sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher]

[11] [Translator’s Note: This is referring to the Austrian psychoanalyst—among other things, he coined the phrase “the sexual revolution”]

[12] [Translator’s Note: The Comintern was the name of the third international organization advocating for global communism (Communism + International = Comintern). It was founded by Lenin in 1919 and dissolved by Stalin in 1943 as way appeasing the wartime allies of the Soviet Union. Between 1934 and 1943 it was headed by the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, who has been mentioned—and will continue to be mentioned—already. The Seventh Congress was its last.]

[13] [Translator’s Note: This is a reference to Palmiro Togliatti, General Secretary of the Italian Communist party from the 30’s through the 60’s]

[14] [Translator’s Note: Herbert von Dirksen, German diplomat to Britain before WWII]

[15] [Translator’s Note: This is referring to Albert Speer]

[16] [Translator’s Note: Hartley Shawcross, the British barrister and head British prosecutor during the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal]

[17] [Translator’s Note: Curt Reiss was a German refugee to America who worked as a war correspondent cataloguing Hitler’s war crimes]

[18] [Translator’s Note: Possibly Avro Manhattan, an Italian polymath and writer]

[19] [Translator’s Note: This was the Italian fascist adult recreation group]

[20] [Translator’s Note: Santiago Carrillo was the General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party from 1960-1982]

[21] [Translator’s Note: This might be referring to Jose Garcia Ladron de Guevara, but I can’t find enough information.

Socialist Reading Series I: The State and Revolution [Part 3]

October 12, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 1 Comment

Alright, after a long delay, I’m back with chapter three of TSaR (you can find chapter two here). This chapter is especially important (especially sections 2 and 3). Let’s just jump back in.

Chapter III: The State and Revolution. Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx’s Analysis

Wherein Lay the Heroism of the Communards’ Attempt?

Summary

According to Lenin, the revolutionary experience of the Paris Commune had a significant impact on Marx’s thinking insofar as it caused him to go back and make one important change to the Communist Manifesto. Specifically, he thought that what the Commune had shown was that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (pg. 43 in Lenin, though the quote is originally from The Civil War in France and, as noted, appears in the Manifesto as well) Whereas some have held that this implies that Marx was urging for a more moderate position–i.e. the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery because it must slowly come to take control of it–Lenin claims that the exact opposite is true:

Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery,” and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, Chapter 3 pg. 44

As evidence for this, Lenin cites Marx’s letter to Kugelmann on April 12, 1871 in which Marx says that “the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the preliminary condition for every real people’s revolution on the continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.” (pg. 44)

Lenin then makes two points in reflecting on this quote. First, that conditions have changed since ’71 such that Marx’s observations are no longer confined to conditions on the continent, but apply to England and the US as well. And second, that the the smashing of the state machinery is a precondition for a people’s revolution, with this showing that Marx was always concerned with a popular uprising rather than a parliamentary incrementalism of sorts.

In 1871, continues Lenin, the only popular revolution that could have succeeded was one that united both the proletariat and the peasantry since these classes were the ones that constituted “the people.” And these are, of course, precisely the groups that were oppressed by the state machinery and which are needed to smash that machinery. Consequently, Marx must have been saying two things. First, that in order for the revolution to succeed, the two classes that made up the people at the time must be united so as to destroy the state. And second, that he thought this was what the Communards were doing. What made the Communards’ attempt heroic, then, is precisely that they were trying to unite the two classes so as to destroy the state and lead a genuine people’s revolution.

Analysis

The central argument here is really bad. Lenin’s claim is that the lesson that Marx learned from the Paris Commune is that the state machinery must be smashed. However, the evidence he uses to support this is something that Marx says in reference to the Eighteenth Brumaire (which was published in 1852) in a letter that Lenin himself acknowledges was written during the time of the Commune. The timing doesn’t make sense. Clearly, Marx couldn’t have learned the lesson from the Commune twenty years before it happened, but it also seems wrong to say that Marx could have drawn the lesson that Lenin claims he drew from it while the Commune was still happening. That’s not implausible, I suppose, since the developments in the early weeks of the Commune could have convinced Marx that something different has to happen. But if so, the quote Lenin uses doesn’t support that development. After all, the quote points back to what Marx already thought in the Eighteenth Brumaire and explicitly says that this–i.e. what he thought in 1852–is what the Communards were attempting to do in Paris.

If all this is correct, then this reflects Marx’s views from before the Commune, and not what he learned from the experience of its failure. Consequently, it doesn’t show Marx’s mature analysis at all even by Lenin’s own lights.

Setting that aside for a moment, the secondary point about what whether Marx thought that the Commune was in fact trying to form a coalition between the peasants and the workers may be correct. I don’t know enough about the Commune or, frankly, of Marx’s commentary on it to be able to weigh in. But there’s nothing at least in the text Lenin presents that makes this seem utterly implausible.

Still, this means very little if we return to the main reason why Lenin’s argument is bad. That is, what Lenin says may very well have been Marx’s analysis at the time of the Commune and he may have endorsed this union between peasants and workers that must smash the state as a pre-requisite of the revolution. But that’s perfectly compatible with the claim that, nevertheless, the Commune experience showed Marx that his analysis at the time was wrong and that this attempt was not the path towards a successful revolution after all. So far Lenin hasn’t shown us anything to think otherwise.

2. With What is the Smashed State Machine to be Replaced?

Summary

Before the Communards, the answer to this question was an abstract one: as we have seen the machine is to be replaced by “the proletariat organized as the ruling class…[by the] winning of the battle of democracy” (pg. 44). However, this does not provide a practical answer. According to Marx the practical answer, claims Lenin, is one that must be borne by experience. Thus, what kind of organization this must take and how exactly this battle of democracy is to be fought remained an open question.

Marx answer this question in his analysis of the Commune in The Civil War in France. Briefly, the Commune arises as a dialectical response to the state power that was developed and consolidated with the ’48 revolution. And what kind of “state” does it attempt form in light of the the features of the ’48 state?

First, it’s one that abolishes the standing army and substitutes in its place an armed people. It also appointed councilors on the basis of universal suffrage, who were representative of the working class and who could be recalled; it disbanded the existing police and handed over its responsibilities to commune members; it paid public servants working-class wages; it removed all the special privileges that came with government work; and it rejected the independence of the judiciary and made it accountable to the people (as all other positions were).

The smashed state was thus replaced by a more fully democratic set of institutions which, crucially, did not serve the function of the suppression of a political class. Consequently, the smashed state was replaced by something which was not a state (in the sense we have defined so far).

Nevertheless, the creation of this new body did not mean an end to suppression–the bourgeoisie still needed to be suppressed–but the source of that suppression was no longer a separate minority, but had now become the majority of the population. Given that the people itself–i.e. the majority–was doing the suppressing, the need for an extra, special force of suppression was lost. Consequently, the state had begun to wither away. In short, the state disappears as more and more of its functions (and especially its main function of suppression) are taken over by the general population instead of being held by a privileged minority.

Here, notes Lenin, the reduction of all wages to workingmen’s levels is of special importance and highlights the shift from a bourgeois democracy to a proletarian democracy. It is only through this process that the population returns to a kind of ‘primitive democracy’ in which the population itself can come to take up the functions of the state (presumably because a difference in remuneration would easily lead to a difference in rank and stature). This return is not, however, a return to an old pre-capitalist democracy–it is not a regression. Rather, it is a kind of dialectical return that takes advantage of the fact that the advances of capitalism has rendered all functions of the state so simple so as to make their execution possibly by any literate person.

By stripping all privilege from state work, removing all grandeur from such positions, and reducing the wages of those who perform them to the wages of ordinary people, a bridge from capitalism to socialism is built and the workers and the peasants are united.

Lenin ends the section on the following interesting note:

From the peasantry, as from other sections of the petty bourgeoisie, only an insignificant few “rise to the top,” “get on in the world” and in the bourgeois sense, i.e., become either well-to-do people, bourgeois, or officials in secure and privileged positions. In every capitalist country where there is a peasantry (as there is in most capitalist countries), the vast majority of the peasants are oppressed by the government and long for its overthrow, long for “cheap” government. This can be achieved only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat at the same time takes a step towards the socialist reconstruction of the state.
Lenin, The State and Revolution pg. 53

Analysis

The first part of this section–as many parts of the pamphlet–is focused on putting pressure on Lenin’s opponents in 1917. The general line of argument is this: Marx thought that the Commune was doing things the way scientific socialism demands they ought to be done. The commune did x, y, and z. Yet, the Mensheviks, SRs, and others refuse to do them and still they have the guts to call themselves Marxists!

This is fine, but not terribly interesting outside of a historical lens. More interesting, I think, are some of the comments that Lenin makes in the latter half of the section, and, in particular, in what he makes of the reduction of wages for all functionaries. There, he seems to make two substantial claims: first is the claim that capitalism has rendered the functions of the state so simple that only basic literacy is needed from its functionaries.

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary “workmen’s wages”…
Lenin, The State and Revolution, pg. 52

This is, to a certain extent, an empirical claim about the working conditions of the state (at the time at least) as well as a normative claim about what would justify a difference in remuneration for state functionaries. That is, because the the work being done is not any more complicated than the ordinary work of a factory worker, that it should be paid at the same rate. This is an interesting claim for two reasons. First, it describes what Lenin thought running the state would be like prior to taking power (at this point he’s still in Finland, and whatever power he has it’s only within the Bolshevik Party itself and not the state). Roughly, he sees management of the state as a matter of performing rote, repetitive clerical work–a kind of analogue to the work done by factory workers in an assembly line. I’m not sure if that is correct, or that it ever was correct. That’s not to say that government work isn’t rote, repetitive, or alienating–I’m sure it is–but rather that I suspect the skill necessary to fulfill government functions probably requires more than just basic literacy at least at some levels.

That being said, the current political administration seems to suggest that Lenin was closer to the truth than further from it–if Rick Perry can be Secretary of Energy…

The second thing that makes the claim interesting is the fact that it leaves open the possibility that if there are some government jobs for which more specialized skill is needed, then perhaps they should be paid higher wages for performing those tasks. This seems like a reasonable principle, but it poses a problem for Lenin and puts a lot more pressure on the empirical claim. Simply put, the withering of the state is contingent on the democratization of its functions. But if at least some of its functions cannot be democratized in some respects and if those functions require special skills and differing remuneration, then a core, privileged group is preserved, and hence, the possibility for a minor population wielding oppressive power remains. In that case, the state doesn’t wither but is granted a different life through the bureaucracy. (I would be remiss to say that something like this actually seems to have played out in the Soviet Union–Stalin worked his way up to power through exploiting the bureaucracy, after all)

One way of solving this problem might be to really stress the responsibility of the general population to recall people in positions should they begin to abuse their power. It’s not clear that this would be of any help since, as we saw earlier, the accumulation of excess wealth tends to have significant influence on others. Still, if the difference in wages is small, the possibility of such accumulation might be a small one.

A different way might be to reject the principle that Lenin seems to rely on and insist that more skilled work does not warrant higher than workmen’s wages. Most of us, having been brought up in capitalist culture, tend to bristle at that suggestion and inevitably see this as presenting a problem of motivation–why would I do more difficult work for the same pay as someone who does easier work? The obvious answer here is that the assumption that wages are the only thing that motivates someone to work is one of the greatest capitalist myths. The fact of the matter is that we are motivated by all sorts of things and frequently do all sorts of labor for little or no money at all (I put in quite a bit of effort in writing all this out and I promise you nobody pays me!). So, the picture that makes us bristle is much too simple and the real answer to the question that’s raised is a matter of figuring out what other ways people are motivated. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all means of motivation are equally as effective in motivating people to do an adequate job (maybe I would write more often and more carefully if I were being paid to do this. Maybe…). But that’s a different matter. In any case, I don’t have the time to fully develop the practical elements of this suggestion–my only intention was to flag the fact that the problem that Lenin runs into might not be as unsolvable as it appears.

Let’s move on to the second interesting claim. That one’s another empirical one about the psychology of the peasant and how taking the measures that he and Marx propose will unite the peasantry and the working class and help build a bridge from capitalism. The line of argument, as you will recall, is that the peasant resents the government for oppressing it, and longs for its overthrow and replacement by a “cheap” government.

The word “cheap” is a tricky one as Lenin uses it. On the one hand, one can read the claim literally as saying that the peasantry is interested in a government that isn’t expensive or cost a lot. That might be plausible, especially if the oppression that one has in mind is an economic one. On this reading, the peasant wants to replace the current government with a ‘cheap’ one because doing so lessens their economic burden. On the other hand, however, one can read the claim as saying that the peasants are interested in a government that isn’t precious or entrenched. Here, ‘cheap’ is synonymous with ‘disposable’ and in contrast with ‘unique’. In this sense, what the peasant wants is a stripped down government that can be replaced easily. This, too, would lessen their economic burden but not because their primary source of oppression is, as it were, squeezed out of them to pay the salaries of expensive functionaries. Rather, it would be because a ‘cheap’ government is one that lacks a certain power to enforce certain oppressive measures that are employed against the peasants (i.e. the state doesn’t defend the interests of the landowners).

Both readings are, I think, consistent with the text, though I think the latter reading makes much more sense in the broader context. Nevertheless, it’s interesting how well Lenin’s description applies to the attitudes of the modern rural worker towards the government. I suspect this is because this is just a common feature of any populist urge, but it’s still pretty insightful.

3. Abolition of Parliamentarism

Summary

Naturally, Lenin once again begins by excoriating his contemporaries for not rejecting parliamentarism sufficiently. The essence of bourgeois parliamentarism (and of most democratic republics) is, according to Lenin (and Marx) to “decide every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament” (pg. 54) This is what the Commune rejected and this is what Marx praised them for rejecting.

But how exactly are the proletariat to get rid of parliamentarism? Lenin tells us:

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, pg. 55

But what does this mean? What does it mean to make turn representative bodies into working bodies? In the first place, it appears to be a matter of transparency–a working body does not obfuscate, its real workings are not “behind the scenes”, and its purpose is not to ‘trick’ the people. In the second place, it’s not concerned with or steeped in bureaucracy and red-tape but aims at doing work. And, finally, in the third place, it is a group in which there is no distinction between legislation and execution; in that respect, it is supposed to be modeled like a shop floor where the distinction between planning and doing is also abolished. [Note: I’m getting this reading by trying to suss out what’s between Lenin’s complaints against the SRs and Mensheviks].

Lenin also tempers our expectations. Our goal in ending parliamentarianism should not be to destroy all bureaucracy at once. That would be utopian. Rather, it is to so smash the old bureaucratic machine so that there can be a gradual end to all bureaucracy eventually. This will be possible for the same reason that it is possible to place all state functions in the hands of literate workers: namely, the advances of capitalism have made questions of organization simple enough to be handled without direct oversight.

Thus, the revolutionary state will not dispense with “workers, foremen, and bookkeepers,” but their employment will be at the hands of the proletariat as a whole rather than the state.

Lenin then gives us a nice description of how things will work:

We ourselves, the workers, will organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline supported by the state power of the armed workers; we will reduce the role of the state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid “foremen and bookkeepers” (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution.
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 58 (emphasis in original)

Here, Lenin is describing the notion of collective central planning, guided by the experience of the proletariat, safeguarded by the armed workers, and the orders of which are executed by particular functionaries.

But crucially, this stage, too, is only transitional. As organizational and accounting functions become simpler and simpler with the help of technology, they will become so simple and internalized that there will be no more need for any kind of special functionaries at all. Everyone will simply know what needs to be done and how to do it.

The seeds of this kind of set up are, according to Lenin, already in the soil. We have already seen how such a central planned system can work in one place with the postal service as a kind of state capitalist enterprise. As imperialism continues unabated, it will transform all organizations similarly–at that point, the only thing that’s needed is for the proletariat to take control through arm, keep it for long enough that knowledge can be diffused and internalized as specified, and wait for the withering away of state and bureaucracy.

Analysis

I’ll note two very important things that finally let me make sense of Lenin’s thoughts. First, it’s puzzling what Lenin exactly means when he says that we must smash the bureaucratic machine without abolishing it. The answer, we know, has to be that the smashing just is the transformation of the existing parliamentary bodies into these working bodies. But how is smashing something compatible with transforming it? Usually, when we talk about the smashing of something, we imply its destruction (“smash the patriarchy!” means “get rid of the patriarchy!” not “transform the patriarchy!”), but Lenin is explicit that smashing of the state or the bureaucracy is not tantamount to immediately getting rid of either. To advocate for the latter is to take the anarchist position, and Lenin is no anarchist. If that’s so, then it might be fair to say that ‘smash’ is a kind of technical term for Lenin. What does it mean to smash x? Plausibly, it’s to de-fang, transform, or remove the primary function of x. To smash the state is to deprive it of its primary function of suppressing class conflict in favor of the bourgeoisie, and to smash parliamentarism is to deprive it of its primary function of lying to the people. In both cases, the thing that has been smashed may continue to have a different, perhaps necessary for the time, function, but it does not exist in the same way that it did previously.

The second thing to note is that, once again, Lenin exposes certain fundamental assumptions he holds about the role of technology and the nature of bureaucracy. Namely, he thinks that as technology improves, the knowledge necessary for bureaucratic and organizational tasks become simpler. Furthermore, this trend doesn’t bottom out! Bureaucratic tasks can become so simple that they can be internalized by everyone and made intuitive to everyone.

To reiterate, this is a substantial empirical claim. Lenin holds that this empirical claim is actually confirmed by the development of capitalism under imperialism and the post office is supposed to be just one example in which the bureaucracy has been appropriately simplified. Lenin seems to be committed to the further claim that all enterprises will develop in this way.

Putting aside the question of whether Lenin was right about these claims about the nature of bureaucracy (he wasn’t), noting them can help us make sense of why, for example, Lenin saw the revolution as so urgent. If the technology is already in place to make social organization and bureaucracy a non-issue in a fully egalitarian and fully democratized society (i.e. if there’s no need for specialized oversight), and if the only thing that’s standing in the way of that reality is only the obstinacy of the ruling class who refuse to give up power, then it makes perfect sense to take up arms against them!

This line of reasoning holds even if the technology isn’t quite there (as it definitely was not in 1917 Russia)! If we’ve already got enough evidence to believe that this is precisely what will happen everywhere, then it also makes sense to take up arms anyway and maintain power until the technology catches up. In other words, even if Russia is currently technologically behind, if the proletariat can come to power and maintain order until it catches up to other industrialized countries, then it can still reach socialism without first going through a bourgeois development. What’s necessary for that, however, is, precisely as Lenin says, a dictatorship of the proletariat that prevents any backsliding into bourgeois tendencies.

Furthermore, this explains why Lenin thought that a revolution in Russia would spread quickly to Europe and why it was so important that it do so. Given the assumptions that he holds, it seems plausible that Lenin thought that the technological material conditions for socialism were already in place in Germany, and that the only (well, perhaps not only) thing keeping socialism from occurring was the masses’ reluctance to take up arms and seize the means of production. In other words, I suspect he thought that industrialized Europe was already in this latest stage (or close to it) of capitalism mentioned earlier in which the knowledge of bureaucratic and organizational tasks was so simple that it no longer posed a challenge. If that’s the case, then seeing that a popular revolution could succeed even in a place where that isn’t the case would give the population enough of an impetus to do their own revolution. In turn, if successful, this fully developed industrial power would require only the shortest time before its state withers away, and would then be able to send material and technological aid back to Russia, thus shortening the time it needs to catch up.

Of course, none of that turned out to be true, but man, does it make things a lot easier to understand.

4. Organization of the Unity of the Nation

Summary

This brief section begins with a few block quotes from Marx about how the nation is to be organized on the model of the Commune. Simply put, the form of the Commune would be applied from the smallest settlement up through the entire nation. On this model, the unity of the nation “was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.” (Lenin quoting Marx)

The purpose for quoting Marx here becomes apparent when Lenin begins to attack Bernstein. Briefly, the question under discussion is whether Marx’s analysis of the Commune commits him to federalism at the national level. Bernstein claims that it does and that, in fact, Marx’s views on national organization end up being essentially the same as those of the anarchist Proudhon. In turn, Bernstein takes his criticisms against Proudhon to apply to Marx as well. Lenin argues that Bernstein is, of course, mistaken–the excision of a parasitic state is in no way similar to any system of federalism. “Marx does not speak here at all about federalism as opposed to centralism, but about smashing the old, bourgeois state machine which exists in all bourgeois countries.” (Lenin, pg 61)

On the heels of some more lambasting of Kautsky and Plehanov (other ideological enemies of Lenin), we get an explanation of what unites and separates Marx from Proudhon on this question. Namely, the two agree on the need to smash the state, but they disagree precisely on the question of federalism and centralism–Proudhon was a federalist, and Marx was a centralist (as proven by the quotes Lenin references at the beginning of the section). He explains:

But if the proletariat and the poorest peasantry take state power into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately-owned railways, factories, land and so forth to the entire nation, to the whole of society–will that not be centralism? Will that not be the most consistent democratic centralism? And proletarian centralism at that?
Lenin, The State and Revolution, 63

And closes out with some more insults against the opportunists.

Analysis

Not having read Proudhon, it’s possible that I’m missing something very important here. The biggest hurdle I have is in understanding how exactly Marx’s comments commit him to a centralism. Here’s my best take.

We know that even the smallest hamlet will be organized in the same way as the Commune. On the one hand, this might mean that each of the independent (little ‘c’) communes will have absolute autonomy from every other commune in what they do and will only nominally be organized in some kind of nation. This, I take it, would be federalism. On the other hand, this might mean that although each hamlet, village, and town are organized on the commune model (all the way up to the top), they will also be united by one central, overarching goal. This, I take it, would be centralism.

The difference, then, is between what the obligations of the communes are to each other. On the federalist view, obligations stop at the something like the municipal level and what the commune does, it does for itself. On the centralist view, the obligations of the commune extend to the whole nation such that different communes might work together not because it is for the benefit of the individual commune, but because it is for the benefit of the entire nation.

This point can be made more clear if we once again remember that Lenin’s use of “smash” is a technical one. He tells us that both Marx and Proudhon agree that the state must be smashed, but whereas the anarchist thinks of this smashing as an abolition and destruction of the state which leaves nothing but individual autonomous communities, the Leninist (Marxist?) sense preserves the overarching unifying structure of the state while removing its previous oppressive function. Thus, unity is preserved among all the communes and their relation to one another remains centralized much as it was before under the bourgeois state. Crucially, what’s changed is the fact that the state no longer functions as a tool of oppression, but is, at best, only temporarily in place until all its functions can be internalized by the workers.

5. Abolition of the Parasite State

Summary

This very short section, again, opens with some long quotes form Marx which are supposed to supplement the remarks from section 4. Briefly put, the quotes focus on how the organization of the Commune and the Communal Constitution should not be confused with any older counterparts: for example, the Commune is not pushing for a return to any kind of feudal communal organization. What it does, instead, is remove the parasite state which has been feeding on the social body and holding back society.

This, according to Lenin, is one of Marx’s notable discoveries: what made the Commune special was the fact that “it was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.” (Lenin quoting Marx, pg. 65)

While everyone else (the anarchists, utopians, Social-Democrats, etc.) were busy doing all sorts of useless things, Marx was deducing what would come next based on what had already happened in France and what had been discovered by the Commune in their experiment. Namely, that the state machinery needs to be smashed and that what would replace the smashed state machinery needs to be a centralized state on the principles of the Commune.

Analysis

I have relatively little to add to this section in terms of analysis. It serves, I suppose, to only highlight once again, the absolute faith that Lenin has in the truth of Marxism and in the methodology of historical materialism to predict the future. Almost all of Lenin’s criticisms against his contemporaries are in their vulgarization and misreading of Marx, but, as I’ve stated multiple times in the past, these criticisms only have any weight if Marx is right about how to read the tea leaves and has unqualified access to the truth.

Zhelyu Zhelev’s “Fascism”: Preface

September 16, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ Leave a comment

A Brief Translator’s Introduction

By birth, I’m Bulgarian; by training, I’m a philosopher. These are two elements of my identity that are likely to remain with me for the rest of my life–the latter, because I’ve gotten used to living that way, and the former, because it’s something that I can’t quite get rid of regardless of how thick my American accent gets and regardless of how little any Bulgarians actually care to claim me. In any case, these two aspects of my identity aren’t that hard to keep together, and, in fact, most of the time, they remain perfectly compartmentalized.

However, there are times when I want the two to meet. Unfortunately, and probably entirely because of sociological circumstances about how the profession works, Bulgarian philosophers are hard to come by. That’s not to say that there aren’t any. In fact, I was lucky enough to meet a Bulgarian colleague at my current institution who is one of the smartest philosophers I’ve ever met. Nevertheless, she works in America as a philosopher who does American philosophy. As do I. We are both Bulgarian, but I can’t say that either of us is a Bulgarian philosopher.

Maybe there’s no such thing. In fact, in most circumstances, I’m inclined to think that trying to find someone like that is a fool’s errand. After all, what do I expect to find? A philosopher who does philosophy in the Bulgarian way? Give me a break! I’m much too foreign, much too jaded, and much too old to believe an any nationalistic bullshit like that. I’m sure there are people who would be willing to argue about this (god knows I’ve been in conversations with people who claim that Bulgaria is an underappreciated historical jewel! Did you know, dear reader, that a Bulgarian invented the computer? Well, no, someone with Bulgarian parents did. And, no, he didn’t invent the computer, but he helped! Okay, he worked in the building where a microchip was developed. But he was there! And he was Bulgarian!). I don’t buy it.

Still, some part of me wants to find something worthwhile in Bulgarian thought that I can say “yes, this is good. It came from here and it speaks of here.”

I think there’s plenty of that in Bulgaria as a whole. I know there’s excellent poetry, excellent art, excellent music, etc. I don’t mean to shit on my birth country too much. However, one area where we haven’t made too much of a splash historically is philosophy. Go ahead, take a look at the Wikipedia page for Bulgarian philosophers–it wont’ take long, it’s a short list.

Yet, I think there may be perhaps be something worthwhile there…

This side project is an attempt to see if there is indeed something worthwhile in Bulgarian philosophy. I’m going into this entirely blind. What you’re about to read is a completely unauthorized translation of Zhelyu Zhelev’s Fascism, translated by me using what remains of my Bulgarian language skills (a nice side benefit is that in taking on this project, I’m also practicing a skill that I’ve almost entirely lost).

It goes without saying that I’m not a professional translator, and that anyone expecting that level of professionalism is in the wrong place. I’m also not a Bulgarian historian and, in fact, know very little about Zhelyu Zhelev. I know that he was a dissident during before 1989 and that he was the first democratically elected president of Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I have some vague memories of him on television as a child, but nothing more than that. I don’t know his politics and I don’t know the significance of the book, or its legacy. I do know, however, that he was a philosopher, that he wrote in Bulgaria, about things that were important to Bulgarians, and about issues that are still of interest to me. It remains to be seen whether he was any good as a philosopher, but that’s another matter…

I also know that I can’t easily find any translation of the text in English. So, in the spirit of samizdat, I provide this translation to the best of my abilities for others to read and analyze. I claim no credit for the original work and expect no money.

I should also make a slight note on the translation. I’ve tried to stick as closely as possible to what I take to be the original text. However, as mentioned before, I’m not a professional translator and don’t feel bound to the rules that other, more capable translators abide by. The biggest difficulty arises in the difference in syntax between Bulgarian and English–Bulgarian syntax has become bizarre to my Americanized eyes. The second biggest difficulty, which is partially the result of the syntax difficulty, is the length of sentences. This may also be a feature of Zhelev’s writing style as well. Again, I’ve tried to stick as closely to the original sentence structure, but where I thought things got ridiculous I’ve broken up super-long sentences in two.

Finally, what you’re seeing here is, of course, only part of the full work. Specifically, it’s only the preface. My hope is that over the next year I’ll be able to translate the full book, but you’ll only see it in pieces.

Fascism

by Zhelyu Zhelev

A Documented Study of German, Italian, and Spanish Fascism

(An Unauthorized Translation by Pavel Nitchovski)

In Lieu of a Prologue

Fascism or the political biography of a book

I am not a fatalist and I don’t like exaggerating, but it seems to me that things didn’t work out with this book. It could have had a much better fate. The book was written in 1967 and published in 1982. For an entire fifteen years it lingered in the publishing houses of Sofia. And it was always returned either because of the overloaded publishing plans, set in advance many years into the future, or because of the notorious “lack of paper.” Only the military was honest enough to tell me the real reason. I remember, when I went to talk to the military publishing house to see what was happening with the book, all the editors came around to see me. To see and to laugh. The laughter was congenial. So I asked them:

“Are you going to publish the book?”

“No, we can’t…”

“Why? Didn’t you like it?”

“On the contrary, we liked it a lot…”

“Well?”

“It’s too good to be published by us. This kind of thing can’t come out in Bulgaria.” One of them told me.

The only comforting thing was that the manuscript was constantly being passed around and read through by way of samizdat, both in the capital and in the county.

Credit for the rapid and widespread distribution of the manuscript goes to Radoi Ralin, who was also the book’s first reader. For years he personally distributed the text in different intellectual and political circles, giving it to certain people who, according to him, urgently needed to read it.

It’s also because of him that credit goes for the book’s speedy legalization. For that (and not only for that, of course) I dedicated it to him, even though it’s not listed in the title page for publishing reasons.

In 1968 I began negotiations with a Czechoslovakian communist party “Liberty.” At the end of July I went to Prague to arrange for the translation and other minor details. That was during the indescribable atmosphere of the “Prague Spring”, and joyous and worrisome were the “Two-Thousand Words…”

Twenty days later the Warsaw pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and everything fell apart. In 1982 ten-thousand copies of the book were published in Bulgaria by the publishing house “Narodna Mladezh.” Three weeks after its release in bookstores it was banned and pulled from libraries. In reality, it was only the third batch of books, the last batch, that was pulled so that at least six thousand copies remained in public hands – these, the police were powerless to collect…

Shortly before the book was banned, representatives of various publishers came to me to ask permission to publish another 30 thousand copy batch. I, of course, agreed, but by the time they went to the printing department of the Communist Party headquarters to ask for an extension on the paper limit, “the infection” had already started and they were summarily kicked out.

In June of 1982 an international book fair was held in Sofia. Publishers from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland wanted to secure a contract to publish Fascism. But our ever-vigilant, ideological police had no desire to discuss this question and simply said that no such book existed. Of course, there was indeed no such book in the “Festival” halls…

In 1986 during the second Congress of Bulgarian Studies a large group of Chinese translators went to Radoi Ralin and asked him for something new to translate. With his inherent generosity and selflessness—which only those of great talent possess—Radoi told them: “Since I don’t have anything better to give you, I’m gifting you a copy of my friend’s book Fascism and recommend that you translate it in Chinese.” The large Chinese group split up the text among themselves and translated the whole book in a month. It’s now offered for publishing in the Academy for Western Philosophy and Sociological Literature in Peking. I’m purposefully withholding the name of the Chinese Bulgarianist who kept communications with us and who informed us of how the work was going. The last thing we heard before that line of communication was severed was that the book had received four positive receptions with high marks regarding the quality of the text, and that the book was already printed and bound with only the attachment of the cover remaining. Unfortunately, it was precisely at that time that the next anti-intellectual campaign started, which, in turn, caused the liberally friendly Chinese intellectuals to lose their posts, and, consequently, their political appointments as well.

The director of the Academy for Western Literature must have been among them, too, because he was also removed from his post. This fact proved to be fatal for the fate of the book’s Chinese publication.

After 1982, lots of Russians requested copies of the book. Some of them aimed to translate and publish it in Russian, while others were more modest and only wanted to introduce it in their samizdat. The brutal limitations on publishing agreements binding “brotherly nations” excluded and continues to exclude the possibility of an official publication in the Soviet Union. But it appears to be a fact that the book did circulate in their system of samizdat since so many Soviet citizens know about the book or have read it.

At one point, Poles, too, wanted to publish different parts in various magazines and periodicals. I don’t know what happened with those attempts.

The last group of people who came and requested a copy during June of this year were members of the committee of the Ukrainian National Front with the intention of translating and publishing the book in Ukrainian. I’m not aware what happened with that or even if anything happened at all.

In general, the fate of Fascism began to remind me of the girl who’s liked by everyone, but, who, for one reason or another, never manages to get married. Let’s hope that this isn’t happening because the girl is getting old… Actually, as the author, I would be happy if it turned out that the themes of the book have become politically dated and passé with time because it would mean that the last totalitarian regime has disappeared from the face of the planet.

But as long as totalitarianism exists, the book won’t lose its actual meaning since it initially represents an attempt, in good faith, with the help of documentary evidence, as in paleontology, to reconstruct the massive political skeleton of the totalitarian mammoth. And those who seriously want to fight against totalitarianism need to know its anatomy and physiology, without knowledge of which success cannot be guaranteed.

Personally, I see no other way to explain why even now in the era of Gorbachev’s perestroika, when the soviet press continues to bring up such massive amounts of crucially vital political information for our society, interest in the book has not waned. People look for it, they re-sell it for high sometimes extravagant prices to the tune of one or two months’ salary. Two years ago, I needed to send two copies abroad, the booksellers offered me a special author’s discounted price of $43 a copy![1]

Before perestroika, what primarily attracted the public to the book was the full overlap between the two variants of totalitarianism—the fascist variant, and, our very own communist one. Despite the analogy between the two never being made explicitly, the nature of the documented material and the way it is organized, the reader himself could discover the horrifying truth that not only is there no substantial difference between the Nazi and Communist political systems, but that to the extent that there is, the difference is of not benefit to communism.

Now, when the organs of mass information speak openly about such analogies and bring in more than a little factual material to support their claims it looks like the book continues to attract attention primarily because of its prognosis regarding the death of totalitarian regimes. The schemata through which the collapse of the fascist totalitarian is elevated to the status of law (a totalitarian system—military dictatorship—a multiparty democratic system) raises the question: will the same schema prove valid for our regime; will this law be preserved, or will it happen a different way? Because if events in Poland confirm this schemata—and this is quite so—then Gorbachev’s perestroika, in the way that it’s been conceived and realized, consists in an attempt to correct it.

Perestroika represents precisely the alternative to a military dictatorship. It has the ambition to do that which must be done by a military dictatorship, but to do so in a peaceful way, humanely, bloodlessly, democratically; i.e. to actualize the social transition from totalitarianism to democracy.

It must be said that, in principle, this alternative is not groundless. The simple fact that Hungary is implementing it before our very eyes and that the Baltic states are attempting to do so as well serves as one confirmation. But this doesn’t happen everywhere, and it’s not easy to do in the beginning.

Of great significance is the nation’s political culture, its moral character, and its cultural-historical traditions. In that sense, the more elevated a nation’s political culture is, the greater its chances of success are to correct the schemata and to replacing a military dictatorship with perestroika.

I worry that for the Soviet Union as a whole this is not an open option. To the circumstances that could lead to a similar development, I note: the multinational character of the country; the different cultural levels of the separate nations; the huge nomenclature; the colossal military machine which, in the most critical phases would have a hard time resisting the temptation to take power from the helpless civilians; the ingrained imperial habits, traditions, and relations, etc.

But the military dictatorship, however hard it tries to preserve the old totalitarian structures, or to save them (as is happening in Poland), cannot alter the process from totalitarianism to democracy but, to the contrary, will speed it up. By radicalizing its contradictions, the dictatorship speeds up the disintegration of the regime. Unfortunately, in this case everything happens with blood, it’s paid for with the lives of more than a few people.

In other words, even through perestroika, even with the help of a military dictatorship, the path through which our communist system will necessarily collapse is singular: from totalitarianism towards a multi-party democracy. This is absolute, nomological, and unavoidable. Everything else is trivial.

But life, which has always been richer than any schemas and for that reason resents being stuffed with them, will probably surprise us with new, many more wondrous and unbelievable combinations from the elements of political reality that we cannot even think of now. Who of us, for example, would have thought—despite the fact that this is so simple and close to the mind—that in the dismantling of our communist variant of the totalitarian system, the system will have to, for a certain period of time, degrade to the level of fascism—to the level of the less-developed and imperfect totalitarian fascist regime, and that in that sense, for us fascism would be one giant step towards democracy! It sounds shocking and paradoxical, but political illusions, emotions, and prejudices are one thing—another are the political realities and iron laws to which they submit.

Today it is precisely this prejudice or ideologically prejudiced way of thinking that prevents the majority from understanding the reason and meaning behind the processes that have happened and are happening in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, China, and even part of the Soviet Union. Now you can hear the majority at home complain about the regime and say “This is horrifying! It’s Fascism!” by which they mean to imply that things have gotten worse than before and that the country is less democratic. If you try to disagree, they’ll point you constantly to the ever-expanding repressive measures being taken. However, they forget that the democratic movement is expanding even faster in the country and that there already exist about a dozen independent groups and movements, that civil society is re-awakening in the country, etc. –things which earlier were completely unthinkable.

This is why it would be better if we told them: yes, it’s true that on the one hand, countries like Bulgaria, GDR, Czechoslovakia, China, etc. face political repression, demagoguery, cynicism, general corruption, chauvinism, patriotism, faithlessness, etc. as well as experiencing unformed movements, open warfare for democracy, changes, and so on. On the other hand, they look more like fascist countries than communist ones, but this fact shows only that they’ve gone through a particular democratic evolution, that they’ve reached a particular phase of decomposition of the totalitarian structure. Because no other path exists in the transition from totalitarianism to democracy except the path that destroys its own political system. Whoever promises to make democracy through the perfection of the totalitarian system is working with the most profound demagoguery.

But because this question is a principled one—that is, it has not only a theoretical but also a direct practical meaning for the current moment, it deserves a closer look so that we can try to see it in historical context.

We, Marxists, were the first in history to create a totalitarian regime, a totalitarian country—the single-party system, built through the violent destruction of the other political parties or through their degradation to ordinary state organizations, completely subservient to the communist party. This absolute monopoly of the communist party in the political sphere necessarily had to lead to the complete fusion of party and state, and most of all with the state apparatus with the party apparatus, as a consequence of which the head of state and the had of the party turn out to be the same entity, possessing limitless and uncontrollable power that runs through all the lower levels of the national and economic hierarchy—the members of the party.

And so that this system could be stable and unshakeable, the absolute monopoly on the state and party, the party’s monopoly of the state, or more accurately, of the party-state, had to spread from the superstructure to the economic base of society. It was necessary that it be turned into state property—big private property by way of expropriation, the small through violent, bloody, Stalinist collectivization.

When this process of privatization of property was complete, the totalitarian regime was completed. That’s how the communist variant of totalitarianism, which even to the present day remains the most perfect model of totalitarianism throughout history. The fascist model which has been often presented as an antidote to the communist one in reality differs only from it insofar as it is unfinished and imperfect with respect to the economic base, and is consequently less perfect and more unstable. This can be investigated even in the inner architecture of Nazism and the Nazi system which nevertheless represents the most complete fascist regime. Here, the absolute monopoly of the party does not spread over the economic base, or, at least over the whole economic base. The latter is constituted in part by private property, different kinds of private property, which naturally doesn’t give rise towards impulses of cohesion, unity, or monolithicity. Quite the opposite, it creates plurality, heterogeneity, and differences which in a crisis easily transform into contradictions. A monolithic superstructure and a diverse base—this is the incompatibility between the political superstructure and the economic base in the fascist totalitarian regime. That’s what makes it unstable and short-lived. This is why ever fascist regime perished much quicker than our communist ones—some like the Nazi German and fascist Italian ones in the flames of the second world war, and others, like Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal after the war, in a matter of speaking, in peaceful conditions.

The fascist regimes not only died earlier, but they also showed up later, which shows that in this respect they are a poor imitation, a plagiarism of the original that represents the real, authentic, refined and perfected totalitarianism. My friend, professor Nicolai Genchev, with his usual sense of humor, defines fascism any time it’s brought up as “an early, un-systematized, bon-vivant variant of communism” and Hitler himself as “a pathetic imitator and operatic hero.” We must say that contained in this joke is a brutal truth. Without in any sense justifying Hitler the executioner and cannibal, we must admit that he is a veritable dwarf in comparison to Stalin the Executioner—even this comparison is a weak one. Stalin the Executioner could carry his colleague in his pocket.

I’ll mention only two figures which speak more eloquently than any arguments and deliberations of the fundamental differences between the two kinds of totalitarianism. Until the beginning of the second world war—September 1^st, 1939—Hitler killed fewer than 10,000 people. As the reader recalls, this includes the victims of the “Night of Long Knives” (June 30^th, 1934), when the opposition leaders of the SA were murdered, as well as the entire existing liberal opposition, and those of “Kristallnacht” (April 2938), the night of the antisemitic pogroms about which there is so much literature… By the same date of September 1^st 1939, Stalin had murdered no fewer than 10 million. Some authors claim that this figure is closer to 15 million, but we won’t argue about that since this isn’t that important in this case. The important thing is that this is a difference that isn’t measured in percentages (one killed such-and-such percent more than the other), is not measured in multiplicities (this many times more than the other), but is a matter of a difference that is expressed in orders of mathematical magnitude; i.e. in quantities used in cosmology, astronomy, and modern physics…

The other figure concerns the victims of the war. Germany, which is at war with a couple of dozen countries in Europe and Africca, and which suffered a full military defeat at the hands of the Allies, suffers between 7.5 and 8 million casualties, and which includes, of course, civilian victims. In contrast, the Soviet Union, which enters the war nearly two years later suffers 30 million casualties. To hide their own incompetence and failure as leaders, Stalin only admitted to 7 million casualties, Khrushchev to 20 million, and currently the Soviet press reports casualties up to 32 million. There are authors who claim that the figure might be as high as 40 million.

Indeed, the difference here isn’t calculated in mathematical terms, but are four or five times greater given that one enters the war much later and doesn’t go to war with as many countries as the aggressor state. This indirectly speaks to the far greater scope of the completed and more perfected totalitarian regime.

But maybe nothing else speaks as eloquently on this topic as the absence of any attempts of a military coup against the Soviet leadership for the fact that it sent the population into a military catastrophe during the years of 1941 and 1942. The history of the 20^th century has never known such a horrific betrayal towards one’s own nation and country as the one perpetrated by Stalin and his Politburo. The destruction of the commanding army staff, the full abandonment of the material-technical supply, the dismantlement of defensive structures on the western border, the criminal neglect of the numerous threats by the intelligent services regarding the immanent threat towards the Soviet Union, the massing of German divisions conspicuously close to the Soviet border, the lightning-fast invasion of the Soviet Union and the capture of nearly four and a half million Soviet soldiers—all this by the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 set up the Soviet Union for a complete military catastrophe, and forced Stalin, through Beria’s channels, to sue for peace with Hitler through the mediation of Tsar Boris.

The fact that even under these nationally catastrophic conditions the Soviet generals didn’t make even one attempt to take down Stalin’s team shows precisely the depth of the political and ideological collapse that was to be found in the social consciousness of the totalitarian regime at is existed in the Soviet Union.

In similar circumstances, despite the fact that they were unsuccessful, German generals did attempt a coup against Hitler and his regime on July 20, 1944. In Italy, the year before (on July 25, 2943) the military leadership of Marshall Badolio managed to arrest Mussolini and to remove the Fascist party from power. In both cases this was possible because the German and Italian generals came from the propertied classes, which means that they had ground under their feet in the civilian sector and in the most important sphere of civil life—the economic sphere. They had property. In practice this meant that if the conspiracy failed, if the worst happened, their families wouldn’t die of hunger, wouldn’t perish, and his brood would be wiped out.

As it relates to the current problem it’s interesting to remember Mussolini’s ideological evolution during the last stage of his life after he was freed from captivity by Otto Scorceni’s squad.

As a result of continuous deliberation (and how much time he had to think while being held captive in that fortress in the Alps!) he came to the conclusion that he has to create a different fascist country where the path to nationalization leads to everything becoming state property. Mussolini understood that only a state monopoly over property could create a monolithic and unshakeable totalitarian regime, capable of guaranteeing the fascist leader and fascist party against any surprises from the military. He put these ideas into his plan for the creation of the notorious Republic of Salo, the creation of which was only frustrated by the military actions of the Allies in Italy.

However, the first practical steps were already made. The creation of the “Neofascist Republic of Salo” was announced in the beginning of October 1943, naturally with close ties to SS General Karl Wolf and his German attaché Rudolf Ran. At the arranged congress in Verona in November 1943 an appeal was made to the north-Italian workers in which they were promised control of the industrial enterprises and a partial nationalization of the land…

But let’s return to the topic at hand. When we talk about the passage through the “fascist” phase in the dismantling of our communist totalitarian regime and when we present this transition as a step towards democracy, this shouldn’t be understood literally in the sense that we’re aiming towards fascism as if towards some kind of idea, that we’ll embrace its ideology, etc. We will pass through it as inevitability, as an unavoidable state of affairs, through necessity and, therefore, the faster we go through it, the better. But we pay special attention to the internal pressures in our totalitarian system in the era of perestroika—pressures which exist because the dismantling of one or another element of the base or superstructure. It is precisely the dismantling that makes the perfect totalitarian regime imperfect, and, because of that, unstable. This circumstance, in turn, becomes a reason to resort to repression as a means of compensation through which stability is restored to the system. It’s possible, of course, for perestroika in different countries to focus the dismantling processes on the base (as is the case in China), or on the superstructure (as is the case in the Soviet Union).

In either case, the totalitarian system enters a phase of instability, as it were, a structural weakness, and to strengthen itself it can’t compensate itself with anything other than the naked use of force, repression, and terror.

The most recent events in China are evidence of this. The economic reforms that the Chinese leadership has been pushing through the last ten years, which dissolved the communes, distributed the land to the peasants under 10, 15, 20, 30, and 50 year leases, which created a freer market, “special economic zones”, etc. one way or another had to lead to contradictions between those in power and the intelligentsia. The economic reforms created conditions under which different groups grew richer, more independent, and more autonomous from the state. At the same time as these groups gained this new social status and position, they demanded to be freer politically as well, which couldn’t happen under the current communist regime without overthrowing the single-party system. So they dared to. The intelligentsia and the youth, which have always been the most sensitive towards the question of freedom and democracy, reacted first against the Communist Party’s monopoly when they called for its removal.

Therefore, even before it came to the return of private property in one or another sphere of civil life, even before it came down to the typical fascist overlap between the base and superstructure (private property and the economic base of society and absolute party-state monopoly of the political structure), the characteristics of the fascist phenomenon have begun to appear.

Of course, it’s very possible that the transition through the fascist phase will not be confirmed everywhere. The instability effect that occurs during the dismantling can occur in the other direction. In the Soviet Union, for example, the economic base is still untouched and an absolute monopoly on the state over the national property continues to be complete, while the dismantling processes in the superstructure have gone so far that political pluralism has become a fact: practical steps for the separation of state and party; unformed groups, movements, and national fronts which challenge the Communist party’s monopoly of power; strikes and national liberation movements; publicity. This consistently exposes the defects and failures of the totalitarian system. In a sense, fascism is created backwards (a monopoly in the base, pluralism in the superstructure!) which, of course, continues to destabilize the system as a whole.

If reform is actualized in Bulgaria as has been planned by the nomenclature—beginning first with the economy, and ending with the political sphere—we’ll see precisely the Chinese variant of dismantlement, and the process of fascistization will be apparent. Indeed, to the extent that economic reforms have been attempted within certain parameters and certain groups in the population have begun to develop a sense of independence and self-confidence, the tension between the base and the superstructure is already more or less palpable. What matters here is not so much the subjective side of this phenomenon, as much as a number of its objective manifestations.

All these reflections on the transition through a kind of fascist stage on the path towards a full dismantlement of our communist model of totalitarianism which, I repeat, represents the perfected form of totalitarianism, don’t change the general course of the disintegration: a totalitarian system, followed by a military dictatorship (or, respectively, perestroika), and a multi-party democracy. The general formula is valid for both types of totalitarianism, and practically for all totalitarian regimes, with the exception that before the more perfected communist variety reaches the second stage it frequently descends to the more imperfect one of fascism. This moment of degradation can sometimes be very easy to spot as an erosion of the first stage, while other times, of course, its expression can be so vague that it is hardly noticeable.

As can be seen, the latest developments on the topic of fascism come from the least expected place – from perestroika – which once again points to the tight link between the two varieties of totalitarianism. Earlier, this connection was either denied, or was primarily seen in terms of a historical or historico-genetic plan (how, for example, communism birthed or stimulated the development of fascism, and following that, how fascism has enriched the political arsenal of communism, etc.), but now, it is seen in actual political terms.

These circumstances bring us back again and again to the foundational problems of studying fascism.

The most recent data confirms that the deepest foundations of fascism cannot be understood if it is not examined as a totalitarian regime, as a type of totalitarian system. Without the totalitarian model in place it’s impossible to see how fascism fits into the political frame of the twentieth century. Even less possible is it to understand its connection to the other kind of totalitarianism—communism—and to establish precisely how the two differ and what they have in common. It’s a bad science which, a priori and necessarily, and due to clearly ideological consideration denies such a connection, emphasizes an imaginary opposition between the two, and at the same time presents itself as most basic and foundational. It’s also bad science when communism is decried as a kind of fascism, the worst kind of fascism, and so on. This attempt amounts to reducing the uncompromised or less-than compromised form of totalitarianism to the other, fully compromised form as judged by the Nuremberg process. And today this hardly makes any sense.

From what has been said so far it should be obvious that for us, the Bulgarian society and the Bulgarian intelligentsia, all the problems of perestroika are not new. We’ve literally been discussing them since the second half of the 60’s, though not at the level of a political empire as in the Soviet Union, but on a significantly higher, theoretical level where the processes in question have the status of laws and from which follow specific consequences for all totalitarian regimes.

Of course, under those circumstances this could only be done openly and comprehensively only on the basis of examining one kind of totalitarianism—fascism—the other was taboo. The public, too, was much more prepared to understand it this way since it already knew the much of the critical material regarding fascism, but retained many illusions about communism.

I remember when the young military officers in Portugal staged a revolution in April of 1974, established a military dictatorship for two years which was followed by a parliamentary multi-party democracy. At the time many friends and acquaintances who had a manuscript of Fascism said that the formula for the collapse of totalitarian regime was working quite well, or, as one especially enthusiastic person said: “it’s working flawlessly.”

The same thing happened in 1981 when martial law was declared in Poland. Of course, this time they didn’t call me on the phone because things were happening in a ‘brotherly country’ and such conversations weren’t safe.

It’s no coincidence that when the book arrived on the scene the authorities reacted with such single-minded and massive repressive measures against anyone connected to its publication. Based on the reaction from the public, and based on the breathless enthusiasm with which parts of the intelligentsia reacted, they instinctively realized that people were openly discussing the biggest problems of our time, and, in that respect, discussing the fate of our “order.”

However unpleasant it must have been for them—and they understood beautifully that they were uncovering themselves by chasing an anti-fascist book—they still understood that they had to repress it since they couldn’t oppose its ideas.

They fired three editors who were closely connected to the book: the poet Cyril Gonchev who served as the internal editor of the book; Violeta Paneva, the editor who ran the “Maver” library (where the book actually came out); and Stefan Landzhev, the head executive of political literature in the publishing house.

The external editor, Professor Ivan Slavov, was censured by the party and “reprimanded.” The question of an administrative punishment was also discussed, but the sharp reaction from the party organization in the philosophy department prevented it from going through. Two reviewers also received party punishments: Professor Cyril Vasilev and Professor Nicolai Genchev. Because of his overly positive review of the book, Genchev received a different punishment. It was ordered “from above” that he resign as the dean of the History department and all of his programs were dropped from TV in the course of three or four years. Because of his positive review in the Plovdiv newspaper “Domestic Voice” Asen Kartalov was punished with a “strong censure and final warning” regarding expulsion from the party, and as removed as OK lecturer of the BCP. The journalist Slavejko Mandev was also removed from his post as head ideological editor in the same newspaper, which seems to have caused him significant stress since he passed away soon after.

As far as I know one of the main reasons for the removal of the then Central Committee’s Comsomol secretary was for ideological reasons; namely, Belcho Ivanov had allowed Fascism to be printed despite the fact that, as was confirmed later, he didn’t even know about the text and was on vacation at the time. I’ve also heard it said many times that the publication of Fascism was used against Alexander Lilov by his enemies in the Politburo but I can’t confirm whether that’s true. In any case, after the publication of the book one of his ‘aides’ attacked me on just those grounds soon after the publication of the book. He told me that with Fascism I had “stabbed Dr. Lilov in the back.”

I, too, of course, had to be punished, but since I had been long kicked out the party, I only received administrative punishments. I was released from leading my section, and was removed from the Scientific Council of History and Culture. And so as to avoid a scandal, they did it in the Jesuit way: they called for a reorganization of the Institute, as a result of which my section on “Culture and Personality” turned out to be closed, and so I couldn’t complain and as a bit of camouflage, they also closed down the neighboring section on “Regional Cultural Problems.” At the same time, the “newly rebuilt” Science Council was announced with only one name missing—mine.

I could have protested and created a scandal, but I didn’t. I was uncomfortable trying to defend myself when, because of my book, other people whom I couldn’t help suffered much more than me. It would have been terrible.

The expectations of the powers that be that these repressive measures would have scared the cultured population, force it to refrain from commenting about the book in public, that those who had a copy would refrain from spreading it around, didn’t come to fruition. The general interest in the book was already so big that the repressive measures only served to add fuel to the fire. People who had never read any political literature were trying to get their hands on it.

At that point the authorities decided to act in a more indirect and flexible way. They organized a massive, lightening fast publication of two foreign studies of fascism: Fascism: Terror and Practice from the French Burderon, and Myth and Reality from the Soviet authors D. Melinkov and L. Chornaya. Both of these were documentary studies. However…

Aside from that, the various Central Committee departments organized a brutal review of the book, which, after a lot of mottling came out in the 12^th edition of “Philosophical Thought” (from 1982) under the title of “Towards a Scientific, Marxist-Leninist Analysis of Facsims” by Mitryo Yankov. The main argument against the book was that it didn’t do a class-party analysis of fascism, and that, consequently, it wasn’t written from a Marxist-Leninist position. Other than that, it made the absurd claim that it was copied—that it was plagiarized—from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, despite the fact that that book came out ten years later in 1981 and my manuscript was registered with the central publishing authorities between 1967 and 1970. This was a nasty and naïve claim to which I was forced to respond with an open letter to the editorial board and in which I insisted that the plagiarism either be proven, as is done everywhere else in the world, or else, for the editorial board to publicly apologize or be taken to court. I had the full intention to sue the members of the editorial board but my wiser friends convinced me not to waste my time. All the more because a group of active anti-fascist fighters whose names include Boris Delchev, Braiko Kofardjiev, Boris Spasov, Dacho Marinov, Ducho Mundrov, Iskra Panova, Nevena Mechkova, Radoi Ralin, as well as younger colleagues like Ana Serafimova, Evgenia Ivanovna, and Ilia Ivanov, wrote protest letters to the head editor of “Philosophical Thought” in which they express their indignation that the publication reserves a place for 50’s style defamatory articles without the opportunity to respond to those defamations.

The authorities, apparently, did not expect these protests because in response they took a very unpopular step: they began to call in the authors of the letters for “comradely” conversations during which they tried to convince them to reject their defense of Fascism. Of course, that didn’t work. In every conversation one side attempted to convince the other to change their mind. Radoi Ralin, who was invited to discuss the matter with the philosophy department in the presence of the academic Sava Ganovski, professor Ivan Kalaikov, professor, Todor Soichev, and others tried to convince the commission that Fascism must be introduced as a textbook in the Party Building course in the Upper Party Academy. If the commission thought that this was just Radoi’s latest political joke must have found it a hilarious one, but when they realized that his recommendation was completely serious, they became completely discouraged and changed the topic to other subjects…

All of the events not only kept the book in the public’s attention, but also consistently popularized it. As a literary fact, they turned it into a political event. A spontaneous movement developed in defense of the sacked editors and reviewers. People constantly came to me to express support and solidarity, as well as, of course, threats of punishment such as expulsion from Sofia, interrogations, and liquidation.

Interest became so large that a genuine political folklore developed around the book. Suddenly, there were comic situations, rumors and legends that became grounds for political jokes. I’ll allow myself to tell you a few of these:[2]

Since she’s heard it be said in certain intellectual groups that a certain book has received a significant level of prestige, a young woman decides to get a copy. She goes to the bookstore and asks: “Excuse me, do you have Z. Zhelev’s Communism?” Surprised, the bookseller asks, “Did you mean to say ‘Z. Zhelev’s Fascism?’” “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

Professor Ivan Slavov’s friend meets him on the street immediately after the party’s punishment has been passed and asks him: “Hey, Ivan, how are you? What are you up to?” To which he responds, “I’m marking myself as yet another victim of Fascism”

Every party functionary has threatened prof. Nicolai Genchev that because of his positive review of the book, he’ll be kicked out of the party. To which he replies: “By kicking me out you’ve only registered me as an active fighter against fascism!”

They asked the director of the publishing house “Naroden Mladezh”: “what’s the newest thing in the publishing game?” To which he replied: “Other than Fascism…nothing new…”

According to another joke, I sent an extensive article to the “People’s Culture” newspaper. The editorial board, overjoyed that I’d once again taken the party position decides to call me: “We’re very pleased with your article. We agree with everything. We’re publishing it without any changes. But why didn’t you sign the sign your name to it?” “Well, because it’s not mine.” “Well, what do you mean?” “It’s written by Goebbels…”

There was apparently another one that managed to compare incomparable things:u

What did the people of Eastern Europe do after the second world war? The Hungarians had an uprising in 1956, the Czechs had the “Prague Spring” in 1968, the Polish had “Solidarity” in 1980, and the Bulgarians published Fascism in 1982…

To compare the publication of one book with the uprising of a nation, or with a whole national movement, is, of course, unfounded, but it’s interesting as a certain way of thinking even if the joke is understood as a bit of self-deprecation which is the most probable case.

In connection with the contradictory and tragicomic situation in which the persecutors of the book found themselves, even the old famous joke about the “mustachioed dictator” has been updated:

A drunk finds himself, sloshed, in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square at midnight and begins to scream “Death to the mustachioed dictator! Death to the mustachioed dictator!” The guard in front the mausoleum pretends not to hear him and waits impatiently for the drunk to leave. But, stubbornly, he remains and, from time to time, turns to the Kremlin, wagging his clenched fist and chanting his slogan. Finally, the guard is forced to call the officer on duty. When the colonel sees what’s happening, he arrests the drunk and reports to Stalin that he’s captured a dangerous enemy who’s been yelling “Death to the mustachioed dictator!” Stalin says that he’s busy at the moment and can’t deal with the matter right now but to bring the enemy to him in three hours. These three hours turn out to save the drunk and he manages to sober up. And when he’s brought before Stalin and asked “Comrade, who were you referring to when you were yelling ‘Death to the mustachioed dictator?” he answers: “Hitler, of course. He treacherously invaded our country, destroyed thousands of cities and villages, and killed millions of Soviet citiz…” “Enough!” says Stalin, “Carry on, comrade!” then turns to the colonel: “And you, comrade colonel, who were you referring to?!”

I tell this clever Soviet joke not only because it was revived by popular opinion and was always related to the fate of the book, but also because, above all, it accurately describes the tragicomic situation in which those who organized and pursued repressive measures against it necessarily found themselves in. On the one hand, they had to punish because of the supposed analogy with socialism; but on the other hand, when those punished demanded that it be pointed out to them precisely where the comparison was made, they had to admit that, despite the fact that there were no explicit textual comparisons in the book, it was written in such a way that anyone reading it would naturally make that comparison—something which the opposing side, by taking the Jesuit position, obstinately denied by proving that such a comparison could only be made by a politically perverted mind. Consequently, those who make the comparisons—the party apparatus itself—are the ones who much be punished. And since this was the direct political accusation against the persecutors, the arguments exploded over and over…

What was happening was precisely that which the authorities most feared: that the punishments wouldn’t remain secret and the interest towards the book would become even more pronounced.

Of the many comic situations that developed, I’ll tell only two.

One day my friend from Pazardzhik, a poet who knew the text of the book well before it was published, saw the book on display he bought fifteen copies. The same day, he was set to meet with one of the village priest with whom he’s good friends and in order to interest him in buying the book himself, he tells him that a new book on fascism has come out and the must absolutely own it at any price. The priest tried, but couldn’t make it to the bookshop in time. A week later, he went back to find it, but by that time it was already gone. At that point, my friend gave him a copy to read and the two agreed that when the two met again in two weeks, the priest would return it. Yet, 15, 20, 30 days pass, then a month and a half, then two and not a peep from the priest. One night, my friend, worried, takes the bus to the village to see what’s going on with the priest. He finds him in the company of the village mayor, the party secretary, the leader of the local friendship league, the head of the union, and two teachers who are meeting to drink and discuss something important. He asks him why he hasn’t returned the book and the priest says “We decided that this book should stay here in the village. We started a reading group and are studying it. We’re reading each chapter and discussing it.”

“What kind of reading group is this” asks my friend. “The party secretary and the mayor are communists, you’re a Christian, the leader of the friendship league is a farmer, the teachers most likely atheists and non-party members…what do you have in common?”

“Ah, true,” said the priest, “when it’s a matter of discussing fascism and drinking, we’re a united front. Here, ideologies don’t matter…”

The other story happened in a town outside of Plovdiv. Apparently, the local union organization decided to reward its most prominent members at the citywide assembly. Along with monetary and material rewards, they also decided to gift them books. They turned to the bookseller and told her that they preferred broadly political literature, with hard covers, and thick enough to catch the eye. The bookseller told them that she had on hand a batch of about ten books on fascism that match their desired requirements—hard covers, thick, etc. The union leaders, who were also apparently the epicenter of the local political life, signed the books and handed them out at the meeting. However, after a couple of days rumor around town spread that they’d handed out an ideologically dangerous and forbidden book. The book became an object of unexpected discussion and commentary. Most likely, these murmurs made their way to that state institution which is most concerned with the ideological health of the country and, on its instruction, they went from person to person to collect the inappropriate book.

However, along with the comic situations, there were also tragic ones. I’ll tell only the most recent one. Last year, a young man from Pazardzhik called me and insisted that we meet.

At first, I thought that that it was someone from the human rights movement seeking to make contact. However, it turned out he was interested in something entirely different. “My fate is very tightly connected to yours” he told me. I expressed my surprise and told him that I couldn’t understand what he meant—we didn’t even know each other. “I was in prison for four years because of you book on fascism,” he continued, “I read it to the soldiers in my company and they put me on trial. They court martialed me and sentenced me to six years in prison, but because I worked, I came out in four. Now, I have to go be conscripted again in the fall to finish my military service. The most insulting thing was that I was tried for…spreading fascist ideas in the military.”

I was shaken—I simply couldn’t believe my ears. Actually, I had heard at one time about a case like this but I didn’t believe it. I thought that it was one of the many rumors and legends that were being spread at the time. But now this young man was standing in front of me and there was no room for doubt. Four of the best year of his young, intelligent man were lost…

“Don’t you have parents?” I asked him, “Why didn’t you run away? Why didn’t you make a scene? Why didn’t you rouse the local population? How could you suffer such a political sham?”

The young man told me that his parents tried to find help here and there but that they were threatened and told that it’s in their best interest to keep quiet, or else things could get much worse.

They truly were scared for their son and made peace with their ‘fate’.

In conclusion, I would like to apologize to the reader for the deluge of facts which have filled this preface—this is something that isn’t normally acceptable. On the other hand, however, I think, because of the strange fate of this book, it shouldn’t be considered a fault. The facts of the book’s political biography clarify and show the importance of the its contents, they decipher and further develop it. The publishers, readers, and the repressive organs, through their attitudes toward it, through the action they took, or through the suffering they endured around its publication and distribution, continued and completed its text. They continue to do so even now…

Sofia, August 1989

From the Author

[1] [Translator’s note]: roughly adjusting 120 leva in 1989 value to dollar value in 2019

[2] [Translator’s note: jokes are hard to translate. Even more so political jokes from 40 years ago.]

I have some bad news: you might live forever

August 30, 2019August 31, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ Leave a comment

[The bulk of this is a retelling of and musing on a paper by David Lewis, but without any of the actual good philosophy–in essence, it’s a less artful way of presenting the same ideas. For some good philosophy, read the paper.]

Please, let me ruin your day.

Consider the following scenario: you’re about to enter into a Star Trek teletransporter that will disintegrate your body here on Earth and put you together in the same configuration on Mars. You step onto the platform, hear the operator press the button to begin the process, and so close your eye in anticipation. Then…nothing. You open your eyes, still on Earth. The machine, it turns out, has malfunctioned and failed to disintegrate you. Nevertheless, as you can see from the familiar face smiling back at you from Mars, it worked well enough to put together a copy of you there. Which one of those people is you?

This question is, in one sense, unimportant. Some people think that both people are you. That may be right, but I happen to think that from your point of view (regardless of who you actually are) the question will seem absurd. You are the person who has your subjective, first-person view and that’s just the person who has this point of view. No other person has, or, indeed, can have this point of view, regardless of how much he looks like you, what they say, what kind of history or memories they have. So, while the question of who’s the real you might pose a problem from the third person perspective of the embarrassed teletransporter technician, it will never be a problem for you.

The same point, of course, applies to whatever or whoever your doppleganger is on Mars. For him, there likewise isn’t any question about who the real him is–it’s the person who has his point of view, i.e. him. And the same point applies to you who are reading this.

The same thing will be true if tomorrow you woke up with an entirely new body. If, for example, you were cursed to inhabit the body of your teenage daughter this Friday, on waking up and taking your usual first-person perspective, the question of who you are would never arise. You might think to yourself “my god, I’m in my daughter’s body!” but you would think “my god, I am my daughter!” That’s just a mistake you could never make–you could never mistake yourself for somebody else from your own perspective. You are necessarily the one who has this perspective and this perspective can’t be somebody else’s.

I also believe the same thing will be true if you woke up with all of your memories wiped clean (well, at least those memories that don’t involve remembering how mirrors work or how to speak or whatever. Play along!). In that case you might in some sense be wondering who you were, but you would still know that whatever the answer to that question is, you’re still now the person who is looking out from these eyes and who’s trying to piece things together. Subjectively speaking, there’s no deep question about your identity.

Back to the teletransporter. Suppose that instead of malfunctioning in the way that it did, a different mistake had happened. Once again, you remain unharmed on Earth. However, when you peek at the screen broadcasting from Mars, you hear screams of horror and see something that looks like your lifeless body, crumpled on their receiving pad. Did you die? The answer is, of course, no. You are where your first-person perspective is and that’s here on Earth where you are very much alive. Furthermore, if you were to die, you couldn’t have any first-person perspective. Necessarily, you can’t experience being dead since do be dead is to have no experience whatsoever (maybe if you have a soul you could still have the perspective from your heavenly ethereal body, but that would still be living a kind of life–an afterlife–and there, too, you would know it by taking this first person perspective). To dust off the old adage: wherever death is you are not, and wherever you are death isn’t. Whew–close one.

Your trials aren’t over just yet. Imagine yourself as the victim of a Schroedinger inspired act of cruelty. You’re put in a cell with a bottle of a deadly nerve agent that is hooked up to a photon detector, which, if triggered by a photon will smash the bottle, release the gas, and kill you. A photon is set to be fired into the detector, but in its way is set up a diagonal half-silvered mirror. In one scenario, there are no collapses (see the Lewis article for the full explanation of what those are), the photon goes into a superposition, hits the mirror and bounces away, the photon detector goes into a superposition of untriggered, the bottle into a superposition of not-smashed, and you go into a superposition of remaining alive. In a different scenario, there are collapses and, well, things don’t turn out as well for you.

It you.

You realize all this. What does it look like from your perspective? What should you expect? Well, if there are no collapses, then you should follow the intensity rule: “expect branches according to their intensities” where branches are the resolutions of the quantum indeterminacy and intensity is a measurement of the likelihood of different events occurring (I’m doing my best here–I don’t know anything about quantum mechanics). In this case, you should expect equally to be alive as well as dead. But, as we just saw, you shouldn’t expect to be dead! You can’t have that experience at all since that’s not an experience you can ever have! So your expectations should be adjusted and you should expect to be alive. In fact, no matter how many times your captor repeats this process you should expect to remain alive. As long as there are no collapses, you’ll always survive your torture.

You can think of this in terms of branching timelines. On one branch (from a third-person perspective) you die, and on the other one you live. The more times the torturous experiment is repeated, the fewer branches there are in which your survive. If there is collapse between the different branches, then, sadly, you will die. However, if there’s no collapse, then there are at least some branches in which you survive. And given that you will always be where your perspective is, and that there is no perspective in which you are dead, there is also no branch in which you will be dead. Thus, you should expect to always survive this experiment.

The same is not true for your torturer. For him, there are plenty of branches in which you die, but this is fine since we’re not asking what he should expect, but only what you should.

Nevertheless, we can ask what he should expect with respect to him and the answer will be very much the same as with you. That is, if there’s no collapse, he will never find himself on any branch in which he‘s dead, though, again, many of those branches involve your deaths.

This point generalizes. One doesn’t need to be in a torture chamber to risk death and it’s clear that there are many events that could occur that could result in death. These can be chemical, biological, or mechanic. Regardless, from your perspective, however, you shouldn’t expect to ever find yourself on any of those (though, of course, I should expect it for you).

So, if there’s no collapse, you should expect to live forever. If there is, however, you should definitely not expect this. So, is there collapse? How would we know? Well, here’s the rub: if there is collapse, then you won’t be able to get evidence of it since, as Lewis says, “its prediction is that in all probability you will die soon.” And once you’re dead your death can’t be used as evidence of any kind for you since you won’t be the kind of thing that will be able to assess evidence–you’ll be a corpse. Notice, also, that the deaths of others won’t give you any kind of evidence as to whether or not there’s collapse. The fact that someone (in fact, everyone!) else has died is compatible with you continuing to live in a non-collapse universe on a branch where someone else has died. The only way you could get evidence that there is collapse is if you died. But then, to repeat, that won’t be any evidence for you.

Should you believe that there’s collapse? Well, you are, of course, free to try dying, though if you’re successful it won’t matter to you anymore and it won’t make a difference as to whether anyone else should believe that there’s no collapse. If you survive, however, you have stronger evidence and the more improbable your survival, the stronger the evidence. As Lewis advises us:

If someday you find that you have survived a remarkably long sequence of dangers, the no-collapse hypothesis will then deserve your belief more than it ever did before.

So, the longer you find yourself alive, the more you should believe that there’s no collapse. Furthermore, you’ll never find yourself not alive (wherever you are, there you are), and, given that you’ve made it this far…

BUT YOU SAID THIS WAS BAD NEWS! WHY DOESN’T THIS SHOW THAT I’M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER?

If there are no collapses, then you really will live forever. But that doesn’t mean you won’t age, grow infirm, diseased, and incapable. Furthermore, while in your timeline you will always survive regardless of what happens to you, from your perspective nobody else will. Everyone else around you will age and die as you, the oldest person alive, will, in all likelihood, continue to survive in constant agony. Even if you tried to kill yourself, you would necessarily find yourself in the timeline in which the gun doesn’t go off, the poison doesn’t work, and the rope slips. Even worse! You might very well find yourself in the timeline in which the gun does go off, but only maims or; the poison does work, but only makes you horribly ill; and the rope doesn’t slip, but only paralyzes you! And this applies to every single person!

Happy Friday!

A silver lining and an addendum:

First, if there’s no collapse you might be able to live a less horrible life in the far future in which horrible infirmities and aging can be reversed though, say, tremendous scientific advances. You would still inhabit a world in which everyone else dies and you continue to live forever, so that’s a bummer, but it’s better than the alternative! Given that in every timeline you’ll necessarily be the person who has lived the longest, you’ll probably get some special preferential treatment in testing!

And note, if everyone believes that there’s no collapse sufficiently strongly, everyone can get to work on making these scientific advances. True, from each person’s perspectives, everyone around them will die, but collectively, we might be able to make it so that in each person’s timeline science is advanced enough to keep the misery at bay.

So, really, the worst is getting through the time that you’re alive now until the science gets really good. Furthermore, once you become convinced that there’s no collapse, you should definitely volunteer to be tested on since you’ll speed up the process and will know that you’ll survive (in whatever miserable state that is) regardless. That might make waiting through that horrible middle phase go much faster.

Chin up, fellow immortal! It’s only a matter of surviving hell for a couple of hundred years. Then it’s just permanent solitude until the heat death of the universe!

Finally, let me add that I know I’ve butchered the quantum mechanics stuff and that I’m not doing justice to Lewis. Relax. This is just another thing you’ll survive.

Socialist Reading Series I: The State and Revolution [Part 2]

August 13, 2019August 15, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 2 Comments

Alright, let’s turn to Chapter 2 of TSaR (could there be a more fitting acronym?!). Discussion of Chapter 1 can be found here.

Chapter 2: The State and Revolution. The Experience of 1848-51

The Eve of the Revolution

Summary

As stated at the end of the previous chapter, Lenin is going to take us through Marx and Engels’ treatments of the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 as evidence that his (Lenin’s) interpretation of the need for a violent revolution is correct. This particular section deals with Marx’s thoughts prior to 1848 and with remarks in The Communist Manifesto.

Specifically, Lenin zeroes in on a passage from the CM about the development of the revolution.

The first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as readily as possible.
The Communist Manifesto pg. 37 in the 7th German Edition 1906 (Lenin’s citation)

What’s crucial for Lenin in this passage is this last definition of the proletariat state as a ruling class. It is this definition that Lenin sees as advocating for the infamous ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (a phrase, I should say, appears like once in a letter that Marx wrote), and it is this definition that the moderates surrounding Lenin fail to account for in their approaches to revolution.

Putting together what we’ve learned already, then, we get something like the following picture: the state is always necessarily a tool of class oppression, the bourgeois form of which must be destroyed by the proletariat and supplanted with a proletariat state that subsequently withers away. This latter state is the proletariat itself organized as a ruling class, and since the state always remains a tool for oppression, then it must be a directed oppression against the bourgeoisie by the proletariat until the aforementioned withering is complete.

More succinctly, the existing state must be destroyed and replaced with an organized ruling class of the proletariat who finish off the capitalist exploiters.

This vision of the state as a ruling class comprised of the proletariat and oppressing the is one that is starkly at odds with any moderate position which sees a kind of peaceful co-existence between capitalists and the proletariat. These positions, claims Lenin, are utopian and are at the root of the failure of the 1848 revolutions; to take such a moderate position in 1917 would be tantamount to distorting Marx and making the same mistake again.

Furthermore, Lenin argues that only the proletariat class can overthrow the bourgeoisie since only it, through its role in economic production, can unite all the disparate peoples who are oppressed by the capitalists.

Lenin then summarizes what he takes to have shown:

The teaching of the class struggle, when applied by Marx to the question of the state and of the socialist revolution, leads of necessity to the recognition of the political rule of the proletariat, of its dictatorship, i.e., of power shared with none and relying directly upon the armed force of the masses. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming transformed into the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the toiling and exploited masses for the new economic order.
The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population–the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletarians–in the work of organizing socialist economy.
The State and Revolution Chapter 2, pg. 30

Lenin then closes with a refinement of this general argument to work in the role of the worker’s party. I believe it’s supposed to go something like this: if this reading of Marx is correct (and Lenin has no doubts that it is), then the state, as we’ve seen, needs to be used as a tool of oppression and violence against the bourgeoisie. But if that’s the case, then the state can’t include the bourgeoisie, and will only be comprised of the proletariat. But since the vast masses that comprise the proletariat have been broken up by the bourgeoisie, it falls on a particular sector of the proletariat to take up the mantle of the state and do the necessary work. Which sector is that? Well, it’s the one that best understands Marxism and which has a consciousness advanced enough to only oppress the former oppressors; i.e. the worker’s party informed by a proper understanding of Marx (i.e. surprise, surprise, the Bolsheviks).

Analysis

I admit, I’m struggling a lot with this section. Lenin moves really quickly, but it seems to me that the crux of the entire argument rests on the simple equation of ‘state = tool of oppression against a rival class’ and ‘state = political rule’, along with an equivocation between oppression, force, and violence.

If the proletariat state is defined as an organized political rule by the proletariat class, and if any and every state is always a tool of oppression by one class against another, then substituting the middle terms, it follows that political rule by the proletariat class will be oppressive against the rival capitalist class. If, furthermore, oppression is force is violence, then it follows that political rule by the proletariat class will be violent against the capitalist class. What also follows from this is also that any political rule will always be (and has always been) characterized by the use of violence against its opposing class.

This argument seems, at the very least, valid. What’s crucial here is whether the posited equivalences are true. This takes us back to the perennial question of whether the state is necessarily a tool of class oppression–a question which I’ve set to the side for this first reading series but which we’ll pick up later. But let’s grant that for now and set that equivalence aside. Now, it’s clear that Marx endorsed the second equivalence between state and the exercise of political rule held, so, Lenin’s point carries: the proletariat state would, indeed, be a state in which the proletariat exercise political rule. What we’re left with, then, is the question of whether the exercise of political power is necessarily the exercise of violence by one class against the other.

Here, I begin to chafe a bit. It seems to me that there are at least two ways to think of the exercise of political power here. One is put in terms of the ability to cause violence and oppress, the other is put in terms of the actual use of violence and oppression. On the former view, one class has political power just in case it can cause violence against the other class (even if such violence is never used); on the latter, one class has political power just in case it does cause violence against the other.

The difference between the two can be illustrated as the difference between my having a handgun so I can fight off a potential burglar who comes into my house and my having a handgun and using it to actively hunt down burglars in my neighborhood. One view on power says that I have power in both cases (and am using it if and when I shoot a burglar); the other says that I only have the power insofar as I’m shooting burglars.

Taking this analogy to the state level, one might say that by gaining the ability to rule politically the proletariat state acquires the means to defend itself through the use of violence against the intrusions of the formerly powerful bourgeoisie. Now, this is markedly different from the stronger claim that in taking power the proletariat state must use violence to crush its opposition since that’s just what it means to have political power. This stronger reading takes it that there is no political power unless it is actively used to oppress and cause violence against the bourgeoisie while the weaker reading takes it that one can have political power insofar as one has the ability (used or otherwise) to cause violence to them.

The important point is that this distinction leaves room for a view of political rule in which the use of force and violence is reactive rather than proactive. This is perfectly compatible with the claim that the state is always a tool for oppression since, after all, tools retain their powers even when they’re not in use. It is also compatible with the claim that the state is an organization of political rule if we we grant that political rule involves the possibility of using force and not simply its actual use.

Again, the difference here in practice is the difference between having a political body which capable of defending the revolution with arms and a political body whose purpose is to kill the enemies of the revolution.

I think it’s not exactly clear which version Lenin is advocating for here. If I squint hard enough I can see him as strictly advocating for the former, weaker version–after all, he does say that the proletariat must transform itself into a class “capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie” [emphasis mine]. Thus, one could read him as merely arguing that the proletariat class must be one that violently overthrows the oppressive state, then maintains its monopoly on violence until such a time that it is no longer needed. But part of me thinks that he’s really pushing for the stronger view that the rule of the proletariat state needs to be proactively violent until there’s no more classes to be violent against.

I don’t see the weaker version as objectionable. Or, at the very least, I don’t see it as unreasonable. However, the stronger version still makes me uncomfortable since it seems to rely on this kind of fetishization of violence that I just don’t care for. I’m also not convinced that the view of power that underlies this version and which rests on the claim that power just is the active use of violence is a good one.

Finally, something needs to be said about the role of the party that sneaks into the very end of the section and which lays the grounds for a single party state. I tried to present the argument in the most charitable way possible in the summary section by pointing out that the way the definitions of the state and political power are laid out excludes the possibility of a state that’s comprised of bourgeois and proletariat parties. This might be true, but it’s clear that Lenin has set things up that makes it almost impossible for a plurality of, say, proletariat parties to work in a state as well. This is because every party that has the same (proper) reading for Marx will, de facto, just be the same party, and every party that doesn’t have that reading will either be opportunistic, or in the worst case, a class enemy that must be destroyed to protect the revolution. What this means is that there will always be one party that has things right, and a bunch of others that must either be defeated or united by force under the party doctrine.

This, for what it’s worth, is something that it seems to me comes purely from Lenin and isn’t to be found in Marx. He doesn’t use any quotes from Marx or Engels to support this, and it seems to me to be entirely brought in from Lenin’s own views about the importance of the party.

“Look over there! Enemies of the revolution!” – Lenin (probably)

2. The Revolution Summed Up

Summary

So, what did Marx make of the ’48-’51 revolution? His full assessment is in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (EB) from which Lenin specifically focuses on Marx’s claim that the revolution failed in France because it tried to work within the state. Here’s Marx:

The parliamentary republic finally, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power. All the revolutions perfected this machine, instead of smashing it up. The Parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.
Lenin quoting Marx. Italics Lenin’s

In short, this passage confirms what Lenin had presented in chapter 1 in his discussion of Engels: the state is not something that can be co-opted by the revolution, but something that has to be overthrown, destroyed, and replaced.

Lenin then walks us through a brief description of the history and development of the modern bourgeois state in France. In doing so, he gives a more specific explanation of something else that we saw previously in Engels–namely, he outlines how the agents of the state come to have the interests of the ruling class rather than the oppressed class. Unlike the general remarks we saw earlier, this is an explanation of how this specifically happens in the bourgeois state as we recognize it and how working within the state failed under the specific conditions of ’48-’51.

Regarding its birth, Lenin says the bourgeois state forms with the collapse of absolutism and feudalism (think 1789 and its consequences). Crucially, this state is primarily characterized by two institutions that displace the existing ones that preceded it: bureaucracy and the standing army [side note: prior to the French Revolution, the majority of warfare was a job for nobility and hired mercenaries; it was only following the French Revolution and the threat posed to it by the monarchs of Europe that the concept of mass conscription and a standing republican army takes hold. For a really really good book on this check out David Bell’s The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as we Know it.] These, in turn, stand as “a parasite on the body of bourgeois society” which it needs in order to suppress, repress, and contain class antagonisms. And it is through these organizations that the state evolves with each subsequent bourgeois revolution that spread on the heels of the French. New lessons are learned and the institutions are developed and perfected to suppress more effectively.

Crucially, what happens with each bourgeois revolution is the establishment of these two institutions, which, in turn, requires the appointment of government posts and positions of power. In filling these positions, the people who are involved in the institutions are separated and placed above the masses and apart from their interests. As parasites on the body of bourgeois society, their own survival depends on the existence of the bourgeoisie, and they come to be work for the benefits of that class.

Interestingly, Lenin doesn’t talk about how this played out in France, but illustrates this point with how the developments played out in Russia following the (bourgeois) revolution that overthrew the Romanovs. Following that revolution, notes Lenin, all the places of power that used to be populated by the Black Hundreds (ultra nationalist supporters of the tsar) simply were redistributed to members of some of the “moderate” Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries, and Kadets parties (each of which were, of course, Lenin’s enemies). Then, with that task complete, all talk of implementing radical changes and instituting reforms suddenly stopped or were indefinitely shelved.

Importantly, as this process of co-optation, betrayal, and inaction plays out, it does not go unnoticed by the proletariat, but serves to demonstrate just what they should expect from any moderates who want to participate in the state as a means of reform–viz., nothing. As the proletariat’s consciousness is raised through this realization, it becomes the best interest of the bourgeoisie and to more effectively perfect the state and its suppressive powers against its enemies.

The point, in all this, is, of course, clear: by participating in perfecting the state and working within it, the revolutionaries of 1848 did nothing more but strengthen the bourgeoisie’s ability to oppress. cannot improve the lot of the proletariat by working through the state, but, again, only by destroying it.

Anticipating an objection, Lenin notes that even if these conditions lead Marx to conclude that this is what the problem was in France in ’51, one may not be justified in extrapolating further than that. Can Marx’s claim be generalized? Unsurprisingly, given the fact that Lenin has already generalized it, he argues that it can. Here, the argument is that since ’51 the same process of consolidation of power against the proletariat has appeared in every country:

On the one hand, the development of “parliamentary power” in the republican countries (France, America, Switzerland), as well as in the monarchies (England, Germany to a certain extent, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, etc.); on the other hand, a struggle for power between the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties which distribute and re-distribute the “spoils” of office, while the foundations of bourgeois society remain unchallenged. Finally, the perfection and consolidation of “executive power,” its bureaucratic and military apparatus
Lenin, The State and Revolution, Chapter 2, Section 3

The argument here is, I admit, a bit obscure, but I believe it’s supposed to be that in every developed country the impetus has been in working within the state–either through parliamentary politics or the re-assignments of offices in non-parliamentary governments, and never towards following any non-state interventions. I’ll return to why I find this argument odd below, but this is the best I can make of it here.

Finally, Lenin ends this section by noting that the global trend as of 1917 is towards imperialism, imperial war, and state-capitalism (note, he’s writing this years before the rise of fascism which makes state-capitalism it’s modus operandi), and that these forces are uniting to further oppress and suppress the proletariat populations of the world.

Analysis

I thought this section was one of the most interesting and most frustrating section so far. It’s interesting insofar as it describes the all-too-familiar process by which participation with the state blunts, subsumes, and defeats all promises of radical reform and change.

I can’t help but draw the parallels between Lenin’s haranguing of people who enter into office promising radical change only to be immediately sucked into the bureaucratic machinery, their promises of reform shelved, and the kind of disappointment that so many of us felt after Obama’s 2008 election. I don’t say that to place blame on Obama himself, but rather to highlight the fact that for many of us, the Obama promise seemed like a truly revolutionary one at the time and many of us seriously thought that with his election there would be some serious changes in place. Instead, nothing like that happened. Sure, I suppose some progress was made (though, to be honest, I’m finding it hard to see what that progress is in light of the last three years), but what was made clear to everyone was just how little could actually be accomplished while working from within the state bureaucracy. I’m afraid similar hopes have been hoisted on the Sanders campaign (a hoisting I’m guilty of as well) and that we’re still under the impression that if just the right people can get in office, then, everything would be alright. In that sense, Lenin’s description and analysis of the attempts to work within the state hits closer to home than I expected. So as far as putting his finger on an interesting phenomenon, Lenin remains an interesting read.

Nevertheless, I find the actual arguments really really thin! In fact, he doesn’t really put forward any arguments about the formation of the bourgeois state, its development, or the opposition that the proletariat must play (he doesn’t really even talk about France, as he says he will, but mostly draws on his own analysis of Russia!). Rather, he just asserts some claims without defending them, and then says that this has been proven by history. I’ve tried to fill in some of the details above (viz. the remarks about the development of the standing army), but even there I’m kind of speculating. Now, I know that he’s writing to a friendly audience that’s supposed to be familiar with Marx and, admittedly, I only got through half of the EB when I tried to read it, but I really wanted to see more. How does the bureaucracy of the modern bourgeois state prevent reform? Why does everyone who works within the state end up necessarily serving the bourgeoisie? (I tried to give a plausible answer to that in the summary, but I have no idea whether I’m right!)

Speaking of that, I also found it really interesting that nothing is said about the ability to enter into the state and destroy it from within. This, one might think, is what the republican party has been doing in the US since the rise of the Tea Party. It’s clearly effective and it can clearly further class interests (since all republican efforts so far have gone to benefit only the bourgeoisie), but it’s not an instance in which the state is violently overthrown. If so, then, it’s possible that the state can be destroyed by participating within it, but this is something that Lenin doesn’t consider. This is all the more strange given that Lenin’s own Bolsheviks frequently used participation in different organizations opportunistically to destroy them (side note: this was also the tactic used by some real chuds to destroy the grad union I used to belong to).

Finally, I found Lenin’s final argument about whether he’s justified to expand the lessons from ’51 apply outside of France really bizarre. What he needed to show was just as working within the state in France didn’t work in ’51, so working within the state wouldn’t work in 1917, and, presumably in 2019. What he does instead is show that the scope and power of the state is expanding everywhere, and then concludes from that that the conditions that held in France apply other places. But this is patently a bad argument! In fact, it relies on the very assumption that working within the bourgeois state is always bound to fail, and since there’s nothing but bourgeois states or states that function through this swapping around of surface appointments, there’s no reason to try. One could argue that there are notable differences between the material conditions of ’51 France and 1917 Russia, for example, that would make work within the former state a viable option. Or, perhaps, the argument relies on the never-before-established assumption that the stronger the state is, the more likely one is to fail in working within it. Now, this latter claim sounds interesting, but I couldn’t find anything in this section that amounted to an argument for it!

Like I said, frustrating!

3. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852

Summary

The question to which Lenin is referring to here is the question of what is going to displace the bourgeois state once it has been destroyed. Marx’s answer, claims Lenin, is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus Marx says in a letter to a colleague in 1852 (the letter to which I referred earlier)

And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society
Lenin quoting Marx; Emphasis Lenin’s

Thus, argues Lenin, the real insight from Marx is not the importance of class struggle, which Marx admits was not his doing, but with the idea that the end of that class struggle requires a dictatorship of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is perfectly content with accepting everything else in Marx except this last part, but it is precisely that which marks (pun intended) the real Marxist from those opportunists and reformists who do not understand his insight.

This is what Lenin’s arch nemesis Kautsky fails to see. Importantly, the exclusion of the dictatorship of the proletariat from limits all discussion within the acceptable bourgeois discourse and thus removes all revolutionary edge from Marxism.

Lenin ends this short section with two important claims: first, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessity–one cannot get to the true classless state of communism without this dictatorship; and, second, that this dictatorship remains a necessity until that classless state is reached.

Analysis

This section presents probably the most forceful argument Lenin has presented this far, but it all rests on what Marx meant by ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. From what I know, this letter is the only time he uses this phrase and it’s not at all clear what he means by this. The language, of course, invites the worst and harshest reading and Lenin’s comments seem to imply that he intends to take the worst of them. For him, a dictatorship is necessarily violent and forceful, so if Marx advocates for a dictatorship of the proletariat, then he must also be advocating for the use of violence of the proletariat.

But it’s not clear that this is the only way to read Marx. One might think, for example, that ‘dictatorship’ here signifies the role of the person or group of people who set the rules despite the wishes of others. This may very well involve violence, but it does not necessarily imply it. The way in which it is implied is in the sense that violence may be used in those cases in which one, for example, takes up arms or seeks to undermine the authority or rule of those in charge. This is, of course, the way in which, for example, most ordinary people think that the state is authorized to imprison or harm people who refuse to pay taxes, kill others, or take up arms against the government. In this sense, the current state is also dictatorial and Lenin is right to say that this is a kind of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Now, clearly, there are cases in which this violence is proactive and patently unjust (e.g. the policing of black and brown bodies in the US), but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sense in which the use of violence is strictly reactive and used in self-defense. To repeat an earlier point, there’s a big difference between the active use of violence any and all enemies, and the right to defend oneself against those enemies should they choose to regain their previous position. The former still seems objectionable to me; the latter seems reasonable.

[Aside: the question of justice in this context is an interesting one that I can’t engage with fully here. I use the term in its colloquial sense. I understand that there’s an argument in the offing about how what counts as just or unjust is itself a product of the ruling class–a Thrasymachean argument–but I think such arguments are pretty weak. The very fact that we can recognize instances of injustice that go against the ruling power’s interests goes a long way, I think, to holding that the link isn’t as tight as such arguments make things out to be. In other words, I still think there’s an autonomy of ethics.]

This is all more the case if we consider that the end towards which the particular dictatorship is put forth is supposed to be genuine universal liberation. I am fine with a dictatorship that prevents the enslavement or rape of others and fully endorse the use of violence against the use of those who would take up arms or use violence in order to override such edicts. If the dictum is true liberation, then it’s downright stupid to oppose violence in defending it (see my note on Engels’ remarks against Duhring in the previous post for much the same argument). Now, of course, there is always the problem of whether this is the end in question (here, again, I still think de Beauvoir has the best take), but this is an orthogonal problem (though very important one).

So, even if we grant Lenin that the revolution requires a dictatorship of the proletariat, the conclusions that should be drawn from this are unclear until we settle the question of what precisely is meant by this term. In fact, even if we grant that a dictatorship necessarily implies the use of violence, the question still remains as to what is meant by violence and to what purpose that violence is put.

To be fair to Lenin, he himself doesn’t make explicit the sense in which he understands the relevant terms(is this fair?!). What makes me skeptical that he takes the more moderate/reactive position that I’ve been pushing for here is the fact that he constantly moves between speaking of the use of violence needed to overthrow the state and the kind of violence that is to be involved in the dictatorship of the proletariat without any qualification. The former, I take it, is clearly an active violence, aimed at overthrowing an oppressor–there’s little doubt about that. The latter, however, can have this reactive reading. If Lenin thought of the violence regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat in any other way than he thought of the violence needed to overthrow the state, then, presumably, he would have made that distinction. But he doesn’t, and the fact that the two kinds of violence seem the same for him, makes me uneasy.

Horseshoes and Class Consciousness: Part II

August 7, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 3 Comments

This is the second part of an essay, the first of which can be found here. It’s not necessary to read the first part, but I will be bringing in some claims that carry over from that essay into this one. In particular, I will hold that:

Fascists and Socialists both respond to certain social ills in society (poverty, war, economic inequalities, loss of traditional values, etc.)
Nevertheless, the two movements differ in two very important respects: first, they differ in how they diagnose the root cause of these problems. Fascists find the root cause in a change in the national character; socialists find the root cause in the capitalist mode of production.
And second, they differ in their ultimate proposals for resolving the problems. Socialists fight for abolishing the capitalist mode of production and fascists fight for the means of strengthening the nation.

In this part, given my own commitments, I will make the assumption that socialists are correct with respect to 2. I won’t make an argument for this assumption, but will only say that it’s much more clear to me how a capitalist mode of production could result in the problems under consideration than how anything like a national character, national spirit, or whatever would do the same. I’m happy to say more in the comments if people are interested, but I don’t want to spend too much time on that.

Furthermore, I will also assume that if the socialist proposal to abolish the capitalist mode of production is to be successful, it will only be so through a massive collective effort in which the people themselves seize the means of production and re-appropriate them for social purposes rather than profit. In short, I’m assuming that successful socialism will be built from the bottom up and not imposed from the top down through a revolutionary vanguard movement. I take this isn’t a radically strange assumption to make, but it is one that would need an argument against a Bolshevik position. I don’t provide such an argument here (though, feel free to read my continuing series on The State and Revolution for my thoughts on Lenin’s philosophy). I do, however, want to stress that my taking the bottom-up approach is not meant to imply the necessity of any kind of slow, building, incrementalism or parliamentarism. I’m not here rejecting such a (relatively) moderate position, but merely stressing that a bottom-up approach doesn’t require taking such a position.

Finally, I will make the further assumption that if what socialism requires is a bottom-up approach, then it also requires a previously developed shared class consciousness through which the problems produced by capitalism are interpreted and understood. In other words, it doesn’t make sense for people to seize the means of production if they don’t see seizing the means of production as the solution to the problems they face, and they won’t see that as a solution until they understand how the current mode of capitalist production creates those problems and what their role is in this mode of production. What a successful bottom-up approach requires, then, is a class consciousness which lets people see themselves as part of a certain economic class as it relates to certain other economic classes within the capitalist mode of production. To assume that there such a class consciousness isn’t needed in a bottom-up approach is, it seems to me, tantamount to assuming that the seizure of the means of production will happen by instinct or without forethought, organization, or purpose. And this seems absurd (or, at best, utterly naive).

Behind this last claim is the more general point that the nature of some problems is such that the solution to those problems only appears as a solution once certain background conditions are in place. That is, the solutions appear only once they’re situated in a particular interpretive framework. Furthermore, there are times when not only the solution but the problem itself is obscured without such a framework (c.f. Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice for a much more sophisticated and philosophical take on this point).

As I’m writing this, the American left is, for the first time in my life (and the life of almost anyone else), having a revival. Here are just some anecdotal points that support this claim: in general, young people are being more critical of capitalism and more receptive of socialism (this link is a bit outdated, but I believe the trend remains the same); we’re seeing more and more young and solidly progressive candidates run in (and win!) elections; almost every candidate running in the Democratic party primary has (thanks to Sanders and Warren) been forced to take a further-left-than-normal position on universal healthcare, student loan forgiveness, free college tuition, income inequality, racial injustice, criminal reform, and climate change–many of these issues are actually being taken seriously for the first time ever; there seems to be a growing popular consensus against the pharmaceutical industry and its role in the opioid crisis; leftist proposals are resounding with surprising audiences; and, in general, it’s becoming more and more acceptable to call oneself a socialist. All in all, things appear to be looking up for those of us on the left.

Furthermore, we have a good explanation in hand as to why we’re seeing trends like these. Namely, we appear to be in the midst of an acute crisis of neoliberal capitalism that started with the gutting of the public sector under Nixon and Reagan, which continued through the Bush/Clinton/W/Obama era, and which has been topped off with the disaster that is the Trump administration and its open cronyism. In that time, unions were destroyed, workers’ rights were rolled back, American industry died, the wealth gap grew astronomically, and wages stagnated as capital consolidated its winnings. What the millenial generation (my generation) was left with at the end of all this is worse than nothing: massive amounts of debt, no pensions, no job security, no prospect of home ownership, no accessible healthcare, and, oh, yeah, an unsustainable climate crisis that threatens all life on the planet.

So, as people my age and older look around and see friends and relatives dying from opium overdoses, as we realize that we’ve picked up six-figure debts to get useless college degrees, as we’re forced to live with roommates through our thirties just to make rent, as we make note of the fact that many of us haven’t been to a doctor or dentist in years, and as we come to terms with the fact that we’ll never have anything more than a precarious existence, we finally understand that nobody is going to save us and that the only means of stopping this is immediate collective action. Briefly put, we’re realizing that capitalism is making us miserable and that the question once again is (as it always has been) between socialism and barbarism. The reason we’re seeing a revival on the left, then, is because the situation has become unbearable and we’re on the precipice of a brave new world in which the revolution may once again become a real possibility.

That at least is the optimistic story.

Ever the pessimist, however, I think that this story, while partially correct and inspiring, is not quite accurate and that we should be much more worried about the trajectory on which we’re headed.

Let me explain. I think that we are, indeed, in a the midst of a crisis of neo-liberalism that has produced serious problems for the majority of people and engendered a palpable populist resentment in the population. People really are suffering and there seems to be a shared sense that something must be done soon to resolve these problems. However, this moment of crisis is not something that only the left recognizes and is aware of. Just as both the communists and fascists were responding to the same problems of capitalism in the early 20th century, so our modern day reactionary far-right and far-left movements are doing the same. And, just as the communists and fascists of the early 20th century responded with different diagnoses and solutions to the problems of their time, so our respective sides are doing the same thing now.

Now, if the assumption I’ve made about the need for a bottom-up approach in the socialist solution is correct, then what matters is whether the majority of the masses–those people most hurt by the current crisis–endorse our socialist diagnosis and solution, or if those same people make a hard turn to the right. The problem comes in if I’m right about my other assumption that in order for these people to come to our side and embrace our diagnosis and solution, they must have a kind of shared class consciousness. This is a problem because, on the one hand, I have no faith that there is a developed class consciousness for the majority of people affected by this crisis, and, on the other hand, the kind of consciousness that’s needed for a hard right turn is pretty much already in place. I’ll address both points.

With respect to the first, my general impression of most average Americans is that they simply do not think of themselves in terms of class in the terms necessary to make sense of the socialist solution as a solution. In terms of class, most people, I think, think of themselves in one of two ways: they either see themselves as part of “the middle class,” membership to which seems to extend to everyone who’s ever lived in the suburbs or owned a car, or as temporarily embarrassed millionaires who may not currently be rich, but who are well on their way.

The first is, of course, an absolute illusion and the label of ‘middle class’ is, as far as I’m concerned, completely meaningless. I suspect the primary drive in people’s identification as middle class is the conflation of ‘middle’ and ‘average’. Thus, what people hear when they hear ‘middle class’ is something like ‘the group of average people’ and when they consider where they are they reason something along the following lines: well, I know that there are people that are much worse off than me, and I certainly know that there are people much better off than me, so I must be the average; hence, I’m middle class. The little adjustments people make (“oh, I’m upper-lower-middle class”) are just reflections on how they situate themselves in relation to those like them. Crucially, to think of one’s class as defined in this way is to think of one’s class as determined by one’s current financial situation, which is to say that it’s not to think about class in the socialist sense at all! The latter, I take it, is a matter of the role that one plays and is expected to play in the capitalist mode of production and that is something totally different from where one finds oneself in the mathematical average in relation to others. This, for what it’s worth, is why, for example, making the same salary is not indicative of having the same class status (you and I might get paid the same as graduate students, but if you stand to inherit property, land, and a company while I stand to get nothing, we don’t belong to the same class). The fact of the matter is that these things come apart and while the majority of people are, indeed, average, they are not middle class.

Undoubtedly, this fetishization of the middle class is also in part due to the fact that belonging to the middle class is constantly reinforced as being capable. To be of the lower class is to have failed, to be lazy, unmotivated, and stupid; to be of the upper class is to be hard-working, innovative, and smart; to be middle class is to be hard-working, competent, and ‘on your way’ to the top. This, I think, is why people also tend to view themselves in the second way mentioned above (i.e. as temporarily embarrassed millionaires): if one doesn’t think of themselves as lazy, stupid, failure (and who could live with that thought!), and if, at the same time, one realizes that they’re not where they want to be, then they must, by virtue of their competence and capability be in the middle class. But since competence, ability, and hard work are rewarded in America by becoming upper class, the current discrepancy between reality and ideology are explained away as a temporary setback–we’re middle class because we’re neither yet failures nor millionaires (but someday!). This, again, is just to say that even if people use the word ‘class’ in referring to themselves as being ‘middle class’, they are using the term in a entirely different way than we socialists use it.

[For what it’s worth, I consider the middle class to be comprised primarily of the managerial class that stands between the owner/s of the means of production (or the board of directors or whatever you want to call it) and those who actually do the physical or intellectual labor. They are always a minority. Apart from that, I’m also inclined to lump in certain members of the professional class whose role is to support the whole machine. These, too, are a minority.]

Now, in reality, most of the people who consider themselves middle class are either upper class (and do so out of a kind of incipient shame) or, more than likely, lower class. This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who accurately identify their class and understand its role in the mode of production. There are such people, but they strike me as a vanishingly small minority.

This kind of general mix-up and inability to see oneself as belonging to a particular class is, I believe, indicative of a general lack of class consciousness in America. Once again, I have claimed that the bottom-up socialist solution can only be seen as a solution if the people who are to implement it are capable of seeing why control of the means of production will resolve the problems they face. That, in turn, requires seeing oneself as part of a class that plays a particular role–i.e. having a class consciousness–and this is simply what we currently lack. The United States simply lacks an internalized, shared, meaningful category of class that can be plugged into the socialist framework.

What about the other side? I’ve stated that for any problem to be seen as a problem and for any solution to that problem to be seen as a solution, it must be nested in a particular framework. The framework that socialists need requires a kind of class consciousness that requires (at a minimum) the category or concept of class. By contrast, the far-right in its fascist guise needs different categories. They need the categories of race, sex, blood, character, morality, patriotism, spirit, and so on, along with the category of The Nation. Recall, as I’ve categorized it, the fascist diagnoses the problems brought about by crises of capitalism as problems in the national character (or one of the other categories) and proposes solutions that aim to fix those problems. Fascists might even take a critical eye towards capital, but, as always, this critical eye is one that looks at what capital is doing to the nation to corrupt it and how it can be reigned in to serve the nation better. What the fascist needs to have people see his diagnosis as the correct one and his solution as a viable one is to be able to employ the categories above in support of his framework.

Unlike us socialists, the fascist pretty much has his work done for him since the majority of people (across alllllll divides) use these categories to navigate social life and make sense of the world every day. Race and gender are, perhaps, the two most salient categories. There may be general confusion as to whether an individual belongs to the capitalist class or the proletariat class, but there can never be any doubt as to whether a person is male or female, or black or white. Society simply won’t allow it (c.f. Marilyn Frye’s “Sexism” on the former). In fact, the concepts of gender queering and race passing only make sense in the background of this deeply ingrained social practice to identify and categorize on the basis of race and sex (I call it a practice because while I see the practice of categorizing as something that humans necessarily do, I don’t think the practice of categorizing on the basis of sex and race as as necessary). Much the same can, I believe, be said about the other categories that the right requires.

And, of course, the concept of the nation is something that all flag-waving, red-blooded Americans are familiar with. So, there should be no doubt that the majority of people have mastery of that concept either.

Crucially, what matters with this concept of the nation is that it necessarily requires that some people be excluded and others be included. The central question with the concept of the nation is always “who’s part of it?” The question is, of course, never satisfactorily answered and we know this. All people were created equal and those of the nation were guaranteed with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, of course! Well, with the exception of those black folks over there who, thankfully, didn’t count as part of the nation! And the native people. And women. And immigrants. And the people of the territories. And foreigners in general And, well, frankly, everyone who didn’t own land. One way of reading the history of the United States is as one long struggle for the definition of who exactly gets to be included in the nation. (This truth has been partially obscured by the fact that, at least on the face of it, the requirements for who gets to be part of the nation were supposed to be pretty loose; hence the melting pot. But, as history tells us, in difficult times those requirements have been immediately tightened. This is happening now as well.) This is, of course, not new or surprising information for anyone, but it underscores the fact that this necessary concept has always been with us and is one that anyone who’s lived here even for a short time has mastered.

Now, what the fascist needs is to wed the concept of the nation with the categories and concepts of race, blood, sex, etc. and to put the blame on those latter concepts as they relate to the health and well-being of the former in order to explain the current crisis of capitalism. And this is precisely what is happening at the moment.

I don’t think that the people who voted Donald Trump into office are fascists. However, I do think that his campaign and administration (although operating as a baldfaced opportunistic kleptocracy) always have been. The very core of his campaign was built on literally restoring the nation, and the diagnosis it has provided for why the nation is doing poorly has, since the beginning been defined in terms of who is benefiting from the nation who shouldn’t be (these, for those of you who are unaware are, of course, illegal immigrants, then Arabs and Muslims, then black people in urban cities, then the feminists and educated elites who are out of touch with real Americans, and finally the globalists–I’ll let you figure out who those are). In short, since the beginning Trump’s campaign has united the concepts of nation and race, blood, sex, etc. as a way of explaining the problems brought about by this crisis of capitalism.

What’s changed since then that is worrisome is the fact that most conservatives seem to have come around to embracing something like this as well and are being completely open about it. (Here’s one example that is perhaps too on the nose but which I would be remiss not to bring up, namely, the Ohio lawmaker Candice Keller who blamed last week’s mass shooting in Dayton on gay people, drag queens, and open borders (her list of reasons is much longer!))

But all of this talk about Trump and conservatives is orthogonal. In fact, I might be completely wrong about the scope and extent to which this is currently a problem . Even in this unlikely scenario, what remains a worry is still the fact that the majority of Americans are already primed and have mastery of the concepts and framework of interpreting this crisis through the fascist ideology. By contrast, we on the socialist left lack the crucial necessary bit to gain popular support: class consciousness. And if the crisis of capitalism comes to a point, it seems much more likely that people will adopt a framework through which they can, at the very least understand the problems they face with the concepts they have than one which requires them to have new concepts.

Does this mean that we should give up? Of course not. Class consciousness can be generated–in fact, it must be generated–but it is not something that we should plan on happening automatically. We should not hope that the crisis will come to a head in such a way that everyone will just come to see the inevitability of socialism. This, I’ve argued, is much more likely to lead to fascism than it is to socialism. And if we want to avoid any vanguardist top-down imposition, we’ve got to get to work and we’ve got to work quickly since the problems that have been traditionally leftists talking points are beginning to be picked up by more and more fash sounding folks (consider, for example, this speech by Josh Hawley at the National Conservatives Conference; fans of philosophy will be glad to see Martha Nussbaum mentioned!)

Here, I’ll close out with just a suggestions on where efforts are desperately needed:

We need a coherent and consistent notion of what it means to be of a certain class that is readily available, easily communicable, and resonates with people in a way that doesn’t require them to first learn Marx. That’s not to say that this notion of class needs to be non-academic, but only that it shouldn’t require being the most pretentious person on the planet in order to get it.
We need to find a way to spread this notion to the most amount of people. In short, we need a propaganda arm. We leftists tend to write a lot, but this isn’t 1917 and people don’t get their information from Pravda (look, I’m guilty of writing this stuff for nobody to read this as well, so I’m not blameless). We have to find a way to make our point broadly accessible and appealing (Chapo Trap House is, of course, the prime example of an excellent way of doing this)
This needs to be communicated to everyone of the working class. This probably means having to communicate with people who we disagree with; it might mean having to communicate to working class racists and sexists (yes, there are plenty of those). This obviously won’t be the task of everyone, but the development of class consciousness cannot be contingent on whether or not one already has the right view on every other issue. If we rely on only the non-racists and non-sexists to have class consciousness, then we are not working with any kind of majority (in fact, we may already be done)
That being said, we can’t lose sight of the other things that we value. I think that the development of class consciousness is of absolute importance, but this doesn’t mean that we should, for example, make alliances with working class skinhead Nazi groups because they’re working class.

There are certainly more things to be said about this, and I’m eager to hear more in the comments, but I’ll leave it at that. The question, now, is whether there’s enough time to do this…

Horseshoes and Class Consciousness: Part I

August 4, 2019August 8, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 2 Comments

This essay is split into two parts: the first part–this part–explains why there is no substantial overlap between fascism and communism. This part is likely to be frustrating for many people for two reasons. First, it says nothing new; ultimately, I’ll argue that although there may be some surface similarities between the two, the two ideologies are not substantially similar. Second, it’s framed in a kind of academic approach that is…dry and indulgently charitable to a position that, again, I think is ultimately not one that should be taken seriously (a third reason to be frustrated is that, like everything else I write, while it’s written in an academic style, it is not academically rigorous). All that is to say that if you want to spare yourself these kinds of frustrations, you can probably skip this first part. However, if you have found yourself thinking that there is some such overlap, take a look.

The second part of the essay is concerned with the importance of class consciousness in avoiding fascism. The claim I defend in that section is that the current failures of neo-liberal capitalism are pushing us closer and closer to a position in which the choice between socialism or fascism will be a serious one again (I mean I think it’s always a serious one, but y’know), and that, crucially, we socialists are in a very bad position to swing that choice in our favor unless we can find some way of creating mass class consciousness. This part of the essay is likely to be frustrating for entirely different reasons, but it has, perhaps, something original to say. If you only read one part of this whole thing, read that part.

Part I: Fascists and Communists

I was having a conversation with a good friend last week (who I hope won’t mind me mentioning this) when we got on the topic of reading the works of difficult people. He asked me if I had read Mein Kampf and I said that I’d only read bits and pieces for various history classes in undergrad. He had read it and said it was a terrible experience (and a terrible book), but that he learned three interesting things from it: first, that it’s obvious that Hitler was always an antisemite and wasn’t shy about expressing it; second, that he was no capitalist and much closer to socialism than he expected; and third, that he wasn’t anti-communist because he had some kind of fundamental opposition to centralized planning or redistribution of capital, but because of his nationalism and antisemitism (communism is all about building international solidarity and Jews were pretty active in the party–or at least perceived to be).

The first point is certainly true (those are the parts I’d read for class)–it’s almost baffling that people didn’t take Hitler seriously given that his rhetoric is explicitly genocidal as early as 1925. The third point also strikes me as essentially correct and I’ll return to it in a bit (with a slight adjustment), but it’s the second point that I want to discuss here. Now, I think this point is mistaken, but I think the mistake is a pretty natural one and one that I think lends itself to the general belief that communists (and that label is usually extended to socialists) and fascists are two sides of the same coin or two ends of a horseshoe. In other words, the view is that the two ideologies have more similarities than they do differences.

This general view is, I think, not uncommon in the public. Here, for example is an absolutely, mind-numbingly bad article arguing exactly that (Dinesh D’Souza is cited multiple times…). On the face of it, it might not seem terribly implausible. In support of this view the most common claim involves pointing to the fact that both fascism and communism in the 20th century resulted in totalitarian regimes arguing that this must mean that they share some deep ideological commitments. This argument is pretty flimsy since it attributes a common cause on the basis of a common effect. Although this way of reasoning can work in some cases, it is clearly a bad way to reason in generally. As a simple counter example, just consider that winning the lottery and robbing someone both have the effect of enriching a person, but the two causes have nothing in common aside from the effect they produce. The same wet, hacking cough might be produced by either a certain virus or a certain bacteria, but this does not tell us that this virus and bacteria are substantially similar (except, of course, with respect to this particular effect!). Likewise, one might grant that fascism and communism have had the same effect of totalitarianism (or, implausibly, that they must always produce that effect) while still denying that the two views have anything substantially in common. Given that this isn’t a generally good way to reason, what would need to be shown is that the inference in question is a good one to make with respect to this case. And that requires a different argument.

[For what it’s worth, I think most people who make this argument don’t really care about whether the two ideologies are similar. Rather, they just want to make the point that they don’t like either view and they usually already make what I called the implausible assumption above that both views necessarily always produce the same effect.]

However, a mover sophisticated claim might be made on the basis of the particular claims that each ideology makes. Consider, for example, the Nazi party’s 25 point program which includes such provisions as: ” 11. Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery…13. the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)…14. a division of profits of all heavy industries…15. an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare… 21. outlawing child-labor” These really do look pretty damn similar to Marx and Engels’ demands of the Communist Party in 1848 (yes, yes, I know about 80 years separates these two and what may seem progressive in one era can appear as the bare minimum in another, but humor me for a second). Simply put, if both groups stand for nationalization, abolition of rent, redistribution of profit, and the institution of welfare provisions, then could the two be that different? Isn’t it plausible, then, that the main difference between the two is merely cosmetic? So, perhaps the claim for significant ideological similarity can be made on the basis that both ideologies take issue with the same things and offer similar solutions to those issues.

Now, I still think this claim is mistaken and that, in fact, the differences between the two make the the two ideologies worlds apart. But this is a more sophisticated claim than the popular one I brought up first, and the apparent overlap between the the two ideologies still warrants some explanation. So here it goes.

Simply put, I think the claim that both ideologies take issues with the same problems is correct; both communists and fascists were (and are), in a certain sense, responding to certain problems of modernity: poverty, concentration of wealth, dangerous work conditions, senseless war, the erosion of certain social roles, the destabilization of traditional values, and, in general, a kind of precarious existence. These problems are genuinely serious ones, so it’s not surprising that different political ideologies would want to address them and put forward demands to combat them. In fact, it would be bizarre if they didn’t! To ignore these problems would be, in essence, to deny them, and such a denial is the privilege of people who don’t have to face them in the first place. There are, in fact, such people who subscribe to these ideologies of ignorance, but these ideologies are certain to be the minority, and are, in general, poor ways to build political movements.

Yet, it should be clear that the identification of a common problem does not entail a common ideology! If it did, then every political movement that takes poverty, war, loss of tradition, etc. (i.e. any political movement that insists on the status quo–that is to say, no political movement given what politics is about) would be identical with every other one. To put the matter another way, I can grant that communism and fascism share a genus on the basis that they share a common concern with certain common identifiable problems, but this does not make them the same species. And to the extent that someone wants to make the former claim (i.e. that fascists and communists are both concerned with the same large problems) without the latter (i.e. they are the same thing) I’m willing to accept the argument.

Still, one might push back and claim that the methods each side proposes to combat the common problem is what makes the ideologies significantly similar. It’s the fact that both groups advocate for the nationalization of industry, the end of rent-slavery, the redistribution of profits, and so on that supposedly makes them identical, and not the fact that they identify the same problems. Here we don’t end up in a position that collapses every political movement into every other political movement. After all, some movements propose combating inequality by progressive taxation, others by eliminating it altogether, and so on. And, yet, here we have two movements each of which advocates nationalization of industry, a redistribution of wealth, and end to profits from rent, and so on. Isn’t this enough to claim that the two ideologies share substantial overlap? Doesn’t this make them not only of the same genus but also of the same species, or, if not quite the same species then super close cousins?

This way of looking at the matter is more forceful than the last two under discussion, but I also think it really matters why, under what conditions, and for what purpose the methods are proposed. Consider a crude analogy: suppose that you and I are surgeons who are tasked with saving a patient with a gangrenous leg. We both see the same symptoms, we both recognize the threat to the patient that it poses, and we both propose amputation as a remedy. On the face of it, outside observers might reasonably infer that we share the same views about medicine, intervention, and cures (i.e. that we share a medical ideology). After all, we agree on these things whereas a different surgeon might propose minor surgical intervention (or no intervention at all!), so this makes us similar. However, suppose that you recommend removing the leg because you think that it needs to be done as a last resort to save the patient’s life and I want to do it as a means of deterrence to teach him a lesson so that he’s very careful with his other leg; or because I think that anytime there’s gangrene anywhere in the body, that body part must be removed; or because I think that when gangrene occurs in people that look like this patient, amputation needs to be performed, but otherwise it can be allowed to spread. I hope it’s clear in this toy case that despite the fact that we have surface agreements regarding how we diagnose and proceed, that the underlying commitments we have about make our medical ideologies very different (I’m not implying that there are such things as ‘medical ideologies’, of course). We still differ significantly from those surgeons who don’t want to interfere at all, but the similarities we share against them are not sufficient to show a substantial common ground.

Stepping outside of the analogy, we can grant that fascists and communists identify the same symptoms (war, poverty, etc.), and that they might even propose similar methods for dealing with these symptoms (redistribution of wealth, nationalization of industry, etc.), but still insist that this doesn’t mean that they share substantially similar ideologies (in the same way that our recommendation to amputate doesn’t mean we share substantial medical ideologies). What matters here is not simply the question of whether these similarities are in place, but whether there are important differences as well. And, of course, there are!

First, the explanations for the symptoms that both groups identify differ. Whereas the communist sees the very system of capitalism as the source of the problem. The communist sees war, poverty, inequality, etc. as necessarily caused by capitalism and what capital needs. By contrast, the fascist places the blame on something like a weakening of the nation’s spirit (or blood, or racial composition, or whatever other bullshit they appeal to depending on their brand of fascism).

Second, this difference in diagnosis also leads to a difference in ultimate prescriptions for political action. Whereas the communist fights for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the seizing of the means of production, the fascist seeks the restoration of the weakened spirit. At times, this might mean that the fascist must oppose capital–thus, the fascist might oppose the tendency of capital to move towards internationalism or multiculturalism, but the problem here are those things and not capitalism itself. This is why, at the end of the day, the fascist is generally a friend to capitalism to the extent that capitalism can be harnessed and put for the good of the nation/race/volk in order to restore its strength. Hitler doesn’t have a problem with I.G. Farben as long as it’s not controlled by Jews and as long as its profits go towards the betterment of “the German people.” Communists, by contrast, are not interested in a beneficial and working relationship between private corporations and the nation, but in eliminating those corporations altogether. And they don’t care about providing just for the nation–they’re interested in creating a world that benefits all workers, irrespective of nationality, blood type, race, or whatever.

Thus, we have a final explanation for why the apparently shared methods or proposals of fascists and communists isn’t grounds for suggesting that the two share a common ideology. Even when it comes to something as radical as nationalization of industry, it’s clear that the communist proposes the nationalization of industry as a means of seizing and abolishing the capitalist mode of production and the fascist proposes the same thing as a means of making capitalism work for the nation.

This brings me to my friend’s third claim: that Hitler wasn’t anti-communist because he hates centralized planning or the redistribution of profits, but because communism is inherently international. In light of what has been said, this is claim is, I believe, true. But rather than showing that there was little natural antipathy between communists and fascists, it shows the absolute ideological breach between the two. Nationalism vs. internationalism; a concern with race vs. a concern with all people; a conditional opposition to capitalism vs. an absolute opposition to capitalism are the big differences between the two.

Still, one might argue that this argument concedes too much and that I really have granted the central claim that communists and fascists are closer than a lot of people think they are. I have, after all, granted that they’re in the same genus! Perhaps this is all that my friend wanted to stress in saying that Hitler’s fascists shared with communists and socialists. Perhaps this is what makes the outlines of the horseshoe.

If that’s the case, then I’ll bite the bullet since I think it’s not enough to draw any serious claims one way or the other; the horseshoe simply comes too cheaply to matter.

If it isn’t clear, I’m firmly in the socialist camp and abhor fascism. My interest here has been to argue that the communist is not a fellow traveler with the fascist and that the cited similarities aren’t enough to establish that they are. Are there views that share nothing with fascism? Perhaps–but those might entail giving up or taking on other commitments that I don’t think should be given up or made. Let me offer one final metaphor: the satanist and the evangelical Christian might both be committed to the the existence of the Devil, but this shared commitment neither makes them sufficiently similar, nor does pointing this out serve as a ground for either to become an atheist.

In saying all this argument I’m not claiming to be offering any startling new insight. It is useful to the extent that it makes dispels some natural interpretation errors, but not much more than that. That being said, what’s been said here will be brought in more generally in the second part of this essay where I think there are some interesting upshots.

Socialist Reading Series I: The State and Revolution [Part 1]

August 2, 2019August 15, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 3 Comments

Why Lenin? Why now?

This is the first entry into what I hope will be a reading series in classic socialist/communist/Marxist texts. I don’t get to read many such texts as part of my graduate school education, and, in general, there seems to be little interest in analytic philosophy departments in discussing them. This isn’t to say that there’s a hostility towards such texts. There isn’t, and in my experience most people’s attitudes towards Marx and socialist theory remain generally warm. But only in a second-hand kind of way–the way that you might have a general positive attitude towards someone that your good friend has vouched for, but whom you don’t know otherwise. I’ve met very few (any?) people in analytic philosophy under the age of 50 who have either read any of Marx’s primary texts as part of their education, or who see Marxism as a serious object of study (dare I say he gets the same treatment in analytic programs as Nietzsche?). So, my impression is that Marx is rarely read, tolerated, but generally considered passe by folks around my age. (This is not the case in other departments within the liberal arts and I’m certain it’s not the case in continental programs but I’m speaking from an analytic department view. I imagine, of course, that there are individual differences between different analytic philosophy departments and perhaps differences in sub-fields. I’d love to learn more about where it is taken more or less seriously.)

Given that Marx isn’t taken terribly seriously, it’s not at all surprising that other socialist writers are not talked about at all. To have an interest in reading Marx might be a tolerable quirk, but to have an interest in reading Lenin (or God forbid!) Mao, you’ve got to have some kind of radical ideological bend! As far as I’m aware nobody reads them in my neck of the woods. Yet, it is these writers, their actions, and their thinking that took Marx’s ideas and used them to shape much of the twentieth century. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with other graduate students about how ineffectual and impotent doing philosophy can seem, and yet, here are writers and thinkers (dare I say philosophers? No…philosophy is done in journals and universities…) who took philosophy and used it to shape the majority of the twentieth century, but whose work we don’t even glance at! I’ve read Kripke’s Naming and Necessity four different times in my philosophical education but had to read Capital Vol. 1 alone during a Christmas break, and have never even touched Mao!

So, in light of all this, I’m trying to do a little self-education through writing. I won’t pretend that I don’t have any kind of ideological bend–I do. I’m highly sympathetic to Marxism, highly skeptical of Anarchism, and critical of anything to the right of that. I’m not going into this study as some kind of neutral objective observer (as if such things exists), so nobody should expect otherwise. I’ll be going into this study as a charitable and sympathetic reader. Nevertheless, I won’t be taking a dogmatic approach to the subject either. Given the fact that I’m a product of my education system, my knowledge of all this stuff is pretty amateurish–I’ve read some classics of socialism, but far from enough to be an expert or to have fixed and decided opinions on some of the more subtle issues. In short, I simply don’t know enough to be dogmatic! So, while I’ll be taking it as a given that, for example, most of what Marx says was fundamentally correct, I won’t be treating Capital as scripture. I’ll also limit my study to the particular piece of literature at hand–i.e. for this bit, I’ll only be reading The State and Revolution and not going to other sources or pulling from other texts. This is less a matter of methodology than of laziness; I just don’t have the time to do the kind of work that would be fitting for something more serious (hence this reading series’s banishment to the crumb dungeon).

Finally, a little note on why I’ve chosen this particular piece of Lenin’s. First, the piece is relatively short and straightforward, and from what I’ve read regarding Lenin’s works, it’s perhaps the one piece that isn’t explicitly directed at some particular factional dispute that he was involved in in like 1875. In other words, it’s one of the works that has had some staying power and that doesn’t require that we understand the inner workings of the struggle for power between emigre nerds in Switzerland in the last century (although, take that with a grain of salt, cause there’s still a bunch of that in here as well!). Second, it’s directed at answering a question that I’m particularly squeamish about (from a perspective that I don’t endorse): the importance of violence in facilitating social change. Frankly, I’m not a fan of the claim that such violence is always necessary and I think one of the things that bothers me is how quickly and easily endorsing that idea can get out of hand. And not only for moral reasons (which rightly might be dismissed as bourgeois anyway), but for practical ones as well. The violence is rarely used against the people whom it is initially justified and bald-faced terror does little to win converts [Aside: One of the things that really pisses me off about the current climate on the left currently is the fetishization of the guillotine as a symbol of popular violence as though the people whose heads were cut off were all aristocrats. The vast majority of them were regular, inconsequential people!] So, this piece is also chosen because of intellectual curiosity: could Lenin’s argument be right, and if not, given that I’m sympathetic to the general socialist project, on what grounds can I criticize it?

With all that behind us, let’s turn to the chapter one. For each section I’ll offer a brief summary followed by an analysis.

[Note: the edition I’m using is 1965 reprinting from the Selected Works of V. I. Lenin, Engl. ed., Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1952, Vol. II, Part I. Fun note: the actual copy is a badass little first edition printing from the People’s Republic of China]

Chapter I: Class Society and The State

The State as the Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms

Summary

Lenin’s goal is established in this first chapter: he wants to set the record straight about the proper interpretation of Marx with regards to the question of…well, the state and revolution. According to Lenin, Marx and Engels have been misinterpreted by different bourgeois philosophers and economists (and Lenin’s political enemies) who have attempted to strip their writings of their true revolutionary and radical commitments. Rather than embracing the true radicalism of Marxism as Lenin has, these thinkers push their adherents to a moderate, incrementalist, complacent position. These are bad interpretations and Lenin is going to show that Marxism is inherently revolutionary from the ground up.

He begins with Engels and his version of the emergence of the state. According to Engels, the state arises at a particular time in history in which the contradictions of some initial communal society are unable to be resolved internally. These contradictions are, naturally, the product of the economic class interests of that society, and are, crucially, antagonistic and irreconcilable. They will continue to exist until some conflict either removes one of the contradictory terms or some other intervention takes place that reduces or contains the antagonism. The creation of the state is such an intervention. Rather than engaging in mutual destruction and a dissolution of society, the state is implemented as something above society and alienated from it whose purpose is to moderate the antagonistic class conflict and keep order.

What this shows, says Lenin, is that the state doesn’t resolve or reconcile the social contradictions inherent in that society (at best, it is brought in to keep the worst excesses from occurring). Rather, the state serves to contain or perpetuate class conflict, not resolve it.

Not only does the state not resolve class conflict, but, claims Lenin, by definition, Engels is committed to the claim that it can’t resolve that conflict since it arises precisely at that point in which conflict becomes irreconcilable. It is not a means of reconciliation, but marks the point at which reconciliation becomes impossible.

The implication is, of course, that at least by the time he wrote Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884, Engels was already opposed to moderate approaches that attempt to use the state as a tool of liberation.

Furthermore, Lenin claims, Marx also held the same position since he held that the state necessarily serves as a tool of class rule that legitimizes oppression through moderation. If this is the case, then the state simply cannot be used as a means of liberation since its very existence entails oppression.

The upshot of both these claims is twofold: first, any proposal and political movement that sees the state as a means reconciliation and liberation is not an accurate reading of Marx and Engels. And second (and more importantly) liberation is achieved only through the violent destruction of the state. I quote:

If the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “increasingly alienating itself from it,” then it is obvious that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation.”
The State and Revolution Ch. 1 Part 1 pg. 9; italics in original

Analysis

It’s clear that the major part of Lenin’s conclusion relies not on the fact that class conflict is irreconcilable, but that the state is supposed to be the tool for one class to oppress the other. Thus, it relies less on the claim about Engels and more on the one about Marx. If, for example, the state were some impartial referee that merely contained conflict without taking sides, then it would not follow that the only way out of the irreconcilable conflict would be through violent revolution and the destruction of the state. Just as in boxing the existence of a referee who contains the conflict within certain boundaries (no biting!) does not imply that the way to end the fight is to destroy the referee, so the existence of an entity separate and alienated from the class conflict which produces it does not imply that the way to end the conflict would be to destroy the state. You might just have to take out the opponent.

However, there is a sense in which my argument only works if we assume some kind of equal starting point, and, furthermore, some further assumption about the agreement regarding the conditions under which we’ll be constrained. Suppose that you and I are set to box, but you’ve spent the last 90 days malnourished while I’ve been hitting the gym every day with my trainer and eating well. The introduction of a ‘moderate’ judge who rewards points on abilities that require good health and training only serves to the benefit the person who already has the initial advantage. In that case, the only path towards your liberation might be to first remove the referee who imposes certain unfair rules against you! Likewise, even if we start from an equal starting point and with an impartial referee, only to quickly switch to an arrangement in which that referee is replaced with my mom (who, as you should know, always rules in my favor and is willing to do horrible things to protect me), then it makes sense to take her out.

So, what matters is why the state, separate and alienated from society, always serves as a tool of oppression in favor of the ruling class.

Unfortunately, Lenin doesn’t offer any citations for the claim that Marx thought the state must necessarily be a tool for the oppression of one class and maintenance of class conflict. This isn’t to say that Marx doesn’t say this, but only that this most vital argument is missing here and that I’ll have to look for it in the literature. I’ll eventually get to it. For now, we can flag this as a fundamental assumption in Lenin’s argument and assume it conditionally. In any case, he says more about this in the rest of the chapter so stay tuned.

Interestingly, one may have thought that who the initial state comes to favor is also an important one. However, it appears that at least from what I’ve gleaned here, this isn’t the case. It’s easy to see why this is the case if we grant Lenin that the state will always favor one side over the other and will necessarily serve to preserve the conflict between classes. If that’s so, then as long as the state exists, regardless of who wields it, it will maintain the irreconcilable conflict which produced it. We can imagine that this power has been traded many times before between the antagonist classes, sometimes in favor of one class sometimes in favor of the other. But because these classes have vested their powers in the state rather than taking measures to abolishing it, the antagonism and conflict has been and continues to be maintained. Thus, if true liberation really does rest in ending class conflict, then true liberation requires the abolition of the state. This also gives us a better sense of what is meant by true liberation: namely, true liberation involves the resolution of class conflict (which seems to be in line with what Marx thought as well).

If what’s been said is right, then it’s also apparent that the abolition of the state is necessary, but not sufficient for the resolution of the conflict! If we accept the story that Engels and Lenin have given us, then the destruction of the state would, presumably, only bring us back to the initial position of irreconcilable class conflict–but now with no holds barred. But this still isn’t reconciliation of the contradictions that made the state a necessity since these contradictions would still be in place. What would be required at this point is the further removal of one of the contradictory terms. And it’s not clear what this entails, but, I assume, it’s not something pretty if avoiding it required the creation of the state in the first place. This is another place to put a finger on.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that the claim that oppression is perpetuated through appeals to moderation is one that many of us would sympathize with today. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist or follow any of Lenin’s argument thus far to notice that an appeal to moderation is not always a way of ensuring anything like fairness and that it can very often be used as a means of oppressing. If you try to kill me and I fight back, to appeal to the ‘moderate’ solution that you should moderate your approach by trying to merely enslave me and I should moderate my response by trying to talk you out of it is clearly one that favors you and not me. And this, indeed, is what many socialists are attempting to point out to moderates: the situation we’re in right now is one in which the rules of moderation only serve to preserve the power of existing structures.

2. Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.

Summary

Returning to Engels, Lenin describes the effects of the state on the initial society which brings it to life. First, it divides people on the basis of territory, and second, it creates an independent armed organization through which it can exert its power and keep order. This organization is not only limited to armed individuals, but also includes separate institutions and material elements that are necessary for it to operate (e.g. prisons and such). This arrangement constitutes the state’s power over the society which birthed it.

Engels’ intention in making this point, claims Lenin, is a revolutionary one: it’s supposed to make the more revolution conscious workers realize that the very existence of a separate armed body in place to keep order is a contingent arrangement that’s in place precisely because the state needs it to serve its function as a regulatory body that suppresses and moderates class conflict.

The question that arises once this is realized is that of whether there can be an alternative to this arrangement involving a special armed body that operates apart from society and polices it. To this question “the West-European and Russian philistines” say ‘no’, citing the complexities of modern society, the division of labor, and so on. However, claims Lenin, this is not why the alternative is impossible–one could imagine a highly complex society that only differs “from the primitive organization of a stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive man, or of men united in clans, by its complexity, its high technique, and so forth.” (both quotes from pg. 11) Rather, what makes an alternative impossible is the fact that in modern societies (more generally, any society after the creation of a state) there already exists the deep and irreconcilable rift between classes.

Crucially, if there weren’t such a separate entity which alone were entitled to use force, but if each individual were armed and capable of doing so, then there would be immediate armed conflict.

The argument here goes pretty quickly but it’s a fairly interesting one. When we ask “why do we need the state? Why do we need the police?” The most common answer is, of course, that without this there would be chaos. This is precisely right and Lenin agrees–if the power of the state disappeared and population armed, you can guarantee that the landowners’ estates would be pillaged and the aristocracy butchered (as Lenin knew from the history of mass peasant revolts in Russia). However, what Lenin asks is why this should be the case. Why should a general arming of the population in the absence of state power result in violence? The answer is apparent: it’s because there are irreconcilable class conflicts simmering below the surface that are constrained only by the existence of the state.

Importantly, because the function of the state is to constrain class conflict, the more acute that conflict becomes, the more power the state will need in order to suppress it. Thus, as empires grow, encompassing more and more people who are ruled by a smaller and smaller minority, the needs of empire will proportionally demand a more and more powerful state–more guns, more ships, more surveillance, etc. with which to contain the conflict.

This is further exasperated by competing states which seek to conquer more and more territory. In other words, the power needed to constrain Germany and France and the class conflicts therein is much greater than the power that either state needs to constrain their respective class conflicts. Thus, conquest of other territories requires a proportionate increase in state power.

Here, Lenin sneaks in an extra argument and jab at his opponents: support for military intervention is defacto support for the continuing oppression and perpetuation of class conflict. Likewise, given that he’s writing this in 1918 before Russia has pulled out of WWI, support for continuing the war, even in defense of ‘the fatherland’, amounts to strengthening the state against the interests of the working class.

Analysis

Engels/Lenin’s understanding of the state as an organization vested with power made manifest in armed men and the institutions that support them seems fundamentally correct. However, one could push on two places. The first has to do with whether the role of the state is indeed to suppress or contain class conflict. In other words, one might grant that perhaps one of the functions of the state is to keep such control in check, but that this is not the fundamental reason for the existence of the state; here, Lenin’s philistine enemies who stress the growing complexity of society might have something to say.

In response, one might make a kind of argument in Lenin’s defense similar to the one Nietzsche makes in On the Genealogy of Morals. Namely, one could argue that people who appeal to the current utility of a practice or institution to infer the original purpose for which that practice or institution arose are making a mistake. Thus, one could argue that although the state now serves to manage complex society with differentiate functions does not mean that it arose because of that need. Pace Nietzsche, just as the current supposed utility of punishment for deterrence (or whatever) doesn’t establish that the initial purpose of punishment was to deter, so the current utility of the state in whatever respect one might point to doesn’t establish its initial purpose.

But this wouldn’t be enough just yet. One would also need to first give an argument for why the original purpose of the state really is what Engels and Lenin say it is–namely, the containment and moderation of irreconcilable class conflict (presumably for that we’ll need to go to Engels himself and see what he says)–and, second, one would also need to demonstrate that the initial purpose for establishing the state is still, in some sense, relevant and present. Clearly, if the genealogical explanation Engels gives is wrong, or if it were right but it could decisively be shown that class conflict had been resolved, then Lenin’s conclusion wouldn’t go through. The latter option seems highly implausible since class conflict seems very much with us. The former, however, might cause some trouble.

Here, again, we would need to depart from the text and do a in-depth study of Engels’ (and probably Marx’s) writings to assess those genealogical arguments. I won’t do that here, but this might make good reading for a further installment in this series. In lieu, I’ll stick another flag here as I did in the first section.

The second related place one might push Lenin back is with respect to the argument that the armed violence that results with the collapse of the state is the result of a return to a kind of naked class antagonism. This also seems to imply that these kinds of violent events occur only under the conditions of class conflict which, in turn, sounds a bit utopian. Won’t there still be instances in which people fight and rob and steal from one another within a classless society? If not, then it seems that one is laying the explanation of every conflict, every jealousy, every disagreement that ends with blood at the feet of class conflict. This seems not only terribly simplistic and naive and at odds with certain basic assumptions about psychology, but also appears to idolize the working class to the extreme; is the working class so psychologically situated that workers never fight?

I think there’s something to this argument, and there are hints elsewhere in Lenin’s writings that seem to point to the kind of absolute faith he had in the post-revolutionary society to just be able to do things right. So, I don’t want to dismiss it out of hand. Nevertheless, the argument is at least partially an uncharitable one since, strictly speaking, nothing is said about the elimination of all violence or conflict. One might grant that conflicts will still exist between individuals or small groups, but insist that these conflicts will not be irreconcilable nor will they be based on some deep contradiction. How they’ll be settled remains a mystery (surely, a better story will be needed than: “they’ll be reconciled because one person will kill the other”!) but there’s space for this kind of position.

Furthermore, one can also claim that the there will be much less violence in the absence of class conflict because the world that we’re considering is precisely the one in which the means of production have been harnessed to provide for the needs of everyone. In such a world, the very motivation for the kind of mass violence associated with peasant riots–poverty, collective revenge for social wrongs, lack of food or luxury that belong to the landowner, etc.–will be entirely undercut. If each of us has what we need and none of us is oppressing the other, then what reason would we have to collectively engage in mass violence, robbery, pillaging, etc.? Does this mean that jealous men won’t kill each other over petty shit? Of course not! But note that jealous men kill each other over petty shit even with the presence of the state! Nothing is made worse. Individuals will still continue to have the same kind of psychologies, but nobody will have motivation to commit the kind of collective violence that now occurs in the vacuum of a collapsed state.

[On the flip side, I think the argument can be made that there will be new motivation for collective action against individuals who, because of idiosyncratic or pathological differences nevertheless wanted to steal or murder or or pillage for its own sake. Specifically, in a mirror to the current state of affairs we would be on guard against anyone who is able to use violence to disrupt the general state of equality we’ve set up since they would pose a threat to the system that fulfills our needs. This needs to be much more fleshed out, but I think there’s an argument there.]

However, one problem with this response to the somewhat uncharitable argument I presented earlier is that it leaves room for a different line of attack. Namely, if all conflict is not necessarily class conflict and if this conflict can be explained in simpler psychological terms, then perhaps the explanation for why violence occurs in the vacuum of weakened state power can also be explained in such terms. That is, one might argue that mass peasant violence occurs not because of class conflict but because people are naturally greedy and they are always interested in accumulating more and more stuff. Mix that in with a theory of group mentality and how it operates and you have an explanation that doesn’t have anything to do with classes. And if that’s right, then the state doesn’t come in as something contingent that is brought in simply to contain and avoid class antagonisms, but as something necessary to curb natural inclinations.

Here, again, the genealogical argument that I don’t provide once again proves vital!

3. The State as an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class

Summary

Maintaining the state requires maintaining certain means which are necessary for its support. These are obtained through the levying of taxes and through the appointment of officials who are qualified to collect these taxes. Naturally, such people come to take a privileged position in society as the state grows in power. In pointing this out, claims Lenin, Engels is once again drawing our attention to the purpose of this stratification: “The main question indicated is: what is it that places [the officials] above society?” (pg. 14) This answer to this question is, as could be predicted, the growth of economic influence.

To see why this is the case, Lenin walks us through more of Engels’ story of the emergence of the state. Initially, as we have learned, the state emerges because of class conflict. However, because it also emerges within that conflict, it by default becomes the-state-of-the-class-which-wields-the-most-economic-influence. Thus, the state “as a rule” (Engels’ words!) automatically comes to support and justify the economic interests of the dominant class: the feudal state supports and justifies the maintenance of slaves and serfs (i.e. the feudal mode of production), and the modern state supports and justifies the maintenance of wage labor (i.e. the capitalist mode of production).

The argument here is a bit obscure (why is it that “[the state] is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class”?), but, given the context in which Lenin presents the quote, I think the argument is meant to be as follows. The state, in its inception, is ex hypothesis created as a tool and does not have an autonomous life–it does not (as yet?) have any “state interests” which it pursues independently. Consequently, it must be yielded by one group or another. However, it is nevertheless populated by people who make it run. And if the question is between whether the more dominant or the less dominant group will have influence over these people, and hence, over the state, the answer seems to be obviously in favor of the former rather than the latter. Why? Simply put, because the economically dominant class buys the state and co-opts it for its purposes. Hence, Lenin’s quote of Engels that:

“Wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely,” first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); second, by means of “an alliance between the government and Stock Exchange” (France and America)
The State and Revolution Chapter 1, Section 3, pg. 15

This reading is reinforced by Lenin’s subsequent remarks railing against his political opponents, arguing that the coalition government established after the February Revolution was immediately bought out by capital and immediately went to work serving capital.

Contained in this tirade is also a more general critique of democracy and democratic republics. It is under these forms of government, specifically, that capital can exert its influence most easily and form what Lenin calls a “political shell for capitalism…[in which] no change either of persons, of institutions, or of parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic, can shake it.” (pg. 15-16) Here, again, Lenin’s justification is obscure (or missing!), but it’s clear that the implication is that just like the shell of a clam obscures the ligament inside from view, so the political shell of democracy is supposed to obscure capital’s influence.

This, he thinks, is why Engels also believes that universal suffrage is nothing but a tool for bourgeois rule. If all that voting in democratic republics does is swap the players out within a static, hijacked system that always serves the dominant economic class, then enfranchising more people simply won’t make a difference in their liberation. They will simply elect individuals who will immediately be co-opted by the existing machinery of the state.

It seems to me that this is a crucial argument (and one to which I will return shortly), but Lenin’s stated intentions here are (apparently) just to clarify that Marx and Engels’ views are not amicable to any attempts to work within the state.

Analysis

This section promised to supply the missing piece that we were looking for in the analysis of section one: viz. why the state is always necessarily a tool for the oppression of one class by the economically dominant one. However, I’m not sure what to make of the argument that’s presented. If my summary is correct, then the argument is, again, that the state serves this purpose because it is essentially bought out by the economically dominant class either directly on indirectly. Now, I think some basic knowledge of the workings of American government makes this argument seem plausible–the military-industrial complex (or the military-industrial-information complex) gives us a really good model for how this actually works in practice. So, I don’t want to deny that this does, in fact, happen. Nor do I want to deny the fact that the state does (and seems to always have) operate to secure the necessary conditions for a particular period’s mode of production (c.f. Elizabeth Anderson’s recent book on private government for evidence of that).

However, what this shows is that the state can easily come to be under the influence of one or another group, and not that it must necessarily always be a tool of oppression by one class against the other. What Lenin needs is the latter claim and not the former. So, I still remain puzzled about why he thinks he’s shown the latter. In fact, the part of what he quotes from Engels seems to suggest that Engels himself doesn’t think that this is a necessity claim. I quote:

By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires a certain degree of independence of both. Such were the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.
Lenin quoting Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

If this is true, then it’s not true that the state necessarily has to be a tool of oppression since it can, even if only as an exception, acquire an independent status of those who would wield it in that way. Accepting this is not tantamount to denying that, nevertheless, the state does not usually or normally come to play such an oppressive role, nor that it’s currently playing such a role. Rather it only leaves open room for the possibility that it might not under certain conditions.

Now, in saying this, I don’t mean to suggest that a ruling state independent of any class interest is a good thing–in fact, such independence might be the worst of all possible worlds. I’m don’t know too much about the First and Second Empires and nothing at all about Bismarck’s Germany, so I can’t speak to that, but one can easily see how a powerful state with its own interests could easily become a totalitarian state.

Nevertheless, the there is a theoretical opening in the argument here that allows us to at least make sense of what might be appealing to a more moderate position. If the state can be made into a genuinely neutral arbiter under certain conditions, or if it can be wielded by the oppressed under others, then it might be best not to destroy it, but to use it for precisely those purposes by attaining those conditions.

However, this is still only a theoretical possibility and does not provide any answer to the difficult question: namely, what should we do if the state is currently in the hands of an oppressive class and being used for the oppression of another? This is, arguably, the situation in which we find ourselves (although, ironically, not the situation that Lenin himself sees in the Kerensky government).

The moderate answer to this question would be, presumably, to bring about the conditions that would allow the state to either attain some significant independence from class interests, or those that would allow it to be wielded by the oppressed. What these conditions might be remains unclear, although the general answer given in the twentieth century was to advocate for institutional development and reform. I admit, my sympathies still lie with in this direction. However, it bears stressing just how vulnerable such institutions are and how interested capital is in infiltrating them and destroying them for its own purposes. One doesn’t need to look beyond the Trump presidency’s blatant cronyism as evidence of this (however, feel free to go back to Citizens United, the rise of Super PACs, the War on Terror, trickle-down-economics, union busting, and pretty much every conservative administration in the last 100 years if you feel like it).

Here, Lenin’s argument still has some life: as long as class antagonisms exist the state will be vulnerable (far more vulnerable!) to the influence of those who control the means of production and will come to be used as a tool for the oppression of those who do not. Thus, as we have seen, any temporary advantages that might be gained through slow, incremental, decades-long building up of institutional reforms intended to remove that vulnerability can always we wiped out and the oppressive status resumed. If that’s correct, then we have two options: the creation of an invulnerable and incorruptible state, or the permanent removal of the underlying class antagonism (i.e. the socialist revolution). If I’m being honest, I have no idea what would be required to do the former, but it seems wildly implausible. And whether the latter is only viable if Marx and Engels are right about the underlying role that class antagonism is supposed to play.

It’s worth noting at this point that even if one advocates for the permanent removal of the underlying class antagonism, nothing has been shown that this must be done violently. We can grant Lenin everything that has been said so far, reject working within the state, and still not endorse violent means.

Nevertheless, there is something like an argument forming in the background from which we might be able to tease out Lenin’s fundamental assumptions. Specifically, Lenin appears to be thinking something along the following lines: before the arrival of the state, society was “a self-acting armed organization of the population”; it arrives on the scene because this way of doing things becomes impossible precisely because it risks mass violence and the collapse of the society. In order to avoid this possibility, the state disarms the population and obtains a monopoly on violence in the name of a shared interest for society as a whole. However, given the context in which it arises, it is immediately corrupted by the economically dominant class and it becomes the defacto militarized arm of that economically dominant class, leaving the economically subservient class in an oppressed position. What this amounts to, then, is not any fundamental change in the conflict between the two classes, but a kind of forced disarmament of and continued violence against the weaker class; i.e. an imposed handicap. In that sense, the arrival of the state only serves to exacerbate the very thing it was meant to address–the irreconcilable class conflict. If this is the case, then it appears that what needs to happen is, at the very least, for the weaker class to be rearmed so that it can fight back against its oppressor’s aggression. Crucially, such fighting back means using violence against the state.

I’ll only make one final point about this story since I’m not sure that this is what Lenin’s argument actually is and I’m only trying to fill in the gaps thus far. First, it’s interesting to note that there’s a kind of cyclical, almost biblical element to the kind of story told here: we start an initial, primitive self-acting armed society with limited means of production, which is divided by an advance in the means of production resulting in class antagonisms. These class antagonisms are kept at bay by a state which grants one side the right to use violence and which oppresses one for the benefit of the other. Under this arrangement, however, great strides in production are made as society advances to different modes of production, ending in the capitalist mode which is able to produce so much that all of the needs of society are satisfied. Given the characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, however, the advances in production also come with an increase in class consciousness which allows the oppressed class to realize its predicament, arm itself, seize the means of production for itself, and banish the oppressing class. With this final revolutionary act, the initial rift is finally closed, and society returns, once again, to a self-acting armed organization of people, now fully satisfied and needing nothing.

This is, of course, interesting for the easily identifiable religious elements present: a simple start, a fall from grace, trials and tribulations, redemption through knowledge of the truth, final confrontation against the Other, and a return to the Father. However, these elements can also be found in Marxism in general. What’s specifically interesting, and what I suspect is uniquely brought in by Lenin, is that the use of violence drive everything! It is through the loss of the ability to inflict violence that the oppressed class becomes oppressed, and it is through regaining that ability that it is able to restore the original balance. The question, however, is still whether this is the right story to tell (both with respect to Lenin and with respect to Marxism).

4. The “Withering Away” of the State and Violent Revolution

Summary

Lenin begins this section with a quote from Engels about the fate the state after the socialist revolution. Briefly put, once the proletariat seize the state they will use it to seize the means of production which will at the same time end class antagonisms and end the role of the state qua state. The idea is straightforward: the state’s purpose is precisely to keep class antagonisms at bay. In turn, these class antagonisms are produced on the basis of a distinction between those who own the means of production and those who do not. So, by socializing the means of production, the proletariat removes the distinction, hence, removing class antagonisms, hence, removing the need for the state. Crucially, however, this doesn’t happen overnight, and the socialization of the means of production are a self-undermining act of the state which makes it superfluous. In Engels’ famous words:

The state is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away.
Engels Anti-Durhing p.303 third German Edition (italic in original)

Lenin claims that people read the claim that the state withers away rather than being abolished as evidence that Engels was in favor of a slow and gradual change rather than a revolution. This, however, “is the crudest distortion of Marxism, advantageous only to the bourgeoisie.” (pg. 19)

The proper interpretation is as follows. First, in Engels’ claim that by seizing state power the proletariat abolishes the state as state, the use of the first term ‘state’ should be given a narrow reading and the second should be given a wide reading. That is, the seizure of power abolishes the bourgeois state as state simpliciter. Crucially, there’s no withering away of this state–rather, it is, as Lenin points out, abolished. In other words, the seizing of state power amounts to a revolution. What withers away is the husk of that state which is now in the hands of the proletariat.

Second, given that the state is a “special repressive force”, what follows is that one kind of repressive force is abolished (that of the bourgeoisie) and another (that of the proletariat) is put in its place–at least until it withers away.

Third, the withering away of the proletariat state occurs only after the state has done its job–i.e. only after the means of production have been socialized. This means that the state can’t wither away incrementally before it does its job–thus, presumably, attempts to enter the state and weaken in from within are fundamentally counterproductive. Interestingly, Lenin also claims that the withering away of the proletariat state will also mean the withering away of democracy. Here, I quote in full:

We all know that the political form of the “state” [after the socialist revolution] is the most complete democracy. But it never enters the head of any of the opportunists who shamelessly distort Marxism that Engels is consequently speaking here of democracy “ceasing of itself,” or “withering away.” This seems very strange at first sight; but it is “incomprehensible” only to those who have not pondered over the fact that democracy is also a state and that, consequently, democracy will also disappear when the state disappears. Revolution alone can “abolish” the bourgeois state. The state in general, i.e., the most complete democracy, can only “wither away.”
The State and Revolution, Ch. 1, Section 4, pg 21

In other words, claims Lenin, Engels is saying something much stronger than what people take him to mean. If the proletarian state just is the means by which the proletariat organizes itself after the revolution, if those means are absolute democracy, and if that state is meant to wither away, then, clearly, it is democracy that withers away and not Congress or Parliament.

Fourth, contrary to popular opinion, Engels’ claims are directed not only to anarchists (whom he addresses explicitly in Lenin’s quote), but also to any opportunists (mention of whom is missing from the quoted passage). Thus, the goal of the revolutionary should not be to fight for a democratic republic since a democratic republic is merely “the best form of the state for the proletariat under capitalism.” (pg. 22; italics mine) Rather, they should be aiming far beyond that and at the direct abolition of the state via revolution.

Fifth, this revolution must be a violent one. Here, Lenin brings in a separate passage from Anti Duhring. I’ll reproduce the paragraph in full here since this is a crucial passage that I’ll return to later.

…That force, however, plays another role [other than that of diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the instrument by the aid of which the social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms–of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economic system of exploitation–unfortunately, because all use of force, forsooth, demoralizes the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual impetus which has resulted from every victorious revolution! And this in Germany, where a violent collision–which indeed may be forced on the people–would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has permeated the national consciousness as a result of the humiliation of the Thirty Years’ War. And this parson’s mode of thought–lifeless, insipid and impotent–claims to impose itself on the most revolutionary party which history has known!
Engels, Anti-Duhring pg. 193, third German edition, Part II, Chapter IV (Lenin’s citation)

To Lenin, this is nothing short of a panegyric in favor of violence and is only ignored for opportunist purposes. Furthermore, this panegyric is repeated in Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, and his criticisms of the Gotha Program. More dramatically:

The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of all the teaching of Marx and Engels.
Lenin The State and Revolution Ch. 1, Section 4, pg. 25

The chapter then closes with a promise that this claim will be further elaborated by looking at Marx and Engels’ separate treatment of the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1871.

Analysis

As with section three, this section promised to provide us with a missing puzzle piece. And as with section three–though perhaps even more so–I find the core argument about the role of violence presented here rather…bad. Let me begin with that before I loop around to discuss the beginning commentary on Engels.

What Lenin wants to show is that Engels was really in favor of a violent revolution and the evidence for that is the passage I quote above in full. However, despite his protestations that only opportunists see Engels’ panegyric as anything other than a full-throated call for violence, I just find that a bit hard to believe (maybe that makes me an opportunist).

Specifically, it seems to me that the purpose of this quoted passage is primarily as a polemic against Duhring and his advocacy of inaction. Now, it does appear that Duhring is, from what I can pick up from the passage, grounding his opposition to acting on the fact that to act would require using force. But to raise an objection to that claim is not to praise violence! In fact, Engels could be interpreted here as saying “yes, I know the use of violence is demoralizing, but in certain cases it is necessary–if only to make people take more seriously the threat that they’re facing.” Note, for example, that he says the use of force may be thrust upon the people and that this might be good because it might have a motivating effect. What Engels seems to be arguing against is the more general claim of the coward who might say “look, violence is always bad, and if standing up for something means that violence might be used against me or that I might have to use violence against someone else, then it’s better not to do anything.” What Engels appears to be doing is arguing that the use of force is not a categorical reason against doing something and that, in fact, in the particular case of Germany at Duhring’s time, the badness of using force is outweighed by what he stands to gain. It’s clear, however, that to say that the use of force is not a categorical reason for acting does not by any means imply that the use of force is always necessary. What follows is not, as Lenin insists, that the revolution must be violent and that the proletariat must be imbued with a violent class consciousness. If anything, what follows is that the proletariat must be willing to use violence if it comes to that.

These are two different claims. It’s one thing to say that it may be worth it to use violence to, say, save your child from danger, and it’s another thing to say that the use of violence is always necessary to save your child from danger. The former claim is a reasonable one even for people who abhor violence; the latter is the claim of a maniac. Mutatis mutandis, it’s one thing to say that the revolution may require the use of violence, and another to say that there must be a violent revolution. Lenin needs the latter, but I haven’t seen an argument for that yet, and I certainly don’t see it as contained in this passage from Engels.

That being said, it’s easy to see how even the weaker claim that I’ve argued for can be made much stronger very quickly. If by definition the state is a tool of oppression whose purpose is to exercise force and violence against the proletariat, then it seems almost certain that it will retaliate to any demand for a peaceful revolution with exercise of that force. And given that certainty of that force, if the only options are “find ways to resist and combat that force in turn” or “submit rather than risk it”, then the former becomes appealing. In that kind of situation, one may as well go in fully prepared to use violence.

Likewise, it’s easy to see how even the weaker claim could be subject to abuse. If we take a loose definition of the use of force without any constraint about the proportionality of its use, or, if alternatively, the value of what is to be gained by the revolution is to be inflated without limit, then anything goes.

But it’s also true that the weaker claim is not an absurd one, and that, in fact, I have a much harder time accepting it’s negation. Is it really never acceptable to use violence against the state? (Against anyone?) Was the French Resistance not justified? Was the Warsaw Uprising not justified? Was John Brown not justified? If they were, then there are some conditions under which the use of violence, however demoralizing, can be justified. Once that’s established, what we need is a method of finding out which cases are ones in which we can use violence and which ones are not. This is beyond the scope of this reading series (though my favorite on this subject is De Beuvoir), but it’s enough here to argue that there’s a middle path between a violent revolution is necessary and violence in a revolution is prohibited.

With regards to Lenin’s other arguments about Engels’ claims, I actually think he’s right–I can’t see another way of reading the claim that the state qua state is abolished yet nevertheless also withers than by giving wide and narrow readings of the term ‘state’ here. And, indeed, it makes sense that the state in the hands of one should be abolished and in the hands of the other it should disappear.

What I’m more skeptical of are two further claims. The first is Lenin’s claim that the withering away of the proletariat state means a withering away of absolute democracy. This simply sounds like utopianism to me. I can grant the claim that there will be no need for a separate body to exist outside of society to moderate class conflict. However, it does not mean that there will be no need for society to coordinate and organize itself according to some means. And here, I think Lenin conflates the state-as-a-means-of-stopping-class-conflict and (what might be called) the state-as-a-means-of-coordinating-society. There’s no need for the latter to be outside of society, and, in fact, the fact that it’s absolute makes it a direct expression of that society, and it can still provide the coordinating function (even if we don’t call it a state). Thus, I think it’s best to read Engels as saying that withers away on this view is the state as a tool of oppression, but absolute democracy still remains as a means of coordination.

Now, I think the charitable way to read Lenin here is as leaving open the option for some new not-yet-known way of organizing society. This, after all, was Marx and Engels’ preferred stance on what happens after full communism. But I think Lenin just got ahead of himself here.

Finally, it’s worth noting that we can see the shadows of totalitarianism in Lenin’s previous claim about the withering away of democracy and his claim that the proletarian state nevertheless doesn’t wither away until it has completed its job. If the role of the proletarian state before it withers away is to a) ensure the seizure of the means of production and b) to oppress the former oppressors (who, while still controlling the means of production will always try to get control of the state), then as long as there are enemies of the revolution internally or externally, the state and its increasing power can be justified. I don’t mean to run quickly over this last element, but I’ve gone on for long enough. I promise I’ll return at a later point.

Wowee! That was only Chapter 1! And it took forever! Chapter 2 coming soon.

A New(?) Problem of Evil

July 29, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 2 Comments

New to me anyway!

The standard problem of evil is usually presented as a tension between the clearly observable fact that evil in the world exists and the triad of God’s omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience. Consider, for example (pace Ivan Karamazov), the death of an (innocent) infant at the hands of some terrible murderous agent. Given God’s traits, this death could have been prevented since God knew about it (he’s omniscient), he wishes it wouldn’t happen (he’s omnibenevolent and wishes well for all of his creations), and he’s capable of stopping it (he’s omnipotent). Nevertheless, the child is killed in some horrible manner. Why?

The standard response is usually to appeal to the value of free will. There are a couple of version of this defense. Very roughly, one argues that free will is of extremely high value such that a world in which there’s free will and evil is better than a world in which there’s no free will and no evil. So, for God to create a world in which there were no evil, it would require that he create a world in which there is no free will, and this would be a worse world. Since God made the world as good as it could possibly be, he made it with free will, letting evil exist as an unfortunate byproduct.

A slightly different version rests on a certain vision of one’s relation to God. Specifically, God wants to test us to see if we’re worthy of the infinitely good reward in the afterlife. For the test to mean anything, we have to have free will, and the ability to have free will involves the ability to choose to do terrible shit. If we couldn’t choose to reject God and could only do what God wanted us to do, then the test wouldn’t be a test of anything and everyone would immediately go to heaven. Hence, evil is explained as the means necessary to justify or earn one’s place in heaven.

A third, less cynical version stresses the development of a certain kind of relationship with God. Again, very roughly, God wants us to have a certain kind of relationships with him that is chosen freely and that is grown and developed. He doesn’t want to make us, as it were, readymade for him and already loving him, but wants us to grow and choose to do so through a deepening understanding that develops over time. And, of course, if we have the ability to choose such to have such a relationship by not sinning, we can also choose to sin, and that involves the ability to choose to do horrible shit. Here, the greater value that explains evil is one’s relationship with God and not necessarily freedom of the will, but freedom of the will is still in the mix since the only way in which this particular relationship can be had is through a free will. Hence, evil is still explained by appeal to freedom of the will.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. It can be the case that God wants a certain relationship with us, that the development of this relationship serves as a kind of test, and that furthermore a world with free wills and evil is better than a world without either. I want to grant all of these but raise a different version of the problem of evil that I don’t think can be explained by appealing to free will at all. At least not any that I can think of.

Now, as far as I’m aware, nobody thinks that freedom of the will requires success in action. My will is free if I fail in doing what I will to do or if I succeed. In saying this I don’t mean to say anything about when my will is or isn’t free–at least not directly. Rather, I want to make the claim that it’s not the case that my will is free only if I’m successful in doing what I intend to do and that this is true even if I don’t provide a positive account of what it means for me to have a free will. The argument for this is fairly straightforward: the denial of this claim implies that my will was free only when I successfully do what I want to do. This has the bizarre implication that if I attempt to strangle you to death but you manage to fight me off, then I did not act of my free will (this might be true for other reasons, but not because I didn’t kill you!). More generally, it has the implication that each of us is radically alienated from any failed assertion of our wills.

I’m not familiar with any philosopher that holds this view (though, I am not a free will scholar). The more sensible view is that freedom of the will occurs…well…in the will, or in the head, or heart, or soul, or whatever. One’s will is free, for example, if one’s actions flow from one’s values or are in line with their second order desires or whatever (c.f. Watson and Frankfurt), but not just in case one’s will produces certain results through action.

More importantly, the Bible (or its author/s) doesn’t seem hold this view. As we know very well from the New Testament, sin begins in the heart and the person who commits adultery there is just as guilty of the act as someone who actually goes through with it. If this is the source of sin, if the ability to sin presupposes the the ability to choose, and if the ability of choice presupposes freedom of the will, then free will exists prior to any consequences that one produces through action. Again, God doesn’t just judge us for actually committing adultery but also for intending to commit it, wanting to commit it, wishing to commit it and so on.

Supposing this is right, let’s return to the case of child murders and let’s go full-blown Ivan Karamazov with this:

“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then—who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why is my favorite dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry…. ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…. ‘At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!…”
The Brothers Karamazov (“The Rebellion”, page 303-304)

I once read that this was a real case that Dostoyevsky found in a newspaper and used in the novel, but even if it wasn’t, we can imagine that it was a real one (in fact, there are no shortages of such cases in real life, but I didn’t want to go too dark here).

Here, keeping what has been said about freedom of the will in mind, the question we can ask is not the general question of why does God allow the existence of this evil, but why does God allow the general to be successful in killing the child?

Notice that the appeals to the freedom of the will won’t be satisfying here. The general exercises his free will in willing to kill the child. As such, he marks himself as a sinner, he fails God’s test, he ruins his relationship with him, and so on. None of these things requires that the general must succeed in killing the boy! If God had interfered the moment before the dogs tore up the boy by making their teeth turn to jelly, by having them trip, or by striking down the general before he issues the order to kill (but after willing that the boy die), freedom of the will would still be preserved!

I suppose someone might say (as the Grand Inquisitor stresses in the subsequent chapter) that if God had interfered in this way then he would provide a certainty for his existence and would make it impossible to doubt. Consequently, it would make faith impossible. Perhaps this is right, but even if we grant that we only need to alter the scenario slightly: how many children are made to suffer or are killed by adults in secret? We only need one for this to be a problem (and if you doubt that there are any, here’s one! CW: the worst stuff. It’s Joseph Fritzl) What justifies these cases?

The only possible solution I can see to this problem of evil is that there’s something about the completion of an action that’s crucial to having a free will. But I can’t understand why this should be the case. Set aside the whole sin-in-your-heart thing I mentioned earlier. Why should the consequences of one’s actions coming to fruition be an integral part of having free will? I’m at a loss.

I imagine someone might appeal to some soul building appeal here in the sense that one has to see the consequences of one’s actions in order to learn from them. In other words, if it weren’t possible for the general to kill the child and for him to make it the case that the child dies, then it would be impossible for him to learn or know that he shouldn’t do that. But that seems to me to be a pathetically anemic response. Now we’re no longer concerned with the value of free will, but with the limitations of human psychology (which, mind you, God gave us!)–innocent kids need to die in horrible ways so that some murdering asshole can’t learn in any other way? How is this omnipotence? How is it omnibenevolence to make such limited creatures?!

Here, again, Ivan Karamazov looms large: this is the world God made?! This is the perfect harmony that’s promised?

Very well, I return my ticket!

On “Midsommar”: Grief, Coping, and the Pagan View

July 18, 2019August 14, 2019 ~ nitchovski ~ 5 Comments

Before I get started, I want to make three small notes. First, this analysis will contain copious spoilers, so anyone who has not seen Ari Aster’s film and who wants to avoid plot spoilers should consider themselves sufficiently warned. Second, the analysis is not a scholarly analysis to the extent that this means that I’ve done copious and careful research. I am not a movie scholar and insofar as I’m some kind of philosopher professionally, I’m hardly one that should be consulted as an expert on the topics I’m about to discuss. In fact, I haven’t even read other reviews of the movie! Which is okay because, thirdly, I intend this blog to serve more as a place to dump the things I’m thinking about that keep me from thinking about other things than anything else. (It perhaps also goes without saying that these posts aren’t heavily edited and are almost exclusively written with two/three beers in me)

With those caveats in mind, let’s get down to talking about the movie and what the reading I have on it.

Part I: A brief synopsis and a rejection of a naive reading

Ostensibly, Midsommar is a movie about an American couple–Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) and Christian Hughes (Jack Reynor)–as they travel abroad and visit the commune village of Swedish co-ed and fellow anthropology graduate student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Along for the trip are Christian’s friends Mark (Will Pouter) and Josh (William Jackson Harper) whose purpose in the film is to serve as comic relief and to highlight just how shitty Christian is (respectively). Along with the implicit promise of uninhibited European sexuality (TM), the group is also explicitly promised to witness and participate in a nine-day pagan festival that only occurs once every ninety years. However, as might be expected, the village commune is not as idyllic as it seems at first sight, the festival is not as harmless as the group would have hoped for, and the young co-eds are picked off one by one over the next nine days until only Dani remains.

On the basis of this synopsis alone it’s clear that Midsommer has the formal structure of the basic slasher horror movie: young, good-looking people (everyone’s good looking, of course) embark on a trip in search of pleasure only to discover The Other who serves as a stark reminder of ‘abnormality’ and acts as a correcting force against the hubris of the protagonists. Everyone learns a painful lesson and we, the audience, are humbled and reminded of the precariousness of life.

This reading is, I assume, intentional–it would be hard to imagine how it couldn’t be–but it is the most surface interpretation of the movie. It is the first naive view and I think we should discard it fairly quickly. The movie simply doesn’t play out as a straightforward slasher even though it has the bones of such a movie.

Rather than being a good reading of the movie, this interpretation only sets up the background against which we should be reading the movie. That is, I take it that the structure of the movie is intended to evoke precisely the tropes of the basic slasher movie so as to make us pay attention to all the ways in which it diverges from it. The most notable of these divergences is, of course, the fact that virtually the entire movie (with the exception of one crucial scene) takes place in full daylight. The horror of Midsommer is not one that comes out from the unseen or the unknown; quite the contrary, the horror is one that doesn’t hide and one that we’re forced to see. This is especially obvious when we take into context the scene of the two ritual suicides (easily one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to sit through). That scene and the choice of setting everything during the Aster is not only showing us that horror isn’t hiding, but by making us see all the mutilation, gore, and violence, is signaling to us that we will see everything.

I take this to be a bold choice for two reasons. First, the dread and anxiety of most horror movies is primarily generated through the fear of the unknown–we are scared when we don’t know what to expect and let our imagination fill the gaps. The monster (psychological or otherwise) obtains its power from not being seen, named, and classified. And generally, once it has been revealed the amount of anxiety and dread is significantly reduced: our fear has a definite shape, definite cause, and can now be studied, analyzed, and ultimately defeated. In general, the longer that a filmmaker is able to keep this tension of the unknown going, the more intense and more prolonged the anxiety in the audience is–thus, as a good rule of thumb, the sooner the audience sees the monster, the worse the horror movie.

Midsommar directly violates this rule of thumb. There is never any mystery about who or what is causing the horror that befalls our protagonists, every ritual is explained by the obliging villagers (To the extent that they themselves understand the rituals! There’s very little hint of deliberate deception on their part!), and we see every horrible detail. In broad daylight. And, interestingly, for the most part, the movie succeeds! Even in that context Aster was still able to make me feel plenty anxious and worried about what was going to happen. Part of this is, no doubt, due to the fact that mystery remains even in the daylight (the audience is still behind a linguistic and cultural barrier after all), but it still stands as a testament to the movie that it could do this without resorting to the most common trope of horror: darkness. [That being said, I should say that there were definitely times when it seemed to me that the tension simply couldn’t build because of how beautiful the surroundings were. I think this, too, was intentional and has more to do with what I take to be my favored reading of the movie, but it’s worth mentioning here. I’ll return this in a bit]

It should also be noted that the use of permanent sunlight here, while subverting the genre in one sense, also conforms to it in another. Namely, by setting the movie in a place where (even for a short time) there is no night, the audience is being led into a different realm. They’re no longer in their familiar world of cycles, patterns, and predictability in which nigh follows day and day follows night. No, they have now entered into a world in which even basic assumptions and expectations (even the biological rhythms!) don’t apply (this is also signified by the dizzying shot of the car as it drives to the village–we are literally flipped into a new world). So, in another sense, Aster is playing his cards very carefully and towing a fine line between subverted and satisfied expectations.

Anyway, back to the plot. Now, it’s clear from the structural and visual cues that we should not interpret this as a standard horror film, but that we should read it against the background of one (at the very least). This bring us to what I take to be the second naive (though perfectly natural) reading of the movie: that the movie is an allegory for breakups and collapsing relationships.

Part II: It’s not (really) about failed relationships

Given that the central framing device of the movie is the collapsing romantic relationship of our two protagonists, the ways in which they are so incompatible with one another, and just what a total piece of shit Christian is to Dani, it’s natural to see their relationship and its downward trajectory as the central key to the movie. We can, for example, see Dani’s willingness to sacrifice Christian in the final ritual (I said there’d be spoilers, right?) and her joyful smile in the final shot as the stressing the importance of righteous anger in the process of rehabilitation (the fire consumes and consecrates and then Dani’s happy). Likewise, we can think of Christian’s drugged participation in the fertility ceremony as the kind of loss of will that I’ve heard people express in justifying their infidelities (“it just happened!”; “I can’t explain why I did it!”; etc.).

Now, these elements are in the movie and I don’t doubt that at least some of the movie is intended to address just how painful and traumatic the death of a relationship can be, but I just don’t think that this is the whole truth (or if it is, then I thought I saw a more interesting movie than I did). I say this for two reasons: first, it’s important to note that Dani and Christian’s relationship was failing before they set on their trip. We know from the very first scene that they’re not happy and that the relationship is not sustainable–we see Christian and his friends discussing how Christian is planning on breaking up with Dani months before the trip to Sweden. In fact, we want them to break up because we realize how terrible Christian is to Dani almost immediately. If the movie were primarily about the tragedy and pain of ending this relationship, then there’s very little to be said about it–the audience wants this relationship to end and we know that it would be a good thing if it did. It would be a different matter if the two were deeply in love and if social forces (pagan, magical, or otherwise) tore them apart (think Julia and Winston in 1984). That would be a tragedy and we would be pained for them and reminded of the fact that such a tragedy can befall us, too, because perhaps nobody is strong enough to resist all such forces. But the end of Dani and Christian’s relationship is not that kind of tragedy. This is not to say that the collapse of their relationship is not painful or that it’s not tragic–but that tragedy comes from somewhere else. I’ll say more about what that source is shortly.

The second reason I doubt that the movie is primarily about their relationship is because it’s hard to explain how the first scene (the winter scene) in which we see Dani’s parents and sister die fits in. The scene is impossibly hard to watch and Dani’s scream through Christian’s phone when she realizes that her sister has murdered her parents is just agonizing (the only other scene that’s had this effect on me is the scene in Hereditary). What is this scene supposed to tell us about the relationship or its failure? I recognize that it’s possible that it could be interpreted as “the-reason-why-a-bad-relationship-is-maintained”, but I think this sells it short. The scene is simply much too powerful than to be mediated by their failing relationship.

I grant that this isn’t a decisive argument–I just think there’s something deeply unsatisfying about that kind of interpretation and I think there’s a better one in the offing. But let me slow down a bit. Even if we take it as the serious interpretation, consider the alternative ways in which the film could have conveyed the information that Christian can’t possibly break up with Dani given these circumstances. Why show us the bodies? Why let us hear the anguished scream? Why have us experience the trauma? It’s surely not to make us empathize with Christian! It’s not as though we’re rooting for Christian and then go through this to see why his hand is forced in this case. No, the guy sucks from the first time we see him on screen and we hate him for it. We feel sorry for Dani! And for two reasons: first, because she’s lost her family, and second, because she, too, can’t break up with Christian given the fact that he seems to be literally her only social and emotional support (despite his shittiness). We know that if the death of her parents had happened a couple of months later, she wouldn’t have to be with Christian.

If this makes the scene about their relationships, it is only obliquely so. In fact, what I’d much prefer to say is that this scene is not at all about their relationship. Rather, it’s about…

Part III: Trauma, Coping, Community

Trauma. Midsommer is, I believe, above everything, a movie about trauma and two different ways in which we can deal with trauma.

The key traumatic element in the movie is, clearly, the death of Dani’s sister and parents. However, the specifics of her situation aren’t terribly important. As grim as it might seem, it is simply a truism that existence entails the possibility of suffering. If one is extremely lucky, this possibly is actualized only rarely–the death of an elderly relative, periods of survived sickness, depression, and so on. For many people (the vast majority of people on earth!) this suffering will be much more frequent and much more intense. To be alive is, to some degree or other, to be made aware of death, pain, torture, prolonged illness, disease, starvation, failure, insanity, depression, and so on; most of it preventable, and almost all of it completely senseless. If this description doesn’t ring true in any way, count yourself lucky for now (but brace yourself).

In any case, this is the kind of suffering that Dani is made to bear: her sister has killed not only herself, but her parents as well during a particularly bad (but from the outside typical) depressive episode. She has reached out to Dani and one can’t help but recognize that if Dani had somehow been able to get a hold of her sister, the tragedy could have been avoided.

This, of course, is not to lay responsibility at Dani’s feet. She is not responsible for what happened. However, we are lead to believe that Dani feels some responsibility for the event. In fact, I’m inclined to call bullshit on anyone who wouldn’t feel any sense of responsibility, any pang of guilt, any thought of “if only I had done something!” in that scenario. We might agree that in the abstract Dani ought not entertain such thoughts, but there’s something that strikes me as almost inhuman about such a reaction. [Philosophers might recognize that I’m making the same point that Bernard Williams makes in “Moral Luck” regarding the trolley driver] And this is no accident. It is precisely because we would and do feel that something horribly wrong has gone in the case when someone doesn’t have these feelings that Aster is going to play with in the rest of the movie.

In any case, this suffering is Dani’s lot. She must either find a way to cope or perish. By what means can she cope? What resources does she have? The first resource, of course, is the one already mentioned: she can internalize her pain and give it an explanation through the things that she could have done to prevent it. In other words, she can make sense of what is senseless suffering by appealing to her role in it–she wasn’t there to help/stop/save her sister and as a result she bears the consequences of her weakness. The second resource is external: she has the group of friends and loved ones to whom she can turn in this horrible time. But who are these people for Dani? Well, they’re Dani’s therapist (who should not be discounted, but who doesn’t seem to be helping too much) and the terrible Christian and his uncaring friends. This, again, is the tragedy of their relationship–he’s thrust into a role of support and comfort that he’s woefully incompetent in fulfilling, and she has nobody else but this bumbling idiot and his equally incompetent friends to turn to. In short, the tragedy is that that this is all there is for her.

So just in these first scenes we get the first main critique in the movie which can be put as a series of questions: what happens when inevitable crushing suffering finds you and you have nobody to turn to? What happens when it finds you and the only people around and your version of Christian and his friends? What happens if you’re not lucky enough to have anyone better in your life? And, of course, the question that stands behind these: is this the only way to deal? [Note: maybe this doesn’t worry you! Maybe your support network is a strong one! If so, great! But imagine anyway.]

So, we have, on the one hand, what I’ll call “the modern” way of coping with life’s senseless suffering: internalization and the network of support one has managed to build up.

On the other hand, we have the alternative as exemplified by the communal life of the village. They, too, are people who suffer senselessly. We know this because Pelle tells Dani that he, too, lost his parents and that it was the commune that helped him out and rescued him. But also because we know that they, too, grow old and have to have that earnest thought of death. So, they’re not exceptional in the sense that they’ve found a way to escape the existential problem. What makes them exceptional is the way in which they confront it. But what way is that?

The first place to look for this is in the hard-to-watch ritual suicide scene. Four things can be noted here on the same theme. First, the suffering as present in the threat of impending death and old age is ritualized. The soon-to-be-departed have a final ritual meal as part of the community in which they take a central and commanding role. Their predicament is one that the entire community is involved in and one that each attending (sans our visitors) know they will have to face one day as well. Second, the suicide itself takes place in front of the community and everyone witnesses it. Third, when the dying man botches his suicide and merely severely maims himself, the community cries in pain with him–they are pained that he didn’t kill himself, and not because they’re upset that they have to see it (as we might be!), but for his sake. And fourth, they don’t shy away from his torment, letting him die on his own. Nor do they assign the unenviable task of assigning one person to end his misery. Rather, three separate people from the community finish him off (contrast this with Christian who reluctantly has to nurse his girlfriend). In all four of these respects there is no barrier between those who face death. At no point are they alone. The pain and suffering is shared between everyone.

By being shared, the suffering is also externalized. It’s not the individual suffering who has to bear the responsibility of fixing things. Crucially, there’s no question of responsibility here. To the extent that pain and suffering is rationalized in this community and made sense of it’s not through an appeal to what one could or could not have done to prevent it. Rather, pain, suffering, and trauma is just something that happens–a part of life that is accepted, ritualized, shared, and overcome–and not something that can be explained through reflection.

The same point is made later in the movie when Dani sees Christian cheating on her in the fertility ceremony. [Updated note: A colleague rightly pointed out that Christian is quite literally raped here and I think that’s right. I’ve left the original text to highlight how easy it was to completely pass over that sexual assault.] Here, the contrast and externalization is even more apparent because there’s no doubt as to who’s responsible. It is the entire community that has worked together to push Christian into his infidelity. Of course, he bears significant responsibility as well, but it’s naive, I think, to assert that he would definitely have cheated if he hadn’t been drugged multiple times and if the entire village population wasn’t pushing him to sleep with the red-headed girl for the purpose of bringing genetic diversity into the village (skeptics of this view should look at Christopher Browning’s exceptional book Ordinary Men). In any case, here, too, despite the fact that it is the village itself that orchestrates the very trauma that harms Dani, it is also the village that takes her pain as their own. This is precisely where we see the contrast between Dani’s second anguished scream, accompanied by the other selected women in the village, and that first anguished scream we hear over Christina’s phone when she hears about her family.

The point is also made in the movie’s final scene in which we discover that two of the villagers have already been sacrificed and that two more are willing to be sacrificed. The point here, again, is not one about responsibility or rationalization–that much is clear!–but of externalizing (and scapegoating in the case of Christian) as a means of coping with trauma and the inevitable suffering of life.

Having presented this “pagan” model of coping, we are inevitably turned back to contrast it with the “modern” model that we start with and the natural question arises: Which one’s preferable? Dani’s smile suggests an answer…

[Optional Part IV: PHILOSOPHY WARNING! Some Nietzsche!]

I’d be remiss at this point if I didn’t bring up the fact that the reading I’ve given here is one done through a Nietzschean lens (those not terribly interested in philosophy can skip to the next section). In a large part this is due to the fact that I’ve been teaching existentialism this summer session and our class had just finished a week on On the Genealogy of Morals, so I’ve had Nietzsche on the brain for a while. Nevertheless, I think this reading is a plausible one given what N. says in the GM and especially in the third essay. As I read it, that essay identifies the key problem of existence as that of senseless suffering. Humanity can bear suffering, but it cannot live with senseless suffering. The essay then serves to tie the themes of the first two essays together by explaining how the ascetic ideal provides an explanation for all senseless suffering through internalization and the concept of sin (“Why did your family die, Dani? Because you–like everyone else–is born a sinner! It’s you that did it!”). Lacking an alternative means of explaining such suffering, the adherents of the ‘noble’ old morality were eventually worn down and made fodder for that equalizing morality that N. hates so much.

Notably, things were different under the ‘noble’ old morality practiced by the pagans. That morality is one that embraces cruelty (as does the Swedish village!), that is cheerful in its application of that cruelty (as does the Swedish village!), that doesn’t focus on responsibility but sees goodness and badness as facts of life (as does the…you get the point), that accepts the cruelties that accompany life as things that happen, and so on.

What we see in Midsommar, then, is precisely the clash between these two types of moralities–the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ and how they tackle this universal problem. In that respect, the movie is deeply Nietzschean and I would definitely show it in an existentialism class if I knew I wouldn’t get fired for doing so (don’t worry, I won’t!).

That being said, the movie isn’t perfectly Nietzschean since, at least as I understand him, N. is neither interested in going back to a kind of pagan morality (the bell of Christianity can’t be un-rung), nor does he think that that kind of morality provides an answer to the problem of senseless suffering. This, after all, is why the ‘noble’ old morality succumbs to the new ‘slave’ morality: it’s only the latter that provides some answer, some explanation to the problem. Thus, in suggesting that the commune’s way of living is an answer, Aster and N. part ways.

It’s not clear whether it’s best to think of the commune’s way of living as providing that answer. I prefer to think of it merely as the presentation of two models that serve to highlight the problems that N. is trying to get us to feel and why we might be unsatisfied with the kind of morality and conventions that most of us will have to rely on when, inevitably, we, too, face senseless suffering. The philosophical suggestion, then, isn’t that we should embrace the pagan view and completely externalize. After all, if the movie is effective as a horror movie at all, we should feel disturbed to the extent that we end up even partially endorsing this alternative way of doing things! Rather, the suggestion is that we should think deeply about what might be attractive about this alternative model that can be preserved, what is bad about our current model of coping, and, in true Nietzschean fashion, how we can create new models and new values.

Part V: Parting Thoughts

I think it’s pretty obvious given the length of this essay that I rather liked this movie. It was well-written, well-acted, and thematically rich. I’m a big fan of the way that Aster plays with the themes of grief in this movie (and Hereditary which will probably deserve its own long post) and the way he manages to dig into the psychology of what makes us scared. What makes this work so effective, I think, is just how familiar the psychological terror is to the audience. Yes, there’s gore, but the gore’s purpose isn’t to shock, but to highlight precisely those things that we find psychologically unbearable. I’m very much looking forward to the next project.

As to all of you, if you made it to the end…wow! Thank you! Leave me a comment or something and let’s talk!

-Pavel