Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism

Revolutionary Apocalypse: IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM Luciano Pellicani PRAEGER Revolutionary Apocalypse Revolu...

Author: Luciano Pellicani

59 downloads 1402 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Revolutionary Apocalypse: IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM

Luciano Pellicani

PRAEGER

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Revolutionary Apocalypse IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM Luciano Pellicani

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pellicani, Luciano, 1939– Revolutionary apocalypse : ideological roots of terrorism / Luciano Pellicani. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–275–98145–2 (alk. paper) 1. Revolutions. 2. Terrorism. 3. Revolutionaries. I. Title. HM876.P445 2003 303.6⬘4—dc21 2003045761 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 2003 by ETAS, R.C.S. Libri S.p.A., Milan, Italy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003045761 ISBN: 0–275–98145–2 First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

The human spirit completely lost its sense of balance with the French Revolution and the simultaneous collapse of religious and civil laws. It had nothing to hold onto, no limits. In this period there came into being revolutionaries of a new species, never seen before. They drove their daring to utmost folly, did not hesitate before anything new, suffered no scruples, showed no hesitation before any design. Nor should it be thought that these new beings were the creation of one ephemeral summer, destined to disappear immediately. They generated a species that perpetuated itself and spread in all civilised regions of the world. Wherever, they retained the same expression, the same passions, the same nature. We ﬁnd that species in the works when we are born: it is still before our eyes. Tocqueville

Socialism concerns not only the working class issue or the issue of the so-called fourth state but, above all, that of atheism, namely the problem of how to realise contemporary atheism, the problem of the Tower of Babel, that is built without God, not to reach from earth to heaven but to lower heaven to earth. Dostoevsky

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

Chapter 1

Intellectuals as a Class

1

Chapter 2

The Apocalypse Fanatics

11

Chapter 3

The Jacobin Experiment

29

Chapter 4

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

59

Chapter 5

Waiting the Reign

77

Chapter 6

The Jesuits of Revolution

99

Chapter 7

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

115

Chapter 8

The Revolutionary Gnosis

149

Chapter 9

Utopia in Power

171

Chapter 10

The Proletarian Church

195

Chapter 11

Building the New World

221

Chapter 12

The Cultural War between West and East

241

Chapter 13

The Annihilators of the World

261

A Conclusion?

285

Index

289

Preface

This book is concerned with tragic events that were dominated by one of the most extraordinary anthropological “types” that has ever existed in the history of humanity: the professional revolutionary, generated by the cultural catastrophe provoked by the uncontrollable advance of modernity. The professional revolutionary is an individual who embraces revolution as a Beruf, an individual who craves the absolute. His disenchantment with the world makes of him “an orphan of God,” dominated by a nostalgia for the totally other. Incapable of accepting reality, he aspires to build a completely new world in the light of a soteriological doctrine—dialectical gnosis—that he proclaims to be the “solved enigma of History.” At last everything will comply with desire, and God’s scepter will be in the hands of humanity. The professional revolutionary’s goal is the creation of an evangelical community, based on equality and planetary brotherhood. To do this, he is prepared to wage a war of destruction against those who have surrendered to mammon and allowed the domination of the law of universal trade that all-profanes and all-degrades. Hence, the destructive calling of gnostic revolution: not a single stone of the corrupt and corrupting world shall remain standing; hence, also, the inevitable destructive and self-destroying outcome of the revolutionary project to purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation.

Introduction

The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substituted transcendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless and stateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical/cultural phenomenon of the secular age. Such chiliasm was dominated by one idea/passion: that permanent revolution, conceived as the overturning of the overturned world, could realize the absolutes of philosophy, by means of permanent revolution. Anatoly Lunacharsky describes the profound inspiration of the revolutionary undertaking thus: “the world will be puriﬁed, re-created” so that all the “cursed questions” are solved for once and for all and the structure of being made to comply with desire. Which is like saying that the elimination of the conﬂict between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality, promised by the religions of redemption in the next world, can, indeed must, be achieved on earth, through a revolutionary call to arms to destroy the evil powers that conspire against human happiness. The project can be qualiﬁed as “gnostic” because it is animated by the belief that there exists a speculative knowledge— dialectical science—that is capable of indicating the method for eradicating alienation and changing the ontological nature of reality. It presents itself as the last avatar of the savior-saved myth, in which the desire for selfredemption of the ancient gnosis combines with expectation of a rupture with the past, which is so radical that it is capable of putting an end to the prehistory of humanity and restoring the great universal harmony destroyed by the desire for proﬁt. Revolutionary gnosticism achieved its most spectacular successes in Russia and in China; thanks to its formidable power of mobilization and existential

xii

Introduction

involvement, it was a major spiritual force of the modern age. In concrete terms, following the traumas generated in traditional societies by the violent impact of the capitalist mode of production, groups of alienated intellectuals assumed a major historical role and appointed themselves bearers of a catastrophicpalingenetic conception of revolution. They proclaimed for all to hear that the event—the annihilation of the old world and the Promethean construction of the new world—was nigh. The logical corrolary of this new, shattering conception of politics as a soteriological practice was the birth of a singular, anthropological “type”: the professional revolutionary, the “permanent negative” of society, a concentration of moral energy, aesthetically dedicated to the destruction of the civilization that generated him. Now, if the policy of alienated intellectuals in the last ﬁve centuries, let us say from Thomas Mu¨ntzer on (it is no coincidence that Engels and Ernst Bloch considered him to be the ﬁrst martyr of the communist revolution) was effectively a gnostic policy and the gnostic policy, the policy of alienated intellectuals, before analyzing the internal structure and development of revolution as such, it may be useful to take a closer look at the nature and the role of the specialists of symbolic production.

CHAPTER 1

Intellectuals as a Class

1. The tendency to consider the specialists of symbolic production a “contemplative class,”1 having no libido dominandi, whose only desire was to accumulate and socialize knowledge, has eclipsed the political role of intellectuals in the class wars that accompanied the dramatic process of formation and development of the modern age. Karl Mannheim, probably the most inﬂuential supporter of this approach, writes: “Although they are too differentiated to be considered one class, there is nonetheless a sociological link between the various groups of intellectuals; to a large extent, education is precisely what unites them. The fact that they enjoy the same education tends to eliminate differences of birth, civil status, profession and wealth and unite these groups.”2 This makes them “an anchorless group, relatively free of the classes”;3 that is to say, a freischwebende Intelligenz consisting essentially of “outsiders who have abandoned their parental stratum,”4 and can for this very reason freely decide to afﬁliate themselves to any one of the classes ﬁghting for power and fulﬁll what they believe to be their “natural” mission, namely act as “advocates whose mission is to safeguard the spiritual interests of humanity at large.”5 This prescriptive rather than descriptive idea of the intelligentsia was more or less explicitly accepted by most social scientists and philosophers, who refused to consider the group to which they belonged as a class with interests distinct from those of other classes. The problem of course is that in this particular case, subject and object of analysis coincided and the interpretation was inevitably subjective. This would also explain the particularly edifying image the intelligentsia painted (of themselves). Theirs was a pure and disinterested e´lite, at the “service of humanity,”6 whose sole goal was the pursuit

2

Revolutionary Apocalypse

of truth and good. Their refusal to regard themselves as a class also surreptitiously spread the idea that they alone had escaped being conditioned by society. They took great pride in being a sociological exception and belonging to a “separate” society resembling no other. Only they had “liberated” themselves from the prejudices and accepted standards of the time with their critical use of the faculty of reason. Not surprisingly, Mannheim’s ideas sparked considerable controversy. Friedrich Hayek considers entirely “gratuitous”7 the claim that intellectuals were not inﬂuenced by class interests in their political decisions. Robert Merton highlights the paralogistic nature of the concept of freischwebende Intelligenz. Mannheim—he observes—tried to solve the “intellectual anarchy” underlying his theory of the existential and social conditioning of thought, by endowing intellectuals with the same mysterious faculty that Hegel had attributed to the “general class” and Marx to the “proletariate fur sich”; a faculty that enabled them to be disinterested, objective observers of society and its problems. This clearly unsustainable theory is mindful—Merton ironically remarks—“of the Baron of Munchhausen and his attempt to pull himself out of a marsh by his whiskers.”8 Joseph Schumpeter expresses a similar view. Mannheim believed “everyone was a victim of ideological illusions, with the exception of the modern radical intellectual, who was without doubt ﬁrmly seated on the rock of truth, an impartial judge of all things human. Now, it is more than obvious that the intellectual is a bundle of prejudices, frequently stated with the vehemence deriving from sincere conviction. That aside, we cannot follow Mannheim in his escape through the emergency exit, because we ﬁrmly believe that ideological prejudice is ubiquitous and consider the conviction of certain groups to be free of such prejudice a particularly frightful aspect of their own system of illusions.”9 Werner Stark is even more adamant and accuses Mannheim of ideological self-illusion; of confusing the ideal for the real. “The intelligentsia is not a free class but, like every other class, has a particular social position, vision of the world and area of interest.”10 In effect, for those with a more realistic conception of social classes, the idea of the specialists of symbolic production being a group without class interests is unacceptable. According to historical materialism, the speciﬁc role played by a social group in the sphere of production and reproduction of material life, and its relationship with the means of production, is the fundamental criterion for identifying classes within a given society: the group that possesses the means of production is the ruling class—the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in capitalist society—the group that does not is the ruled class. In fact, Marx’s “bourgeois ideologues” belonged to neither, although admittedly Marx was particularly ambiguous in this regard. They did not possess the tools of production and therefore were not part of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, yet they were not without possessions, since their highly qualiﬁed knowledge placed them above the direct producers; above all, their remark-

Intellectuals as a Class

3

able capacity to manipulate symbols meant they were “naturally” destined to exercise leadership in workers’ organizations and battles and protest movements. This knowledge and this capacity constituted an “occult capital.” Stark’s radical theory is that “alongside all the other battles on the contemporary arena, there was also a deﬁnite class war between the intellectuals seeking power and the captains of industry who were determined not to lose it. To claim that the intellectuals remained to one side without being inﬂuenced, detached onlookers predestined to acting as umpires in the arena of political manoeuvring, is to live in Utopia, not in England, France or the United States.”11 The most devastating attack against the notion of intellectuals as a nonclass comes from Alvin Gouldner. In an essay with the eloquent title The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Gouldner suggests that, by gradually extending the sphere of those enjoying knowledge, the Industrial Revolution had allowed the formation of a huge “cultural bourgeoisie that quietly took over the advantages of a cultural capital produced historically and collectively.”12 This cultural bourgeoisie—composed of whoever had access to the particular form of capital constituted by knowledge—was the new class, whose economic basis was precisely that “cultural capital” that it monopolized and spent as a strategic resource to maximize power and privilege. According to Gouldner, this process was achieved by means of two fundamental strategies: the welfare state and the socialist state. The historical-political signiﬁcance of the two strategies was not the emancipation of workers from the domination of capital—as the active ideologues of the new class liked to claim—but the transformation of the cultural bourgeoisie into the ruling class. Gyorgy Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi suggest the same hypotheses with respect to the socalled “popular democracies” in their monograph describing the “march of intellectuals toward power” where they describe the strategy implemented by the intelligentsia—ﬁrst and foremost the elimination of market laws—with a view to transforming their monopoly of knowledge into a monopoly of power.13 2. In light of the above, it is hard not to conclude that the intellectuals are a class characterized by speciﬁc social functions, namely the processing and transmission of knowledge; the spiritual guidance of the masses, and so on; and by speciﬁc interests, despite their claim that they have always been the one and only group representing the general interest. Gramsci rightly queried the truth of this clearly ideological claim.14 No one can deny that some intellectuals have dedicated part of their existence to defending interests that transcended those of their own class, but to claim that that was the only activity of the “specialists of symbolic production” is to ignore reality. The lofty demiurgic project of remodeling society according to the dictates of science was simply an attempt to “rationalize” a deﬁnite class interest: the

4

Revolutionary Apocalypse

interests of an alienated intelligentsia aspiring to take over political leadership and become the ruling class. The origins of the modern intellectual class supports this theory. In Alfred von Martin’s sociological analysis of renaissance civilization we learn that, between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the economic and cultural changes produced in European society by the expansion of capitalism led to the emergence of two new classes: men of letters and merchants. Both felt they were superior to the “common folk” whom they despised and had no desire to frequent; both were very much opposed to the classes who held the power at the time: the aristocracy and high clergy. Although the two new classes shared the same aversions, they were hardly allies, because they had completely different values and capital. For intellectuals, knowledge and virtus—spiritual education—were the supreme value; for the merchants, wealth, because they considered that personally accumulated riches were the only criterion for judging people and things. This profound difference explains why the two “chosen” classes tended to despise each other and, worse still, why the intelligentsia “who believed they were endowed with a spiritual mission because they represented the e´lite of their class, insisted on the other class appointing it to act as its spiritual representative.”15 Of course this could never be, for the merchants’ only value was to maximize proﬁt and accumulate wealth. The outcome was inevitable. “A sensation of inner resentment against the middle class at large and traders and merchants especially among the bourgeois intelligentsia, composed of individuals who were proud of their individuality. People whose only capital was mental and whose aspiration was to live on that capital could only exist within a bourgeoisie, yet they felt conﬁned to a position of inferiority and resented the attitude of a class that had accumulated wealth and, in so doing, had become powerful, in both economic and political terms.”16 Von Martin’s analysis is particularly useful in terms of understanding why, especially in the last two centuries, intellectuals have tended to support anticapitalist movements.17 In their view, a capitalist society is structurally incapable of achieving the supreme values they claim to incarnate. In effect, in capitalist societies, material values prevail “over all other values, with the consequence that the economy leaves its mark on every ﬁeld of society and culture.”18 The sensation of profound alienation and impotence experienced by intellectuals19 derives therefore from the incompatibility between the role of spiritual leadership they aspire to fulﬁll and the speciﬁc nature of the social order that revolves around values and forces that are completely foreign to them. In this material world, pervaded by material values, intellectuals feel like aliens, who are unable to leave a mark on society. Their natural vocation is to guide consciences, indicate goals, transform the public ethos. The fact that modern society is dominated by economic issues, is impervious to their messages, and refuses to recognize their role of spiritual leadership offends them deeply.20

Intellectuals as a Class

5

In fact intellectuals probably tend to underestimate their inﬂuence on society. In the short term, it may be superﬁcial and even insigniﬁcant, but in the long run, this is certainly not the case: “sooner or later, ideas, not established interests are the danger, for better and for worse.”21 People pursue their material and spiritual interests on the basis of what they believe to be reality; that is to say, on the basis of the images of the world that they have absorbed during the process of socialization and that have become common sense. As intellectuals are the specialists who process those images, it is in their mental laboratories that “the point of view on the basis of which society will act in the not too distant future” is built.22 Or, in the words of Ortega y Gasset, “Beliefs in the squares of tomorrow depend on what the intellectual starts thinking today.”23 Of course this is providing there are suitable channels of communication that permit the transmission and widespread diffusion of messages. In conclusion, intellectuals have a profound impact on society’s reality, but “indirectly, and in the long term, with their ideas: by modifying our way of assessing and interpreting the world, by building our visions of the world.”24 The problem is that the power in the hands of the specialists of spiritual production—the power of ideas—is not a direct power: “Between the intellectual and his potential public there are technical, economic and social structures, that are possessed and manoeuvred by others.”25 Moreover, if ideas are to acquire validity, they must cease being ideas and become beliefs, dogmas, intellectual and moral standards: in other words, deeply rooted ways of feeling and thinking.26 This is a process that takes time: an idea doesn’t become an accepted standard overnight. The psychological consequences of this time lapse are particularly severe in the case of intellectuals: no matter how much prestige they enjoy, the fact that new ideas take so long to become common usage leaves them with the sensation of living in a desert of indifference and even hostility. Words are their tools of action, yet words barely seem to touch the surface of reality, leaving no mark. This naturally generates a sense of frustration. Taken to the extreme, it transforms the intellectual into a “resentful person” or, worse, a neurotic.27 3. It is often argued that intellectuals cannot possibly constitute a class because they offer their services impartially to all parties and social classes. This argument—upheld with particular vehemence by Robert Michels28—is by no means conclusive. No one has ever denied that workers constitute a class with interests distinct from those of other classes, yet in no country have they ever been identiﬁed with one party. Depending on historical circumstances, they have always ﬂuctuated between the extreme left and the extreme right. To say that intellectuals constitute a class does not mean they are always united nor less that their political behavior is constantly oriented in one direction. It simply means to use a structural variable—the class situation—to explain the tendency of intellectuals to oppose the capitalist-bourgeois order

6

Revolutionary Apocalypse

and advocate the advent of a new type of social organization in which the values of culture—and the people incarnating those values—will at last prevail. The argument that intellectuals do not constitute a class per se was probably also fuelled by Marx’s image of class and of class wars, whose impact was so strong that it eclipsed important historical facts. Marx conceived classes as closed, impervious entities, with a compact and united stand on all fundamental issues of political life, the principle being that “it is not the conscience of men that determines their being; on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their conscience.”29 According to Marx, the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a dominant theme of capitalist society, was the one theme that absorbed all other conﬂicts of interest. Undeniably the conﬂict between capital and labor is a dominant theme of the modern age: indeed, it is innate to a system, centered on a pluralistic/market democracy, which generates almost physiologically what Raymond Aron has called a state of “constant agitation,”30 that is fuelled by those who have no economic resource other than their labor force. But to argue that the conﬂict between the haves and the have-nots is the only conﬂict of interest in capitalist societies is unrealistic. Moreover, Marx’s theory is clearly ideological—that is to say, an “objective mystiﬁcation,” to use an expression he coined himself—in that it permits certain forms of protest of plutocratic bureaucracy to be presented as a ﬁght of, and for, the proletariat, whereas the real actors, and those involved in a direct conﬂict with capitalism, are usually the more marginal elements of the modern intellectual class. Max Nomad has done some excellent work on this point.31 He makes explicit reference to the Polish revolutionary Jan Waclaw Machajski,32 who continued Bakunin’s33 devastating and prophetical critique of Marxism, suggesting that the hypertrophic development of the intellectual class was one of the most important social and political events of modern society. It was bursting over with frustrated, alienated semi-intellectuals, who were radically opposed to capitalism and presented themselves on the political arena as the disinterested advocates of the working classes. The socialist movement came into being as a result of the combination of two factors: the birth of an industrial proletariat, gradually, and with great sacriﬁce, gaining self awareness, and the presence of increasing numbers of de´classe´s intellectuals who had placed themselves in the front line in the ﬁght against capitalism, in an effort to avoid proletarization. In addition to its role as the workers’ protest organization, the socialist movement was used as a tool by the marginal elements of European intelligentsia to “colonize” the industrial proletariat and gain social and political power.34 At the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave le Bon also suggested that the increasing frustration of growing numbers of intellectuals, due to the loss of their monopoly of specialized knowledge following the extension of higher education, was a source of permanent tension: “Since the chosen are few [we read in the famous Psychology of Crowds] discontent is per force immense.

Intellectuals as a Class

7

Those who are discontented are ready for any revolution, whoever the leaders and whatever the objectives. With the acquisition of knowledge he can’t use, man will always become a rebel.”35 In effect, industrial capitalism seems to have an innate capacity to generate a subclass of intellectuals within the “contemplative class,” who can but be profoundly dissatisﬁed with the society in which they live, since that society is incapable of guaranteeing them a modus vivendi that meets their high expectations. The imbalance between status and legitimate expectations generates the phenomenon of relative deprivation, which inevitably leads to the secession of the declassed intelligentsia. Excluded from what they consider to be their “natural” place, they become a group of outsiders, strongly opposed to the existing order and its basic values. A chain series of psychological processes eventually leads to what Giovanni Sartori describes as the “politicalrevolutionary exit of the intellectual from the original platform” and the consequent formation of a radical intelligentsia, “typically intolerant of their time and in revolt against their own world, a compact group committed to taking the reins of history and forcefully leading it towards solutions of society of reason.”36 The revolutionary secession of the intelligentsia was certainly not an exclusively Russian phenomenon, although in Russia it took on speciﬁc connotations. Indeed, for the reasons indicated above, it accompanied the Industrial Revolution like a shadow, contributing signiﬁcantly to creating that “atmosphere of almost universal hostility” vis-a`-vis the capitalist-bourgeois society, so expertly analyzed by Schumpeter, who believed it to be the main source of the revolutionary nature of the class war between the haves and the have-nots.37 In conclusion, everything seems to indicate that, while reformism was the spontaneous reaction of the working class to the trauma generated by the uncontrolled accumulation of capital, revolutionarism was a solution proposed by alienated intellectuals. In no way can it be considered a proletarian solution, the only possible response to the real interests of the proletariat, as revolutionaries like to claim against all evidence.

NOTES 1. The deﬁnition is in Considerations on the Spiritual Power on Social Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1911), p. 270. 2. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 138. 3. Ibid., p. 137. 4. K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge, 1967), p. 143. 5. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 140.

8

Revolutionary Apocalypse

6. E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1970). 7. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 182. 8. R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), p. 561. 9. J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 12th ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 37. 10. W. Stark, Sociologia della conoscenza (Milan: Comunita`, 1963), p. 389. 11. Ibid., p. 392. 12. A. W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 19. 13. G. Konrad and I. Szelenyi, La marche au pouvoir des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1979). 14. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 15. A. von Martin, Sociologia del Renacimiento (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1946), p. 67. 16. Ibid., p. 68. 17. It is odd that though trained in the Karl Mannheim school, von Martin never examined the role of the declassed clergy, who forged the spiritual arms of the millenarian protest movements and took over political leadership. 18. W. Sombart, II socialismo tedesco (Padua: Il Corallo, 1981), p. 13. 19. On this point, see C. Wilson, The Outsider (London: Gollancz, 1967). 20. Cf. G. P. Prandstraller, L’intellettuale-tecnico (Milan: Comunita`, 1969), pp. 26–27. 21. J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 384. 22. F. A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 182. 23. J. Ortega y Gasset, Il tema del nostro tempo (Milan: SugarCo, 1985), p. 85. 24. G. Sartori, “Per una deﬁnizione della scienza politica,” in G. Sartori (a cura di), Antologia di scienza politica (Bologna: II Mulino, 1970), p. 21. 25. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 296. 26. On the distinction between ideas-inventions and beliefs-institutions of fundamental importance, see Ortega y Gasset’s essay, “Idee e credenze,” in Aurora della ragione storica (Milan: SugarCo, 1983). 27. Sartre was the most typical example of an intellectual who, although enjoying prestige and international repute, lived in a state of permanent impotence and frustration: “For a long time,” he confessed, “I used my pen as a sword: now I know we are impotent” (Les mots [Paris: Gallimard, 1964], p. 211). This explains his admiration for Togliatti, whom he considered the prototype of the intellectual/politician, who, like Plato, the philosopher/governor, was capable of having a direct impact on reality and guiding the masses toward the goals indicated by philosophy. It also explains, at least in part, the blinding fascination that the communist project to remodel the present on the basis of Marxism exercised on the author of Nause´e (see L. Pellicani, “II marxismo immaginario di Sartre,” in AA. VV, Lo storicismo come tradizione [Messina: Perna, 1994]). 28. R. Michels, “Intellectuals,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 119.

Intellectuals as a Class

9

29. K. Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Marx and Engels on Economy, Politics, and Society, ed. by John E. Elliot (Santa Monica: Goodyear, 1981), p. 4. 30. R. Aron, La lutte des classes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 227. 31. M. Nomad, Aspects of Revolt (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961) and Apostles of Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1961). For a critical examination of Nomad’s thesis, see P. Mattick, Ribelli e rinnegati (Turin: Musolini, 1976), p. 45 et seq. 32. Machajski’s works are contained in an anthology entitled Le socialisme des intellectuelles (Paris: Seuil, 1979) with a long introduction by Alexandre Skirda. 33. Bakunin considered the declasse´s intellectuals infesting the European socialist movements as “doctrinaire revolutionaries who had taken upon themselves the mission of destroying existing power and order to create their own dictatorships on its ruins” (Statism and Anarchy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]) and indicated that Marxism was the philosophy best suited to giving legitimacy to that mission and preventing the workers from perceiving its real class connotations. 34. Georges Sorel had a similar theory: “The real vocation of intellectuals is to exploit politics; they want to convince the workers that it is in their interest to take them to power and accept the hierarchy of skills that places workers under the direction of politicians” (Mate´riaux d’une the´orie du prole´tariat, vol. 1 [Paris: Rivie`re, 1929], p. 98). 35. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Unwin, 1896). 36. G. Sartori, “Intellettuali e intelligentzia,” in Studi Politici, nos. 1–2 (1953), p. 30. 37. J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), pp. 145–155.

CHAPTER 2

The Apocalypse Fanatics

1. The history of revolutionary gnosticism and of the proletarianized intelligentsia has much in common, at least in the sense that the plan to alter the ontological status of reality, by destroying the old world and building a new one on its ruins, found its most natural interpreter and ardent activist in the declassed “proletaratised intellectual.” The prophetae of the millenarian movements of the Low Middle Ages and the professional revolutionaries of the twentieth century were in society but not of society. For that very reason both were consumed by a passionate desire to overturn the macrocosm in which they existed as aliens. They longed for the unity of the past, rejected the existing order, and abhorred money and its adulators and a world that exuded injustice from its every pore. They shared the same Weltanschauung: reality was perceived as an immense battleﬁeld dominated by a conﬂict of cosmic-historic signiﬁcance between the forces of good and of evil, which inevitably concluded with the victory of good and the deﬁnitive renovatio mundi.1 It is no coincidence that the ﬁrst signs of the extraordinary events accompanying revolutionary movements should have emerged with the introduction of capitalism in European society. Wherever the formidable creativedestructive force of the self-regulated market successfully broke its way into society, it generated masses of uprooted individuals forced to live “on the margin of society, in a state of chronic insecurity.”2 The reason is obvious: by extending the radius of ratio beyond all proportion, capitalism tended to transform Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft, eroding community bonds and substituting them with impersonal, utilitarian, temporary ties. The closed, oppressive (but protective) “community world” was substituted by an open, dynamic one,

12

Revolutionary Apocalypse

ruled by the laws of competition and proﬁt; a world in which solidarity was unknown and anyone not in a position to participate successfully was considered an outcast. This also explains why capitalism has always generated anomy and alienation or, to cite Karl Polanyi, “cultural catastrophes.”3 An understanding of these cultural catastrophes is essential for identifying the elements that led to the eruption of mass millenarian movements, based on “the radical denial of the existing world.”4 These movements were the “response” of the victims of the cultural catastrophes generated by the penetration of self-regulated markets in traditional societies, the desperate attempt of the “internal proletariat” of Western civilization to oppose the impersonal, heartless mechanism that condemned them to living as outsiders. Arnold Toynbee rightly claims that the distinguishing feature of the proletariat “was not poverty or humble birth, but the awareness—and the resentment that this awareness produced—of having lost one’s ancestral place in society.”5 The internal proletariat was therefore “a psychological group” composed of individuals of different social backgrounds, upon whom the dissolution of Gemeinschaft had had a particularly negative impact. Being marginalized from community life, they felt they were no longer an integral part of their macrocosm or bound by those moral and affective ties that once gave meaning and direction to their existence. Hence their receptivity to new messages, especially those favoring a radical overturning of the existing order that they hated and resented. Hence their search for a new group in the hope of recovering lost solidarity. At this point they became a “class of outsiders,” in conﬂict with everyone and everything: people, behavior, values, institutions. The scene was set for the revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat, not— this should be clear—to be confused with Jacquerie. The history of most civilizations is marked by revolts of the oppressed against cruel, heartless oppressors. The objective of these revolts is to suppress abuses, not uses. “Dominated by the omnipotence of custom,”6 the rebels aspire to restore the previous, overturned order, not to create a new one. Instead in Europe in the Low Middle Ages a radically new sociological phenomenon appeared on the scene: the violent eruption, in successive waves, of movements in direct conﬂict with the dominant system of values, based on an interpretation of the Holy Scripture, aiming to recover the original chiliastic pathos and enlightened by eschatological doctrines announcing the imminent restoration of the Kingdom of God.7 Only the leaders of these movements could manipulate the symbols. Only they had the cognitive skills necessary to draw up a counterideology and a program for restructuring society. Being excluded from knowledge, the masses had only their anger and destructive energy to fall back on. According to a rigidly hierarchic division of labor, in the new revolutionary army the masses were the shock troops. Although the millenarian movements professed themselves in favor of the suppression of inequality, they could not avoid what Max Weber called the

The Apocalypse Fanatics

13

“law of the small numbers.”8 Decisions were always made by a small minority, generally individuals “from the lower strata of the intelligentsia.”9 In the speciﬁc dynamics of the revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat, we ﬁnd two actors, linked in a typically charismatic relationship: the “plebeian proletariat” (the mobilized workers) and the “aristocratic proletariat” (the declassed intellectuals). They had nothing in common but their resentment against a society that had alienated them and the belief that liberation was at hand, providing all available energy was directed toward overturning the rich and powerful in what was conceived as the “last of the holy wars.” No matter how strong the alliance between the “plebeian proletariat” and the “aristocratic proletariat,” leadership remained exclusively in the hands of the intellectual e´lite. The “prophet” and his most direct assistants were always intellectuals upon whose action in every ﬁeld—education, protest, organization, strategy—depended the particular connotation of each millenarian movement. 2. In a broad sense, millenarianism “is faith in a future age, profane yet sacred, terrestrial yet celestial; all wrongs will be righted, all injustices remedied; illness and death will be abolished.”10 This faith, in which religious and sociopolitical change and renewal are presented as one and the same thing, was ﬁrst revived by the prophetae of the Middle Ages. They formulated a whole school of apocalyptic doctrines taken from a variety of sources—the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of John, the speculations of Gioacchino da Fiore on the Third Kingdom11—to which they added their own reinterpretation of gnostic cosmologies, especially the Manichean doctrine, translated in a language readily accessible to the people, to whom at last they offered the prospect of imminent liberation. It was the diffusion of these doctrines that fomented the revival of the antiinstitutional radicalism that had prevailed in the early Christian communities, dominated by the expectation of the Second Coming, seen as a palingenesis “in which all profane values would be overturned and the humble and the suffering would ﬁnd their apotheosis as supreme reparation for the injustices suffered.”12 Taken to its logical extreme, this “refusal of the world” should have induced Christians to believe that their ﬁrst duty was to destroy an empire contaminated by a religion and a civilization condemned by Christ. And this extreme conclusion was effectively reached by the circuncellioni, “Christ’s militants” for whom donatism was the theological justiﬁcation for their claim that the only way to save the rich was to massacre them.13 Although the vast majority of Christians harbored less extreme thoughts, their doctrine was undoubtedly animated by a burning hatred for Rome, considered to be “the new Babylon,”14 and a strong spirit of anarchy. “It rejected a system of rules codiﬁed and legitimated by secular support”15 and was therefore a force of division and dissolution. Why should Christians worry about

14

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the future of society, if this was simply a regnum perditionis, destined to be swept away by the “breath of our Lord”?16 All they had to do was wait for the “end of the world” and not allow themselves to be contaminated by the moral miasma around them,17 in the knowledge that “human wisdom is foolishness before God.”18 In fact, Christians led a kind of “underground, non-violent war”19 against institutions: “Nothing is more foreign to us than the State.”20 On the surface, they were good citizens of the empire; underneath, they refused its basic values because they considered them meaningless, or even negative, in light of the second coming of Christ.21 Non-Christians understandably resented this attitude: “whilst the happiness and glory of a temporal reign were promised to the disciples of Christ, the most dreadful calamities were denounced against an unbelieving world.”22 Thus, relations between Christians and nonChristians were poisoned at the root since “the truth of one was but a lie for the other”23 and “every city, every home was split by civil war.”24 In short, according to Jean Guitton, “in the Roman Empire the Christian was a conspirer of Jesus” and his ardent proselytization.25 Things changed dramatically with the Edict of Milan (313). Once Constantine made Christianity a state-protected religion, in a desperate attempt to increase the spiritual foundations of the empire, the church was, in a sense, obliged to take its distance from chiliasm—despite the words of the missionaries and apologists of the evangelical message26—and present the Kingdom of God as a purely spiritual revolution, a renovatio in interiore homine with no speciﬁc political or social content. The church tried to reduce the antiinstitutional spirit of what Tertullian called the “contempt for the Age,”27 which had transformed Christians into outsiders, who cared nothing for the fate of the civilization in which they lived. It is often claimed that the transformation of Christianity from religion of protest to religion of legitimation of the existing order occurred when the empire took the church under its protective wing. At that point, the church became an agency for recruiting a “new class” of individuals, interested in retaining command and therefore wary of the “enthusiasts” who threatened the established order with their eschatological impatience.28 This is undoubtedly true but, once the second coming of Christ ceased being the dominant issue, it was inevitable that Christians should have felt bound to concern themselves with the fate of a world that was falling apart before their eyes. The only solution, in their view, was to introduce “an intellectual discipline of iron, an absolute and unquestionable doctrine of life, able to withstand the assault of interests and passions.”29 This essentially is why the 413 Council of Ephesus used Saint Augustine’s interpretation of the Holy Scripture (an interpretation that barred the way to any chiliastic thoughts)30 to condemn the belief in the millennium as a superstition. In this way it solemnly, and ofﬁcially, reconciled the church with the present, re-

The Apocalypse Fanatics

15

moving all legitimacy from the subversive charge that had been the authentic and original inspiration of Christianity.31 The church could not continue to be a school of anarchy, radically hostile to anything tasting of order and hierarchy, when the institutions of society were falling apart and souls were ﬁlled with anguish. Once it had accepted that “celestial Jerusalem would never come,”32 the only realistic approach was to read the book of Revelation as an immense spiritual allegory, to move the soul saving event to another world, to accept to live in, and adapt to, the old world. This produced what P. Wendland has called “the triumph of the Church over Christianity”;33 a triumph that was possible precisely because “the Kingdom of God that was to descend from the sky to the earth, was placed in heaven.”34 It was not an absolute triumph, however. The ﬂame of expectation of messianic deliverance continued to smolder beneath the ashes and ﬁre spirits every time it became necessary to break away from the oppressive hold of reality. This occurred whenever the impersonal forces of market, competition, and capital set off a mechanism of social mobilization, whereby the uprooted masses, already prepared by Christian socialization for the advent of the Redeemer, heeded the words of those preaching the imminent advent of the millennium. The soteriological message of the prophetae had much in common with the messianic tradition that the church had never managed to eliminate altogether, because that tradition was an element constituting its depositum ﬁdei: “unhappiness, misfortune then salvation.”35 The material and moral suffering of the poor and underprivileged was presented as the antechamber of redemption: a completely terrestrial redemption, since the prophetae revived the original message of the Bible, with the advent here and now of the Messiah, the bearer of peace and justice.36 In this sociopsychological environment, to some extent, the revival of the gnostic Manichean tradition was a natural outcome. It had failed before because it had preached radical anti-institutionalism, rejection of secular laws, and delegitimation of existing forms of life. For this same reason there was a kind of elective afﬁnity between its teachings and the feelings of the disinherited masses. With its insistence on the radically evil nature of the world and on the ﬁgure of savior-saved, the gnosis of Mani offered a therapy for alienation. Its “project for a fantastic overturning of the real world”37 pointed to the prospect of an immediate renovatio mundi, which is why the gnosticManichean heresy, which the Catholic Church believed it had defeated, reappeared in a transﬁgured form in many heretical movements.38 The Patarine, Cathar, Flagellant, Lollard, Taborite, and Anabaptists movements all contained gnostic-Manichean elements.39 They all challenged the political and religious authorities, protested the legitimacy of the Christianity of the church, and condemned the greed of usurers and private property in the name of evangelical communism. They deﬁed the existing order; they criticized the abuses of those with power and money and the very concept of hierarchy.

16

Revolutionary Apocalypse

They proposed a transﬁgured world, in which equality and universal brotherhood would at last prevail. Thus it was that rejection of the old world and belief in the advent of a new one led chiliasm and gnosticism to join forces and present themselves as one spiritual force and confer the role of savior upon the propheta. As such, the leader was charismatic, the circumstances in which he operated extraordinary, and extraordinary the mission and the message he addressed to the outcast group: a message of hope, based on the expectation of the eschatological event, that was to be typically both terrible and liberating: an apocalyptic catastrophe from which would arise a regenerated and puriﬁed macrocosm. One can imagine the enthusiastic response to the propheta’s every word and the charisma of his followers. The eschatological myth of the end of general corruption intimately connected to the prospect of imminent renovatio ﬁred the “plebeian proletariat” already mobilized to dare all, in the blind conviction that nothing could stop them. After all, had the propheta not proclaimed that, once the evil, the powerful, and the rich had been eliminated, the doors of celestial Jerusalem would magically open? 3. These very same elements—the propheta, the plebs pauperorum, belief in a millenium in which all would be equal, war among classes, and so on—were present in the movements led by Tanchel and Eudes de l’Etoile, in the ﬁrst half of the twelfth century. However, John Ball and Wat Tyler’s uprising (1381) was the ﬁrst mass revolutionary movement to constitute a serious threat to established order. Little is known of the words used by John Ball to stir the masses. For sure they were based on an egalitarian interpretation of the Holy Scripture40 and violently accused the gentry and the clergy of betraying the evangelical message. The reaction was immediate: Richard II marched against the rebels and had them dispersed and their leaders executed. Yet, “for generations the upper classes lived in fear of a popular rising.”41 The “poor preachers, the real missionaries of [Wyclif’s] new message”42 continued to gain followers among the more humble classes and to ﬁre their faith in an earthly renovatio. The sparks that fell on Bohemia were to become the ﬁre of revolution. John Hus, an ardent admirer of Wyclif, eliminated the local element from the Lollard doctrine and transformed it in a message applying to all Christianity. In 1420, Hussite agitators produced an overpowering state of chiliastic euphoria in Bohemia, which was to lead to a war among classes. Although “the popular heresy presented an irenic face,”43 the Taborites, the extremist wing of the Hussite movement, proclaimed that the massacre of the wicked would smooth the way for the millenium. Once the original anarchicegalitarian communism had been revived, the evil institutions of class society would have no reason to exist. There would be no authority, no money, no private property. In a Tractatus contra errores on the “extermination of the evil,” by one of the intellectual leaders of the Taborite movement, the powerful and

The Apocalypse Fanatics

17

the rich are said to represent evil. There was no alternative but to annihilate the privileged, in order to restore the Kingdom of God. “Whoever did not join them in ‘liberating truth’ and destroying sinners was himself a member of the hosts of Satan and Anti-Christ and therefore ﬁt only for annihilation.”44 This meant murdering whoever did not identify with the chosen charismatic community, regardless of social status. The logic of millenarianism and the imperatives of a class war soon transformed the community into a theocratic society with a rigid hierarchy and a strong martial spirit. Of course the peasants were the ones who paid the price for this transformation. Since the Taborites were ﬁghting on their behalf—or so they claimed—they had no choice but to tolerate every kind of extortion from the “men of God’s law”: “If you disobey, with God’s help we will force you to follow our orders, using every means we have, especially ﬁre.” The Taborite army was defeated in the Battle of Lipan in 1434. The army was defeated, but not the eschatological doctrine that had animated it. One century later, with much more vigor and in a much more favorable climate,45 Luther was to revive the Hussite preaching against the Church.46 “Antagonism between the feudal system and the capitalist system”47 was at the origin of the Reformation. In other words: “capitalism, being constituted on commercial bases, tries to dominate the labour market; a ﬂedgling proletariat no longer disposes, or can dispose, of the tools of its labour; between them, something that already resembles a class war.”48 The social and psychological consequences were particularly acute in “areas where the population was rapidly increasing . . . [and] the areas of rapid social change.”49 The “growing importance of capital, of the market and of competition rendered insecure, isolated and full of anxiety”50 not only the existence of the proletarized working masses, but also that of the marginal strata of the intelligentsia who found themselves as if thrown into a hostile, incomprehensible world, governed by impersonal forces beyond their control. It is not surprising that the declassed intellectuals should have “constituted the avant-garde of the Reform.”51 Contrary to an interpretation that is as widespread as it is arbitrary, the Reformation was an anticapitalist movement. For the entrepreneurs, the practice of indulgences had transformed relations with the church into a reassuring kind of bookkeeping exercise: “If you can buy paradise, then God must tolerate and encourage wealth and not be hostile to proﬁt.”52 In criticizing this attitude, the Protestant preachers laid the foundations “for a new critique of capitalism as the work of the Devil, a critique that went deep, because the accusation was against capitalism itself and not the abuses indicated by Catholicism.”53 It brought the mercatores before the court of the Holy Scripture and condemned them as men who had surrendered to mammon, corrupting Christianity with their lust for wealth and proﬁt. The most appropriate response would have been to revive the original evangelical message and violently expel the mercatores from the temple. Luther

18

Revolutionary Apocalypse

did not go so far.54 Being a radical pessimist, he thought that the corruption of Christianity would never be eradicated manu militari and that the only solution was for the faithful to avoid being infected by the spirit of proﬁt and to continue to work “obediently in the pre-ordered social conditions.”55 This solution failed to satisfy the peasants, besieged by hunger, the plague, taxes, and usury; and the artisans, who had fallen under the control of capital and were forced to work for greedy, insensitive masters. Luther’s devastating critique of the Church and of capitalism had raised much higher hopes among this internal proletariat for “an autumn of the middle ages.” Predictably, they began to look for a solution elsewhere. They found what they were seeking in Thomas Mu¨ntzer, “the revolution theologian”—Ernst Bloch’s deﬁnition56—“[who] fanned hatred against the ruling classes, he stimulated the wildest passions, and used only the forceful language that the religious and nationalist delirium had put into mouths of the Old Testament prophet.”57 He liked to present himself as a paraclete, whose soteriological mission was to “combat the enemies of faith”58 in order to overturn an overturned world and free the oppressed and the exploited from the rule of priests, the powerful, and the rich. His revolutionary agenda “demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth, of the prophesied millennium, by restoring the church to its original status and abolishing all the institutions that conﬂicted with the purportedly early Christian but in fact very novel church. By the kingdom of God Mu¨ntzer meant a society with no class differences, no private property and no state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society.”59 Understandably, Mu¨ntzer’s vision of the imminent advent of a communist millennium aroused people treated “like society’s beasts of burden.”60 Peasants, miners, and artisans rushed to listen to Mu¨ntzer and Pfeifer, his assistant.61 The content of their speeches was always the same: those in command had no right to exercise power; power should pass into the hands of the chosen community; the priests had betrayed the evangelical message and therefore should be expelled from Christianity; the rich would never save their souls because they had surrendered to mammon; everything had to be shared; the very distinction between meum and tuum was contrary to God’s will. Revolutionary effervescence reached its peak in 1525. Gangs of peasants, invariably led by priests who had abandoned their cassocks to act as agitators and activists, spread like wildﬁre all through Germany. At the very time Mu¨ntzer had become the Sire of Mu¨hlhausen and was reorganizing the city according to the principles of evangelical communism (though not disdaining to preach the methodical use of “Gideon’s sword”). “The sword”—he said— “is necessary to exterminate them. And so that it shall be done honestly and properly, our dear fathers the princes must do it, who confess Christ with us. But if they don’t do it, the sword shall be taken from them. . . . If they resist, let them be slaughtered without mercy. . . . At the harvest-time one must pluck the weeds out of God’s vineyard. . . . But the angels who are sharpening

The Apocalypse Fanatics

19

their sickles for that work are no other than the earnest servants of God. . . . For the ungodly have no right to live, save what the Elect choose to allow them.”62 The Mu¨lhausen experiment lasted but a few months. In vain Mu¨ntzer dispatched messengers to spread the ﬁre of revolution in other German cities. The Anabaptist movement was isolated. Its army of badly armed and worse trained peasants was defeated in the battle of Frankenhausen. As always, the revenge of the ruling classes was immediate and horriﬁc. The prophet who had dared to incite the masses against exploitation and injustice was barbarically tortured and put to death. Yet, less than 10 years later, the Anabaptists again challenged established order, with the same fury, the same eschatological vision, the same purpose: to destroy the old world and build a new Jerusalem in its place. This time the revolutionary movement was led ﬁrst by Jan Mattys and, after his death, by Jan Bockelson, better known as John of Leiden. Mu¨nster was the city chosen by “the predestined community” for conducting the sacred experiment of bringing about a metamorphosis of the human condition, through the abolition of money, usury, and private property. The tool for doing this: a “bloody prophetocracy”63 endowed with authority “in all matters, public and private, spiritual and material, and power of life and death over all inhabitants of the town.”64 After expelling the bad and the evil—that is to say “any citizen who did not heed the lessons of the prophets”65—Bockelson proclaimed Mu¨nster the new Jerusalem. He tried, as Mu¨ntzer had 10 years earlier, to extend the revolutionary ﬂame. Agitators were sent wherever there was discontent to announce that the communist millennium was already underway in the Holy City of the Anabaptists and that soon its jurisdiction would extend to all Christianity. Yet again, the ruling classes prevailed. On July 25, 1535, Mu¨nster fell, after a siege lasting months. The usual bloodbath followed. The Anabaptist heresy was mercilessly suffocated and with it any hope the masses had of freeing themselves from the oppressive yoke of their masters. 4. After hibernating for a century, the revolutionary spirit raised its head yet again, but this time in England.66 The Great Rebellion was, not as Engels claimed, “the second great uprising of the bourgeoisie,”67 but the violent reaction of the social classes proletarized by the spread of capitalism. It is no coincidence that the Puritan revolutionary movement was led by gentlemen from the declining gentry,68 small landowners and propagandists recruited from the growing sub-intelligentsia. The latter gave the protest against the court its extremist ﬂavor and directed it toward the goal of overturning the existing order and building a society conceived in their chiliastic imagination as the new Jerusalem. In his excellent study on the anomalous social and existential condition of the intellectuals who became permanent agitators in the Puritan movement, Michael Walzer concludes that their role in the dynamics of the Great Re-

20

Revolutionary Apocalypse

bellion was so important that the rebellion could be deﬁned a “revolt of the third clerical state.”69 The intellectuals were tormented, insecure, dissatisﬁed individuals, humiliated not only by their poverty but also by their precarious status. They represented the nation’s spiritual aristocracy and felt unfairly marginalized. This ﬁlled them with resentment and hostility for the existing order, in which they felt they occupied a place not corresponding to their merits or to their spiritual mission. In short, they were typical declassed intellectuals, naturally drawn to more radical ideas. By embracing the cause, they attained the “good conscience” and gratifying conviction of being the “children of Israel”70 and therefore the moral avant-garde of society. The alienation and resentment of individuals condemned to living in society like an “exiled social group” was fueled by the preaching of John Knox, a typical ideologue of the proletarianized intelligentsia, who had transformed the “Calvinist concept of saint in an ideal around which men without established social interests could gather”71 and recognize themselves as an “e´lite” separate from society and in conﬂict with its dominant institutions and values. On the other hand, Calvin had explicitly supported the theory that “the gospel was a dynamic force that always tended to reform established order, to transform it in a just order.”72 His program is conveyed in the slogan, “To establish the Kingdom of God on earth.”73 The Puritans radicalized Calvinist activism and elevated politics to the rank of collective salvation, by identifying it with the methodical reshaping of the existing order according to a design that was intelligible only to the chosen few: the “saints.” Therefore “the saints—not medieval man—were responsible for the world, and responsible above all for its unceasing transformation,”74 culminating in the creation of a kind of “Christian Sparta”: a compact, ascetic, intolerant society based on a “pious discipline against the religion of trade,”75 in other words, a society that had nothing in common with the bourgeois-capitalist society; a society from which were banished trade and usury, the source of all the evils and vices afﬂicting Christianity; a society of brotherhood in the real faith guided by “a divine e´lite called by providential decree to govern and achieve the Reform in the world and in the motherland.”76 With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into Western civilisation:77 (revolutionary) politics as fulﬁllment of God’s will, with the objective of consciously building “a new human community, that could substitute the lost Eden”78 and produce a prodigious “change in human nature.”79 For centuries, politics had been conceived as a “cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a technique for the accumulation of power (Machiavelli). From the Puritan cultural revolution on, politics was conceived as a soteriological practice, dominated by an eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore as a calling, whose methodical objective was to overturn the world in order to purify it.80 The slogan originally used by the Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived: “Permanent warfare against the existing, in the name of the New World.” If we are to understand why a pressing need to rebuild society on radically

The Apocalypse Fanatics

21

new foundations emerged at that particular time, the “sociological earthquake” produced by the transition from a feudal to a capitalist society must be our starting point. As prosperity and the number of “nouveaux riches” increased, “many gentry were declining while others were rising, and . . . many of the poorer gentry were only just managing to maintain their status and position.”81 This led to a widespread sense of frustration and resentment in a social group that had always been a pillar of the monarchy, to which was added the discontent of the graduates churned out by the university “in numbers well in excess of the capacity of the church to absorb them,”82 who also felt the threat of an imminent loss of status. Meanwhile, the massive movement of wealth generated by the introduction of a market economy had had a visible impact on the power and inﬂuence of the feudal aristocracy. This in turn had eroded the base (material and moral) supporting the monarchy.83 The outcome was a profound change in the power relations among the various social forces, followed by a rapid weakening of the spirit of loyalty and tradition, especially among the proletarianized intellectuals, always particularly sensitive to moral disorder and prone to transforming their speciﬁc existential difﬁculties into general problems. At the beginning, the Puritan sects that came into being in this situation of anomy were simply an attempt to recreate artiﬁcially, almost in vitro, the community bonds that had been torn apart by the advance of the market.84 The spiritual leaders were uprooted intellectuals, disoriented by all the things that were going on around them. As “anomic individuals” they reacted against the cultural tradition in which they had been socialized in a heterodox fashion. They sensed that the axiological heritage handed down to them from previous generations could no longer perform its function of regulating behavior or satisfy their speciﬁc requirements. Hence, the emotional withdrawal from tradition, followed by an attempt to reinterpret it completely; hence, also, the search for a “credo” that could alleviate their anxiety and legitimate their resentment and aggression. In this situation, the Calvinist version of the Christian message understandably exercised an irresistible attraction on alienated and disoriented intellectuals in the unstable social structure of England, in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century. It provided them with a political-religious doctrine they desperately needed: an answer, expressed in commandments, to their problems as morally deprived individuals, forced to seek a new sense of direction in a society they considered inconsistent and unfair. Above all, the idea that they were among the “chosen,” the impersonal purveyors of God’s will, gave them the proud awareness of being privileged actors in a “cosmic drama”85 and satisﬁed their psychological need to get their revenge on the ruling classes. In addition to this, Calvin and Knox’s preachings contained the mysterious virtue of all the great religions of salvation: they transﬁgured the believer, regenerated him morally, instilling in him the conviction that it was his duty

22

Revolutionary Apocalypse

to prepare himself methodically and ascetically to fulﬁll the existential mission for which he had been called.86 It is therefore legitimate to consider the Puritan doctrine a typical “transition ideology,” but not—as Marxists and Weberians claim—because it was functional to the process of economic modernization, giving legitimacy to the class interests of the bourgeois entrepreneurs and transforming the individualistic acquisitive instinct into an ethical-religious calling. With its rigor and revolutionary call to arms, in fact, the Puritan doctrine reshaped the personality of the proletarianized intellectuals, transforming them into intrepid activists, willing to dare all, convinced as they were that God was on their side. The many agencies of resocialization of the Puritan doctrine “modeled” the raw material constituted by the intellectual proletariat into a sui generis anthropological “type,” to which it entrusted the mission of regenerating English society. This new anthropological “type” was the “saint in arms” that Tazney, Voegelin, Walzer, and Mathieu correctly consider to be the spiritual ancestor of the Jacobites and Bolsheviks:87 an “intramundane” aesthete, in the sense speciﬁed by Weber, with a psychological and moral armor, devoted body and soul to the sacred cause of “destruction of the anti-Christ”88 and exalted by the certainty of being part of an important eschatological undertaking—“God’s cause against that of the devil.”89 Hence, the institutionalization of a model of political action—perfected over the centuries to the point that it became one of the main agents of social transformation of the age of secularization— whose salient features had been described in great detail by a scholar who had observed the precise strategy adopted by the Puritan preachers to create a mass revolutionary movement.90 The strategy, consisting of ﬁve separate stages, initiated with the holy revolutionary expressing deploration and permanent indignation, and thus giving the impression of being an individual of such lofty moral sentiments as to be constantly offended by the evils afﬂicting the world, at the same time creating in the multitudes a strongly critical attitude, a situation that was exacerbated in the second stage of the strategy, with the demonization of institutions, the culpabilization of the ruling classes, and the obsessive repetition that they were to blame for all the ills afﬂicting the population. Step three was the logical consequence of the previous two: incitement to revolt and invitation to join the battle to establish a completely new form of government as the only remedy to corruption. In other words, the “kingdom of saints” was the only cure for the pathological situation of society. The fourth move of Puritan rhetoric was to present the postrevolutionary society as a dream situation, in perfect harmony with the most profound aspirations of men. Whoever was opposed to the change was considered an agent contrary to Christ. Step ﬁve reinforced the previous moves and was of fundamental strategic value: any objection to the Puritan solution was labeled as an example of the old mentality, which was destined to disappear with the advent of the new Jerusalem.

The Apocalypse Fanatics

23

The Puritan strategy proved extraordinarily effective. Wherever those referred to by Richard Baxter as the “devoted”—that is to say the “permanent persuaders and professional agitators of the Puritan movement—managed to convey their ﬁery message, popular discontent increased and extended visibly.91 Acting as veritable agitprop of the revolution,92 they successfully “penetrate(d)” vast sectors of society and eroded the consensus on which the absolute monarchy rested. As a result, England witnessed a class war that concluded with the dictatorship of the “saints in arms.”93 For the ﬁrst time in history, a sect of activists, composed of 20,000 fanatical soldiers indoctrinated by the “devoted,” was responsible for the fate of an entire population with the declared objective of reshaping society on the basis of the doctrine of salvation for which it had declared war on the existing order. The “holy experiment” proved to be a failure. The government of saints that “manifested itself to the mass of the nation . . . in the form of numberless and miserable petty tyrannies, . . . thus became hated as no Government has ever been hated in England before or since”94 for its insistence on forcing the population to “eat religion with their bread.”95 In the same period, Cromwell put together an army of nouveaux riches soldiers who jealously guarded their prerogatives96 and soon transformed the dictatorship into a tool for marginalizing whoever considered the “puriﬁcation” of the state and the church as the ﬁrst step for achieving a free and equal society.97 This put an end to the “hopes of the millenarians”98—the Levellers and the Diggers—and, before the century was through, was followed by the triumph of possessive individualism.99 The interests of the privileged, new and old, prevailed over the aspirations of the working classes, whose most passionate and energetic representatives were John Lilburne and, especially, Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated the reorganization of society on rigorously communist foundations and the suppression of “buying and selling,” the source of “all oppression and tyranny on earth.”100 After the Restoration, the English e´lites did everything in their power to eliminate every trace of the revolutionary experiment.101 The collectivistic version of Puritanism was substituted with the individualistic version that, far from “establish on earth a ‘Kingdom of Christ,’” instead instituted “an ideal of personal character and conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and private duties.”102 It took a good 150 years for the idea of permanent revolution to reemerge as a means to establish a kingdom of justice and regenerate human nature. From the fall of the Bastille, this strong, infectious spiritual force marked the start of the “era of hope in revolution.” NOTES 1. See M. J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 21–22. 2. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval

24

Revolutionary Apocalypse

and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 28. 3. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Gower Beacon Press, 1957). 4. W. Muhlmann, Messianismes re´volutionnaires du Tiers Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 179. 5. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 63. 6. R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth Century France, Russia, and China (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971). 7. See G. Volpe, Movimenti religiosi e sette ereticali nella societa` medievale italiana (Florence: Sansoni, 1971); T. Manteuffel, Nascita dell’eresia (Florence: Sansoni, 1975); F. Tocco, Storia dell’eresia nel Medioevo (Genoa: Melita, 1989); G. Forquin, The Anatomy of Popular Rebellion in The Middle Ages (Oxford: North-Holland, 1978). 8. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 952. 9. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 70. 10. I. Pereira de Queiroz, Riforma e rivoluzione nelle societa` tradizionali ( Milan: Jaca Book, 1968), p. 23. 11. The Jacomite doctrine was a turning point in the history of Christianity. By challenging the Augustinian interpretation of the Holy Scripture it paved the way for the reeschatologisation of the evangelical message and provided a powerful theological argument to movements directed toward the “introduction of a state of perfection already during earthly history” (A. Tagliapietra, “Introduzione to Gioacchino da Fiore,” Sull’Apocalisse [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994], p. 42). 12. P. Gentile, Storia del cristianesimo dalle origini a Teodosio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), p. 300. 13. See R. A. Knox, Illuminati e carismatici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1970), p. 73 et seq. 14. G. Boissier, La ﬁne del mondo pagano (Milan: SugarCo, 1989), p. 294. 15. R. Ruggiero, La follia dei cristiani (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1992), p. 157. 16. S. Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World (London: Faber, 1966). 17. See A. G. Hamman, La vita quotidiana dei primi cristiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993), p. 146 et seq. 18. Celso, Contro i cristiani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 201. 19. R. Campa, Il profetismo laico (Padua: Marsilio, 1971), p. 72. 20. Quoted from L. Storoni Mazzolani, Sant’Agostino e i pagani (Palermo: Sellerio, 1987), p. 33. 21. See F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World and The Beginning of the Middle-Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). 22. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997), p. 564. 23. M. Stirner, L’Unico e la sua proprieta` (Milan: Mursia, 1990). 24. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 25. J. Guitton, Il puro e l’impuro (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1994), p. 26. 26. Despite considering the millenarian interpretation of the evangelical message a “misunderstanding,” Alois Dempf does acknowledge that it was “justiﬁed by the ﬂuctuations of the biblical texts themselves” (Sacrum Imperium [Le Lettere: Florence,

The Apocalypse Fanatics

25

1988], p. 2). It is hard to deny that from its origins Christianity suffered an intimate dualism that led it to ﬂuctuate between sacralizing existing institutions and rejecting the world insofar as civitas diaboli. It is essential to go back to this original dualism in order to understand the proliferation of an impressive number of heresies—many of which were driven by an intense revolutionary pathos—in the bimillenarian history of Christianity (See T. Molnar, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy [Lanham: University Press of America, 1990]). 27. “May we willingly lose the things of the earth and look at the things of heaven. Let the world collapse in ruins, as long as I am enriched with patience” (Tertulliano, in G. Barbero, ed., Il pensiero politico cristiano, vol. 1 [Turin: UTET, 1962], p. 221). 28. On this point, see the detailed analysis of G. Puente Ojea, La formacio´n del cristianismo como fenomeno ideo´logico (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1984), pp. 294–305. 29. G. Ferrero, La rovina della civilta` antica (Milan: SugarCo, 1988), pp. 137–138. 30. Agostino, La Citta` di Dio (Milan: Rusconi, 1984), pp. 1000 et seq. See E. Gilson, La citta` di Dio e i suoi problemi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1959) and S. Cotta, La citta` politica di Sant’Agostino (Milan: Comunita`, 1960). 31. See F. Belo, Una lettura politica del Vangelo (Turin: Claudiana, 1975) and G. Girardet, Il vangelo della liberazione (Turin: Claudiana, 1975). 32. A. Loisy, Le origini del cristianesimo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1974), p. 483. 33. Quoted from W. Mu¨hlmann, Messianismes re´volutionnaires du Tiers Monde, p. 297. Nietzsche’s opinion is even more drastic: “The Church is precisely what Jesus preached against—what he taught his disciples to ﬁght against . . . The Church is not only a caricature of Christianity, but a war organised against Christianity” (The Will to Power: The Complete Works, ed. by Oscar Levy [London: Edinburg, 1909]). 34. K. Kautsky, L’origine del cristianesimo (Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1970), p. 369. 35. M. Weber, Sociologia della religione, vol. 2 (Milan: Comunita`, 1982), p. 664. 36. Erich Fromm has remarked that the Bible contains two visions of salvation: one “horizontal,” of the prophetical world and the other “vertical,” of the apocalyptic world (Voi sarete come Dei [Rome: Ubaldini, 1970], pp. 91–92). The prophetae combined the two, giving formidable revolutionary impulse to their preaching. 37. E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Champaign-Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1974). 38. One of the most signiﬁcant aspects of Mani’s gnosis was its extraordinary capacity to reappear on the scene in the most diverse forms, permeating other traditions of thought, without losing its fundamental connotations. In this way, at least in part, the history of medieval heretical movements is also the history of the metamorphoses of Manicheanism and its repeated challenges to the Christianity of the Church (see S. Runciman, Le maniche´isme medieval (Paris: Payot, 1972]). 39. See F. Tocco, Storia dell’eresia nel Medioevo (Genoa: Melita, 1989). 40. The chronicles of the time inform us that Ball liked to write his sermons before the rebels commenting on the following rhyme: “While Adam was digging and Eva was spinning, where was the nobleman hidden?” Interestingly, we ﬁnd the same rhyme some centuries later in the sermons of the Levellers and Diggers (see C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution [London: Temple Smith, 1978], p. 86ff). 41. W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4th ed., vol. 1: The Birth of Britain (London: Cassell, 1957) p. 294f. 42. R. Marx, L’Angleterre des re´volutions (Paris: Colin, 1971), p. 73.

26

Revolutionary Apocalypse

43. J. Macek, The Hussite Movement in Bohemia, 2nd ed. (Prague: Orbis, 1958). 44. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 225. 45. The press played a decisive role. Thanks to the press, Luther and his followers successfully “infected” the countries of Europe not subject to the domination of the Spanish Empire, which had undertaken to eradicate heresies by vigilating over the thoughts and actions of the faithful by means of the Inquisition. Hence, books are correctly considered to have been the “ammunition” of the Reform (see H. A. Oberman, Masters of the Reformation: the Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 46. In a letter written by Luther in 1529 we read: “I realize that up until now I have been teaching and sustaining all Hus’s theories without knowing it; . . . we are all hussites without knowing it. I don’t know how to express my surprise.” (Quoted from M. Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli, Wyclif: il comunismo dei predestinati [Florence: Sansoni, 1975], p. 3.) 47. P. Blicke, La Riforma luterana e la guerra dei contadini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981), p. 19. 48. H. Hauser and A. Renaudet, L’eta` del Rinascimento e della Riforma (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 418–419. On the methods by which capitalism took over production, degrading artisans to the level of workers subject to orders of the entrepreneur, see especially A. Labriola, Capitalismo (Naples: Morano, 1926), p. 101 et seq. 49. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 22. 50. E. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Kegan Paul, 1942). 51. E. Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 123. 52. P. Miguel, Le guerre di religione (Florence: Sansoni, 1981), p. 40. 53. N. O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1966). 54. In truth, in the early period of his activity Luther did not hesitate to preach the elimination “with arms” of “the evil people that were infecting the world.” However, when he saw the dramatic consequences produced by his words, he grew nervous and embraced the cause of order, inciting the princes to have no scruples in killing the “creatures of the devil” who were among Mu¨ntzer’s followers (Revelation and Revolution: Basic Writings of Thomas Mu¨ntzer [Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993]). 55. E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. II (London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 56. E. Block, Thomas Mu¨ntzer, the´ologien de la re´volution ( Paris: Julliard, 1964). 57. F. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 471. 58. T. Mu¨ntzer, Scritti Politici (Torino: Claudiana, 1972), p. 86. 59. F. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” p. 422. 60. G. Ritter, La formazione dell’Europa moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1976), p. 183. 61. See T. La Rocca, Es Ist Zeit: Apocalisse e Storia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1988), p. 129 et seq. 62. Quoted from N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 256ff. When Mu¨ntzer advocated killing the wicked he was simply giving a literal interpretation to the terrible phrase in the Gospel of Luke: “These enemies of mine who did not want me to lord over them, bring them here and kill them before me.” 63. R. P. Reck-Malleczewen, Il re degli anabattisti (Milan: Rusconi, 1971), p. 23.

The Apocalypse Fanatics

27

64. N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 292. 65. I. Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 66. In the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, France was also repeatedly shaken by protest movements. Having no counter-ideology, these movements were not of a revolutionary nature (See B. Porchenev, Les soule`vements populaires en France au XVII sie`cle [Paris: Flammarion, 1972]). 67. F. Engels, L’evoluzione del socialismo dall’utopia alla scienza (Milan: Edizioni Avanti!, 1961), p. 50. 68. On this point, see H. Trevor Roper’s fundamental essay, “The Gentry” in The Economic History. Supplements, 1953. 69. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 115. This thesis is anticipated in the pages where Hobbes analyzed the role of universities in the legitimation and diffusion of the “spirit of sedition” (“Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil War of England” in The English Collected Works, ed. by W. Molesworth, vol. 6 [Aalen: Scientia, 1966], pp. 212–215, 233–236). 70. M. Prestwich, “Introduction,” in M. Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 11. 71. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 67. 72. A. Be´lier, La pense´e e´conomique et sociale de Calvin (Geneva: Georg, 1961), p. 264. 73. D. E. Holwerda, “Eschatology and History,” in E. D. Holwerda, ed., Exploring the Heritage of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1976), p. 138. 74. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 42. 75. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), p. 173. 76. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (London: Cresset Press, 1961). 77. Strictly speaking, it was not so much a new element as the development of an idea that already existed within the Anabaptist movement: the purpose of politics was the revolutionary transformation of the existing in the light of the Holy Scripture. On the basis of this, Mannheim writes that with the Anabaptist movement “politics in the modern sense of the term begins, if we here understand by politics a more or less conscious participation of all strata of society in the achievement of some mundane purpose, as contrasted with a fatalistic acceptance of events as they are, or of control from ‘above’” (Ideology and Utopia, p. 191). 78. M. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 28. 79. E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 80. On the eve of the revolution, Samuel Harlib, the author of Macaria, was full of eschatological hope in the imminent “reform of the entire world.” He indicated that Parliament should lay the “ﬁrst stone of happiness in the world.” Jeremy Burroughs delivered a stirring speech in the House of Commons entitled “The Joy of Sion.” The main theme of the speech was the “resurrection of Church and State.” Equally imbibed with messianic hope was the language used by Thomas Case: “Reformation must be universal . . . Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up.” Finally, a gentleman from Yorkshire wrote to a friend that times were ripe to “build a new world” (quoted in L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972], p. 52ff). The chiliastic pathos of the Levellers and Diggers was even stronger: they envisaged a return to the

28

Revolutionary Apocalypse

original state of equality, uncontaminated by the principle of authority and selﬁsh passions (see C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down). 81. L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, p. 74. 82. Ibid., p. 113. 83. See L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 84. See Chr. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Panther Book, 1969), p. 267 et seq. 85. P. Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 167. 86. See B. Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 60 et seq. 87. Gramsci considered Cromwell’s round heads to be “English Jacobines” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks), thus indicating a line of research that Marxist historians, Christopher Hill up front, chose to ignore in deference to the Engelsian myth of the Great Rebellion as a bourgeois revolution. 88. H. Peters, “Le opere di Dio e il dovere degli uomini,” in U. Bonanate, ed., I puritani (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 103. 89. Chr. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Panther Book, 1969), p. 130. 90. The scholar is Hooker. His penetrating analysis of Puritan psychology and strategy was brought once more to the attention of scholars by Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics). 91. See B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution 1640–1649 (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 251ff. 92. See H. Holorenshaw, “I livellatori,” in Chr. Hill, ed., Saggi sulla Rivoluzione inglese del 1640 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957), p. 153 et seq. 93. L. F. Solt, Saints in Arms (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959). 94. W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. II: The New World (London: Cassell, 1956), p. 249. 95. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1946), p. 255. 96. G. Walter, La Rivoluzione inglese (Novara: De Agostini, 1972), p. 94. 97. See E. Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (London: Cass, 1966), p. 132 et seq. 98. Chr. Hill, L’Anticristo nel Seicento inglese (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990), p. 89. 99. See C. B. Macpherson, Liberta` e proprieta` alle origini del pensiero borghese (Milan: ISEDI, 1973), p. 156 et seq. 100. G. Winstanley, La terra a chi la lavora (Bologna: Guaraldi, 1974), pp. 206–207. 101. They did this not only to defend their privileges, but also because they had learned the lesson: Revolution, whatever the initial intentions, tends irresistibly toward military despotism or ideological tyranny. In other words, the Puritan experiment immunized English society against any extremist temptation and transformed British history into a sort of “manual on how to avoid revolution” (C. Tilly, The European Revolutions: 1492–1992 [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994]). 102. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 211.

CHAPTER 3

The Jacobin Experiment

1. Guglielmo Ferrero’s course held in the early thirties at the University of Geneva was published after his death with the signiﬁcant title Les deux Re´volutions francaises. At the time it was generally accepted that there could be only one spirit behind a revolution, including the Great Revolution. As Clemenceau put it: “Revolution is one block.”1 Ferrero disagreed. He suggested that the French Revolution had been like a two-headed Janus: initially the driving force had been liberalism but, due to a series of unexpected events, it had as if “gone mad” and totalitarianism and terrorism had taken over.2 “The hardest problem is to explain how the principles of the Revolution produced such a completely unexpected result.”3 The Revolution had proclaimed the rights of man and of the citizen, but these rights were systematically denied. Betrayal, inconsistency, the work of the devil? By no means. The Revolution became a “walking paralogism,” beyond the control of its organizers and developing according to its own internal objective and irresistible logic. The reason? Fear. A fear that rapidly became hysteria, transforming the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of both the e´lites and the masses. In the end, no one was able to control the Revolution; it became autonomous; something “other” than originally intended.4 In trying to decipher the paradox of the French Revolution—the paradox of all revolutions, formulated by William Godwin as follows: “Revolution is caused by indignation against a tyranny, yet it is always itself impregnated with tyranny”5—Ferrero refers explicitly to Constant and, in particular, to his concept of usurpation.6 The revolutionaries could not govern according to the principles they themselves had proclaimed, because they were “usurpers”: in the eyes of public opinion there was nothing that legitimated their power.

30

Revolutionary Apocalypse

This would explain the pathological difﬁdence and insecurity of the revolutionaries and their need to exercise a police-like control on the masses, on whose behalf they claimed to be governing, but whom in fact they feared. In short, they were dominated by fear and had no alternative but to use fear to retain power. In effect, the Revolution started with what historians refer to as the “Great Fear.” “For the disconcerted contemporaries this was somewhat a mystery”7 and could only be understood by accepting the conspiracy theory. “July 14 [Hubert Me´thivier rightly claims] was none other than the shock produced by a multiplicity of fears.”8 The bourgeoisie feared bankruptcy and unrest; the peasants, famine; the army, the dimensions of the popular revolt; the aristocracy, the hostility of the entire nation exasperated by their privileges and parasitism.9 For six weeks, as the news of events in Paris swept across the nation “the entire population—the peasants, the workers, the lower middleclass, the executives and the upper classes—refused obedience, as if at an agreed signal, some kind of secret password. The immediate and irresistible correlation: the masses revolted because they sensed that authority was paralysed: the authorities took no action, because they felt they had lost control of the masses.”10 The sudden and spontaneous collapse of the ancien re´gime was followed by a situation of impotent omnipotence of the Constitutive Assembly, described by Ferrero in these terms: “The Assembly was nervous. It was nervous because of the malcontent that its reforms had aroused in the ancien re´gime, the Court, the clergy, the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie. The new revolutionary policy inevitably stepped upon a variety of interests and made many people nervous, especially as concrete steps were taken to introduce the reforms. There was no great drive in the discontent of the upper classes. They themselves were scared and disorganized and their opposition virtually useless. Yet, the Assembly was nervous. Its origins were still too recent and its right to make laws too uncertain, for it to feel conﬁdent; moreover, it felt isolated in the midst of general anarchy and without an armed force to defend it. It was worried about the rising discontent of the upper classes as more and more reforms were introduced. In this situation what developed was a state of mutual fear. The Court, the nobility and the clergy were afraid of the Assembly, and the Assembly trusted neither Court, nor nobility nor clergy. Every act, even the most innocent, was interpreted by either side as evidence of hostile intentions; imaginary plots were seen everywhere. On its part the national Assembly was nervous of the masses who were becoming increasingly agitated in the cities and especially in Paris. The masses were suffering from a veritable persecution mania and attributed all their woes to mysterious plots of the Court and high clergy.”11 In this situation of complete anarchy, the Assembly, whose intentions had been reformist and basically moderate, was forced to play a revolutionary role for which it was not in any way equipped.12 Not only was it forced to impro-

The Jacobin Experiment

31

vise, it was forced to do so in fear, besieged by all sorts of enemies, real or imaginary, and without legitimacy, the only element that might have restored its conﬁdence. Despite the widespread support of the masses, its power was the expression of a principle of legitimacy—popular sovereignty—that was irreconcilable with the principle of legitimacy under the ancien re´gime— based on an alliance between the throne and the altar (i.e., on the divine right of the sovereign)—that still survived in the hearts of millions of French people. Added to this, Louis XVI tried to break away from the control of the Assembly. Varennes prevented any possibility of compromise between the Assembly and the Court. The Representatives of the Third Estate did not trust a king who had violated the Constitution at the ﬁrst opportunity. Their only alternative was to radicalize the Revolution, to make it a war of patriotism, to use nationalistic exaltation and general mobilization to unite the French population. In short, “they reached the point of theorising a world revolution because they felt unsafe in their own country.”13 Brissot not only proclaimed a “holy war” against reactionary Europe for the “renewal of the face of the world,”14 he also declared that the Revolution “was in need of great betrayals.”15 And massacres—added Danton—so that a “river of blood”16 would ﬂow between the republicans and the e´migre´s. From then on, a perverse logic took possession of French society: the logic of fear, conspiracy, suspicion; in a word: the logic of a state of siege. Of course it is senseless to talk of liberty, of democracy, of tolerance, of the rights of the minorities in a society that sees itself as a “besieged fort.” The only objective becomes to destroy the enemies of the Revolution, wherever they may be. And this can only be done by means of state terrorism. The revolutionary movement cannot limit itself to exterminating the reactionary forces but is condemned by the very logic of its situation to mistrust itself, to fear that “enemies of the people” are hidden within its very own breast, with the result that revolutionary terror has to act on two fronts: externally, against the declared enemies, and internally, against its supposed enemies. Even the lukewarm constitute a threat. Any call for moderation is interpreted as a dangerous sign of surrender, an “objective betrayal.” “All the French people [declared Saint-Just at the height of the Terror] are urged to expose the supporters of tyranny, conspiring foreigners, scoundrels, criminal plots against the rights of the people.”17 Even Danton—who had boasted that he had instigated the September massacres—was guillotined for the “wicked offence of invoking clemency.”18 Such an invocation “could only be a ruse of the internal enemy . . . most probably the result of a plot organized from without.”19 The huge contradiction between the principles proclaimed and the methods adopted had incalculable consequences. On June 2, 1793, when the Jacobins took over the Convention with a coup de main and “liquidated” the Girondist party, a supposedly liberal government was forced by circumstance to tread upon every form of liberty and become overtly illiberal. Until then, the war had been between revolutionary France and the ancien re´gime. Now

32

Revolutionary Apocalypse

it was also within the revolutionary movement itself. By suppressing the Girondist party, essentially the Jacobin party denied the right of opposition to the revolutionaries as well, starting a revolution within the Revolution, antithetic to the earlier 1789 uprising. This second revolution did not hesitate to use terror to eliminate its enemies, real or imaginary, and subjected France to a terrifying inquisition against everyone and everything. 2. As early as 1792, Danton explained why the Convention had been forced to use terror in enforcing the principle of popular sovereignty: “The republicans are a minute minority; the rest of the population is attached to the monarchy; it is necessary to terrify the monarchists,”20 in other words, the vast majority of the French population. After the 1793 coup d’etat ( June 2), the modus operandi of the revolutionary government became even more paradoxical: not only was it obliged to terrorize the monarchists but also those revolutionaries who refused to accept its program. Although the Jacobins claimed they were in favor of universal suffrage, they were nervous about the judgment of the people and feared any form of opposition precisely because they themselves had taken possession of power with violence. Enforcement of the principle of popular sovereignty was postponed indeﬁnitely and a dictatorship set up. This dictatorship behaved as if it were an “oligarchy of invaders that establishes and preserves itself in an occupied nation,”21 but nonetheless proclaims itself the one and only interpreter of the will of the nation. This is a truly singular paradox, which we ﬁnd during the Puritan dictatorship in Great Britain and later in Bolshevik Russia. This point cannot be stressed enough: the Jacobin dictatorship was dominated by fear. For this very reason it had no other solution but to use terror in order not to be overthrown by the masses on whose behalf it claimed to govern. It was dominated by fear because it was an illegitimate government in form and in substance: in form, because it came into being illegally; in substance, because it did not have the support of the vast majority of the French population—the monarchists, the Girondists, the feuillants, the indifferent—and indeed was even perceived as an usurper. The only solution would have been to hold universal suffrage elections and grant the right of opposition. But this would have been suicide. The Jacobins therefore opted for revolutionary extremism and used every means they had to retain power and save their lives. They proclaimed that “it was the will of the people that Terror should be the norm,” until the complete triumph of the Revolution and the elimination of all the “enemies of the people.”22 But who were these enemies of the people? Practically every single French citizen. Besieged by fear, the 12 members of the Committee of Public Safety saw conspirators everywhere. The only way to calm their terriﬁed spirits was to eliminate every imaginable enemy. “All factions must perish at the same time,” declared Robespierre on March 15, 1794. The result: even the most energetic and determined enemies of the ancien re´gime were suspected of

The Jacobin Experiment

33

plotting against the people. After the “mass extermination of the counterrevolutionaries and of the naive corrupt,” 23 the guillotine immediately fell on the heads of the revolutionaries themselves. In rapid succession, Danton, Desmoulins, Herbert, Roux, and so on were accused of being traitors and beheaded. Saint-Just knew that his party had given birth to a monstrosity—“it is a terrible thing to torment the people”24—but couldn’t stop the infernal circle of fear, the mechanism that forced the Jacobins to violate the principle of popular sovereignty, based on universal suffrage and the institutionalization of the right of opposition. The Revolution had gone mad; it was uncontrollable. The Jacobins had to use terror to the bitter end, “tormenting the people” and suspecting everyone and everything.25 In other words, “overthrowing the principle of democratic legitimacy and building on its ruins the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, as conceived by their terror: bloody idol, insatiable Moloch to which they sacriﬁced the majority, rights and opposition, beheading, drowning, riddling thousands of victims with shots.”26 Yet, the Jacobins were not the bloodthirsty monsters described in the reactionary pamphlets. They used terror because they were terriﬁed; they manipulated the masses, because they knew they did not have their support; they destroyed every form of opposition, because they feared for their own lives. The Jacobin dictatorship was the typical revolutionary dictatorship, a nervous illegal regime, which could only survive by using terror and becoming a totalitarian regime that enveloped and controlled the whole of society. It tried to gain the support it needed by mobilizing the nation against the “enemies of the people” and drugging it with massive doses of ideology. 3. According to Ferrero, the 1793 golpe was “a revolution in the revolution” and antithetic to the 1789 Revolution. Terror was the inevitable consequence of the state of siege of the revolutionary government in a society that had been turned into a battleﬁeld, with the denial of all legality. Ferrero’s analysis is undoubtedly enlightening and useful for gaining a better understanding of the paradox of the French Revolution: a revolution that came into being to extend liberty and, according to the young Marx, ended up introducing the “most horrendous terrorism and a jurisdiction of suspicion.”27 Yet, Ferrero’s interpretation eclipses the ideological dimensions of the Jacobin revolution. Ferrero considers the role of Rousseau’s theory of general interest in the dynamics of the French Revolution, but his excessive emphasis on fear leads him to identify the totalitarian logic with lack of legitimacy. He fails to perceive the huge difference between the Robespierre and the Napoleon dictatorships. The former was undoubtedly the product of circumstance; but, unlike the latter, it was also an almost paradigmatic expression of a metapolitical conception of revolution: this was the apocalyptic event, both terrible and sublime, that would put an end to an age of lies and corruption. Our thesis is that the Jacobin experiment was the consequence of the com-

34

Revolutionary Apocalypse

bination of the terrible crisis of anomy into which France precipitated immediately after the fall of the Bastille and a particular forma mentis developed by the passionate preachings of a group of penseurs in favor of the emancipation of workers and the regeneration of human nature. We must go back to the words of these men—Jean Meslier, Baron Lahontan, Abbaye Mably, Morelly, Dom Deschamps, Restif de la Bretonne, Linguet, and, naturally, Rousseau—if we are to get to the heart of the second revolution, which was antithetic to the 1789 Revolution, for reasons that were, of course, of circumstance but also, and especially, ideological. We can accept Talmon’s deﬁnition of the Jacobin revolution as an “improvisation,” as long as we remember that the philosophical foundations of this “improvisation” are to be sought in the political culture of eighteenth-century France. The catastrophic collapse of the ancien re´gime created a situation favorable to the ideas of the philosophes. A new spiritual force—political gnosticism—made its appearance in the European arena, launching a historical process that was to lead, by successive steps, to the institutionalization of the professional revolutionary,28 devoted body and soul to the sacred cause of overturning the overturned world. We have already seen that both the Judeo-Christian and the Manichean tradition had never ceased “preparing” the European conscience to interpret history along apocalyptic-palingenetic lines. According to a widely accepted thesis, the French Revolution was the “outcome of the Enlightenment.” Its speciﬁc spirit was the consequence of the destructive critique of the eighteenth-century philosophes: a critique that spared nothing and no one and consisted essentially in bringing the entire Western tradition before the “court of Reason.” Throughout the eighteenth century, European intelligentsia was driven by a powerful idea-force: “hope in a new kingdom: the kingdom of Reason.”29 Hence the “will to look at the future rather than at the past, to free oneself of the past while making use of it.”30 A typically modern sensitivity developed from this new attitude. In traditional society, traditio is the undisputed norma agendi and the source of legitimation of institutions and authority. With the philosophes, traditio comes under constant public scrutiny. The heritage of the past is no longer accepted uncritically and “acquired ideas must be subject to methodical doubt and even tested.”31 Traditio is no longer what legitimates the present, but it must itself be legitimated by an instance that is external and recognizes no authority other than itself; an instance that presents itself as the supreme court and even as the only orderer of reality. Hence the tendency of the philosophes to “ﬁght in every ﬁeld against the force of custom, against tradition and authority.”32 And especially against religion that—unless they are atheists—they intend to free from dogma and superstition and transform into a “natural religion” that is both tolerant and open. As a result, throughout the eighteenth century we witness the “progress of incredulity in

The Jacobin Experiment

35

cultivated circles.”33 And with the progress of incredulity, we also witness the progressive delegitimation of established order and its ofﬁcial representatives. Bossuet correctly claimed that the belief that kings “were God’s ministers and his lieutenants on earth”34 had been the pillar of the ancien re´gime. It was the right of sovereigns to command and the duty of subjects to obey. Admittedly there were limits: limits established by laws, by customs, and especially by the presence of counter-powers. Which is why the so-called European absolutism was so different from Asian despotism, where subjects were totally subordinate to the will of the sovereign. Nonetheless, rulers and political institutions enjoyed an extremely “strong” legitimation35 that derived from the fact that in European society the “temporal and the spiritual were closely associated.”36 Institutions were deconsecrated as soon as positive religion came under the scrutiny of reason and was accused of harboring superstitions, dogmas, and hidden interests. Public opinion became increasingly skeptical and accused those in command of usurping power. They began to assess men and things with criteria that had nothing to do with tradition. In other words, since the absolutism of the monarchy relied on the organic alliance between throne and altar, the “ideological defences of the ancien re´gime”37 were inevitably weakened by the devastating critique of Christianity. The lower classes remained impervious to the message of enlightenment. In the absence of adequate means of communication and structures of political resocialization, such as modern political parties, the process of reappraising institutions and ideas was inevitably restricted to the educated e´lites. Moreover, it was generally felt that “the cultivation of Reason should be the prerogative of a sect of intellectuals, while society as a whole, people and rulers, should remain in the orthodox faith.”38 This produced an intolerable situation. The e´lites considered unfounded the claim that in the absolute state, rulers ruled by divine right. The spirit of enlightenment had pervaded their whole being. They tended to “repudiate tradition and the past . . . in an attempt to rebuild society on entirely new foundations . . . with the sole guidance of Reason.”39 They supported a process of “permanent reform” and repeated concepts such as: “No country in the world has a good code. For the obvious reason that laws are written progressively, in relation to time, place, events, needs, and so forth. They are written one after the other, by chance, irregularly, in the same way as cities are built.”40 “Many countries have laws which are more uniform, but there is probably no one country that is not in need of a reform. And once this reform has been completed, it will be necessary to have another . . . Once we succeed in having a law that is tolerable, a war will come along and break down all the limits and ruin everything; and we will have to start all over again like ants, whose home has been destroyed.”41 Thus, criticism of tradition produced a kind of permanent state of disenchanted reformism. There was no illusion that a deﬁnitive political order would ever be possible, which is why it is not possible to accept Hayek’s

36

Revolutionary Apocalypse

theory42 that the philosophes of the Enlightenment, with their constructivistic rationalism, were the spiritual fathers of revolutionary totalitarianism. Although the philosophes conceived rational politics as a grandiose work of institutional engineering, there is no evidence they ever accepted the idea that is typical of all totalitarian regimes: that people could be forced to accept the dictates of an illuminated minority.43 Holbach’s recommendations conﬁrm this: “No, the wounds of the people will not be healed by means of dangerous shocks, not by means of battles, murders and useless crimes. The cure is always more cruel than the evil they wish to heal. The voice of reason is neither seditious nor bloody. The reforms it proposes are gradual; but, for this reason, all the safer.”44 Nor is it true—as is sometimes claimed—that, being dominated by a perfectionist ideal, the Enlightenment generated consequences that it could neither foresee or control. Perfectionism is absolutely foreign “to the methodical and literary ideals of the philosophes, to the cult of common sense and reasonableness, to the rejection of metaphysical claims, to scientiﬁc and lay inspiration, to the sense of history and human progress.”45 Certainly the philosophes’ critique of religion deconsecrated the ancien re´gime and rendered it vulnerable to the attacks of public opinion. To the extent to which it delegitimated institutions, it created the cultural conditions that Ferrero referred to as the “war between the invisible genii of the City.” But, essentially, this was fortuitous. The original intention of the majority of representatives of the third estate was not to conduct a war against the thrones and Altars of Europe but to search for a reasonable compromise between the monarchic principle and the liberal principle, so that the educated bourgeoisie—the ofﬁciers, the lawyers, the intellectuals, and the like—could participate in the political leadership of the country, according to the rules of a representative regime.46 Their desire was that France should achieve what Great Britain had achieved with the Glorious Revolution: a constitutional monarchy, based on an accord between the traditional ruling e´lites and the new e´lites who had proliferated with the advent of capitalism. In this sense—but only in this sense—theirs was a bourgeois revolution.47 4. For the reasons we have already seen, the moderate policy failed and leadership of the revolutionary movement passed into the hands of the Jacobins. Their intellectual compass was the Social Contract,48 whose spirit was so removed from the culture of enlightenment that Cassirer spoke of “abyss from Rousseau and his century.”49 In his fundamental essay on this topic, Cassirer stresses that the amazing originality of Rousseau’s philosophy lay in the transposition of the issue of bad from the ﬁeld of theodicy to that of politics.50 To perform this transposition, Rousseau invalidated the Christian conception of man as a sinful being, dominated from birth by negative passions. When asked, “Where does radical evil come from?” he answered with-

The Jacobin Experiment

37

out hesitation: “Man is good by nature and only our institutions have made him bad.”51 This answer denies—and herein lies the “revolutionary” nature of the Rousseau anthropology—that evil is due “to an obscure wish of God or to a presumed original sin of man” and places the blame “entirely on society.”52 Consequently, evil can be uprooted, if the “corruptness” of institutions is eliminated and suitable political steps taken to remodel society. Therefore “radical evil”—that is to say, the existence of a “depraved tendency” that is expressed as “cold wickedness”53—is not part of human nature but is external and can be banished from the world, providing society is completely rebuilt. The moral: “salvation”—liberation from evil—is no longer a religious issue; it is a political issue or, more precisely, an issue that (revolutionary) politics is called to solve; indeed, implicitly it is the calling of revolutionary politics to extirpate the roots of alienation. Given these metaphysical premises, it should not be surprising that an intellectual and moral void soon developed between Rousseau and the philosophes. For the latter, institutions could be improved—although institutional engineering would never completely expel evil—whereas Rousseau believed that the “defects” of society could, and indeed should, be eliminated, by completely revolutionizing what existed. In the very moment in which Rousseau rejected “modernity as such, considering it, in its globality, as the realm of the degeneration of man and of a non-authentic existence,”54 he glimpsed the possibility of reconquering paradise lost. A puriﬁed “new world” could be created, providing society was completely remodeled and humanity returned to its original state of innocence.55 History became a process of progressive moral degradation, when private property made its disastrous appearance on the scene, bringing “driving ambition, hunger for money . . . competition and rivalry, as well as the underlying intention of pursuing one’s own advantage at the expense of others”;56 and so “the most horrible state of war”57 became the normal condition of humankind. This was a state of war sanctioned by laws whose speciﬁc function was that of “placing new obstacles in the way of the poor and procuring new power for the rich, irremediably destroying natural liberty, establishing the rule of property and inequality and subjecting the whole of humanity to labour, slavery and misery to the advantage of the ambitious few.”58 It is easy to imagine the extent to which Rousseau’s vision of history clashed with a capitalist society, based on private property and competition among men, driven exclusively by the rational calculation of personal gain. Capitalism was labeled as a system contrary to nature in which perverse passions degrading humanity triumphed each day. Capitalism must be substituted with a radically different system in which the rich no longer rule and exploit the poor. We are but a step from communism.59 Admittedly, in the Draft Constitution for Corsica, Rousseau explicitly states that it is not his intention “to destroy private property completely, because that is impossible.”60 However, imme-

38

Revolutionary Apocalypse

diately afterward he explains that his objective is “to conﬁne it within very narrow limits, to give it a measure and a rule, to curb and guide and channel it, so that it is constantly subordinate to the public good.” In this way, “public property is great and strong and that of citizens shall remain, as far as possible, small and weak.”61 Rousseau also describes the power deriving from wealth as “illegal”62 and declares that the ideal would be for the State “to own everything and for everyone to have only the portion of the common good that corresponds to his needs.”63 Although lamenting the fact that “a handful of men was bursting over with superﬂuous things and the hungry multitudes lacked the essential,”64 Rousseau never actually concludes that the only way to eliminate evil is to abolish private property and that communism therefore is the only form of social organization that can put an end to the rabid war in which civilization had precipitated the human family. However, Rousseau’s works contain all the ingredients for legitimating a political program that was hostile to capitalism and its main institutions: the market, private property, representative democracy, liberty, privacy. They outline “a policy whereby, in accordance with the principles of ancient liberty, citizens are to be totally submissive because the nation is sovereign and the individual, slave, in order for the people to be free.”65 Rousseau’s ideal democracy is a system in which “sovereign power will have no need to provide its subjects with guarantees, because it will be impossible for the body to want to harm all its limbs.”66 It will be dominated by the general will—that is to say, by the will based on the principles of morality, not to be confused with the “will of all,” the mere sum of individual wills and for that reason selﬁsh—that “is always strong and tends always toward public good”67 and is hostile to “partial societies” and ready, where necessary, to force men to free themselves from their “unnatural” egoism. Hence, Rousseau’s grandiose program for the refoundation of social order: “He who dares to take the initiative to found a nation must feel he is capable of changing, so to speak, human nature; he must be capable of transforming every individual, in itself a perfect and isolated whole, into part of a greater whole, from which this individual in some way draws life and being; to change the constitution of man to strengthen it; to substitute the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a partial and moral existence. In short, he will remove from man the forces which are his own strength in order to give him other forces that are foreign to him and which he cannot use without the help of others. The more the natural forces are dead and eliminated, the greater and more lasting will be the acquired forces and the more institutions will be solid and perfect. In this way, once every citizen is nothing and can nothing, other than through all the others, and once the force acquired from the whole is equal or superior to the sum of natural forces of all individuals, then it can be said that legislation has reached the highest degree of perfection.”68 Rousseau’s democracy is an illiberal democracy or, as de Jouvenel and Tal-

The Jacobin Experiment

39

mon call it, a “totalitarian” democracy,69 similar to the democracy of Sparta, absolutely contrary to any vestige of individuality and for this precise reason considered by Rousseau preferable to the democracy of Athens, too close to modern democracy. The famous querelle on Sparta and Athens that divided French intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century70 is useful for understanding the reasons that led the Great Revolution to split into two parts. These reasons were philosophical as much as they were of circumstance. In that querelle, Athens symbolized the bourgeois society, focusing on the market and modern liberty, as illustrated by Constant in what still remains the most lucid manifesto of possessive individualism.71 Those—like Rousseau or Mably—in favor of Sparta had in mind an antiindividualistic society driven by solidarity and passion for the egalitarian ideal. It was precisely this second ideal that inspired the Jacobins. Far from being the interpreters of the class interests of the economic bourgeoisie, as claimed by the Marxist vulgata, the Jacobins tried to destroy the empire of wealth and suffocate possessive-competitive individualism. This is more than evident in the words used by Dutard to describe the bitter conﬂict that opposed the Mountain to the Gironde: “The Brissotiens want to establish an aristocracy of the rich, of merchants and proprietors, and refuse to see that these men are the scourge of humanity, that they only think of themselves, only live for themselves and are ever ready to sacriﬁce all to their egoism and ambition . . . It is necessary to hold these greedy depraved men back . . . It is necessary to place some barrier in their path.”72 5. Marxist historians would have us believe that the French Revolution was a “necessary step in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.”73 By granting maximum freedom of action to individual enterprise, they claim that the French Revolution “gave impulse” to production and “accelerated the concentration of enterprises,”74 thus permitting the bourgeoisie to triumph. After the publication of Jean Jaure`s’s Storia socialista, they had to acknowledge that for some reason the French Revolution had been different from the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, but they chose the easy explanation: the former two revolutions had been “bourgeois and conservative,” whereas the latter had been “largely bourgeois and democratic.”75 In fact, things were not as the Marxist historians imagined them to be at all. The second French Revolution—the one that started with the coup de main of June 2, 1793—was explicitly antibourgeois from every point of view: social composition, organization, ideology, and objectives. If the Jacobins had been successful, French capitalism would have met with an untimely death.76 At this point, it must be said that following publication of Alfred Cobban’s essay The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, not even the capitalistbourgeois nature of the 1789 Revolution can be taken for granted. Cobban reveals, embarrassingly so for the Marxist interpretation of the Great Revo-

40

Revolutionary Apocalypse

lution, that “the revolutionary bourgeoisie was mainly composed of the declining class of ofﬁciers, of men of law and other professionals and not by representatives of trade and industry,”77 a point also particularly stressed by Burke and Saint-Simon78 to the extent that even an orthodox Marxist such as Albert Soboul is forced to acknowledge that the “engine of the bourgeois revolutions can be traced back to the growth of small and medium producers, artisans and independent peasants; to the small and medium bourgeoisie, therefore, and not to the upper middle class, that had more or less coalesced with the power of the absolutists, the state, the ﬁnanciers, big traders, factory owners, entrepreneurs etc.”79 Soboul adds: “In the bourgeois revolution, the fundamental class conﬂict exists between the democracy of the small and medium merchant producers and free farmers, on the one side, and the oligarchy of large feudal landowners, allies of the haute bourgeoisie, and of the monopolistic and privileged holders of commercial capital, on the other.”80 To deﬁne the French Revolution, as Marxists generally do, as a conﬂict between a rising class—the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie—and a declining class—the feudal nobility—means to violate the truth, to make it coincide at all costs with the Marxist philosophy of the history of Marx.81 A fortiori it is absolutely arbitrary to see the Terror as the peak of the bourgeois revolution and the tool used by the entrepreneurial class to consolidate its political power.82 To capture the absurdity of this interpretation of the Jacobin revolution, we need only remember that in his Carnets, Robespierre, mindful of the lesson of the “divine Jean-Jacques,” when asked “Where does Evil come from?” answered “From the bourgeois,”83 and that when the factions were being annihilated in order to “purge the fatherland of its declared enemies,”84 SaintJust stated that the objective of Terror was to “overturn the empire of wealth.”85 This is certainly close to communism, so much so that one year after the Thermidor reaction—with which the bourgeois society freed itself from a regime that wanted “to sacriﬁce it to ancient political life”86—Babeuf expressed all his admiration for Robespierre’s “regenerating ideas”87 and proclaimed loud and clear that it was necessary to suppress private property, to materialize the ideal of “pure equality,” and to purify men, corrupted by “greed and ambition.”88 The ideal of a completely socialist economy was foreign to the Jacobins. Nonetheless they “created an anti-capitalist dynamic and a system of social rules that, throughout their enforcement, violently stiﬂed growth, proﬁt and the accumulation of capital.”89 This should not come as too great a surprise, if we recall that throughout the eighteenth century the prevailing culture was quite the opposite to the culture of the Enlightenment: being animated by a strong millenarian pathos, it was radically opposed to the present in its every form.90 The dual nature of the Great Revolution is to be interpreted in the light of the profound dualism that dominated—and still dominates—Western civ-

The Jacobin Experiment

41

ilization. For almost 2,000 years this civilization was torn between two instances: “Greek rationalism and Judaeo Israeli Messianism.”91 The origins of the spirit of the Enlightenment are to be sought in the former: that is to say, the culture of the secular city. In politics, this found its most typical expression in liberal democracy and in the promise of social democracy; the origins of the latter are to be sought in a series of avatars, the revolutionary spirit that tends to transcend, to deny and to annihilate the existing order in view of a totally new order of things. 6. So the French Revolution was a dual revolution. It was a war of the “society of citizens” against the “society of subjects,” but it was also a war between two irreconcilable models of “society of citizens.” To the purely formal conception of equality, as expressed in the Le Chapelier law, by which “the imperialism of the bourgeois contract [had been extended] to the world of labour,”92 the Jacobins opposed a conception of substance based on the following reasoning. If the declaration of rights is not to be a farce for the poor who are the vast majority of the population, the state must be organized in such a way as to guarantee every citizen a supply of material goods, a job, and a certain level of education.93 On this condition only would liberation from absolutism mean liberation of the entire population, and not of one particular class, the plutocratic bourgeoisie, or in any event of the group of social classes in a position to be competitive.94 Undoubtedly with Jacobinism we witness a “passage from a juridical and political equality to an economic equality, a passage from equality of rights to equality of institutions.”95 In other words, the passage from a liberal conception of justice, as free competition between citizens-proprietors, to a socialist conception—or at least a protosocialist—conception of justice, as substantial equality, which implies a new idea of the functions of the state. The role of the state is not limited to guaranteeing fair competition but intervenes to adjust the economic machinery, to ensure that every member of the community enjoys citizenship rights. Hence the theorization of “a real right to work which society owes to all its members.”96 This in itself makes the Jacobins the spiritual fathers of modern democracy—based on universal citizenship rights (political, economic, and social)— and the welfare state. But the Jacobins were also the spiritual fathers of Bolshevism. According to Albert Mathie´z, Lenin was “a Robespierre who was successful.” Indeed, this is a ﬁtting deﬁnition that throws a clarifying light on the true signiﬁcance of the Jacobin movement, which was absolutely—this can never be stressed enough—anticapitalist and antibourgeois. It is true that Robespierre, although acknowledging that “the extreme disproportion of fortunes was the source of many evils and many crimes,” considered “equality of possessions . . . a chimera”97 and that he never placed the complete nationalization of means of production on his revolutionary agenda. But it is equally true that Robespierre developed a theory of private property, as a social in-

42

Revolutionary Apocalypse

stitution subordinate to the will of the legislator, that was in marked contrast with the theory contained in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, whereby property was “an unviolable and sacred right.”98 It goes without saying that, if the Jacobins had limited themselves to opposing a conception of substance to the formal conception of equality, we could not consider them the spiritual fathers of Bolshevism. The fact is they went the next step, which was to have immense consequences: in order to establish “true liberty,” they declared that it was necessary to establish, albeit for a limited period of time, a “despotism of liberty”99 and adopt the password “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.”100 The interests of the community, they claimed, must always prevail over the interests of the individual, implicitly criminalizing the private sphere as such. And so the Jacobins embarked upon totalitarian democracy. Their revolution was not an egalitarian adjustment of the liberal revolution but it became a revolution in the revolution aimed at the creation of a compact, closed, monolithic society, in which the individual will would mystically amalgamate with Rousseau’s general will “ever constant, unalterable and pure”101 and “ever in favour of the most advantageous solution for public interest.”102 In other words, when it came to deciding between Sparta and Athens, the Jacobins chose Sparta103 and in so doing went against the spirit of modern civilization. In addition to this, the Jacobins opposed a catastrophic-palingenetic concept of revolution to the enlightened concept of politics, as a technique for settling the conﬂicts that inevitably arise in society by institutionalizing compromise. With their revolutionary call to arms, Robespierre and Saint-Just intended to achieve the metastatic transﬁguration of human nature and the regeneration of the political corps. “First great catastrophes [announced Saint-Just in 1793] then universal happiness.”104 Equally catastrophic and palingenetic was the point of view expressed by an obscure Jacobin in 1792: “Major crises are necessary to purify an organism infected by gangrene; it is necessary to chop off limbs to save the body.” And, a year and a half later— “while heads were dropping like tiles”105—Fouquier-Tinville, public prosecutor of the revolutionary Tribunal, in favor of permanent purge within the Jacobin party, declared, “If we purge ourselves, it is to have the right to purge France. We will leave no foreign body in the Republic: the enemies of liberty must tremble because the club is raised; the Convention will use it. Our enemies are not as numerous as they would have us believe; soon they will be revealed and will appear on the theatre of the guillotine. They say we want to destroy the Convention; no, it will remain intact; but we intend pruning the dead branches of this great tree. The important provisions taken by us resemble the gusts of wind that make the rotten fruit fall from the tree and leave the good fruit on the tree; after, you will be able to pick the ones left and they will be big, ripe and juicy; they will bring life to the Republic. What care I that there be many branches, if they are rotten. It would be better there

The Jacobin Experiment

43

were fewer but green and vigorous.”106 Carrier was less eloquent: “We will make a cemetery of France, rather than not re-generate it our way.”107 Clearly there was nothing liberal about this revolution, which was instead a metapolitical project, where revolutionary violence is used as a tool of puriﬁcation and regeneration of spirits contaminated by egoism and the acquisitive spirit. Saint-Just described it in these terms: “It is our duty to create an order of things that is such as to create a universal inclination toward good.”108 Crane Brinton correctly states that the distinguishing feature of the Jacobin revolution is the “attempt to achieve heaven on earth.”109 Equally correct is Talmon’s deﬁnition of Jacobinism as a political Messianism that aspired to create a “pre-ordered, harmonious, perfect order of things towards which men would be irresistibly driven and which they must per force achieve.”110 Earlier, Carlyle had interpreted the Jacobin revolution as “the supreme effort, after eighteen centuries of preparation, to realize the Christian Religion” according to the principles expressed by the “Fifth and new Evangelist, Jean-Jacques, urging each and everyone to amend the perverse existence of the entire world.”111 A typically gnostic-Manichean Weltanschauung underlies the palingenetic project of the Jacobins. The basic idea is that the world exudes inﬁnite horrors from every pore and that these render the human condition intolerable. But such horrors—poverty, violence, oppression, exploitation, selﬁshness, and so forth—are by no means physiological. They are the consequence of an event, both mysterious and decisive, that changed the natural order of things and perverted relations between men, as well as their feelings.112 Yet, salvation is possible. The solution is to overturn the overturned world, purge society, restore human nature to its natural state, the state it was in before it was corrupted by institutions, sanctioning lust for power and wealth. In a word, the solution is to light the revolutionary ﬁre in order to purify the city and put the scandal of evil to an end, once and for all. The consequence: man should not wait for salvation to come from God. He must take action and use all his physical and moral energy to save himself; he must abandon himself to the cause of equality and become a permanent militant revolutionary. The reason is that (revolutionary) policy is a soteriological practice that provides a global answer to “the cursed questions” that suffocate human nature. Thus it can be said that universal happiness depends on the success of the revolutionary project that, in any event, is written in the “code of nature” and will proceed until virtue reigns sovereign in every ﬁeld and every corner of the Earth. The problem is that redemption from radical evil is no easy matter, since the enemies of virtue hide everywhere, among the nobility and the clergy, as is to be expected, but also among the “partisans of the order of egoism, almost all disciples of Voltaire and of the encyclopaediaists.”113 Such characters have no dignity since—as Lanot explained during the Terror—“those who are not Jacobins are in no way virtuous.”114 The only solution is to annihilate them, so that the ideal of a “virtuous society” can gain substance, which implies that

44

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the revolution must conduct a permanent war against the enemies of equality, until it has successfully re-made man un-made by history. This is an extremely difﬁcult undertaking, since the “virtuous” are a tiny minority, as the masses have been intoxicated by centuries of ignorance and slavery and can no longer perceive that their interests and rights are daily trodden upon by the rich and the powerful. This is why they need someone to stimulate their awareness, “inﬂaming them, enlightening them . . . and exalting the republican enthusiasm, with every means.”115 The person who leads them toward the realm of virtue must be one of the “pure,” enlightened by revolutionary gnosis, and able to interpret the confused desire of emancipation of the victims of exploitation and translate it in a precise strategy. Rousseau expressed this thesis very clearly when he wrote: “How can a blind multitude, who often does not know what it wants, because it rarely knows what is good for it, introduce without help such a great, such a difﬁcult undertaking, as a legislative system? People always want good but are not always able to see it alone. The general will is always honest but the judgement guiding it is not always enlightened. So it is necessary to show them objects, sometimes as they are, others as they should be, show them the right path to follow, protect them from the seduction of particular desires, bring places and times to their eyes, offset the attraction of immediate, concrete advantage with the danger of far-off, obscure evils. Individuals see the good they do not desire, the community wants the good it does not see. All have an equal need of guidance. The former must be forced to make their will comply with reason; the latter must be taught what it wants.”116 Thus the revolutionary e´lite, acting on the basis of the diagnosis-therapy of the evils of the world contained in the “true philosophy,” comes to take on the typical role of the Paraclete in gnostic tradition: it alone knows what is for the good of the city and how to achieve it; it must impose the general will on individual interests and force individuals to free themselves of their egoism; that is: institute the despotism of Virtue until men have not been regenerated. The inevitable consequence is that “individuals as such are demonized and criminalised,”117 society is conceived as an immense battleﬁeld in which there is total war “between the chosen and the damned”118 “in that there exist only two factions, the faction of the corrupt and the faction of the virtuous.”119 The moral asymmetry between the two is absolute since—as Saint-Just was to declare on April 14, 1794—“Upon the victory of the “virtuous” depends the passage from bad to good, from corruption to integrity.”120 So “the voice of reason”—thus goes Marat’s sinister theorem—“can but command the cruel necessity of massacring [the enemies of the revolution].”121 No less sinister Saint-Just’s declarations of war against the “enemies of the people”: “The incorrigible supporters of tyranny dream of nothing other than our defeat, and every day they create new enemies of liberty . . . Purge therefore the country of its declared enemy . . . as long as the enemy of liberty still breathes, there can be no hope in prosperity. You must punish not only traitors but also

The Jacobin Experiment

45

the indifferent; you must punish whoever in the Republic is passive and does nothing for it; because following the expression of the will of the French people, anything that goes against such will is outside the sovereign body and everything that is outside the sovereign body is an enemy . . . those who cannot be ruled with justice must be ruled with iron; tyrants must be oppressed.”122 In this situation, the only way for the Revolution to achieve its eschatological objective—“the passage from bad to good”—is clearly through the holocaust of its enemies, including those who are “lukewarm.”123 Death must be “bureaucratized” in order for it “to achieve its programme of virtue”: death becomes an “anonymous and generic death” to the point that it “embraces 90 per cent of the male population over the age of fourteen.”124 There is no alternative to a state of permanent terror under the control of the “virtuous state” until original perfection has been restored.125 Robespierre’s famous Report to the Convention of December 25, 1793, contains these crude words: “The revolution is a war of liberty against its enemies . . . The revolutionary Government must act extraordinarily, precisely because it ﬁnds itself in a state of war. In times of peace the force of popular government is Virtue; in times of revolution, it is at the same time Virtue and Terror. Without virtue, Terror is deadly; without Terror, Virtue is impotent. Terror is none other than an immediate severe and inﬂexible justice. It is therefore an emanation of Virtue. It is far less a contingent principle than the consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the country . . . the Government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”126 7. This concept of redemption of humanity requires a society organized as if it were a militarized convent. And, in effect, in the virtuous state created by the Jacobins during the Terror “no intermediate autonomy was to restrain the impulse from the centre”127 and no form of liberty was envisaged for citizens. They had to march in compact lines and identify themselves completely with the objectives and values of the revolution.128 And they were obliged to do so, not only—as is often said—because there was a war to win, but also because the Jacobin ideology required “militarizing” the political battle, because it conceived revolution as the last holy war against the perverse powers conspiring against human happiness, in order to establish “the rule of Reason.”129 “We [Robespierre had proclaimed on February 5, 1794] wish to realise the promises of Nature, the fate of humanity, the promises of philosophy, and absolve Providence from the long reign of crime and tyranny.”130 This was an unequivocal way of saying that the Revolution undertook to achieve in this world what Christianity promised to achieve in the next: to modify the ontological status of reality and regenerate human nature.131 In a sense, the Jacobins had no alternative: their revolution “had to show that its denial of an arbitrary religion, favouring the chosen few, was the afﬁrmation of a religion of justice the same for all citizens; that its denial of privileged property was the afﬁrmation of non-privileged property extended to all.”132 In other

46

Revolutionary Apocalypse

words, in the conscience of the people, it had to present itself as the functional equivalent of Christianity.133 Hence the cult of the Supreme Being; that is, of divinized humanity134—the new avatar of the gnostic myth of savior-saved— whose logical consequence was the claim of the Committee of Public Safety to be “Church and Inquisition,”135 according to the typically totalitarian theorem that “everything that was immoral was impolitic and everything that tended to corrupt was counter-revolutionary.”136 The Jacobins appointed themselves the sacred custodians of the revolutionary verb—and in fact Proudhon referred to them as “the Jesuits of the revolution”—and acted with the deliberate intention of destroying the institutions of pluralism in order to create a compact, homogeneous system, driven by a millenarian faith and organized according to the principle of absolute centralization. The Jacobin revolution had devastating consequences on the bourgeoisie. A major policy of the Terror had been the introduction of a completely new economic system. This involved a systematic limitation of the laws of the market and the political-administrative management of processes of production and distribution. This new economic system—as documented by Gue´rin, Palmer, Aftalion, and Fehe´r—was essentially a forerunner, albeit still imperfect, of the future command economies. “Opulence [stated Saint-Just] is an infamy.”137 The Jacobins were intimately convinced that the only way to eliminate excessive wealth from society and guarantee means of subsistence to all workers was to eliminate competition in allocating the goods produced by the community. As its ﬁrst formal act, the dictatorship of the Mountain passed a law, ﬁxing maximum prices and salaries (September 11, 1793). This law was greeted by the sansculottes as a great victory for the needy masses. The results were disappointing: ﬂour and bread disappeared from the shops altogether and ended up on the black market because “the maximum price established was lower than the cost of production.”138 In vain, Albitte warned his comrades in arms to remember that “badly prepared good does bad.”139 The Convention blamed the shortages on the conspiracy “of the counter-revolutionaries of the rich and of the merchant aristocracy, whose egoism it intended to punish.”140 It radicalized its economic policy, rather than correct it, and insisted that all essential foodstuffs be sold at the ofﬁcial prices, established arbitrarily by the Convention. Moreover, to “encourage” compliance with the law, it recruited a “revolutionary army” whose speciﬁc function was to combat monopolies and the merchant aristocracy. When the shortage of goods became increasingly dramatic and inﬂation hit the urban proletariat, the Convention—pressured by the sansculottes, who wanted “to direct the Terror against commercial capital”141—found no better solution than to use the method of conﬁscation on the basis of the principle— formulated explicitly by Bare`re—that “all the products of the land are state property and all property belongs to the State.”142 As a result, the French economy became a typical war economy: the revolutionary leaders “controlled the near totality of production and distribution.”143

The Jacobin Experiment

47

The huge contradiction that was to emerge was repeated in all the revolutionary regimes of the twentieth century: the titanic effort of achieving equality via economic dirigisme forced the Committee of Public Safety to set up a “huge bureaucracy that invaded all and regulated all”;144 in the end, this suffocated both democracy and production. Corruption thrived in the regional government departments because the ofﬁcers responsible for conﬁscations themselves hoarded the produce. Finally, the system produced the exact opposite of what Robespierre and Saint-Just had tirelessly advocated. On the other hand, economic dirigisme offered many advantages to the Jacobin party: ﬁrst and foremost, its clubs became an organic part of state administration. “Thousands of plebeaians set themselves up in the many ofﬁces of revolutionary administration, mainly in the department of war and the Interior, in supplies and in the various repressive corps etc. At the bottom of the scale, after September 12, 1793, the revolutionary committees had more than 500,000 salaried members.”145 Despite its hyperdemocratic ideological formula, it was precisely due to its all pervasive nationalization that the revolutionary government was able to create that social support without which it could not have survived without committing suicide. The dictatorship of a party, exercised in favor of those elements of the lower intellectual middle class, had “irremissibly linked their fate to that of the Revolution.”146 Of course, only a small minority of the Jacobin party were intellectuals. But—as conﬁrmed by the data provided by Crane Brinton—at the top of the organizational pyramid, the number of intellectuals increased.147 Its leaders were composed of a few “deserters of the bourgeoisie”148—as Daniel Gue´rin calls them: in fact they were lawyers without clients, literati without a public— united above all by ideological and moral ties and by a gnostic pathos whereby they considered themselves the conscious avant-garde of the French people, indeed of humanity, degraded by centuries of corruption and slavery. Theirs therefore was the typical revolution of “declassed” intellectuals. They elected themselves “tribunes of the people” and became leaders of the protest movement against the ancien re´gime by manipulating public opinion in a manner that later was to be considered “exemplary.” They had been able to do so because they had learned to perfect the art of revolution already used by the Puritans and above all because of what Philip Selznick has called the “organizational weapon.”149 Prior to the 1793 Revolution, the Jacobins already had an efﬁcient electoral mechanism that enveloped all French society in a thick network of clubs in which no fewer than half a million members were indoctrinated and guided by means of a system of circular letters sent out from the main central club. After they took over power, the Jacobins transformed the local clubs into “simple, passive wheels of the mechanism of the dictatorship.”150 The organization took on the connotations of a proper army, conducting an ideological war. Anyone not identifying with the Jacobin vision of the world was eo ipso in favor of corruption and egoism and therefore an enemy to be exterminated.

48

Revolutionary Apocalypse

In concrete, the clubs operated like “artiﬁcial cells” whose speciﬁc function was to isolate the militants culturally, until they were psychologically impervious to the messages of national society and, closed in their intellectual and moral certitude, became the agitprop of the Jacobin party, driven by an intense missionary zeal. The clubs were agencies of political resocialization that used a method of indoctrination to forge homo ideologicus and train him to be the gnostic activist of the permanent revolution, devoted body and soul to the sacred cause of destruction of what existed and the ediﬁcation of the realm of virtue.151 Thanks to this particularly complex and tentacular organization—“machinery” as Francois Furet calls it152—the Jacobins were able to “penetrate the disorganised French society and reintegrate the nation just when the old institutions and social relations were falling apart.”153 In other words, they ﬁlled a void of power that had been generated by the sudden collapse of the ancien re´gime and mobilized the entire nation in the war that opposed revolutionary France to the whole of Europe by “abolishing in practice any distinction between soldier and citizen.”154 This may have saved the Revolution,155 but it changed its historical significance. Civil society was not emancipated but became a slave to a tyrannical, ideological power that aspired to restore ancient liberty on the ruins of modern liberty. And for this precise reason, after 14 months of “despotism of liberty”—during which no Frenchman could live a normal life, free of fear— civil society rebelled against the ideocratic regime that had tried to force it to comply with its ideal of collectivistic utopia and reconquered its freedom. Admittedly, the Thermidor reaction substituted a red terror with a white terror, but it dismantled the bureaucratic economy that was starving France and restored, albeit partially,156 the essential conditions for the Industrial Revolution: protection of private property and/or proﬁt and free competition, albeit under the cloak of an authoritarian political regime.157 Thus, the Jacobin’s titanic enterprise of materializing Rousseau’s “general will” by uprooting every trace of bourgeois individualism ended in failure. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their party fell because they had “exchanged a realistically democratic, ancient community, whose foundations were based on real slavery with the modern representative spiritualistically democratic State based on the emancipated slavery of civil society. What a huge illusion to be forced to recognise and sanction in the rights of man, modern civil society, the society of industry, of general competition, of the free pursuit of private interests, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality, alienated from itself, and to want, at the same time, to annul in individuals the vital expression of this society and model its political head in an ancient manner!”158 The Jacobins had tried to stop and overturn the spontaneous development of France, by destroying capitalism, a civil independent society, and modern liberty, and substituting the rule of the bourgeoisie with that of ideocratic bureaucracy. In short, they tried to substitute an “open society” with a “closed

The Jacobin Experiment

49

society,” liberalism with totalitarianism. It is for this very reason that their experiment inspired all the revolutionary movements of our time, in conﬂict with modern civilization and its essential values. Strictly speaking, the history of the revolutions of the twentieth century is simply a repeat of Jacobinism, the development of the project to “create an identity between civil society and State, to unify by means of a dictatorship the elements constituting the State in an organic and broader sense (State as such and civil society) in a desperate attempt to control the life of the nation and the people.159

NOTES 1. Quoted from E. Schmitt, Introduccion a la historia de la Revolucion francesa (Madrid: Catedra, 1980), p. 14. 2. Essentially, Francois Furet and Denis Richet represent Ferrero’s interpretation, stressing in particular the de´rapage of the Revolution (La Re´volution francaise [Paris: Hachette, 1965]). It is surprising that Ferrero is only cited very marginally in their work and that the fear aspect is hardly touched. 3. G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi (Milan: SugarCo, 1986), pp. 15–16. It is interesting that in his “comparative remarks” Alessandro Manzoni should have already identiﬁed with considerable precision the paradoxical effects of the ’89 Revolution: “oppression of the country, in the name of liberty; and the extreme difﬁculty of substituting a Government in ruins with another Government endowed, naturally, with the quality of being lasting” (Storia incompiuta della Rivoluzione francese [Milan: Bompiani, 1985], p. 21). 4. Saint-Just was very aware of the paradoxical situation of the revolutionaries: “The force of things perhaps leads us to results which we never anticipated” (quoted from F. Furet and D. Richet, La Re´volution francaise, p. 206). In other words, he saw what the reactionary De Maistre was to express three years later with his famous formula: “The revolution guides men more than men guide it” (Considerations sur la France [Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1988], p. 18). 5. W. Godwin, “Ricerca sulla giustizia politica e sull’inﬂuenza sulla morale e sulla felicita`,” in G. M. Bravo, ed., Gli anarchici, vol. 1 (Turin: UTET, 1971), p. 202. 6. B. Constant, Conquista e usurpazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1983). 7. G. Lefebvre, La Grande Paura del 1789 (Milan: Einaudi, 1973). 8. H. Me´thivier, La ﬁn de l’Ancien Re´gime (Paris: PUF, 1989), p. 100. The impact on the French was so strong that it was common to say about someone born on the “Day of Fear” that he was born on the day of the taking of the Bastille (Cabanes e L. Nass, La ne´vrose re´volutionnaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1924), p. 23. 9. Sieye`s gave theoretical dignity to this feeling of exasperation: “If the privileged order were eliminated, the nation would not be something less but something more. What is the third state today? Everything, but an everything oppressed and hindered. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and ﬂourishing . . . The worst organised of all states would be the one in which not only individuals, but a whole class of citizens, took upon themselves the merit of remaining immobile in the midst of general animation while consuming the best part

50

Revolutionary Apocalypse

of the product, for which it had done nothing to contribute to its creation. Without doubt such a class is for its ‘doing nothing’, cut off from the nation.” (What Is the Third Estate? [London: Pall Mall Press, 1963.]) 10. G. Ferrero, Potere (Milan: SugarCo, 1981), pp. 93–94. 11. G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, pp. 39–40. 12. Martial Gue´roult writes: “Before 1789 the practical reason was reformist. This explains why the revolution came as a complete surprise, as an immense event that surprised its contemporaries; it was certainly not something of the spirit . . . The mind approaches the revolution without having a clear idea of what it will achieve” (quoted from A. Ge´rard, La Rivoluzione francese [Mursia: Milan, 1972], p. 12). Michel Vovelle presents an identical thesis: “For most of the actors, the Revolution came as a surprise despite the American precedent” (Ideologies and Mentalities [Cambridge: Polity, 1990]). 13. R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of European and America 1760–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964). 14. Quoted from G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, p. 75. 15. Quoted from H. Guillemin, Robespierre politico e mistico (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), p. 87. 16. N. Hampson, Danton (London: Duckworth, 1978). 17. L.A.L de Saint-Just, Terrore e liberta` (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966), p. 207. 18. N. Hampson, Danton. 19. C. Barbagallo, Due rivoluzioni (Milan: Garzanti, 1945), p. 188. 20. Quoted from G. Ferrero, Le due Rivoluzioni francesi, p. 88. 21. H. Taine, Le origini della Francia contemporanea, vol. 4 (Milan: Treves, 1930), p. 55. 22. Danton spoke these words just a few months before being sentenced to death for betraying the revolution. 23. P. Kropotkin, The Great Revolution 1789–1793 (London: Elephant, 1986). 24. H. Guillemin, Robespierre, p. 305. 25. The infernal logic of suspicion was so prevalent that even the members of the Committee of Public Safety mistrusted each other. On several occasions, Carnot accused Robespierre and Saint-Just of wanting to set up a dictatorship; Robespierre retaliated, hissing “I’ll be there, waiting for your ﬁrst defeat.” On his part, one day Billaud-Varenne shouted to Robespierre: “You’re a counter-revolutionary.” Taine writes, “The fatal ﬁgure that looms before them, the Fury for which they reigned, silently pronounced its oracle and every heart heard it: Whoever among us does not wish to be murderer is a conspirator and a counter-revolutionary” (Le origini della Francia contemporanea, vol. 4, p. 228). 26. G. Ferrero, Potere, p. 212. Ferrero was probably inspired by what Desmoulins wrote against the excesses of the Terror: “Love you then this blood-thirsty goddess whose high priests demand that a temple be built with the bones of three million citizens as in Mexico and repeat unceasingly to the Jacobins, to the Commune, to the revolutionaries, the words of the priestesses of Montezuma: The Gods are thirsty” (quoted in A. France, Gli Dei hanno sete [Milan: Garzanti, 1967]). 27. K. Marx, “Osservazioni sulle recenti istruzioni per la censura in Prussia,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Opere Complete, vol. 1 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 116. 28. It is interesting that in his Carnets, Robespierre explains very clearly that it is necessary to institutionalize the revolution, to make it permanent, creating a body of

The Jacobin Experiment

51

consecrated (leaders)” (see J. Ratinaud, Robespierre [Milan: Mondadori, 1963], pp. 109–110). 29. B. Groethuysen, La ﬁlosoﬁa della Rivoluzione francese (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1967), p. 237. 30. P. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). 31. J. Godechot, Le rivoluzioni (Milan: Mursia, 1975), p. 92. 32. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 33. D. Mornet, Le origini intellettuali della Rivoluzione francese ( Milan: Jaca Book, 1982), p. 71. 34. Quoted from P. Goubert, The Ancien Re´gime: French Society 1600–1750 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). 35. On the concept of “strong” legitimation, see my essay, “La legittimazione del Potere nella Citta` secolare,” in G. Pecora, ed., Potere politico e legittimazione (Milan: SugarCo, 1987). 36. D. Roche, France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 37. G. Rude`, Revolutionary Europe 1783–1815 (London: Fontana, 1964). 38. E. Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), pp. 29–30. 39. A. de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 40. Voltaire, Dizionario ﬁlosoﬁco (Milan: Mondadori, 1962), p. 414 and 418. 41. Voltaire, Saggio sui costumi e lo spirito delle nazioni, vol. 4 (Novara: De Agostini, 1967), p. 531. 42. F. A. Hayek, The Counter Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (New York: Free Press, 1964) and New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 43. Quoted from E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). 44. See J. Sole`, La Re´volution en questions (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 29. 45. W. Bernardi, Utopia e socialismo nel ’700 francese (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), p. 4. 46. On this point, see Domenico Settembrini’s excellent essay “Rivoluzione francese: il mito e la realta`,” in Mondoperaio, no. 7 (1989). 47. See F. Chabod, Alle origini della Rivoluzione francese (Florence: Passigli, 1990). 48. The Social Contract had such a strong inﬂuence on the Jacobins that Edgard Quinet wrote that “Rousseau ﬁtted the Revolution in the same way as a bud ﬁts a plant. He pre-represents and personiﬁes it, to the extent that an individual can represent a social system” (La Rivoluzione [Turin: Einaudi, 1953], p. 101). 49. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment, p. 359. 50. E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 23. 51. The phrase is contained in a letter Rousseau wrote to Malherbes on January 12, 1762 (quoted from W. Durant, Rousseau e la Rivoluzione [Milan: Mondadori, 1970], p. 24). 52. L. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (London: NLB, 1972). Rousseau’s theory that the corruption of social institutions was responsible for every evil inevitably became a convenient moral alibi. It therefore should not surprise us that the philosopher’s cynical answer to Madame Francueil’s indignation about his abandoning his children in an orphanage should have been: “Forgive me, madame,

52

Revolutionary Apocalypse

but nature wants me to bring them into the world because the earth produces sufﬁcient food for all. But it is the class of the rich that steals the food from my children’s mouth” (quoted from F. Jonas, Storia della sociologia [Bari: Laterza, 1970], p. 198). 53. I. Kant, “La religione nei limiti della semplice ragione,” in Scritti di ﬁlosoﬁa della religione (Milan: Mursia, 1989), p. 87. 54. P. Rossi, “Introduzione” to J.J. Rousseau, Opere (Florence: Sansoni, 1988), p. XXXV. 55. Here it should be stressed that Rousseau never deluded himself that it was possible to restore the “original transparency,” whereas the Jacobins considered the Social Contract an “infallible” tool for the regeneration of human nature. 56. In J. J. Rousseau, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau C. E. Vaughan, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. “Jean-Jacques [wrote Paul Janet] was without question the founder of modern communism” (quoted from J.C. Petitﬁls, Les socialismes utopiques [Paris: PUF, 1977], p. 33). 60. J. J. Rousseau, “Progetto di Costituzione per la Corsica,” in Scritti politici, p. 1113. 61. Ibid., p. 1113. 62. Ibid., p. 1121. 63. Ibid., p. 1113. 64. J. J. Rousseau, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, p. 71. 65. B. Constant, Principi di politica (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 228. 66. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Charles M. Sherover, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. B. de Jouvenel, Il potere (Milan: SugarCo, 1991); J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 70. See L. Guerci, La liberta` degli antichi e la liberta` dei moderni (Naples: Guida, 1979). 71. B. Constant, “La liberta degli antichi paragonata a quella dei moderni,” in Scritti politici (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982). 72. Quoted from C. Dawson, The Gods of Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1972), p. 87. 73. A. Soboul, Comprende La Re´volution (Paris: Maspero, 1981). 74. A. Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789–1799 (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1977). 75. A. Soboul, La civilization et la Re´volution francaise (Paris: Arthaud, 1988), p. 376. 76. That the intention of the Jacobin revolution was to suffocate capitalism is more than evident in Robespierre’s statement: “Free trade of corn is incompatible with the existence of our Republic” (in P. Kessel, Le gauchistes de 89 [Paris: Union ge´ne´rale d’Editions, 1969], p. 253). 77. A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 78. “The general composition [of the representatives of the third estate] was of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attornies,

The Jacobin Experiment

53

notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomentors and conductors of the petty war of village vexation” (E. Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France [Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 42). “When the French Revolution appeared on the scene, it was no longer a question of changing the feudal and theological system, for it had already lost almost all its real strength. It was a question of organising the industrial and scientiﬁc system that that phase of civilisation required in its place. Consequently it would have been the natural role of industrialists and scientists to occupy the political scene. Instead, the jurists put themselves in command of the revolution and directed it with the metaphysical doctrines. There is no need to remind you of the deviations and troubles that derived from this decision and the troubles that derived from these deviations” (C. H. de Saint-Simon, “Il sistema industriale,” in Opere [Turin: UTET, 1975], pp. 590–591). 79. A. Soboul, “Alla luce della Rivoluzione” in AA. VV., la Rivoluzione francese: problemi storici e metodologici (Milan: Angeli, 1979), p. 103. 80. Ibid., p. 103. 81. Massimo Terni suggests that the social consequences of ’89 were the following: “A class of bureaucrats and professionals moved from minor to major positions within the government, pushing to one side the supporters of a court that was ﬁnished: this was the meaning of the bourgeois revolution. The peasants freed themselves from their obligations vis-a`-vis the seigneurs: This was the meaning of the end of feudalism.” (Il Mito della Rivoluzione Francese [Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1981], p. 54). 82. To keep the Marxist argument on its feet, Eric Hobsbawm managed to invent a “solid bourgeoisie that hid behind the Terror” (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962]). This imaginative theory had a strong inﬂuence on non-Marxist scholars too, among whom Barrington Moore, who tried to prove, against all evidence, that the Terror had been functional to the development of French society in a bourgeois and capitalist sense (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World [London: Penguin, 1967]). Despite the fact that the Marxist historian Albert Mathiez had documented in great detail that “Robespierre rose up against the bourgeoisie that had tried to turn the revolution to its own advantage with the PLUTOCRATIC constitution of 1791, and fought with all his might” (Robespierre [Rome: Newton Compton, 1976], p. 217). 83. Quoted from F. Furet and D. Richet, La Re´volution francaise, p. 222. 84. L.A.L. de Saint Just, Terrore e Liberta` (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966), p. 198. 85. Quoted from J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. 86. K. Marx and F. Engels, “The Holy Family,” in Complete Works, vol. 4, p. 122. Note that this judgment on the Terror and on the Thermidor coincides with the one made by Constant in his essay “Des effets de la Terreur” (Paris: Flammarion, 1988) and is in marked contrast with the theory according to which the Jacobin dictatorship was functional to the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony (see F. Furet, Marx and the French Revolution [Chicago: Chicago University Press”, 1988]). 87. F. N. Babeuf, Il Tribuno del Popolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), p. 252. 88. Ibid., p. 241. 89. F. Fehe´r, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 90. Dom Deschamps gives the best summary of the political agenda implicit in the eighteenth century gnostic culture in a letter to Rousseau: “Il faut entie`rement nettoyer

54

Revolutionary Apocalypse

la place” (quoted from B. Baczko, Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress [New York: Paragon House, 1989]). 91. C. Rosselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 92. L. Bergeron, F. Furet, and R. Koselleck, L’eta` della rivoluzione europea (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970), p. 45. 93. This is what we read in article 11 of the “Declarations of the rights of man and of the citizen” proposed by Robespierre on April 24, 1793: “Society is obliged to provide for the subsistence of all its members by procuring them a job, by ensuring means of subsistence to those who are unable to work” (La rivoluzione giacobina [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967], p. 123). 94. See M. Robespierre, I principi della democrazia (Sambuceto: Editrice Trimestre, 1989). 95. F. P. Benoit, La de´mocratie libe´rale (Paris: PUF, 1978), p. 53. 96. F. P. Benoit, Les ide´ologues politiques modernes (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 47. 97. Quoted from F. Crisafulli, Giustizia e furore (Cosenza: Giordano, 1989), p. 340. 98. “Dichiarazione dei diritti dell’uomo e del cittadino,” in F. Battaglia, ed., Le Carte dei diritti (Florence: Sansoni, 1946), p. 123. 99. The formula was coined by Marat, but we ﬁnd it also in Robespierre. 100. J. P. Marat, L’Amico del Popolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1968), p. 183. 101. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, p. 66. 102. J. J. Rousseau, Economia politica, p. 383. 103. See M. Ozouf, La fete re´volutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 330 et seq. 104. Quoted from M. Duverger, Les orangers du lac Balaton (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 255. 105. Quoted from A. Soboul, A Short History of the French of Revolution. 106. Quoted from L. Trotsky, “Giacobinismo e socialdemocrazia,” in an appendix to Lenin’s Che fare? (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. 424. 107. Quoted from H. Taine, Le origini della Francia contemporanea, vol. 4, p. 73. 108. Quoted from A. Camus, The Rebel (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 92. 109. Quoted from C. Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 239. 110. J. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. The Marxists disagreed with Talmon’s thesis most adamantly, obviously forgetting that it had been formulated by Gramsci earlier when he said, “Jacobinism draws from its messianic spirit, from its faith in revealed truth, the pretext of suppressing with violence every opposition, any will that refuses to adhere to the social contract. And so falls into the contradiction that is so typical of democratic regimes, the contradiction between the professions of faith that hail unlimited freedom and the practice of tyranny and brutal intolerance” (Selections from Political Writings (1910–20) [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977]). 111. T. Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, Book 5 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 332f. 112. Mably wrote this about the corrupting inﬂuence of private property: “The inequality of fortunes and of conditions decomposes, so to speak, man and alters the natural sentiments of his heart” (“Della legislazione ossia dei principi delle leggi,” in Scritti politici, vol. 2 [Turin: UTET, 1965], p. 268). 113. A. Mathiez, Robespierre, p. 222. 114. A. Cochin, L’esprit du jacobinisme (Paris: PUF, 1979), p. 123.

The Jacobin Experiment

55

115. As we read in Robespierre’s Carnets (quoted from J. Ratinaud, Robespierre, p. 110). 116. J. J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, p. 67. 117. V. Mathieu, Cancro in Occidente (Milano: Editoriale Nuova, 1980), p. 10. 118. C. Brinton, A Decade of Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 159. See also Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). 119. The thesis was formulated by Robespierre during the Jacobin session of May 8, 1793 (quoted from F. Diaz, “Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione,” in L. Firpo, ed., Storia delle idee politiche, economiche e sociali, vol. 6, 2 [Turin: UTET, 1975], p. 625. 120. Quoted from J. Pirenne, Storia universale, vol. 3 (Florence: Sansoni, 1956), p. 387. 121. Quoted from R. Bodei, “Ragione e terrore,” in Il Centauro, no. 3 (1981), p. 42. 122. L.A.L. De Saint-Just, Terrore e liberta`, p. 198 and pp. 117–118. 123. See J. Castelnau, Histoire de la Terreur (Paris: Perrin, 1970). 124. R. Cobb, Reactions on the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). There was a good deal of talk in the Jacobin clubs as to how many “corrupt” citizens had to be exterminated in order to purify society. For Dr. Bo, half the French population; for Antonelli and Guffroy, only 5 million were to be spared; nothing compared to Catherine The´ot, who claimed the world population should be reduced to 140 thousand souls! (See J. Servier, Le terrorisme [Paris: Gallimard, 1979], pp. 21–22.) 125. F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 126. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, pp. 147, 161, and 167. 127. C. Schmitt, La dittatura (Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 174–175. 128. See R. Cobb, The People’s Armies: The arme´es revolutionnaires: Instrument of the Terror in the departments April 1793 to Flore´al Year II (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 1–9. 129. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, p. 160. 130. Ibid., p. 161. 131. In January 1794 Gre´goire declared, “The French people are superior to all other peoples; but the hateful regime of whose remains we are now ridding ourselves, still keeps us at a great distance from Nature; there is still an abyss between what we are and what we might be. We should hasten to bridge that gap; let us reconstitute human nature and give it a new stamp” (quoted from L. Hunt, La Rivoluzione francese [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989], p. 10). 132. J. Michelet, Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 4 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), p. 10. 133. This emerges absolutely clearly from the following statement by Chaumette: “The people said to the priests: you promise us miracles. We are about to do them” (quoted from J. Michelet, Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 5, p. 20). 134. The terminology used by the revolutionaries leaves us with no doubts: “The day of revelation is upon us [proclaimed Fauchet before the Bastille]. We have reached the heart of time . . . the regeneration of human nature and of the life of nations.” Vergniaud and Cloots echoed his words: the former said he was certain that the “reign of ‘holy humanity’” was nigh; the latter announced the cult of “Our Lord the human race” (quoted from A. Camus, The Rebel, p. 87). 135. G. Maranini, Classe e Stato nella Rivoluzione francese (Florence: Vallecchi, 1964), p. 240. Here Maranini picks up Michelet’s well-known thesis according to which the

56

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Revolution did not create a Church because “it was a Church itself ”; it was a church because “it continued christianity and contradicted it. It was both heir and enemy at the same time” (Storia della Rivoluzione francese, vol. 1, p. 10). Tocqueville shared a similar view. He believed that the French Revolution was “a political revolution that acted like a religious revolution and in some respects took on some of its connotations” (The Old Regime and the French Revolution). 136. M. Robespierre, La rivoluzione giacobina, p. 163. 137. Saint-Just, L’Esprit de la Re´volution (Paris: Unione Generale d’Editions, 1963), p. 155. 138. D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 204. 139. M. Bouloiseau, La Re´publique jacobine (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 118. 140. F. Aftalion, The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 141. A. Soboul, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). 142. Quoted from R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 225. 143. F. Aftalion, The French Revolution. 144. G. Maranini, Classe e Stato nella Rivoluzione francese, p. 224. 145. D. Gue´rin, Class Struggle in the First French Republic: Bourgeois and bras nus, 1793–95 (London: Pluto, 1977). 146. G. Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793–1799 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). 147. C. Brinton, The Jacobins, pp. 150–151. 148. D. Gue´rin, La Re´volution francaise et nous (Paris: Maspero, 1976), p. 50. 149. P. Selznick, The Organizational Weapon (New York: MacGraw Hill, 1952). 150. F. Fehe´r, The Frozen Revolution: An Essay on Jacobinism, p. 181. 151. The works of A. Cochin are fundamental on this point: Meccanica della rivoluzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1971) and L’esprit du Jacobinisme. 152. F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution. 153. F. Gross, The Revolutionary Party (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), p. 52. 154. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. 155. It is widely believed that the Terror was functional to the victory of the Revolution; whether this in fact corresponds to fact is debatable. According to Michelet, for example, revolutionary France “was saved despite the Terror” (Il popolo [Milan: Rizzoli, 1989], p. 255). Quinet agreed: “The art of war, and not Terror, saved France” (La Rivoluzione, p. 597). 156. In fact, not even the Thermidor revolution accomplished what should be the historical function of bourgeois revolutions, according to the Marxist theory, namely to accelerate the development of forces of production. From a purely economic point of view, the consequences of the Great Revolution were negative, as documented in great detail by R. Se´dillot (Le cout de la Re´volution francaise [Paris: Perrin, 1987) and F. Crouzet (Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). 157. Remember that “in the orientation of the economy as in conducting their current affairs, bankers, shopkeepers and manufacturers were not the object of any special encouragement for the fact that there interests were subdued to an overall

The Jacobin Experiment

57

foreign policy that obeyed its own logic. The representatives of major economic interests were among the sectors that gradually detached themselves from the regime because it failed to give them sufﬁcient security” (L. Bergeron, France under Napoleon [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981]). 158. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, p. 122. 159. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.

CHAPTER 4

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

1. Since the end of the eighteenth century, European awareness had been shaken by three overturning events: the French Revolution, provoking the war between the invisible Great Minds of the City; the Industrial Revolution, source of universal reiﬁcation; and the crisis of the sacred, an inevitable consequence of the destructive criticism of Christianity during the Enlightenment. The combination of these three events had created a particularly intense state of anomie and strengthened the desire for a radically different order of things, which set forth what Talmon has called the “religion of Revolution.”1 The latter had been perceived from generation to generation as the universal remedy for the triple crisis being experienced by Europe—the crisis of legitimization, the crisis of redistribution, and the crisis of secularization—the great surgical operation that would ﬁnally heal the structure of society. Humanity as a whole was on the brink of a huge upheaval on both the historical and cosmic levels, which would destroy the roots of its unhappiness and launch a period of freedom, equality, and brotherhood.2 The change would be extremely painful, but a new completely transformed world would arise upon the ruins of the old one.3 Thus, the human odyssey was on the verge of coming to a happy ending. It was not a question of turning away from capitalist bourgeoisie, for that had already been condemned by history. Instead, a revolutionary apocalypse was knocking at the door, announcing the imminent and much-awaited liberation from evil. With the violent overturning of the existing state of things, what Christianity had promised—the death of the “old Adam” and the birth of the “new man”—was about to come true. This was precisely Friedrich Schlegel’s intuition, when he pinpointed the “revo-

60

Revolutionary Apocalypse

lutionary desire to create the Reign of God as the beginning of the Modern Age.”4 In order to understand the meaning of these words beholding one of the greatest secrets of the last two centuries, it is important to analyze the colossal event, whose consequences are still visible and ﬁnal outcome is unknown. This epochal event was denominated by Hegel, before Nietzsche, as “death of God” and by Weber, following Schiller, as “disenchantment of the world.” The two expressions are equivalent. They indicate the historical and cultural development that sociologists usually label as secularization. It is the loss of plausibility of the religious outlook on the world and the corresponding narrowing of the sphere of the sacred. Such a phenomenon is strictly related to the transition from a “closed society” to an “open society”5—thus modernization—and it represents one of its most typical and meaningful features. The closed society is distinguished by the fact that tradition not only rules all human aspects of life but is as well inﬂuenced by the sacred: therefore this characteristic confers upon tradition an almost absolute authority and controlling disposition. In other words, tradition and religion appear to be one, or at least two objects closely linked. The individual in the closed society interacts within a system of symbols—beliefs, laws, values, myths—invested with sacredness. Therefore, Howard Becker has rightly described the traditional society as sacred.6 In fact, in the traditional society the sacred can expand anywhere and penetrate anything; it works everywhere, it governs even the most basic aspects of daily life—food, hygiene, clothing, and so forth— and guarantees a strong intellectual and moral unity. With the introduction of modern forces into the structure of traditional society, one witnesses the progressive decay of the sacred aspect of tradition, the exclusion of hierocratic institutions and the “privatization” of religion. The consequences of this development were so destructive for tradition that Rene´ Gue´non has described them as “satanic.”7 When exposed to a critical analysis, the religious view of the world, which attributes a moral and metaphysical meaning to the human condition, came to be seen as a huge deceptive mythology. Secularization is precisely that: the unfolding of the profane at the expense of the sacred, the demystiﬁcation of the religion of the ancestors, and the weakening of the controlling disposition of the standard model of thinking, perceiving, and acting inherited from the forefathers. Modernization and secularization, therefore, developed simultaneously, the latter being but the shadow of the former. Truly, wherever the “science of profanity” tries to undermine the “science of the sacred,” everything is questioned and translated before the “court of reason” for ruthless examination. Thus starts the so-called “age of criticism,” according to the Critica della ragion pura. The outcome is that the past is progressively transformed into a heap of superstitions, and the mandatory institutions no longer justiﬁed by tradition come to be seen by the public as mere mechanisms of domination.

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

61

It is not that the sacred vanishes completely. One is unaware of societies completely lacking hierocratic practices and institutions. Even in our postindustrial societies—the current philosophical trend quite arbitrarily likes to deﬁne them as postmodern8—they continue to practice their typical functions. However, their parental power is diminished as soon as the controlling disposition of speciﬁc religious values is weakened. As a result, religion has little inﬂuence on the thoughts and actions of most individuals and appears to be “as if isolated from the other aspects of their lives.”9 The ﬁnal outcome is that, whereas in a traditional society atheism is an individual phenomenon and faith a collective one, in a modern society—or in the secular city, so called by Harvey Cox10—“scepticism is part of an everyday reality,”11 and religion is a choice.12 Up until then, religion had always been a given reality, something an individual carried within himself forever and from which he was never freed. One was born Christian as one was born French or English, and there was no possibility to cease being one or the other. It is hardly necessary to underline that before the Industrial Revolution had involved the subordinate classes in the Great Transformation, atheism had only concerned the European e´lites. In the eighteenth century, it expressed itself as an outstanding sociological event. Nothing about the religious tradition was spared the criticism of the enlightenment. In particular, reason attacked the providential view of history, founded on the idea that “everything converges toward the same purpose”13 and accordingly humanity is a gigantic caravan marching toward a predetermined destination: the reign of God. The Age of Enlightenment replaced this view with an image of a strictly machinedriven world, where there is no room for ultimate motives. The only concession is that religion is useful for the upkeep of social order in that it “controls” the working classes’ expectations, by making them submissive toward the established authorities, and that reason can coexist with a vague deism without doctrines and cult practices. At ﬁrst, the mechanistic concept of the world was welcomed as a remarkable triumph of reason and as an exciting redemption from the yoke of superstition that had kept humanity in chains for millennia. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Romantic intellectuals were horriﬁed to realize that the world had ceased to be a moral macrocosm animated by an immanent telos and had been transformed into an indecipherable and uncontrollable machine. No one better than David Strauss has described the ontological anguish experienced by the intellectuals when faced with the acknowledgement that “the Gods had abandoned the world” (Hoelderlin): “The disappearance of a faith in God’s Divine Intervention is actually part of the more signiﬁcant loss deriving from the detachment from Christianity. One pictures one’s self in the mighty machine of the world with its dented gears that swirl around whirring, its heavy hammers and pistons plunging with deafening noise, never knowing if one will be caught and cut up by a wheel for a careless gesture, or squashed by a hammer. At ﬁrst, this feeling of impotence is frightening. One’s own

62

Revolutionary Apocalypse

desire is not enough to change the world, in fact common sense tells one that the world effectively is such a device.”14 The transition from the Enlightenment’s Stimmung to the Romantic Stimmung consists in this: the Enlightenment thinkers, with a certain superﬁciality, farewelled the loss of Christianity as a liberation, while Romantic theorists experienced it as a moral and metaphysical tragedy. They realized that the disillusioned individual was now alone, abandoned and powerless and forced to wander in a universe deprived of an immanent telos and seemingly senseless and amoral. Hence, an absurd and intolerable reality where “every corner was obstructed for the sacred.”15 The ultrasensitive world, the world of thoughts and ideals—the metasystem from which stemmed the meaning of the structure—that for centuries Western inhabitants had considered as the true world, was losing any real strength, and all the beliefs and convictions collapsed. At this moment, nihilism, “the most terrifying of guests,” entered the scene. While it was “scattering its shadows”16 all over Europe, a new anthropological species came into being: “the orphans of God”: those who, though abandoned by the faith of their ancestors, were dominated by the “nostalgia for the absolute Other.”17 How to escape the impasse created by the profane criticism of the philosophes? How to nourish hope in an environment conforming to the deepest desires of the soul? If we ignore these questions, we will never be able to understand the meaning of Hegel’s titanic and speculative venture. His fundamental plan was to render an objective explanation to reality, showing how it still had an intimate rationality, in spite of the disappearance of faith in God, which explains why Nietzsche has described Hegel as “the great non conformist par excellence.” In fact, Hegel tried to delay the nihilistic consequences of God’s death, by demonstrating that thanks to a sixth sense—the historical sense—there was an immanent telos in universal history, which was visible as in ﬁligree. Therefore, life ceased to be a crazy adventure and became a progressive march toward freedom. The accuracy of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Hegel’s historicism18 is conﬁrmed by the fact that Hegel himself introduces his philosophy as “a theodicy, a justiﬁcation of God.”19 Aided by dialectics—which insofar as “self thinking of the Logos”20 does not provide “knowledge of mundane affairs but knowledge of the non-mundane, of that which is eternal”21—theodicy demonstrates how and why “the world’s history is none other than the plan of Providence.”22 Thus, Hegel’s theodicy consists of substituting the transcendental God of the Judaic and Christian tradition with an immanent God—the Spirit—and the belief that even evil has a positive role in the subtle plan that dominates universal history. In such a way, the world returns to its primordial state before the vanishing of Christianity and becomes a mechanism of redemption. The nihilist threat—“the loss of every single value of the previous absolute principles”23 originating from the discovery that “being is unnecessary”24 and that there is no reliable answer to the terrible metaphysical question “Why in

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

63

general does being exist and not nihility”25—is therefore removed from human sight. Hegel’s answer to God’s death is certainly brilliant but irremediably intellectual26 and thence constitutively incapable of indicating a strategy prone to halting what Nietzsche was later to portray as the painful “rise of the desert.”27 The answer conceived by Marx had a totally different impact. He promptly realized that the Hegelian theodicy changed nothing. It did not eliminate evil; it limited itself to exorcising it and, in addition, by claiming to demonstrate that all that was real was rational, it ended up justifying it. It was necessary to overcome the Hegelian theodicy, maintaining, however, its positive side and precisely the idea that one could assign a telos to reality, without having the God of the Bible intervene. According to Marx, this was only possible by assigning to dialectics, besides the ability to foresee the ultimate purpose of humanity’s journey, also an absolute transforming faculty, changing the image of the philosopher into an activist thrown heart and soul into a battle without boundaries against the perverse powers that prevented self-fulﬁllment according to the deep essence. Brieﬂy, with Marx’s dialectic, gnosis changes from contemplative to activist and for this reason becomes a belligerent and revolutionary call, directed toward all “God’s orphans,” allowing them to become Promethean builders of the millenarian Kingdom of Liberty. This was an operation Marx improved by blending the “dilemma of salvation” with the “issue of justice” and consequently assigning a dual functional task to the communist revolution: a soteriological one and an ethical political one. In other words, Marx proclaimed that the Revolution, by eradicating the roots of alienation, would end the scandal of human contingency, as well as the crime of exploitation. Such interpretation represented an exciting prospect for all the intellectuals who were experiencing God’s death as a tragedy: it gave them a redeeming mission; it bestowed a meaning upon existence and provided an escape from the desert of nihilism. 2. On the other hand, the “orphans of God”—the intellectuals with the prophetical-messianic calling of permanent revolution—were not alone in being condemned by the capitalist bourgeoisie to unhappiness and alienation. The victims of the Great Transformation were millions. They were the “outcasts of the industrial society,” the “excluded” from property and therefore from the advantages of the civilization of wealth. Liberal emancipation had resulted in the emancipation only of a small group of the privileged, the rise to social power of a class formed by all those whose abilities to negotiate— wealth, education, technical expertise, talent—had equipped them to participate successfully in the catalytic game. Faced with this “new aristocracy” spontaneously assembled along with the growing process of marketing, those who had no other option but to sell their labor on the market represented the “internal proletariat” in the civilisation of wealth: they were within society but not part of society, condemned as they were to being “excluded from the

64

Revolutionary Apocalypse

political and human city and rejected in the unreal capitalist city,”28 to the extent that even the conservative Disraeli could not refrain from noticing that “two nations” had formed within European society and that there were no sympathetic interactions between the two. They “reciprocally ignored each other’s customs, thoughts and emotions, as if they were from different areas and distinct planets created by opposite developments, fed different foods, had different rules of behaviour and had not been governed by the same law.”29 The alarming phenomenon of the “two nations” was the disruptive consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which was spreading everywhere, the catalytic logic generating “the rapid alienation of the working classes and the downgrading of the majority of producers.”30 The division of labor from other activities and the generalization of contractual freedom activated a progressive course of annihilation of all organic forms of existence and substituted them with a different atomistic and individualistic type of social organization. In reality, this meant that the primary groups and noncontractual associations— neighborhood, family, corporation, religious cults, and so forth—were threatened by extinction, since they were incompatible with the recruiting and exploitation of manual labor through the impersonal laws of the market. The result was the dissolution of the traditional communities where formerly individuals lived and beneﬁted from a guaranteed status and at least a minimum of solidarity. The general outcome was that “the majority of the rural population, organically brought up in an agricultural environment and tied to the earth, was uprooted and became as mobile as quicksand.”31 The factory system acted as a strong magnet able to generate a gigantic mobilization of the population: an enormous number of peasants were taken away from their ancestral social-cultural habitat and thrown into the factory system, giving birth to a new historical subject: the industrial proletariat. Social mobilization is an extremely complex event meticulously analyzed by Gino Germani, who divides it into six instances:32 1. a state of integration in a speciﬁc structural model; 2. a phase of schism altering the actual level of familiarization, weakening the harmonious structure of the system; 3. a stage of dislocation of individuals and groups who are ﬁrst “displaced” and then “forced” into a new net of social relations; 4. a reaction from the groups who were displaced and then alienated and who are psychologically available to undertake new models of socialization and conduct; 5. a constructive frame of time characterized by several answers proposed by the dislocated groups in response to their existential dilemma; and 6. a state of reintegration when the alienated groups discover new and more satisfactory social and cultural ties.

The phase that is of particular interest for this study is the third, when the mobilized social classes are diverged and thrown into a completely changed

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

65

world. “Many important old social, economical and psychological bonds are eroded or broken”33 and the dislocated individuals ﬁnd themselves in a typical situation of displacement that generates a “growing feeling of loneliness and insecurity”34 in their souls. The “rootless” are those who, being fully attacked by the course of social mobilization, have lost their ancestry. Therefore, they are forced to lived as “aliens” in a world they daily perceive as foreign and careless toward their needs. In other words, the detachment from traditional community ties greatly isolates the dislocated masses, transforming them into a crowd of aliens. Isolated, deprived of traditional groups of referral, abandoned to themselves, each member of the mobilized group is condemned to live full of resentment and anger, with a painful sense of exclusion. The core of the matter is that one of an individual’s essential needs is to be part of a group where he or she can receive moral and material expressions of support in moments of extreme necessity. This concept has stimulated Simone Weil to write, “Rooting is perhaps the soul’s most important and misunderstood requisite. It is one of the most difﬁcult to deﬁne. An individual has roots thanks to his authentic active and natural participation in the life of the community which preserves certain treasures of the past and certain future intuitions.”35 One can say that, when an individual has lost his feeling of belonging by being rejected from the ancestral community and thrown into a foreign or even hostile cultural environment, he loses direction like a foreigner not pressured by tradition. From that point he is a potential enemy of society ready to contest the prevailing table of values and become a professional demolisher of the established order. All these phenomena—loss of community, alienation, resentment, and so on—can be summed up with the expression proletarianization. This not only meant the transformation of peasants and artisans into disciplined and depersonalized workers in the factory system, but most of all “a complete displacement”36 that stimulated, if not their material need,37 certainly their spiritual one. In fact, the industrial proletariat simultaneously paying the costs of wild accumulation—exhausting work, a rigorous military discipline, terrifying working conditions, and the like—found him or herself in the capitalist society as an “exile population” forced to live in a “new type of prison”—the factory—being subordinate to the moral pressure of a “new jailer”—the clock.38 For this reason, Henri de Man has described the working conditions of the nineteenth century as a true “crisis of abandonment.”39 In fact, everything happened in such a way that European society, having initiated the path of laissez-faire, downgraded direct producers, turning them into a mere workforce, therefore goods among goods, and showed a total lack of interest in their destiny. The result: the direct producers did not have any other solution but to reestablish through spontaneous association these community bonds the self-regulating market tended ruthlessly to destroy. This gave birth to several social reinstatement institutions starting from unions, whose main function was to give workers a new community of belonging.40

66

Revolutionary Apocalypse

All this was a logical consequence: “wherever the market is abandoned to self-regulation, it recognizes only the dignity of the object instead of that of the individual, ignoring duties of brotherhood and compassion and the original human relations beheld by personal communities. These are obstacles for the market’s free development; the speciﬁc interests of the market in turn are a speciﬁc testing ground for all such relations. Rational interests strongly determine market development. The free market not tied up by ethical laws and exploiting interests and a situation of monopoly together with its bargaining is considered by every ethics as unworthy of brothers. The market place, in contrast with all the other communities that always imply brotherhood in addition to kinship, is foreign to any form of fraternity.”41 This translated into Toennies’s language means the market—where the social actors through contracts exchange goods and services only based on mere lucrative calculations, excluding by principle any form of solidarity except for the one dictated by convenience—tends to devour the typical ties of the Gemeinschaft and to substitute them with the typical relationships of the Gesellschaft, therefore transforming “a durable and authentic cohabitation” into a “passing and superﬁcial one.”42 As a consequence, the segregation of the social body occurs with the “dissolution” of all loving and moral elements between partners. The same word socius experiences a semantic alternation: no longer does it mean a member of a community bonded by sympathetic ties; from now on—and with the expansion of the catalytic logic—it indicates an individual who, having invested capital, will share the proﬁts (and eventual losses) of a commercial company, therefore, a selﬁsh person, exclusively driven by a utilitarian motive and by a precise calculation of the expenses and the returns. In fact, capitalism is justly described as an “organisation of selﬁsh people” by both Marx and, signiﬁcantly, the liberal Keynes.43 That is, an amoral, if not an immoral society, whose fundamental principle is self government of the economy, namely the deﬁnite separation between the business world and everything that does not belong to the proﬁt sphere. Rationality, interpreted in its etymological meaning,44 must dominate uncontested the entire economy. Since “only a fraction of the needs of social existence can function without material means of one type or another,”45 the separation between the marketplace and the other domains tends to become the acquisitive and calculating spirit’s invasion and colonization of the community. The consequence: the moral, religious, political principles, and the like are expunged from community life or, anyway, “neutralized” so they are unable to restrain the logic of proﬁt, upset economic calculation, and hold back the freedom embarked upon. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his profound analyses, “Normally economic order is simply a function of the social structure in which it is contained.”46 With the development of capitalism—that is, with the “progressive freeing of the economy from everything that does not represent economy—a unique event occurs in the history of humanity: not only the radical separation of economic aspects from the social structure and their establish-

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

67

ment in an independent domain,”47 but also the submission of human life to the impersonal and amoral laws of the market place, while proﬁt becomes the “great idol of the time, toward whom all strengths must be applied and all talents must pay their respects.”48 3. So one should not be surprised that all during the twentieth century, the introduction of the self-regulated market in European society created the process of destruction of institutions and traditional aspects of living denominated as “cultural disintegration” by Robert Nisbet.49 It broke traditional ties of solidarity, atomized the social structure, disrupted intermediate communities, and left dislocated workers alone, faced with a life without support and any kind of protection. These workers, aware of being abandoned, concluded that society was hostile toward them or was guilty of indifference, since it did not protect them or help them during their harsh autoplastic process of adaptation. More and more they detached themselves, until they more or less withdrew completely from society and lived as outcasts. Hence, the process of proletarianization is mostly to be interpreted as a terrible cultural deracination that created an enormous army of aliens abandoned to themselves. The factory system broke the protective sheath of traditions that had surrounded workers and forced them to face absolutely new problems they were not prepared for. Their “quiet vegetative life,” to use one of Engel’s expressions,50 had been overturned by the methods of industrial production. The subsequent process of amalgamation, urbanization, and standardization of workers gave birth to the particular existential condition Marx has described in a masterly manner with the following words: “Within the capitalist system, all the ways to increase the productive social strength occur at the expense of the worker as an individual. All the means of production are transformed into means of domination and exploitation of the producer, that mutilate the worker, making of him a partial human being, humiliating the worker as an insigniﬁcant appendix of a machine, and destroying the content of his labour, the content of the actual product; the worker’s intellectual strengths are estranged from the working process to the same extent as science is incorporated as an independent strength. The working conditions are deformed; during labour the individual is subject to the worst hateful oppression, his very life is changed into labour time, wife and children are sentenced to death under the Juggernaut wheel of capital.”51 The portrayal of the working class’s situation in an ofﬁcial document from the Prussian government is no less sinister: “Nothing could be expected from the factory owners, unless legal measures (vetoes and regulations) forced them to allow spare time for education. The factory owners were ﬁrmly convinced that the State’s destiny relied on their factory’s performance. Their worst nightmare: a phaseout of even the smallest department in the factory, a fall in the sales and the need to lower the cost of products. They are used to considering workers as casual machine appendixes; all they have to do is en-

68

Revolutionary Apocalypse

sure that their spirit is able to avoid the laziness of the body and purposely continue the conforming and appropriate movements.”52 Identical is the picture Michelet was to draw 20 years later: the fanatics of production for production caught up in the awful gear of capitalist competition that did not leave them in peace “obligated many people to amalgamate in the city and in the countryside; these recruits of labour they compared to tireless machines. It was as if they were applying the great imperial principle to the factory system, sacriﬁcing people in order to shorten the war. Work had to be done at the charge, in haste; too bad for those who died.”53 In conclusion, “the relationship between the factory owners and the worker was not a human one but merely economical”54; the former considered the latter as a machine’s appendix to be used in the most opportunistic manner, ignoring its human nature and considering the worker only a means of production. Not that the working conditions in the ancien re´gime had ever been idyllic, but at least the master had felt responsible for certain obligations toward his worker—protection, administration of justice, and so forth. Contrarily, the capitalists, although expecting the workers to happily accept their subordinate position, did not believe they had any moral responsibility. The only goal was to exploit their labor according to the harsh principles of competition and ignore any worry related to their destiny. Tocqueville had foreseen all this with his usual, extraordinary lucidity: “Although, by nature, the workers did not have any interest in the aristocracy’s destiny [one reads in Democracy in America] they did not feel less obligated to sacriﬁce themselves for their owners; and the latter, though believing they belonged to a different race from that of their slaves, still felt that duty and honour obligated them to protect those who lived on their land, at the expense of their own life.”55 The relationship between the new aristocracy of wealth—the capitalist bourgeoisie—and the modern working class was totally different, Tocqueville remarked: “The aristocracy born from commerce never allocates itself amongst the working population it rules; its aim is not to govern it, but to exploit it. Such an aristocracy cannot have a great inﬂuence on those it exploits. Even though it is able to keep them under oppression for some time, sooner or later they will ﬂee. This aristocracy is incapable of desiring and reacting. The landed aristocracy of the past centuries was legally obligated, or believed itself forced by tradition, to help workers and reduce poverty. But today our manufacturing aristocracy, after impoverishing and brutalising the people it uses, abandons them in times of trouble to public charity for nourishment. Therefore the interactions between workers and owners are frequent but there is not a true friendship.”56 This concept pushes one to correct the vulgar interpretation of the degradation of workers in the capitalist society of the last century as being determined exclusively by exploitation. Economic exploitation in itself had not caused the “proletarization of the souls”; this was caused by the “disruption of the cultural environment,”57 the vanishing of any form of solidarity, since

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

69

all social interactions—even those between owner and workers—can be ethically disciplined, except for industrial relations within a system based on a self-regulated market.58 Thus, behind the social protest that attacked the Europe of the last century, one should perceive the “growing anxiety of being threatened by an increasing isolation of the individual in an atomised society, where the religion of the social traditional society did not have any function and had not been replaced.”59 Simultaneously, the spreading of the idea of equality produced with varying intensity and speed a transformation of relationships between owners and workers, with the result that the entire system of expectations was restructured. In our century, this cultural phenomenon referred to by sociologists as “the revolution of growing expectations” has lost its explosive aspect and become one of the constitutive elements of modern industrial societies. However, when such revolution started, it predictably generated a general crisis in social relations that Tocqueville has described in the following manner: “During the transition from one social state to another, there is always a period when the soul is undecided between the aristocratic concept of subordination and the democratic notion of obedience. Compliance loses then its morality in the eyes of the person who obeys, who no longer considers it to be some sort of divine obligation, but still does not look upon it from a purely human perspective: it is neither sacred nor just; the person accepts obedience as something degrading and utilitarian. In this situation, the workers perceive a confused and incomplete image of equality. At the time, they are unable to distinguish if this equality to which they are entitled exists also in the servile condition or only outside of it. Deep in their hearts they rebel against a state of inferiority they themselves comply with and from which they beneﬁt. They agree to serve and are ashamed to obey. They love the advantages of slavery but not their owner. Perhaps it is their right to be owners and they tend to consider their ruler as an unjust encroacher of that right. At this point, the scene is sadly similar to that of present political society. It becomes the place of a deaf and internal war between two ever suspicious and rival powers. The owner is both spiteful and merciful; the worker malicious and willing. The former wants to use dishonest restrictions to avoid the duty of protecting and paying, the latter of obeying. The reins of domestic administration wave between them and both make every effort to catch them. The lines dividing authority from tyranny, freedom from leave, right from fact, appear to be intricate and confused and no one knows exactly who or what one can or should do. This state is not democratic, it is revolutionary.”60 In this case, it should not be surprising that the dominant classes of the time—the aristocracy, which, in spite of the earthquake in ’89, still controlled civil service61 and the bourgeoisie, who governed the productive process with mad and ruthless energy—perceived the industrial proletariat as a revolutionary mass surrounding the city, similar to a besieging army, judging it as a “dangerous class”62 to fear. “The bourgeois individual [Michelet believed in

70

Revolutionary Apocalypse

1846] is afraid, is shouting, is asking for protection. The old bourgeoisie was at least consistent. It was glad of its privileges, it wanted to expand them and looked to the future. The present one looks down; it sees the multitude approaching behind its back, in the same way as it had done. It does not want that and withdraws and solidarises with power . . . The majority of governments have speculated on this sad progression of fear that, in the long run, becomes moral death. They have thought that the dead can be better manipulated than the living. They have shown two medusa heads to the terriﬁed bourgeoisie, in order to ﬁll them with fear of the people: in the long run, these two heads, terrorism and communism, have turned them into stone.”63 The two medusa heads were not only capable of multiplying real dangers but most of all were capable of creating imaginary dangers, inhabiting the bourgeois imagination with many kinds of phobias. As an outcome, the European bourgeoisie lived in a state of siege and was literally terriﬁed by the alarming presence of the internal proletariat and of the communist movement—“an excellent political machine for intimidating the owners,” Michelet’s deﬁnition is appropriate64—whose threatening war cry was “expropriate the expropriators.” In addition, the workers, realizing the “bourgeoisie was not compassionate toward their troubles,”65 started to organize themselves and create their speciﬁc unions for disputes, protection, and reinstatement. The result: class struggle became a permanent phenomenon and frequently a veritable “social war”66 between those who lived in a “poor condition without any hope”67 and felt excluded from the bourgeois city and those who had barricaded themselves in that city as advocates of civilization against barbarity. Obviously, a society based on these weak foundations was an unwell society. Its components, instead of being oriented toward mutual goals, were in contrast with each other and driven by feelings of mutual extraneousness and hostility. One of the more typical and severe end results deriving from this pathological situation was the creation of a subclass of experts in symbolic production “having unique features and claiming to guide or shape consciences, to be political educators and even protagonists of history.”68 These “intellectual outcasts”—as a rule longing for absoluteness and dominated by Promethean fantasies whose function was to offset their frustrations—would not cooperate with the ruling classes—aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and the elevated clergy— and openly opposed them, in the name of a social ideal that was nothing but the equivalent of the Christian utopia of universal brotherhood. With their pedagogical and revolutionary action they sought to stimulate in the exploited an awareness of the injustice they experienced daily, in order to mobilize them against what they considered to be the only cause of their material and moral sorrows: private property. United by the same feeling—the awareness of being underprivileged, without a community of belonging and therefore condemned to alienation and misery—the radical intellectuals and displaced workers pre-

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

71

dictably69 became allies in a deadly war against the civilization of possessions. The declared objective: to rebuild ab imis the social order according to the principles of justice that had been denied by capitalism in the last century when it had chosen laissez-faire as its guiding principle. This is what led to the revolutionary secession of the internal proletariat of Western society in a period of uncontrolled accumulation. It was an intellectual, moral, and emotional secession that took on the appearance of a socialist movement, incorporating “certain eschatological elements of Christianity—its view of the development of history and redemption, the division of the City of mankind and the City of God.”70 In its numerous expressions, the socialist movement was the voice of a great collective resentment, a “cry of pain and sometimes of anger”—to use Durkheim’s deﬁnition71—of the victims of the ﬁrst Industrial Revolution and an amazing challenge against the “capitalist’s absolute and uncontrolled power,”72 whose productive fury was such that Sombart recognized something “diabolical” in its product.73 And in fact, to the “damned of the Earth”74 of the last century, capitalism appeared to be an infernal mechanism, generator of an indecipherable and uncontrollable world, in which any form of solidarity had vanished. NOTES 1. Jacob L. Talmon, Political Messianism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), p. 18. 2. See Edward Hyams, The Millennium Postponed (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), p. 3 et seq. 3. “The old world [wrote Richard Wagner in 1849] is in pieces and on its ashes will arise another, because a sublime god, the revolution, is descending and ﬂuttering the wings of storm . . . Everyone awaits the revolution . . . to free the world from its afﬂictions and to create a new world capable of making everyone happy” (Scritti scelti [Parma: Guanda, 1988], pp. 101 and 104). 4. Max Stirner had an identical theory: “At the dawn of new times a Man-God is born. . . . The Man has killed God in order to take his place as the only God that reigns in the heavens” (The Ego and His Own). 5. The “closed society” and the “open society” are obviously two mental constructs, or, if one prefers to use Weberian terminology, two ideal types. They were made famous by Popper, who ﬁrst made systematic use of them in his famous work The Open Society and His Enemies. The most penetrating and useful analysis of the transition from the closed to the open society is, however, Ortega y Gasset’s posthumous work, Una interpretacio´n de la historia universal (see Luciano Pellicani, La sociologia storica di Ortega y Gasset [Milan: SugarCo, 1987], p. 95 et seq.). 6. Howard Becker, Societa` e valori (Milan: Comunita`, 1963), p. 63. 7. Rene´ Gue´non, La crise du monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 157. Identical is the theory of Julius Evola: “Mechanical civilisation, sovereign economy and the civilisation of production and consumption foster the exaltation of the future and of progress, of a vital and unlimited impetus—in short, the expression of the devil in

72

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the modern world” (Rivolta contro il mondo moderno [Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1984], p. 407). 8. It is pointless to discuss the “end of the modern age” for the simple fact that as inhabitants of the secular city, we are up to our necks in it. The only solution is to return to the sacred-magic city. But of this there is no sign at all. (See Luciano Pellicani, Modernizzazione e secolarizzazione [Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997].) 9. Rene´ Gue´non, Simboli della scienza sacra (Milan: Adelphi, 1990), p. 16. 10. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: S.C.M. Press, 1965). 11. Julius Evola, Cavalcare la tigre (Milan: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1971), p. 22. 12. See Lucien Febvre, Le proble`me de l’incroyance au XVI sie`cle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968), p. 307 et seq. 13. J. B. Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 428. 14. Quoted from Friedrich Heer, Europe Mother of Revolutions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). 15. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertation of the German University” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT-Press, 1993). 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, transl. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 17. Max Horkheimer, La nostalgia del totalmente Altro (Brescia: Queriniana, 1972), p. 15. 18. Benedetto Croce also considered Hegel’s historicism a godless theodicy. How else should we understand his famous statement that Hegel’s greatness was to be sought in the fact that he had “redeemed the world from evil” (Indagini su Hegel e schiarimenti ﬁlosoﬁci [Bari: Laterza, 1954], p. 78). Nietzsche grasped the illusory aspect of Hegel’s exercise, while Croce considered it an answer at last to the tragedy of the death of God. It gave an objective meaning to history and therefore to the human condition. In short, for Croce the idea of history being a plan of Providence was the most effective barrier against the advance of nihilism and the only “philosophical strategy” for restoring the sovereignty of the absolutes threatened by spreading skepticism. 19. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa della storia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967), p. 30. 20. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). 21. G.W.F. Hegel, Filosoﬁa della religione, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1983), pp. 28–29. 22. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa della storia, vol. 1, p. 65. 23. Martin Heidegger, Sentieri interrotti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968), p. 205. 24. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Methuen, 1969). 25. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). 26. As was Giovanni Gentile’s answer to the same question. According to actualism, evil—alienation, nature, death, error, contingency—is unreal once man has understood, thanks to the idealistic philosophy, that everything is Spirit and that “the Spirit is the Messiah” who “must come, and does not come without uprooting the plant of evil, that is nature, without destroying this world to establish the Kingdom of God” (Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, vol. 2 [Florence: Sansoni, 1942], p. 369).

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

73

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ditirambi di Dionisio (Milan: Mondadori, 1977), p. 109. 28. Francois Perroux, Alie´nation et socie´te´ industrielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 9 29. Quoted from Gino Germani, Marginality (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980). 30. Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 57. See also P.N. Stearns, ed., The Impact of the Industrial Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). 31. Werner Sombart, Il capitalismo moderno (Turin: UTET, 1967), p. 645. 32. Gino Germani, Sociology of Modernization: Studies on its Historical and Theoretical Aspects with Special Regard to the Latin American Case (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1981). 33. Karl W. Deutsch, “Social Mobilitation and Political Development” in Harry Eckstein and David E. Apter, eds., Comparative Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 583. 34. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 35. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). 36. Max Pietsch, La re´volution industrielle (Paris: Payot, 1963), p. 31. 37. Recent studies have shown that the standard of living of workers improved, albeit in an irregular manner and extremely slowly, also in the ﬁrst phase of the Industrial Revolution (see F. A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954] and Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985], pp. 124 et seq. 38. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 39. Henri De Man, Au dela du marxisme (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 59. 40. In a letter to Engels, Marx remarked that workers like to participate in political meetings. Oddly enough, he added that he didn’t know why. Yet, the reason is obvious: in the Socialist International the workers found those community ties and the solidarity that had been more or less destroyed by the self-regulating economy. According to Julien Benda the workers’ movement “did not come into being because one day the proletarians experienced given economic needs, but because their educators had introduced a moral idea into their conscience and this was stronger than the economic requirement: the idea of their solidarity, of the moral grandeur of their solidarity and a religious idea: the expectation of a better tomorrow, of a new parousia” (Discours a` la nation europe´ene [Paris: Gallimard, 1979], p. 22). 41. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 636f. 42. Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955). 43. “Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in a pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state” (Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 172). “Modern capitalism is absolutely non-religious, lacking in internal unity, without public spirit and often, but not always, a mere conglomeration of owners and parvenus” ( John M. Keynes, Esortazioni e profezie [Milan: Garzanti, 1975], p. 229). 44. “Ratio is the technical term for counting, calculation; . . . it is the act of counting

74

Revolutionary Apocalypse

as it was concretely practised and in the written form” (Emile Benveniste, Il vocabolario delle istituzioni indoeuropee, vol. 1 [Turin: Einaudi, 1976], p. 114). 45. Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966). 46. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 47. Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis (Milan: Adelphi, 1984), p. 21. 48. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). 49. Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, p. 87. 50. Friedrich Engels, “The Situation of the Working Class in England,” in Complete Works, vol. IV, p. 311. See Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1974). 51. Karl Marx, The Capital, in Collected Works, vol. 35, p. 639. 52. Quoted from Jurgen Kucynski, Nascita della classe operaia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1967), p. 41. 53. Jules Michelet, Il popolo, p. 112. 54. Friedrich Engels, The Situation of the Working Class in England, p. 563. 55. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by J. P. Mayer and M. Lerner (London: Fontana, 1968). 56. Ibid., p. 287. 57. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 172. 58. The very speciﬁc nature of Japanese capitalism is conﬁrmation of this. In Japan the market was never allowed to regulate itself, because the managerial elite managed to introduce into companies those ties of hierarchic solidarity that are typical of the feudal world. As a result, “work in Japan is not simply a contractual agreement to obtain a salary but a means of identiﬁcation with a much wider entity—in other words, it gives a gratifying sense of belonging to something greater and more meaningful. For management and for workers there is the idea that a job should probably last until the normal retirement age. For both, this generates a sense of security and also a sense of pride and of loyalty toward the ﬁrm. There is little of the feeling that is so common in the West of being an insigniﬁcant and replaceable cog of a great machine” (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese [Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1981], p. 131). This explains why the Japanese working class did not experience the crisis of abandonment and therefore never felt the need to protest against the system. 59. George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Praeger, 1961), p. 25. 60. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 61. See A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croon Holm, 1981). 62. J. P. Rioux, La re´volution industrielle (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 180. 63. Jules Michelet, Il popolo, pp. 138–139. 64. Ibid., p. 139. 65. Felix Ponteil, Les classes bourgeoises et l’ave`nement de la de´mocratie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968), p. 126. 66. Friedrich Engels, The Situation of the Working Class, p. 329. 67. Edourad Dolle´ans, Storia del movimento operaio, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1977), p. 17. 68. Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), p. 125.

God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned

75

69. The possibility of a revolutionary alliance between “God’s orphans” and the workers had been predicted with extraordinary lucidity by the Prussian minister Count von Galen: “The old year concluded with a famine [we read in a letter dated January 1847] the new one is starting with starvation. Spiritual and physical indigence is spreading across Europe in the most alarming manner: one without God, the other without bread. There will be trouble if their hands meet!” (Quoted from Lewis B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals [London: Oxford University Press, 1946]). 70. Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 284. 71. Emile Durkheim, Le socialisme (Paris: PUF, 1971), p. 37. 72. Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cape, 1928). 73. Werner Sombart, Il socialismo tedesco (Padua: Editrice il Corallo, 1981), p. 15. 74. This is the expression used by Robert Owen to deﬁne the “internal proletariat” of industrial civilization. One hundred and ﬁfty years later, Franz Fanon was to deﬁne the “external proletariat.”

CHAPTER 5

Waiting the Reign

1. Socialism was much more than the display of the internal proletariat’s resentment of Western civilization and a system that claimed to expel any form of solidarity and any principle of justice from social life in the name of the impersonal laws of economy. It was a therapeutic diagnosis of the intellectual and moral anarchy that Europe had fallen into, a diagnosis that, by showing a glimpse of opportunity to materialize the Christian dream of universal renovatio,1 had contributed signiﬁcantly to liberating the working classes from what Edward Thompson has happily denominated “the millenarianism of despair.”2 In reality, one should talk not of one but of many socialisms, since the emergence of several cults is what characterized the historical existence of European society during the uncontrolled growth of capital. Many of these sects had an eschatological vision of history that brought them to judge the existing order “an overturned world” destined to be swept away to make room for an absolute new order.3 Among these cults, through an almost Darwinist process of assimilation and selection, in the last two decades of the century one in particular—the one founded by Marx and Engels—became that “Church built on the proletariat rock” foreseen and predicted by Lassalle, just before his premature death. The rise of Marxism to the orthodox rank of the continental socialist movement4 occurred thanks to a harsh battle fought on two fronts. On one side, it was able to keep alive the “spirit of opposition”5 among the working classes by contrasting any reformist temptation; on the other, it successfully curbed the eschatological impatience of the extremists who believed they could demolish the supremacy of capital with a sudden attack. Marx opposed both these

78

Revolutionary Apocalypse

strategies with his strategy of controversial expectancy of “hour x.” This plan had been elaborated by Marx and Engels when they became aware that the socialist movement was caught between the devil of reformism and the deep blue sea of extremism. To embrace the reform method meant to lose sight of the ﬁnal goal—the millenary reign of freedom—identifying socialism with the improvement of workers’ living conditions in the institutional setting of liberal civilization; but to undertake the strategy of frontal attack was equivalent to condemning the “party of revolution” to regular defeat by the “party of conservation.” A totally different approach was therefore necessary in order to be constantly ready for the predicted violent overturning of the existing order without brainlessly throwing the revolutionary forces into campaigns that had no chance of success. Thus, war to knife against the capitalist bourgeois society was the message of Marx. Not a party warfare as the extremists had predicted, but trench warfare, aiming for the progressive spiritual dissolution of the “class enemy.” Marx and Engels had reached this conclusion when they were forced to acknowledge that the ﬂame of revolution had died down and the reactionary forces were going to prevail for a long period of time. At the brink of the 1848 Revolution, their position had been no different from that of most extremist cults. Like the “blanquistes,” they were neoJacobins, fanatically convinced that there existed objective conditions within the European society for launching the ﬁnal attack against the fortress of capital. Already in the Manifesto they had proclaimed the “inevitable and imminent fall of today’s bourgeois property.”6 When, on February 24, Paris had risen against Louis Philippe and the revolution had started to spread all over the continent, Marx and Engels immediately predicted that the days of the “old spectral world”7 were numbered and that a “general ﬁre was going to burn down the old European institutions, enlightening the winning nations towards a free, happy and glorious future.”8 By logic, the evolutionary theory formulated in Ideologia tedesca of revolution as the inevitable outlet for the process of industrialization should have led them to conclude that the material preconditions for the emancipation of the workers were not yet mature and that, therefore, it was unrealistic to expect the proletarian party to win. Besides, it only existed in their vivid imagination. Yet, with an astonishing non sequitur, they hoped for—rather, predicted as imminent—a conﬂict of planetary dimensions that would crush the only industrial country of the time—England—where, moreover, the crisis of Chartism had indicated how the class struggle was not oriented toward nonrevolutionary solutions.9 “Europe’s redemption [we read in one of the many articles in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where Marx and Engels repeated their conviction, all-pervaded by eschatological impatience, that the bourgeois revolution was the “prelude of the proletarian revolution”]10 both the oppressed nationalities conquest of independence and the fall of feudal absolutism, depends on the victorious insurrection of the French working class. But in

Waiting the Reign

79

France every social uprising necessarily drowns before the English middle classes, ie., before Great Britain’s industrial and commercial supremacy in the world. In France, and in the European continent in general, any partial social reform is, and will remain, a pious and empty desire with regards to its chances of achieving permanent absoluteness. Old England will only be overturned by a world war. That alone can provide the Chartist party and the organised English workers party with the conditions to conduct a triumphant revolution against their great oppressors. Only with the Chartists at the head of the English government will social revolution go from the reign of utopia to the reign of reality. Any European war in which England is involved will be a world war. It will be in Canada, as well as in Italy, in East India and in Prussia, in Africa as well as on the banks of the Danube. The European war is the ﬁrst consequence of the victory of the workers’ revolution in France. As in Napoleon’s times, England will ﬁnd herself at the head of the counterrevolutionary armies but, by that same war, will be thrown at the head of the revolutionary movement and will redeem its debt against the Revolution of the eighteenth century. The summary of 1849 is this: revolutionary insurrection of the French working class, world war.”11 Underlying this prognosis (which is also an action plan instigating civil world war) is the most irrational political passion; that is, law as pantoclastic pathos: “one openly supports the annulment with terror of entire populations, of those who do not have the common sense to submit to the cosmic plan of total and absolute civilisation, who, on the contrary, are so foolish to prevent its achievement.”12 The following is an example of one of Engels’s most terrifying predictions: “The future world war will not only exterminate classes and reactionary dynasties but also entire reactionary populations. And this too is progress.”13 Until the writing of the Meeting of the Central Committee of the League of the Communists, that is, until March 1850, Marx and Engels remained blindly convinced that humanity was very close to the great revolutionary overturning that would end the supremacy of capital. After that, suddenly, and as if struck by a revelation, they launched a violent attack against the “alchemists of revolution” who shared “the ancient alchemists’ mental unbalance and obtuse ﬁxed ideas” and “plunged themselves in smart concepts which would create revolutionary miracles.”14 In the following September, during the Communist League’s Central Committee meeting, for the ﬁrst time they exposed the strategy of trench warfare, based on the idea that workers still had to “exceed ﬁfteen, twenty, ﬁfty years of civil wars in order to change present relations and prepare themselves for taking over power.”15 The revolution ceased to be an event within reach and became a long-term option that was absolutely not to result in compromising with the bourgeoisie. The latter was still the “class enemy” to be destroyed with all means—including, if necessary, terror.16 Given the ease with which the reactionary forces had been able to suppress the European revolutionary movement, it was necessary to prepare spiritually

80

Revolutionary Apocalypse

for a long “crossing of the desert,” giving up senseless attacks that would provide “the enemy with unnecessary opportunities to destroy the workers’ organisations and deprive them of their managers with jail or exile.”17 So a reformist Marx never existed.18 Admittedly, after April 1850, he unceasingly disputed the “alchemists of revolution” but he always did so within a military vision of the class struggle. To the extent that during a conference on September 25, 1871, he conﬁrmed the concept that “the working class would conquer its right to self emancipation on the battle ﬁeld” and therefore it was imperative to form a “proletarian army” and, once victorious, to establish a “proletarian dictatorship.”19 Nor was Marx ever against statism or for autonomous forms of management. Or rather, if he was, it was only for l’espace d’un matin and for exquisitely “strategic” purposes. Thrown by events, though judging the Commune an experiment far from the type of socialism he had in mind,20 Marx did not hesitate to welcome it as the ﬁnally discovered “political structure in which the economic emancipation of labour could occur.”21 As evidence of the instrumental aspect of this opinion, one need only read the following page written by Franz Mehring: However brilliant were in every detail the Commune’s accomplishments, they were in some contrast with the principles Marx and Engels had supported for a quarter of a century and had already proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto. According to their concept, amongst the ﬁnal consequences of the proletarian revolution, there truly was the abolishment of the political organisation called state, but only as a gradual suppression. The main purpose of this organisation has always been to assure through military forces the economic oppression of the majority of workers by a minority consisting exclusively of owners. With the disappearance of the latter vanishes also the need for an oppressive armed power for the State. At the same time Marx and Engels emphasised that, in order to achieve this and other far more important objectives for the future revolution, the working class ﬁrst of all had to seize the organised political power of the State and use it to crush the resistance of the capitalist class and give a new organisation to society. This concept, exposed in the Communist Manifesto did not agree with the praise expressed in the International’s Address of the General Council to the Commune of Paris for having started by eradicating the parasitic State from its foundations.22

In fact, the model of social organization the Communards had in mind, as expressed in the Declaration of the Parisian Population drawn up by the proudhonian Pierre Louis, was based on federalism and mutualism, upon the consistent application of the principle of decentralisation,23 whereas Marx and Engels had always favored “an absolute centralization of power in the hands of the State,24 as well as the “centralisation of all the means of production.”25 One cannot say that after the Communard experiment Marx and Engels converted to proudhonism, since they continued on every occasion26 to question mutualism, reconﬁrming that the key to the emancipation of the workers relied

Waiting the Reign

81

on “the national centralisation of the means of production”27 with the consequent substitution of the “anarchy of the market” with the “single plan.”28 2. From all this it is obvious that Marx and Engels were constantly faithful to the fundamental principles of communism as they had developed them in the 1840s—class struggle, violent revolution, terror, transitional dictatorship, integral state economy29—but, when they realized that the revolutionary drive had exhausted itself, they rediscovered the principle of economic maturity, expressed in Ideologia tedesca but uninhibitedly put aside during the rising of 1848. In such a way, besides explaining the unsuccessful proletarian revolution as a logical consequence of an inadequate development of the productive forces, they could continue to believe that the revolutionary break was inscribed in the “ultimate, deep, essential but hidden fundamental structure”30 of liberal civilization: all one had to do was wait for the Industrial Revolution to produce its overturning effects and to create the material conditions prone for the violent upsetting of the existing order. In conclusion, the destiny of capitalism was marked and nothing or no one could modify it. For this precise reason demobilization was not the solution; on the contrary, it was mandatory to assemble all the available forces and be ready to launch the ﬁnal attack, the inevitable day of settling accounts with the bourgeoisie. Then it becomes clear what the function of The Capital was to be in Marx’s mind. By “scientiﬁcally” demonstrating the inevitable catastrophic collapse of capitalism, it had to prevent the reformist temptation from prevailing among the proletarian masses during the “passage through the desert.” At the same time, Marx had to dissuade workers from following the path indicated by the anarchists who, deceiving themselves and others, expected to defeat the bourgeois state before times were ripe for the ﬁnal victory. Thus, everything depended on the theory of fall. Only if such theory became the worker’s guide would it be possible to avoid the omnipresent danger of the workers becoming integrated in the institutions of liberal civilization, as well as consuming revolutionary energies in hopeless frontal attacks against the fortress of the capital. The fact that Marx, after the failure of the European revolution, dedicated most of his amazing intellectual and moral energies to ﬁght any form of extremism did not mean that he had abandoned the revolutionary domain to side with reformism.31 It only meant he believed that, before launching a ﬁnal attack, it was necessary to wait for the times to be mature. It was equally necessary to ensure that revolutionary tension did not cease during the wait for the ﬁnal battle. Otherwise, what he most revealingly called the “bourgeois infection”32 would spread to the working class and, consequently, the prospect of social palingenesis would vanish from the sight of history. The Capital was the solution Marx conceived to prevent the positive integration of the proletariat in the structures of liberal civilization. He was able— precisely to the extent that he provided incontrovertible documentation that capitalism was marching “with the ineluctability of a natural process”33 toward its

82

Revolutionary Apocalypse

self-destruction—to foster amongst the masses the messianic expectation of revolutionary parousia. The declared objective was to “ﬁx” the workers’ alienation by instilling the idea that the civilization of Possessions was bound to precipitate in a historical void. This is most evident in the letter Marx wrote to Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwehuis on February 22, 1881: “The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipation of the action plan for the future revolution is only used as a distraction from the present battle. The dream of the imminent end of the world inspired the early Christians during their struggle against the Roman Empire and gave them faith in their victory. The scientiﬁc understanding of the inevitable degradation before our eyes of the prevailing social order, and the increasing anger the masses are thrown into by the old, now almost spectral, government, while simultaneously one witnesses the positive fact of the incredible progress of means of production—all this guarantees that, at the time of the true proletarian revolutionary outbreak, also the conditions for its subsequent modus operandi will be given (even though they certainly will not be idyllic).”34 In other words, capitalism is condemned by history, it has no escape route, and for this reason awaiting an insurrection is not an illusion; rather, it is absolutely rational. Therefore the workers’ movement must readily await the ﬁnal battle, which inevitably will end with the annihilation of bourgeois property and its civilization. Certainly, the extremists too believed capitalism to be irremediably condemned. But they made the mistake of exchanging a sure event for an imminent one. Besides, they were utopians who projected their wishes onto reality and appealed to Sollen, while actually the advent of the reign of freedom was a Mu¨ssen, a historical necessity. In conclusion, they abandoned themselves to “fantastic descriptions of the future society”35 and claimed to draw the outline of the “new Jerusalem,” while the task of science could not be the “prescription of recipes for the inns of the future”36 but the identiﬁcation of the “rules . . . and of the trends operating and occurring with granite-like necessity”37 that guaranteed that “the old society was coming to an end and the structure of deception and prejudice was collapsing.”38 3. The advantages deriving from such an approach to the problem of erecting the New World were as numerous as they were substantial. For one thing, it solved the problem of having to specify the characteristics of the social organization that would replace the existing one. This aspect is not to be underestimated, since it was impossible to describe communism in positive terms. How does one portray a society lacking labor distribution, institutions, power relations, dilemmas, and conﬂicts of interests? The only thing to say about such a desire-image is that it would be the “denial of denial”:39 a mystic formula borrowed from the terminological arsenal of Hegelian theodicy, which, like all mystic formulas, could not be ﬁlled with any real content. But, for this precise reason, it was necessary to speciﬁcally forbid the asking of questions about the social organization to be founded upon the ruins of the

Waiting the Reign

83

existing one. This is exactly what Marx did, when he proclaimed that “whoever presented a future plan was reactionary.”40 Second, and most important, insisting on the fact that “the decline of the bourgeoisie and the triumph of the proletariat were equally inevitable”41 meant instilling in the “armed proletariat” certainty of ﬁnal victory and therefore conﬁdence even in the presence of the most unbearable defeats. Moreover, it meant assigning the proletariat an exciting mission of cosmic-historical justice: to accomplish the Weltgericht maxim. The problem remained of how to immunize the workers from the “bourgeois infection.” It was necessary to demonstrate that their living conditions within the institutions of a capitalist society would never improve but indeed were destined to deteriorate, despite all the unions’ efforts to wring wage increases from their employer. Therefore, the method of reforms was deceptive. At the most, this method could be used as “daily practice” to stimulate an uncompromising spirit of opposition. To reconstruct Marx’s deduction on this speciﬁc matter, it is crucial to keep in mind Hegel’s theory of essence. In the Scienza della logica, Hegel states that “essence is the truth of being”42 and such truth coincides with what is contained in its concept. He also claims that any empirical existence tends to develop and, in so doing, to adjust to its essence or initially hidden nature. If one applies this metaphysical notion to the capitalist method of production, one can say that “it does not exist in its pure state, it does not correspond to its concept, and has not adjusted to itself.”43 This is proven by the fact that within empirical capitalism there is one element—“an external demand for what the worker has made [the goods]”44—that is contrary to “capitalism according to its concept,” which can only accommodate two social classes: the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. In conclusion, once the empirical existence of capitalism corresponds to its hidden essence, it will be impossible for goods to be absorbed by the economy, and, as a consequence, any means of proﬁt will vanish. That is, as soon as the social classes between capital and labor disappear—something that will inevitably happen, since the calling of every empirical existence must coincide with its concept—the engine of the capitalist machine will break down. This explains why the bipolar class thesis has an extremely important role in Marx’s theoretical system. The classes must be two and only two, since this is the binding condition for the demise of capitalism. This is not only because the division of society into a rich and a poor minority renders highly probable the development of “two great enemies”45 and hence the transformation of the class struggle into a real “class warfare,” but also and especially because the economy will lack the vital prerequisite for functioning: the existence of a sufﬁcient demand of goods and services, deriving exclusively from outside the working classes. In fact, if the sole demand for goods and services came from the workers, proﬁt would be impossible, since, through the marketing

84

Revolutionary Apocalypse

of their goods, the capitalists would make the exact amount they had put aside for their wage fund. Capitalism therefore represents an enigma. In reality it should not exist at all, since, in its essence, it is a method of production “that cannot function.”46 Yet, it exists; only because it has not become itself. Which means that its end is inscribed in its essence. It will occur, as soon as its dialectic self-movement brings it to coincide with its concept. Besides, there is a law—deﬁned by Marx as “the most important in political economy and the most essential for understanding the most difﬁcult relationships”47—that states that “to the extent to which productivity of labour increases, the rate of proﬁt decreases,”48 since “maximum development of productivity combined with maximum growth of existing production coincides with the depreciation of capital and the degradation of the workers.”49 These being the facts, one can certainly say that capitalism is a “living contradiction,”50 since the following paradox is present within its logic of development: the growth of productive forces goes hand in hand with the increasing impoverishment of the working classes and the (tendential) decline of the rate of proﬁt. Such a paradox will inevitably lead to “explosions, disasters, crises, where a temporary expansion of labour and the momentary destruction of most of the capital will violently bring [capitalism] to a point where it will not be able to continue to use its productive ability to the full, without committing suicide. Besides, the disasters occurring regularly will be repeated on a vaster scale and eventually lead to the violent fall of capital.”51 These words contain practically everything Marx was to try to demonstrate through the complicated chain of circular arguments and tautologies that represent The Capital. Using the pseudo-Hegelian logic, he will oppose to the “vulgar economists,” who mistook the empirical existence of capitalism for its authentic essence, the “crazy” idea that the bourgeoisie, though having built a phenomenal wealth-producing engine, was condemned to increasing workers’ material and moral poverty in an intolerable manner and destroying its nourishment, namely proﬁt. From this originated the famous prognosis—a truly catastrophic and palingenetic vision of the fate of humanity—that ends volume one of The Capital: Each capitalist launches a deadly attack on many others. Centralisation, namely the expropriation of many capitalists by a few, is accompanied by a constant increase in the cooperative method of labour, the conscious technical application of science, the systematic exploitation of the earth, the transformation of means of labour in ones only usable collectively, the economy of all the means of production through their use as means of production of combined social labour, while all populations are increasingly caught in the net of the world market, thus developing increasingly the international character of the capitalist regime. With the constant decrease of capital magnates, who abuse and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass increases in poverty, oppression, subordination, degeneration, exploitation, and the rebellion

Waiting the Reign

85

of the working class also increases and is regulated, united and organised by the same mechanism as the capitalist productive process. The monopoly of capital becomes a constraint on the method of production that developed with it and under its inﬂuence. The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach the point where they are incompatible with their capitalist cover. Which is broken. The capitalist private property has its last hour. The expropriators are expropriated.52

Remembering this, one can absolutely say that the “transition of socialism from utopia to science” Marx believed had been accomplished in reality had been the transition of socialism from utopia to theology. With his grandiose theoretical construction, Marx gave a semblance of rationality to the messianic expectation of revolutionary palingenesis. In order to subtract the communist alternative from any critical debate, he elaborated the pluri-logics theory emphasizing the existence of two rationales, of which one, the “bourgeois” rationale, was basically incapable of capturing the hidden essence of reality. This hidden essence was clear only to those who had been able to escape the stupefying effects of the “false consciousness” undertaking the point of view of the actor—the revolutionary proletariat—to whom history had assigned the calling of leading all humanity toward the millenary reign of freedom. For over 20 years, Marx and Engels tried to impose their revolutionary theology as the ofﬁcial doctrine of the European socialist movement, resorting, where necessary and without any moral scruples, to the art of manipulation.53 They failed, mainly due to the vital resistance of the anarchists who had promptly predicted that the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” would lead to the establishment of a “prison like regime” based “internally on slavery and externally on permanent war.”54 Although the criticism of the anarchists could not have been clearer or more penetrating, the intellectual supporters of the French workers’ movement (for the majority blanquistes and proudhonians) were defeated after Thiers’s brutal repression of the Commune. Bakunin’s death deprived the anarchists of their charismatic leader and a “wait-and-see policy” started to prevail on “voluntarism.” Besides, everything seemed to point to the fact that emeutisme was a self-destructive strategy, only enabling the bourgeois governments to ruthlessly attack workers’ associations and deprive them of their leaders. There had to be another alternative. In fact, Marxism provided a solid theoretical framework for conceiving social revolution as an extended historical process, without losing an ounce of the palingenetic spirit, since the inevitable outcome of such a process would be the overturning of the existing state. Aware of this, it is not surprising that within the European socialist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century there occurred a division that repeated with incredible analogy, “the division between the Catholic Church and the millenarian sects, in which were laid the foundations of that movement, with Marxism representing the ecclesiastic moment, ie., the realistic and organised aspect, and anarchism perpetuating the eschatological

86

Revolutionary Apocalypse

impatience and revolutionary voluntarism of a chiliastic movement. This analogy is valid both for the way of interpreting the route to be followed in order to reach the Reign ( ⳱ Revolution) and of representing the future Millennium. Like the Church, the Marxist party strove to preserve the good tidings uncorrupted in a hostile world until the coming of the Reign, relying ﬁrst and foremost on the fatal dynamic of the system. Instead, the anarchists, like the heretics and the sectarian forefathers, actively tried to destroy the system, to make way for the achieving of the ideal which they expected to come from their efforts alone. Like the Church, the Marxists tended to identify the Reign with the rule of their own party, but were induced by their own realism to portray everything else in a manner almost identical to the existing society— socialism: phase one of the palingenesis—postponing to some indeﬁnite future, in a manner no different from how the Church interprets the end of the world, the advent of a classless society—communism: second and ﬁnal phase of the palingenesis. Which has, within this concept, exactly the same comforting function as the Christian paradise. Although the advent of the new Jerusalem is awaited literally in time and in space, it is depicted with such characteristics as to virtually disappear in a vanishing future and substantially is no more realistic than paradise.”55 4. The ecclesiastical conception of socialism, where chiliastic utopianism intertwined with the harshest political realism, needed a “scholastic” arrangement of its basic dogmas. This need was satisﬁed in a way many considered exemplary by Engels when, between 1877 and 1878, he wrote the series of articles that were to become famous under the title Anti-Duhring. Their readings constituted a real “enlightenment” for the main Spd leaders—Liebknecht, Bebel, Kautsky, and the like—whose doubts as to the scientiﬁc nature of Marxism were immediately dissolved. From then on, they did everything in their power to ensure that the fundamental ideas of Marxism penetrated the party’s cadres and oriented their actions. So, what for decades had simply been the doctrine followed by one of the many cults that deﬁned themselves as socialist became something very similar to orthodox German democratic socialism. In particular, it was conceived as such by Kautsky, who had dedicated all his life to ﬁghting any attempt to avert the Spd from the path traced by Marx and Engels. He was ﬁrmly convinced that, externally, socialism would lose its original sense of direction, degrading to a mere movement of social reform, while its “historical calling” was to reestablish the whole of Western civilization on new foundations. In reality, after the October Revolution, Kautsky was accused of altering Marx and Engels’s message and transforming it surreptitiously into an “ideology of integration”56 that was inclined to more or less consciously hide the nonrevolutionary nature of Spd procedure behind a strictly verbal radicalism. This was absolutely not true: far from being an “opportunistic” detour from genuine Marxist tradition, Kautskism represented “an essential moment [of that tradi-

Waiting the Reign

87

tion] without which the success of Leninism, at least in Europe but possibly also in Russia, would have continued to be absolutely incomprehensible.”57 It converted Marx’s philosophy into a widespread and deeply established way of thinking and feeling and contributed signiﬁcantly to keeping alive the hope of revolution in a period when the cycle of class struggles that had started in 1889 seemed to have come to a close. Certainly, Kautsky never missed an opportunity to attack whoever—blanquistes, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists—aimed to relaunch a war of action, which they considered the only form of struggle able to foment “a burning feeling of rebellion” among the proletarian masses.58 However, his criticism was always ﬁrmly anchored to what was the pillar of the Marx-Hegel strategy: the rejection of any reformist hypothesis, tied to the rigorously scientiﬁc belief that the destiny of capitalism was marked and could not be changed by anyone or anything. From here, his deﬁnition of the Spd: “a revolutionary party and not a party conducting revolutions.” “We know [one reads in one of his successful pamphlets] that our goal can only be achieved by means of a revolution, but we also know that it will be as difﬁcult for us to start this revolution as for our opponents to prevent it. Therefore we are not even thinking about provoking or preparing a revolution. Being unable to initiate a rebellion when we choose, we cannot say anything about when and in what circumstances and under which aspects the revolution will take place. We know the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will not end until the latter acquire complete political power to build a socialist society. We know that this class struggle will extend and become stronger, that the proletariat is increasing in numbers, and as a moral and economic strength, that therefore the defeat of capitalism and the triumph of the revolution are inevitable, but we can only give vague hypotheses as to when and how the ﬁnal crucial battles of this social war will be handled.”59 Marx and Engels added nothing new from the “turning point” of September 1850, with the declared objective of preventing the integration of the working class during the passage through the desert to the Promised Land. And, if it is true that Kautsky gave an ultralegalistic interpretation of Marxism, it is also true he laid the theoretical foundations for what, for a quarter of a century, was to appear to the vast majority of European socialists—Lenin included60—the “correct” attitude to adopt vis-a`-vis the bourgeois-capitalist order: an attitude that combined in a very delicate balance an extreme rejection of such order and an apparent respect for its rules—obviously until the day in which the awaited total revolution exploded. It is precisely for this reason—for having successfully combined radicalism and legalism, constantly referring to the authority of Marx and Engels—that Kautsky was considered in and outside European democratic socialism the most uncompromising advocate of the revolutionary purity of socialism,61 the man whose systematic pedagogical action had transformed Marxism into a cultural force able to have a signiﬁcant impact on social reality.

88

Revolutionary Apocalypse

It goes without saying that Kautsky would never have been able to transform Marxism into a mass counterculture had his voice not been ampliﬁed by thousands and thousands of “permanent repeaters” hired among those whom Hayek called second- and third-hand “thought vendors” and organized exactly like the Prussian bureaucracy on a strictly professional basis.62 In fact, when Guglielmo Ferrero arrived in Germany at the end of 1894, he was immediately struck by the fact that the Spd was a kind of “state within the state” with “magniﬁcent ministries and majestic budgets” and with dozens of publications capable of producing the “daily intellectual nourishment duly fermented with socialist leaven for millions of workers.”63 Such a huge organization—simultaneously a counter-society of “true faithful” in partibus inﬁdelium and a bureaucratic device managed by armies of activists for whom socialism was a Beruf (in the dual sense of calling and profession) contributed signiﬁcantly to perpetuating the “national polarisation” of Germany under Wilhelm and actually intensiﬁed it, offering huge “masses of workers a way of living considerably different from that of other groups and especially from that of those who speciﬁcally supported the prevailing political and social system. This way of living was ensured through a rich network of political, economic and cultural organisations”64 all animated by the belief in the inevitable fall of capitalism and the equally inevitable advent of socialism. Better than any other social democratic ideologist, Kautsky attributed to the awaiting the ﬁnal reign the semblance of a self-evident truth, tirelessly stressing the idea that the “capitalist society had closed shop,” so one could certainly say that “its dissolution was only a matter of time” and that the “creation of a new form of society in the place of the present one was no longer simply something that was desirable but had become inevitable.”65 This was an exciting prospect for all those the Spd had managed to include in its community structures. In addition, Kautsky was pleased to represent the “goal-conscious militant proletariat” as the “avant-garde of all the exploited and oppressed” upon whose “irresistible development” actually depended the establishment of “eternal peace among all peoples.”66 This obviously contributed to fostering among the Spd leadership the conviction, “a source of boundless pride and of passionate devotion to their cause, that History was on their side”67 and they alone possessed a clear vision of the end of humanity’s dramatic odyssey. It also contributed to making the Spd a sui generis party, simultaneously family, native countryland, and religion, a party within society and not of society, driven as it was by the messianic belief of being predestined to building a “totally different” civilization from the one in which it operated. This rendered German democratic socialism a “world apart” that had deliberately chosen self-imposed cultural isolation. Thus, substantially, it was a moral body, which was alien to the national community, proud of being “different,” and therefore perceived as a dangerous subversive force by all those who identiﬁed with the prevailing order, ready when the right moment came along to go from a trench warfare to a war of action.

Waiting the Reign

89

It is true the social democratic leaders missed no opportunity to stress the Spd’s legalism.68 But this was not enough to totally cancel the spiritual extraneity of the counter-society they had patiently built, providing large masses of workers with a community of belonging, based upon concrete ties of solidarity, enlightened by a wonderful prospect—the revolutionary escape from capitalism—where a gratifying role was predicted for all the underprivileged: that of being nothing less than the Promethean builders of “Paradise on earth.”69 From this stems the almost idolatric cult of the working class and of the revolutionary party, which found in Kautsky its supreme priest, ready to theorize the absolute subordination of individuals to that collective subject—the socialist movement—that, although being one section, aspired to become the absolute. “Among the organised workers [we read in one of his most typical and meaningful pages] communist instincts are almost as strong as among primitive people, naturally on a more elevated and international scale; which means that for organised workers the individual is insigniﬁcant, class is everything . . . What drives us toward the party, what keeps us within it, is not a lucrative prospect but the prospect of fame and honour; not even the acknowledgement of, or a particular empathy for, party members. It is only and exclusively the communist instinct, the sense of duty, which tells us the class of the underprivileged is entitled to all our personality, not only part of it, whose limits are imposed by individual freedom. We belong to the party, body and soul, before it we have only duties, no rights, except for one: equality. We are obligated to sacriﬁce everything for the party, instead the party not even the smallest object for us.”70 The inevitable consequence: the socialist revolution, whose task was the “destruction of the class State,” was not to seek its model in the “bourgeois democracy” based upon individualism but “in the communities where complete equality reigned, in the primitive tribes,” which were founded not upon “principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, but only on equality and fraternity.”71 This was like saying that the Spd was a “cultural alteration” based on the rejection of the freedom typical of the bourgeois Gesellschaft as conceived by modernists and opposed by the Gemeinschaft’s solidarism and organicism. It is evident that such a party—theorized, organized, and experienced as an ecclesia militans, thus as a charismatic institution—could not integrate itself positively in the national society, in part because its basic values were very different from those of the prevailing culture—all-pervaded with nationalism and militarism—in part because it conceived the struggle for socialism as “a prolonged civil war.”72 At the end of that war, “the expropriators would become the expropriated,” and the state and the commune, now owners of all the production processes,73 would introduce “a conscious organisation of social production in accordance with the pre-arranged plan.”74 This was a veritable declaration of war against the existing state, even though the social democratic leaders, in accordance with Kautsky’s interpretation of Marxism endorsed by Engels,75 did not try to anticipate the moment of the ﬁnal battle that, instead, they tended to represent in peaceful and almost idyllic forms.76

90

Revolutionary Apocalypse

6. To conﬁdently await the revolution “while capitalism was digging its own grave”77 and, in the meantime, extend the domain of inﬂuence of Marxism, consolidating the intellectual and moral barriers that separated the proletarian Gemeinschaft from the bourgeois Gesellschaft: in synthesis this was the strategy theorized by Kautsky and systematically implemented by the Spd ofﬁcers. The successes the Spd achieved along the path designed by the “red pope” were so considerable that, from the foundation of the Second International, it became the “party model” looked upon by the great majority of continental socialists with a combination of admiration and envy. And not only for its remarkable electoral success, but also and especially for the fact that it had been able to organize the lives of thousands of workers in a community spirit and at the same time develop a majestic conception of the world where the socialist movement was the charismatic actor destined to materialize a project of cosmic and historical signiﬁcance: to start “a new era for humanity.”78 Yet, before the century ended, this grandiose construction was shaken by an internal controversy that broke its spiritual foundations, a controversy that concerned the very nature of socialism and its long-term goals and, therefore, involved the entire Second International, which for years was torn by what most inappropriately was called the “revisionist debate.” Ironically, the controversy was actually started by Eduard Bernstein, the man considered to be the executor of Engel’s will and one of the most ardent promulgators of Marxism. After a long period of time spent in Great Britain, where he had been in direct contact with the English workers’ movement and Fabian-socialism, Bernstein had been forced to admit that capitalist society was not evolving according to Marx’s theory.79 Indeed, it seemed that every notion of that theory was being invalidated. Bernstein ﬁrst illustrated this concept in a series of articles published as of 1896 in the Neue Zeit; he later formulated it explicitly in October 1898 in his address to the Spd conference in Stuttgart. On that occasion he urged his fellow party members to acknowledge that “social relations had not deteriorated” as predicted in the Manifesto; that the “number of owners had increased rather than decreased” and the “intermediate strata of society were not disappearing from the social ladder.”80 The following year Bernstein published his I presupposti del socialismo e i compiti della social democrazia, which came to be known as the “Bible of revisionism.”81 In that text he used precise ﬁgures to demonstrate that Marx’s picture of modern industrial society was absolutely wrong. Albeit slowly, welfare was expanding. Thus, it was unreasonable to talk about the increasing impoverishment of the working classes, just as it was unreasonable to talk about the proletarianization of society. If anything, the opposite was true. Society was gradually becoming more bourgeois. Absolutely nothing supported the theory of the catastrophic decline of capitalism, upon which depended the very meaning of the war conducted by the Spd and the certainty that sooner or later the walls of the bourgeois stronghold would collapse. That being so, it was time for the Spd to put aside its strategy of waiting and

Waiting the Reign

91

self-imposed isolation, as well as the revolutionary tradition, all-pervaded by a thaumaturgical perception of the class struggle; a perception that even Marx, despite his insistence on the principle of economic maturity, had not been able to free himself from. Hence, his “overestimation of the creative force of revolutionary violence, directed toward the social transformation of modern society.”82 This made Marxism an updated form of blanquisme, totally incapable of having a positive impact upon the development of democracy. As long as the working class lacked strong, independent organizations of an economic nature and real political maturity through self-government, the so-called “proletarian dictatorship” had inevitably to be the ideological tyranny of an e´lite of revolutionary intellectuals over the proletarian masses who had no notion of how to manage the state. Bernstein warned: “If from a social class, whose vast majority lives in poverty, is poorly educated, badly paid and even that miserable wage is not sure, we cannot expect high intellectual and moral standards, which are the pre-requisite for the establishment of a stable society, then let us not even try to attribute this to it.”83 Bernstein also questioned the scientiﬁc nature of the theory of the “historical mission of the proletariat.” In Marx’s writings—this was the main point of his criticism—the working class was a mere mental construction; it did not correspond to the working class as it really was, which showed no revolutionary calling but a spontaneous reformist tendency that the Spd was obliged to foster, operating as a political and social reform movement within the liberal state, whose institutions were to be considered both as a “means of ﬁghting for socialism” and as “modes of its accomplishment.”84 Certainly such institutions could not perform miracles; but equally certain was that they were the most precious resource the workers had to acquire full right of citizenship. The overall sense of the struggles led by the parties making up the International—this was, according to Bernstein, the conclusion one was forced to make on the basis of the evolution of European society in recent decades— was the “creation of situations and premises that enabled and guaranteed a smooth transition, without violent fractures, from the modern social order to a superior order”85 through a progressive widening of the liberal state’s boundary, yes, born bourgeois, but liable to becoming a cooperative association of all social classes. This meant considering socialism the historical heir of liberalism; indeed, an “organising liberalism,”86 whose method was gradualism and whose aim the generalization of modern freedom. Hence, it was not a movement tending to overturn the existing order, but to improve it, by working within the institutional framework. 7. Bernstein’s challenge irritated the caretakers of the “Marxist temple” enormously: Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Cunow, Mehring, Antonio Labriola, Rosa Luxemburg, and so on. Bernstein and his followers—Conrad Schuitt, Georg von Vollmar, Eduard David, Ludwig Frank, and the like—were accused of wanting to introduce typically “bourgeois” ideas into the socialist move-

92

Revolutionary Apocalypse

ment. With the assumption of correcting Marxism, they would undermine its foundations and eventually reinforce the “enemies of the working class.” So, during the conference in Lubeck in 1900, the Spd leaders ofﬁcially declared themselves against revisionism, though Bebel was careful to specify that, despite his heretical ideas, Bernstein could not be considered a “bad comrade” nor less a “renegade,” as suggested by the most passionate champions of Marxist orthodoxy, for whom the ideological purity of the socialist movement was an absolutely essential value. Of course, there were precise reasons for such a violent reaction to the idea of a critical revisitation of Marxism and of the social democratic strategy. Bernstein said too many things that explicitly contrasted with what had, by then, become a way of thinking and feeling that was deeply rooted in the minds of the great majority of social militants; he challenged the idolatric cult of the working class, as well as the charismatic role of the revolutionary priests; he questioned dogmas that were essential for the spiritual unity of the proletarian Gemeinschaft: in other words, he questioned everything that deﬁned the socialist identity. Adverse to the prevailing culture, which they considered condemned by History, the Spd leaders had been able to build a closed counter-society, driven by a strong belief in the advent of the kingdom, thanks to the formidable messianic charge of the Marxist Weltanschauung. This offered an “exalting image of a better future. It promised the ﬁnal victory through the unity of the masses against the system that seemed inevitably destined to fall, due to its internal contradictions and the growth of the workers movement. It attributed a scientiﬁc meaning to the frustration and resentment of workers visa`-vis society as a whole.”87 It therefore was the perfect counter-ideology for keeping united all those who felt like outsiders within the national community and reintegrating them in a new community of belonging. So it was impossible to renounce Marxism, without the risk of precipitating the proletarian Gemeinschaft into a general crisis of identity. Its internal cohesion depended upon the belief in the scientiﬁc and moral superiority of the doctrine that had so strongly contributed to drawing millions of underprivileged people under the socialist banner, people who were obtaining too intense a gratiﬁcation from such belief to be willing to detach themselves from it. The material interests of the members of the state—the ofﬁcers of “bureaucratic socialism,” as Ferrero called them—were also at stake. For these people the essential objective was not the materialization of the reformist aims, as indicated by Bernstein on the basis of the English socialist model, but the preservation of the “separation” of the counter-society, upon which was based their power and their prestige. They “had not been elected to articulate the party’s policy within society but to create a new society”;88 and this required that “the party should remain united no matter what, and function as an absolutely compact organism of election and propaganda.”89 Hence, their absolute determination to oppose revisionism. By questioning the cer-

Waiting the Reign

93

tainties upon which the revolutionary counterculture had been created, revisionism in fact threatened to crush the spiritual wall that separated the Spd from civil society. So, the very success of the ecclesiastic strategy had transformed the “body of the consecrated”—for whom socialism was not only a belief but a career and a unique source of intense psychological gratiﬁcation— into a conservative force determined to keep its status quo. To all this was added the fact that for moral and existential motives, many social democratic militants could not even entertain the thought of abandoning the idea of total revolution. They were restless souls, in search of a substitute for the lost faith in the God of Judeo-Christian tradition.90 A purely secular socialism that, instead of aiming at the regeneration of humanity, limited itself to proposing a prosaic improvement of the existing state, would never satisfy their yearning for the absolute. Thus, during the Bernstein Debatte, two “spiritual families” animated by opposing and incompatible values confronted each other. The members of the orthodox tradition, dominated by the “principle of desire,” denied the evidence and, deceiving themselves and others, obstinately embraced a doctrine they believed to be scientiﬁc, but that was nothing but a huge mythology.91 And the revisionists, who explicitly referred to the tradition of the Enlightenment, aimed, ﬁrst and foremost, to verify the objective trends of capitalism, in order to then suitably adjust the action of the workers’ parties. Theirs was a rational methodology, governed by the “principle of reality.” It is precisely for this reason that it was bound to clash with the psychological and moral resistance of all those for whom, in a world characterized by “the agony of God,”92 hope in revolution was the only thing that could give a religious meaning to life.

NOTES 1. Antonio Labriola stated very clearly that socialism was nothing other than an attempt to materialize the messianic hope that had been infused by Christianity in the European consciousness: “We socialists are going back to the Christian idea of society as an institution of the poor: not providence in the next world but providence in this world. We socialists have the holy audacity to declare ourselves more Christian than priests, indeed the only Christians of the century. We are the true disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, of Jesus who announced the Kingdom of God who will come in peace and love and will be made thanks to, and by virtue of, our sentiments.” 2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 411. 3. “It is not a matter of mere improvement [we read in an article published in the Times regarding the Brussels Congress of the First International] but of nothing short of a regeneration, and not of one country but of all humanity. This is certainly the broadest goal than any institution has ever given itself, except perhaps the Christian church” (quoted from Norman MacKenzie, Socialism: A Short History [London: Hutchinson], 1966). 4. I use the word “continental” because British socialism was not greatly inﬂuenced

94

Revolutionary Apocalypse

by Marxism and had a deﬁnite reformist vocation (see Gino Bianco, L’esperienza laburista [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976]). 5. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 271. 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto del Partito comunista, in Opere complete, vol. 6, p. 663. 7. Karl Marx, “Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte,” in Opere complete, vol. 11, p. 115. 8. Friedrich Engels, “Letters from Germany,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 16. 9. See Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London: Longman, 1959). 10. Ferdinando Claudin, Marx, Engels y la revolucio´n de 1848 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1976), p. 297. 11. Karl Marx, “The Revolutionary Movement,” in Complete Works, vol. 8, p. 215. 12. Domenico Settembrini, Due ipotesi per il socialismo in Marx ed Engels (Bari: Laterza, 1974), p. 235. 13. Friedrich Engels, “La lotta delle nazioni,” in Opere complete, vol. 8, p. 237. 14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Reviews,” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 318. 15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Meeting of the Central Committee of the League of the Communists on the 15 September 1850, in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 626. 16. This is conﬁrmed in a letter Engels wrote to Bebel in 1891. After praising ’93, he conﬁdently added, “If a war brings us to power prematurely, the technicians will be our chief enemies; they will deceive and betray us wherever they can and we shall have to use terror against them” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846–1895 [London: Martin Lawrence], 1934). 17. G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1954). 18. Contrary to what has been claimed, among others, by Rodolfo Mondolfo (Umanesimo di Marx [Turin: Einaudi, 1975]) and Shlomo Avineri (The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx [Cambridge: CUP, 1968]). 19. Quoted from G. M. Bravo, Marx e la Prima Internazionale (Bari: Laterza, 1979), p. 69. 20. Marx stated this very clearly in a letter to Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis in 1881: “The majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be. With a bit of common sense it could however have made a compromise with Versailles that would have been useful for the mass of people.” 21. Karl Marx, “Civil War in France” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 334. 22. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1968). 23. See Vittorio Mancini, La Comune di Parigi (Rome: Savelli, 1975), p. 244 et seq. 24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 285. 25. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 505. 26. In his article “Indifference in Political Matters,” written in January 1873, Marx stated: “To avoid any offence to this respectable class [the category of masters, entrepreneurs, and bourgeois], the good Proudhon recommends to the workers (up to the coming of the mutualist regime, and despite its serious disadvantages) freedom or competition, our only guarantee” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 18, p. 305). 27. Karl Marx, La nazionalizzazione della terra (Parma: Da Adam, 1969), p. 43. 28. Friedrich Engels, “Anti-Duhring,” in Opere complete, vol. 25, p. 299.

Waiting the Reign

95

29. One point should be clear: Marx did not think of the transition dictatorship as “a relatively short period” (Riccardo Guastini, I due poteri [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982] p. 82); on the contrary, he was always convinced that “the class rule of the workers over the strata of the old world who are struggling against them can only last as long as the economic basis of class society has not been destroyed.” (“Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 24, p. 521.) 30. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 3, 1 (Rome: Rinascita, 1956), p. 259. 31. This is conﬁrmed in a letter Marx wrote to Engels on October 8, 1853: “On the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character” (“Letters,” vol. 40, p. 347). 32. Letter from Marx to Engels on April 9, 1863, in Opere complete, vol. 41, p. 468. 33. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 35, p. 751. 34. Quoted from Domenico Settembrini, Il labirinto marxista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), p. 333. 35. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 515. 36. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 25. 37. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 9. 38. Karl Marx, “Discorso dell’Associazione di Cultura di Londra,” in Opere complete, vol. 7, p. 619. 39. Karl Marx, The Capital, vol. 1, p. 751. 40. Quoted from Edward H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (London: MacMillan, 1950). 41. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 496. 42. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. 1, Book 2, translated by W. H. Johnston et al. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1929), p. 15. 43. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970), p. 649. 44. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 26. 45. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 485. 46. C. Napoleoni, “Introduzione” to C. Napoleoni, ed., La teoria dello sviluppo capitalistico (Turin: Boringhieri, 1972), p. XXVII. 47. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali, vol. 2, p. 460. 48. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 480. 49. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 461. 50. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 28. 51. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 461. 52. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 750. 53. See Jean Elleinstein, Marx, p. 469 et seq. 54. From a letter sent by Bakunin to the editors of Liberte´, in G. Ribeill, ed., Socialisme autoritaire ou libertaire (Paris: Union Ge´nerale d’Editions, 1975), pp. 397–398. 55. Domenico Settembrini, Anarchismo, marxismo e cristianesimo in Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx (Naples: Guida, 1974), p. 101. 56. Erich Matthias, Kautsky e il kautskismo (Bari: De Donato, 1971), p. 77. 57. Domenico Settembrini, “Karl Kautsky e le basi teoriche della socialdemocrazia,” in Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx, p. 153. 58. Georges Sorel, Reﬂections on Violence (New York: Collier Books, 1961). 59. Karl Kautsky, The Road to Power (London: Pluto Press, 1990). 60. This was contrary to the legend built by Communist historiography, until the

96

Revolutionary Apocalypse

outbreak of the Great War. Lenin considered Kautsky a master of revolutionary Marxism (see Marek Waldenberg, Il Papa rosso [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980], p. 475 et seq.). Why accuse him of being a renegade, if he thought that he had always been a revisionist in disguise? 61. So intransigent that Georg von Vollmar scornfully referred to him as “a theory fanatic, the man who had become the party’s German teacher, he who would rather let the world and, if necessary, even the party go, than change one syllable of his nice doctrine” (quoted from Massimo L. Salvadori, Kautsky e la rivoluzione socialista [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976], p. 75). 62. On this point, see Robert Michels’s classic, Political Parties: Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Dover, 1959). 63. Guglielmo Ferrero, L’Europa giovane (Treves: Milan, 1898), p. 65. On Ferrero’s acute analysis of German democratic socialism, it is well worth reading Massimo Borlandi’s excellent essay, “Ferrero e il socialismo” in R. Baldi, ed., Guglielmo Ferrero fra societa e politica (Genoa: ECIG, 1986), p. 71 et seq. 64. Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (New York: Arno Press, 1979). 65. Karl Kautsky, Il programma di Erfurt (Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1971), p. 123. 66. Ibid., pp. 195, 200, and 201. 67. P. J. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London: OUP, 1969). 68. Typical is Bebel’s statement to the Reichstag in 1895: “Up to this very day, they cannot attribute violently revolutionary aspirations to democratic socialism, or even the slightest attempt to achieve their objectives by means of a violently revolutionary route” (quoted from H. J. Steinberg, Il socialismo tedesco da Bebel a Kautsky [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979], p. 92. 69. Karl Marx, “Discorso sul congresso dell’Aia,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Critica dell’anarchismo, p. 99. 70. Quoted from Alessandro Panaccione, Kautsky e l’ideologia socialista (Milan: Angeli, 1987), p. 56. 71. Ibid., p. 56. It should be mentioned that Kautsky gradually modiﬁed his attitude toward the modern concept of liberty to the point that he eventually considered it an essential value. This is obvious in the ﬁnal pages of Agrarfrage where he exalted the function of capitalism: “By proclaiming permanent economic revolution,” it had transformed individualism “from an aristocratic phenomenon to a more democratic phenomenon”; he then added, “The trend toward the free expression of personality in socialist society must become even stronger” (The Agrarian Question [London: Zwan, 1988]). Still more radical was his position in Origine del cristianesimo, where he even expressed the view that “if modern communism wished to meet the needs of man created by the modern mode of production, it had to guarantee the highest degree of individualism in consumption” (Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1976), p. 171. 72. Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution (London: Black, 1903). 73. Ibid. 74. Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Marx (London: Black, 1925). 75. This endorsement was ofﬁcially expressed in the famous “Introduction” to the reprint of Marx’s Lotte di classe in Francia, where Engels admitted that the Jacobin model of class war had become obsolete and that the emancipation of the industrial proletariat could only take place in the framework of the institutions of bourgeois democracy and by means of a gradual strategy. However his palinode was formulated so ambiguously

Waiting the Reign

97

that Otto Bauer stated, and not without reason, that “Engels in no way abandoned his conviction that the ﬁnal decision would come from a civil war between the classes” but limited himself to advising “the workers parties to defer this ﬁnal decision for as long as possible” (Fra due guerre mondiali? [Turin: Einaudi, 1979], p. 228). 76. Although on several occasions Kautsky distinguished the total revolution as he imagined it from the violent revolution, he never excluded that “the war might have been a means for accelerating the political evolution of the proletariat and taking it to power” (The Social Revolution). Thus he anticipated Lenin’s strategy, which was based on the transformation of the war between bourgeois states into a revolutionary war. 77. Georges Rude´, Ideology and Popular Protest (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 78. Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Marx. 79. In reaching this conclusion, Bernstein was inﬂuenced by the Fabian socialists and by Francesco Saverio Merlino, whose critical essays on Marxism Bernstein had discussed at length on the “Neue Zeit” (see Nico Berti, Francesco Saverio Merlino [Milan: Angeli, 1993]). 80. Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism (Cambridge: CUP, 1993). 81. See Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism (New York: Collier Books, 1962) and U. Ranieri and U. Minopoli, Il movimento e` tutto (Milan: SugarCo, 1993). 82. Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany. 88. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg. 89. G.D.H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, vol. 3. 90. In 1896, Bertrand Russell made the following observation: “Marx’s system is a real religion and therefore it cannot be tolerant of other religions. Just like Christianity, democratic socialism tends to place itself against all existing faiths; if it did otherwise, it would end up losing much of that formidable emotional impact it owes to the completeness of its system” (La socialdemocrazia tedesca [Rome: Newton Compton, 1971], p. 118). 91. Rosa Luxemburg’s participation in the Berstein Debatte is most interesting in this regard: Not being able to accept the idea that socialism was not “objectively necessary,” at ﬁrst she denied the evidence; that is to say, the ﬁgures Bernstein had presented to the orthodox Marxists to induce them to review the strategy of social democracy. Realizing how inadequate her reaction had been (in Accumulation of Capital [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951] she tried to demonstrate that those ﬁgures, though true, meant one thing only: that the ﬁnal demise of capitalism would take longer than Marx had anticipated and would only occur after the entire noncapitalist environment had been engulfed by capitalism. It was an ingenious solution, but had the defect of postponing the revolutionary break sine die, which explains the cold reception on the part of the Bolshevists who had no intention of waiting for the whole world to become capitalist before launching the ﬁnal attack against the bourgeoisie (see Nikolai Bukharin, L’imperialismo e l’accumulazione del capitale [Bari: Laterza, 1972]). 92. Guglielmo Ferrero, Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto (Milan: Treves, 1920), p. 293.

CHAPTER 6

The Jesuits of Revolution

1. In 1903, Franz Mering conﬁdently announced that “revisionism was of no historical interest, except for the question of how it came into being in German social democracy.”1 In fact, only a blind faith in the scientiﬁc validity of Marxism could have prevented it from being obvious that revisionism had been generated by the gap between the prognosis made in The Capital and the effective dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. This gap was so huge that it should have been clear to all that, sooner or later, it would have been necessary to review the political strategy on which that prognosis had been based. Instead, like “monks absorbed in the contemplation of sacred icons,”2 the orthodox Marxists either denied the issue existed, or tried to exorcise it, by banishing revisionism as if it were a dangerous heresy. As a result, socialism continued along a path leading nowhere. It certainly did not escape Lenin, a young militant of the Russian SocialDemocratic party, destined to go down in history as the greatest revolutionary of all time, that the response of the custodians of Marxist orthodoxy to Berstein’s challenge was based on an illusion. In public he never missed an opportunity to express his theological scorn for those in favor of a “revision” of Marx’s theoretical legacy,3 but in private he admitted that history had falsiﬁed the Zusammenbruchstheorie. Bernstein believed that social democracy should forget revolution and transform itself into a movement of social reform similar to British socialism. Lenin, instead, developed his own original strategy based on the idea that capitalism could still be overturned, once “Archimede’s lever”4 had been created; that such a huge undertaking was still possible, even though communism did not bear those lethal contradictions scientiﬁc socialism claimed were necessary to make the “leap” into the reign of freedom. Lenin

100

Revolutionary Apocalypse

considered revolution to be a categorical imperative, an absolute duty, to the extent that, if history did not move in the direction of communism, this could only mean that it was the duty of revolutionaries to deviate the spontaneous course of human affairs.5 Underlying this grandiose program was a conception of politics that had nothing in common with the one formulated by Marx when he used his famous obstetrician image.6 Lenin did not believe that the capitalist society contained in embryo the communist society. Instead, the latter was something to be invented and created, even if this required the use of violence to prevent society from evolving spontaneously. In other words, the economic-social structure is not what determines the political/ideological superstructure, but quite the contrary: (revolutionary) politics is the engine of (future) history, an engine fueled by that particular form of intellectual and moral energy characterizing the Marxist ideology, whose unique function is to enlighten revolutionaries so they are aware that their primary responsibility is to “combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie.”7 With his usual clarity, Lenin explained why: “There could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively left to their own effort, is able to develop only tradeunion consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, to ﬁght employers, and strive to compel the government pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the proprieted classes, by intellectuals. By their social status, the founders of modern scientiﬁc socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.”8 This means that a revolutionary consciousness is not an automatic consequence of belonging to the working class, something that workers develop spontaneously by participating in unions, but the outcome of a complex theoretical exercise requiring speciﬁc skills. These skills are possessed by the specialists of spiritual production; they alone can develop an alternative ideology capable of challenging the existing order. It is an illusion to expect the workers to escape the reformist logic without the external assistance of radical intellectuals. Take the British labor movement: although it operated in a highly industrialized society, it never developed anything more than a trade union strategy. In Lenin’s eyes, this simply conﬁrmed the fact that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”9 and that revolutionary theory is the exclusive domain of intellectuals. The workers would never be a vanguard movement: they worked hard, long hours and, anyway, lacked any theoretical knowledge. They hardly knew what their “immediate interests” were. Instead, the objective of the revolution was in the “real in-

The Jesuits of Revolution

101

terest” of the workers and could only be perceived by those who had a global vision of the historical process. So, Lenin explicitly advocated that the intelligentsia should substitute the working class as bearers of the revolutionary project.10 Or, rather, he advocated transforming the scientiﬁc superiority of intellectuals into a political superiority. His attitude toward the workers was similar to the attitude an aristocrat might have for his soldiers: although acknowledging they possess many virtues—courage, discipline, spirit of sacriﬁce, and the like—they will never develop the intellectual skills necessary to elaborate a real strategy.11 Revolution was too serious a matter to be left in the hands of mere workers. Of course, they were an essential component in the war against the bourgeoisie, but only as troops, since they could not perceive the ultimate motives of the revolution. To ﬁght for socialism means to ﬁght to change the destiny of humanity, and this requires the theoretical vision of individuals who have assimilated an “only scientiﬁc conception of history.”12 Waclaw Machajski considered what he called the “Jesuit science of the Marxists” to be the ideology of the alienated intelligentsia, whose aspiration was to sweep away the plutocratic bourgeoisie and create a new social hierarchy, based not on the hegemony of the “haves” over the “have-nots,” but on that of the “knows” over the “ know-nots.”13 Volodia Smirnov referred to Lenin as “the ideologue of the intelligentsia.”14 In effect, every word of Lenin’s theory of the party as the “armed vanguard of the proletariat” is a legitimization of the historical right of revolutionary intellectuals to monopolize existential representation. This right had to be exercised even against the will of the workers, if they were not able to perceive their “real interests.” This was inevitable, given Lenin’s conviction that to build socialism meant to oppose the spontaneous tendencies of workers and make them bend to the imperatives of revolutionary theory, in other words, to impose upon reality the demiurgic will of those who had been enlightened by Marxism and had developed the “right consciousness.” 2. Lenin was rigorously and inexorably e´litist. If reality moves in a direction opposite to the one envisaged and willed by scientiﬁc socialism, and if the bourgeois spirit is so strong that the working class is irremediably infected by it, then clearly, before embarking on the revolution, it is necessary to create (as in a laboratory) an artiﬁcial actor, driven by the categorical imperative of ﬁghting against history. This actor—a veritable deus ex machina—is the party of professional revolutionaries conceived as a “consecrated body” bonded to the working class by a whole set of intermediate structures, yet rigorously separate from it. In effect, it is a sui generis party, not really a party at all. According to Western culture, a “party is part of a whole.”15 If it wins the elections, the party continues to consider itself part of a whole. The party theorized by Lenin in What Is to be Done? is a party whose right-duty is to become all, since it is only by insti-

102

Revolutionary Apocalypse

tutionalizing a rigorous monopoly of decision making that it can dominate the spontaneous tendencies that “conspire,” so to speak, against revolution. The very nature of the undertaking means that it cannot coexist with other political actors, who are all an expression of a social organization—the civilization of possessions, by nature immoral insofar as it “compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich”—to be eliminated from the face of the earth.16 Consequently, the revolutionary party must be conceived as “a centralised, militant organisation”17 committed to “stubbornly and relentlessly combating”18 anything—ideas, institutions, customs, people, and so forth—that is in conﬂict with its strategic plan. The revolutionary party therefore is a war machine at the service of a calling: “puriﬁcation” of the existing state of things. On this point, Lenin is, as always, most explicit. Revolution—he says—is “a long, tenacious desperate war between life and death”;19 as such, it must adopt a military strategy. At that point the distinction between “stasiology” and “polemology” becomes senseless. As Lasswell and Kaplan put it, the “civil arena” must be converted into a “military arena”20 because the planetary progress of revolution requires the annihilation of the bourgeoisie and its organic allies. Admittedly, an armistice with the “class enemy” is always possible, but bearing in mind that the socialist transformation of society requires creating a situation in which it is unthinkable to “to roll back the wheel of history”;21 a situation, therefore, in which power is concentrated in the hands of those whose chosen calling is to do everything in their power to prevent the revival of the acquisitive spirit. Lenin imagines a scenario in which a war of planetary proportions is fought between two “ideological armies”: one embodying the revolutionary spirit and the other the all-corrupting and degrading bourgeois spirit. The moral destiny of all humanity depends on that “island of purity,” formed by those whose whole existence is devoted to permanent war against capitalist-bourgeois corruption. “We are marching [writes Lenin] in a compact group along a precipitous and difﬁcult path, ﬁrmly holding each other in our hands. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we march advance almost constantly under their ﬁre. We have joined forces by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of ﬁghting our enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have accused us with separated ourselves into forming a group and with having chosen the path of struggling rather of the path of conciliation. And now some among us start to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the march is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are

The Jesuits of Revolution

103

‘free’ to go where we please, free to ﬁght not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh.”22 Things being thus, clearly the revolutionary party not only had to be organized as an army, but it had also to be structured in such a way that it could not be polluted by the moral miasma of the surrounding “bourgeois swamp.” The only solution was to distance revolutionary theory from the corrosive acid of the critical spirit. Revisionism—which is a moral fact before being an intellectual one—must not be allowed to infect the revolutionary party and turn it into a reformist party. The function of absolute centralization and military discipline is not only to guarantee the revolutionary party maximum efﬁciency, making of it a war machine ever ready to strike the enemies of socialism, but also to preserve the intellectual and moral purity of the “consecrated bodies.” Rigorous centralization and military discipline are both systems of protection whose speciﬁc objective is to prevent the putrid waters of the “bourgeois swamp” from penetrating the “oasis of purity.” We ﬁnd this obsession with purity in all millenarian sects whose calling is to “free humanity from evil.” It also explains the strategic function of the constant purges.23 If the party is to preserve its identity and escape the permanent threat of bourgeois infection, it must periodically channel the waste it accumulates into the external environment and at the same time block the access of exogenous ideas, by deﬁnition corrupt and corrupting. Purity therefore means orthodoxy and the defense at whatever price of scientiﬁc socialism, the only theory that can stop “spontaneity” from prevailing over “consciousness.” “This shows, that every submission to spontaneity of the working-class movement [writes Lenin] every denigrating of the ‘role of the conscious element’, of the role of the Social-Democracy, means quite independently whether it desires it or not, a strengthening of the inﬂuence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.”24 In other words, submission is intellectual and moral “deviation,” unwillingness to ﬁght capitalism, corruption; in a word: “opportunism.” In a world that is a moral swamp, periodical purges are essential if the revolutionary party is to remain faithful to its calling. The party acts as a sect of “true believers” in partibus inﬁdelium constantly opposing attempts to revise the revolutionary theory—“to belittle the socialist ideology, in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology”25 warns an inquisitorial Lenin—periodically “it must free itself of all non assimilated or assimilable elements.”26 Otherwise, opportunism will raise its head in the name of “freedom of criticism,” producing the “perversion of the socialist consciousness of the working masses.” Contact with “the bourgeois and their ideas” would transform social democracy into a democratic party, interested only in “miserable reforms.” At that point, humanity would not stand a chance: nothing and no one could stop the spontaneous progress of the civilization of possessions toward the “abyss of ignominy.”27 3. A party conceived along these lines belongs to the historical-sociological family of charisma-bearing groups, so masterfully described by Max Weber.

104

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Actually, Weber devoted little attention to the grandiose Bolshevik undertaking and limited his comments to a few inadequate, superﬁcial judgements.28 The fact remains that Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and Politic Als Beruf contain the most suitable categories for analyzing the Leninist party. The concept of charisma did not so much concern the leader of the Leninist party as it did the doctrine. Luciano Cavalli remarks that, if by charisma we understand “a power not accessible to the ordinary person,”29 Marx’s doctrine—conﬁdently proclaimed by Lenin to be “omnipotent because it is true”30—can certainly be considered charismatic: only particularly qualiﬁed individuals are allowed to come into close contact with it, to absorb it and be transﬁgured by it, but after a rigorous process of selection and technical/moral education. All the others—be they bourgeois or workers—are excluded, at least until after the “great revolutionary transformation.” They are therefore condemned to a lower level of consciousness. In this sense, Lenin can be said to have conceived scientiﬁc socialism as the generator of a new “aristocracy of the spirit,” similar to the chosen minority in the Manichean Church. Being “the tangible embodiment of proletarian class-consciousness,”31 in the eyes of the unskilled masses this aristocracy must be endowed with a deﬁnite charismatic authority. Added to this is the absolutely “extraordinary” nature—in the sense speciﬁed by Weber—of the dialectic-revolutionary science: to free all humanity from capitalist-bourgeois corruption. This is only possible if it “in a revolutionary and sovereign manner . . . transforms all values and breaks all traditional or rational norms.”32 Thus, it is a speciﬁcally revolutionary power, distinct from all other existing orders and, indeed, in open conﬂict with them, with the given that, whereas the revolutionary power of the ratio “works from without: by altering the situations of life and hence its problems,”33 scientiﬁc socialism “manifests its revolutionary power from within, from a central metanoia.”34 Whoever has been enlightened by the dialectical gnosis and, of his own accord, has become a member of the revolutionary party, undergoes “a complete psychological transubstantiation, a complete re-education of his personality in the spirit of Marxism.”35 Nothing will ever be the same again: not ideas, feelings, or moral sensitivity. His soul will be as if overturned. Conversion will be experienced as an intellectual revelation and a moral regeneration. The outcome will be a “new man,” conscious of being part of a small minority not contaminated by the “bourgeois infection” and for this very fact destined to perform a soteriological role. With this awareness, the “new man” is ready to be transformed into a professional revolutionary, to perform the difﬁcult tasks and take the huge risks that such a decision implies, with one requirement:36 he will not live of politics but also and above all for politics. The professional revolutionary follows a calling; militancy “by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a ‘cause.’”37 In brief, to be a professional revolutionary means to be “boundlessly devoted to the revolution”;38

The Jesuits of Revolution

105

the party is the only reason for living and the only source of psychological gratiﬁcation. It also means submitting to rigorous discipline, even to the point of becoming an “ascetic.” Askesis—self-discipline—is what characterizes the speciﬁc way of being of the professional revolutionary.39 It is a typically intramundane askesis, since the revolution is conducted in the world and against the world in a ceaseless struggle that will only end with the eradication of every symptom of the malignant bourgeois spirit that has perverted humanity. In this sense, the professional revolutionary is a crusader of permanent subversion, a monkwarrior engaged day and night in a war against other orders, all in varying degrees corrupt and corrupting. For this purpose he will eliminate from his life everything—feelings, interests, passions, tastes—that might distract him from his calling. He will pursue a relentless process of self-puriﬁcation until he can identify absolutely and completely with the cause and the institution— the revolutionary party—that embodies it. It is his “family, school, barracks and the rest of the world is left outside.” Everything else must “be destroyed”40 for it is a “ﬁlthy hell,” a veritable regnum perditionis. 4. These elements—“(a) absolute consensus; (b) absolute devotion and discipline; (c) permanent conﬂict with other groups; (d) rigid leadership of the masses who would be incapable of realising their socialist destiny if left to their own devices”41—make the professional revolutionaries’ party something far more than a mere political organization. In trying to understand this “diversity” (that all communist parties have proudly indicated as evidence of their moral superiority over bourgeois and reformist parties), it is useful to compare the Leninist party with the Jesuit religious order, as has been done on many an occasion.42 It is governed by the same principles: the Compagnie de Jesus was conceived by its founder as a “war machine”43 at the service of redemption.44 Although he never dared to confess his debt to Ignatius of Loyola, when Lenin started along the path indicated by Bakunin,45 he accepted the fundamental rule of the Jesuits: perinde ac cadaver.46 Upon that rule he built the institution that he believed would save humanity from moral ruin and from being drawn into the “bourgeois swamp.” The declared objective: maximum intellectual and moral cohesion of the “consecrated body,” making it spiritually impervious. Lenin christened his model of organization “democratic centralism.” Its objective was to guarantee the purity of the doctrine of scientiﬁc socialism and its impersonal rule on the thoughts and conduct of the revolutionaries themselves. In theory, this model did not exclude discussion with the “chief of state” of the revolutionary army, but established that “once the ﬁnal decision had been taken, this must be accepted by all and not only superﬁcially. Consensus had to be total and it had to be sincere.”47 This was only possible if those who had accepted to dedicate their lives to permanent revolution were also willing to accept a “most rigorous and truly discipline”48 so that the spir-

106

Revolutionary Apocalypse

itual unity of the “conscious vanguard” would prevail in every moment of the planetary march of communism. Without this submission, communism would inevitably be contaminated by the spontaneous trend toward “opportunism,” “deviationism,” and “revisionism.” So, Lenin’s centralism not only guaranteed the unity of the conscious and active e´lite through the practice of unanimousness49 but also acted as the institutional custodian of the purity of the charismatic doctrine, as a cultural isolator therefore. Without this theoretical and practical unity, the party’s communist identity would be in danger. If the militants were allowed to criticize and organize protest,50 the party would be invaded by bourgeois ideas and irremediably polluted.51 Rosa Luxemburg captured the essence of Lenin’s strategy when she described it as a “ruthless centralism” that introduced a “state of siege psychology”52 into the socialist movement. In effect, Lenin was horriﬁed by the idea that Marx’s doctrine could be adulterated or denied. The salvation of humanity was at stake. The fact that even he who had been chosen by Engels as executor of the legacy had been infected by “the revisionist germ” was further evidence of the formidable power of the “bourgeois swamp.” The only way to protect revolutionary consciousness from the constant threat of reformism was to introduce complete and total censorship,53 centralism, military discipline, permanent purges, intensive indoctrination, and orthodoxy: their sole purpose was to render the core of professional revolutionaries psychologically and morally impervious, spiritually isolated from the surrounding environment. In other words, it was simply a method for preventing the victory of spontaneity. The socialist ideology—that is, Marxism—was conceived as a categorical imperative; every person and thing had to submit to it. The party was simply there to translate its impersonal commands. Every member of the consecrated body had to rid his mind of the ideas, values, and feelings of the bourgeois culture and embrace the ideal of the “new man,” embodied by Rakhmetov, the main character in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done?: an individual who was “one with the system,”54 enclosed within it both intellectually and morally, and totally absorbed by the dual mission: “to re-educate himself and to re-educate society according to the spirit of the new science.”55 In other words, a person truly determined to make permanent revolution his mission has to be transformed in a homo ideologicus, completely absorbed in the spirit of Marxism and suspicious of the outside world and its spiritual product, which is by deﬁnition, corrupt and corrupting. From this perspective, to be a professional revolutionary means not only to be willing to accept “any sacriﬁce . . . in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly and patiently [in those institutions, societies, and associations] . . . in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found”56 but also to act as the custodian of orthodoxy, vigilating constantly over self and comrades to prevent the contaminating and perverse power of the bourgeois ideology from prevailing over the values and the ideals of communism.

The Jesuits of Revolution

107

5. A party structured as a cohort of charisma-bearers determined to reshape society ab imis through the impersonal dictatorship of scientiﬁc socialism can be referred to as a polemical-hierocratic order. Bund (order) as conceptualized by Herman Schmalenbach in his essay “Die soziologische Kategorie des Bundes” is midway between Ferdinand Toennies’ Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). Toennies distinguished two forms of social cohabitation: one conceived as “a real and organic form” (community) and the other as “an ideal and mechanical form” (society). You do not join the former, you belong to it a nativitate whether you like it or not. Family, motherland, ethnic group are classic examples of a community that the individual does not choose, but ﬁnds, and of which he is an integral part, over and beyond his speciﬁc attitude. By contrast, the second form is the type of association one chooses to join and in which the members, though living side by side, “are essentially not tied but essentially separate. They remain distinct, despite the many ties, while in the community they remain tied, despite the many separations.”57 To belong to the Bund is also a choice, but the bonds that are established among individuals in the Bund and between individuals and the actual Bund are so intimate, profound, and strong that they produce what Schmalenbach calls “fusion.”58 This consists essentially in the extinction of individual will in the will of the institution. Hence the “totalitarian passion that marks the Bund”59 is closely associated with the conviction that the calling of those making up the Bund is of an absolutely extraordinary nature and requires absolute and unconditional devotion. The Schmalenbach model demonstrates the absolute novelty of the professional revolutionaries’ party with respect to the mass socialist party. The latter is a Gemeinschaft; the new type of party ideated and constructed by Lenin is a Bund, a religious order. Like all religious orders, it is made up of a narrow e´lite of individuals who “assemble as if truly regenerated”60 and are willing to sacriﬁce everything—family, career, personal happiness—to the sacred-divine cause with which they have identiﬁed. Such a party is driven by “the ideal of the ecclesia pura . . . , the visible community of saints, from whose midst the black sheep are removed.”61 From a sociological point of view, Lenin’s party is therefore a mechanism of selection separating the skilled from the unskilled. This selection is made on the basis of an ideological criterion: only those who can prove they have absorbed the principles of revolutionary science and been completely reshaped can aspire to enter the narrow circle of those with the immense privilege of being the “conscious vanguard” chosen to lead the proletarian masses to the Promised Land. Thence, in every way they are gnostic activists who are convinced they know the method to uproot evil and live in and for action. So the Leninist party is a hierocratic institution in the sense speciﬁed by Nietzsche: “an ediﬁce of domination that guarantees supremacy to the more spiritual and believes in the power of the spirit.”62 Within the institution, power is concentrated in the hands of a minority that is intellectually and morally

108

Revolutionary Apocalypse

superior to the masses. Unity of thought and action—a principle that Lenin borrowed from Bakunin and Nechaev63—is guaranteed through the concession or refusal of the supreme good: to be part of the institution that incarnates the Pravda,64 outside which there is only wrong and corruption. A highly hierocratic institution is also a polemical institution (in the etymological sense of the term). The historical mission of the Leninist party is to ruthlessly oppose and destroy the existing order of things because it is contaminated by the bourgeois spirit. This requires a veritable war of annihilation that will only cease once the civilization of possessions has been razed to the ground and humanity reunited under the banner of Marxism. Like the founding fathers of scientiﬁc socialism, Lenin saw the world as one huge battleﬁeld in which the “party of corruption” and the “party of puriﬁcation” were involved in a ﬁerce and bloody war. The organization destined to free humanity from the polluting presence of capitalism was conceived as a paramilitary organization “where stern orders were given and obeyed, where only a select few were admitted to the councils of the masters where the broad masses had to serve, theirs is not to question why; but one bond would unite these masses with their leaders, a common dogmatic faith enshrined in a series of holy books, with this difference, however, that the select would know and interpret holy writ, while the outer world of the uninitiated would bow to their authoritative teaching.”65 In this sense, the Leninist party was the most energetic and consistent attempt to fulﬁll the dream of building the church of the future on the rock of the proletariat that so many revolutionaries, starting from Robespierre and Saint-Just, had so ardently desired. Lenin acknowledged that his model of revolutionary organization was simply the continuation of an undertaking initiated by the Jacobins, Proudhon’s “Jesuits of the revolution.”66 The Jacobins had been the ﬁrst to actually develop a method for destroying the “empire of wealth” and creating a party that operated like a war machine and was led by “virtuosi” dedicated body and soul to permanent revolution. Its one fundamental goal: the introduction of a “despotism of liberty,” a compulsory step in the transition to a puriﬁed society. Countless attempts had been made in the nineteenth century—by Babeuf and Buonarroti, Blanqui and Tkachev, Bakunin and Nechaev, Marx and Engels67—to complete what had been started by Robespierre and Saint-Just. The Jacobin task remained unﬁnished, until Lenin developed an “organizational weapon” to destroy the civilization of possessions that was used with passion by generations and generations of revolutionaries. Lenin’s extraordinary capacity to combine a millenarian faith in the advent of the reign of liberty and an almost managerial conception of the “Undertaking” produced “specialists in the art of revolution,”68 “engineers of history,” to use Jules Monnerot’s69 deﬁnition, speciﬁcally trained to conduct a war against capital. For the ﬁrst time, revolution was no longer conceived as the outcome of spontaneous mass action, but as an art that required a speciﬁc know-how and the methodical

The Jesuits of Revolution

109

use of “a sober and strictly objective appraisal of all the class forces.”70 Because of its nature, this art obviously had to be the exclusive heritage of a minority, qualiﬁed from the ideological and moral point of view, but also from the technical one. Lenin therefore conceived the revolutionary party as an agency specialized in the selection and professionalization of revolutionaries, essentially as the generator of a new type of technocratic e´lite. In this sense we can say that, by “professionalizing” the ﬁgure of the revolutionary, Lenin placed instrumental rationality at the service of the socialist idea and, in so doing, gave it a strength it had never had before. The result: Lenin and his party marked the end of the romantic age of revolutions and the start of the technocratic age. Revolution ceased being a dream of naive disarmed prophets and was converted into a “long term process, calculated, planned and executed with cold scientiﬁc precision”71 by a cohort of technicians of permanent subversion, fanatically convinced that the “the future belongs to them”72 and therefore determined to make any sacriﬁce for the “victory of Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world-wide scale.”73 NOTES 1. Franz Mehring, Storia della socialdemocrazia tedesca (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961), p. 702. 2. Georges Sorel, Saggi di critica del marxismo (Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1970), p. 381. 3. “We well know [Lenin used to say] what attempts at revision of Marxism lead to. We need only think of Bernstein and here at home of Bulgakov and Struve. With his revisionism Struve has got bogged down in the most abject liberalism; as for Bulgakov, he’s gone even lower. Marxist doctrine is monolithic. There is no way it can be diluted or its nature changed with the addition of other elements. Of a person who criticized Marxism, Plekhanov once said: Mark him with the ace of spades and then we’ll see. Well, in my view, anyone claiming to correct Marxism should be marked with the ace of spades without delay. This is what a true revolutionary would say. If you come across a dead body you don’t have to touch it to know what it is and decide what to do. The stink is enough.” (Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, My Encounters with Lenin [London: Oxford University Press, 1968]). 4. Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to Lenin, Che fare? (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), p. XLIV. “Give us an organisation of revolutionaries and we will turn Russia upside down!” Lenin used this famous phrase to sum up his strategy. 5. On this point, which is fundamental for understanding the meaning of the communist revolution, C.S. Ingerﬂom’s interpretation of Leninist thought is most important (Le citoyen impossible [Paris: Payot, 1988]). However, Ingerﬂom missed the point that Lenin’s policy against spontaneity did not come into being as a remedy for the backwardness of Russia but as an attempt to prevent the global victory of Western capitalism. In other words, Lenin’s policy was not, as Ingerﬂom believes, a response to Russian underdevelopment but a reaction to Fabian’s reformism and Bernstein’s revisionism. Kautsky and Plekhanov opposed Bernstein’s challenge with academic ar-

110

Revolutionary Apocalypse

guments, defending against all evidence Marx’s theory of catastrophic collapse; Lenin was more creative. He developed an alternative strategy that would lead “to revolution, despite the fact that the theory was false” (Domenico Settembrini, Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx, p. 296). 6. This does not mean that Marx does not have a voluntarist conception of political practice. In his works—as shown masterfully by Settembrini in Due ipotesi per il socialismo in Marx and ed Engels—two theories of revolution coexist and intermingle: one expressing the spirit of enlightenment and seeing the growth of productive forces as the decisive variable of historical progress; the other expressing a Romantic-Jacobin spirit, based on the exaltation of revolutionary violence as the “locomotive of history” (Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 122). Lenin was always faithful to the latter spirit and in fact was accused of Jacobinism by Trotsky, Plekhanov, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg. They should have accused Marx of the same thing. On the eve of Forty Eight he proudly remarked that “there are surprising analogies in history. The Jacobin of 1793 is the Communist of today” (“Discorso sulla Polonia” in Opere complete, vol. 6, p. 557). 7. Lenin, What is to be done? in Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961), p. 384f. 8. Ibid., p. 375. 9. Ibid., p. 369. 10. Plekhanov, Martov, and Trotsky accused Lenin of “substitutism.” They believed some elements of his strategy were profoundly distant from Marxism. In fact, Lenin simply rendered exoteric what in Marx and Engels had been esoteric; that is to say, “class per se” (intellectuals) prevailed over “class in se” (workers). 11. A note in What is to be done? is usually overlooked, yet it expresses with brutal frankness what Lenin thought of the intellectual capacities of workers. “I spent many weeks ‘examining’ a worker who came often visit me, regarding every aspect of the conditions within the enormous factory at which he was employed. Admittedly he did somehow manage to describe the place, but with what effort, but at the end of the interview the worker dried the sweat from his brow, and said to me smilingly: It would be much easier to work overtime than to answer your questions.” (What is to be done?, p. 491). 12. Lenin, “What Are the Friends of the People?” in Complete Works, vol. I, p. 142. 13. J.W. Machajski, Le socialisme des intellectuels, p. 156 et seq. 14. Quoted from Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma (London: Ink Links, 1979). 15. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 26 16. Lenin What is to be done?, p. 400. 17. Ibid., p. 477. 18. Ibid., p. 462. 19. Ibid., p. 398. 20. Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 494. 22. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 355. 23. Signiﬁcantly, Lenin’s epigraph for What is to be Done? is Lassalle’s words: “Party struggle gives the party strength and vitality; the greatest sign of weakness of a party is

The Jesuits of Revolution

111

its dispersion and the disappearance of well-deﬁned limits; by purging itself a party is strengthened.” 24. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 382f. 25. Ibid., p. 384. 26. Vittorio Strada, “Dissenso e socialismo,” in Vittorio Strada, ed., Socialism e dissenso (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. XIV. 27. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 354. 28. See Massimo L. Salvadori, The Rise of Modern Communism (London: Hutchinson, 1953). 29. Luciano Cavalli, Il capo carismatico (Bologna: il Mulino, 1981.) 30. Lenin, “Three Sources and Parts of Marxism,” in Complete Works, vol. 14, p. 23. 31. Giorgy Lukacs, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought (London, New York: Verso, 1997), p. 27. We should not be misled by Lukacs’s formula: the consciousness Lenin is referring to is not class consciousness but consciousness tout court. Lenin made constant use of the terms soznanie and soznatel’nost without any additions. Luckacs himself conceives class consciousness according to Hegelian gnosis, meaning that it is the consciousness that the all has of self, therefore fundamentally the self-consciousness of humanity as it marches toward the reign of freedom. So, while the bourgeois consciousness effectively is a class consciousness—therefore partial, distorted, and distorting—the proletarian consciousness (of which the Communist Party has the monopoly) is absolute consciousness, and, as such, the bearer of the objective meaning of history. 32. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 1115. 33. Ibid., p. 245. 34. Ibid., p. 1117. 35. Leon Trotsky, My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (London: Butterworth, 1930). No different is Luciano Gruppi’s description of the existential bond between the militant and the party: “To belong to a party is not for a suitably trained Communist something extra in his life, but a profound transformation of self, another way of being. At a certain point you realise that the reason why you join the party is to become one with it . . . so to abandon the party is in fact to abandon self ” (La teoria del partito rivoluzionario [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980], p. 188). 36. The speciﬁcation is necessary because the term “profession” does not cover the whole semantic area of the Weberian Beruf, which, in addition to meaning “profession,” also means “calling”: an intimate calling to fulﬁll, an existential calling felt to be unrenounceable. 37. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 84. 38. Lenin, What is to be done?, p. 473. 39. See Bruce Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic, p. 124 et seq. 40. Ignazio Silone, Uscita di sicurezza (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), p. 82. 41. R. H. McNeal, The Bolshevik Tradition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 12. 42. See Rene´ Fueloep-Miller, The Mind and the Face of Bolshevism (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Vittorio Zincone, Lo Stato totalitario (Faro: Rome, 1947), pp. 46–47; Karl W. Deutsch, Politics and Government (Houghton Mifﬂin: Boston, 1970), pp. 278–279; Alain Woodrow, Les Jesuites (Paris: Lattes, 1984), pp. 130–131. 43. Jules Michelet, I Gesuiti (Rome: Avanzini e Torraca, 1968), p. 45.

112

Revolutionary Apocalypse

44. See W. V. Bangert Storia della Compagnia di Gesu` (Genoa: Marietti, 1990), pp. 32–33; Jacques Lacouture, Jesuites (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 103 et seq.; Rene´ Fueloep-Miller, Segreto e potenza dei Gesuiti (Varese: Dall’Oglio, 1974), pp. 29 et seq. 45. In a letter written in 1870, Bakunin states very clearly that the revolutionary movement will only defeat the reactionary forces if it adopts the spirit and the form of organization of the Jesuits: “Have you ever thought about the main reason for the power and the vitality of the Order of the Jesuits? I will tell you the reason. It consists in the absolute extinction of the individual in the will and in the organisation of the Community. And I ask: can this be considered a sacriﬁce for a strong, empassioned and honest man? This further implies sacriﬁcing appearances for reality, the futile halo to save real power, the word to save action. This is the sacriﬁce I ask of all our friends. I am ready to be the ﬁrst to give the example. I do not wish to be I, I wish to be us On this condition only, this I repeat a thousand times over, will our idea triumph. This victory is my only passion” (quoted from Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution [New York: Collier Books, 1961], p. 184). 46. In an interview with Oriana Fallaci, Giancarlo Pajetta told an interesting anecdote. To a Jesuit who asked him what it meant to be Communist, he answered. “To be like you. Perinde ac cadaver. The Jesuit was irritated and probably didn’t believe me. He should have, because that is precisely what it is was like and still is today. To the Communist Party, to this church called the Communist Party, I am tied like a dead body, Perinde ac cadaver.” 47. A. G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Praeger, 1962). 48. Lenin, “Left-Wing Radicalism as a Childhood Disease of Communism” in Complete Works, vol. 31, p. 23. 49. In a letter written by Gramsci to Togliatti we read: “Something the Executive [of the Comintern] feels particularly strongly about is that voting should always be unanimous. This is not simply a formal issue. In the experience of the Russian Revolution lack of unanimity in major public voting has always had a deﬁnite impact on the masses; the political opposition tends to polarise toward the minority, extending and generalising their positions, secretly publishing their manifestos, programmes etc, possibly with the signature of the opposition or of a group of opposition supporters, and working to agitate the waters. All this can be most dangerous in a given moment. A protection against this type of behaviour is unanimous voting. To the public this gives the impression of consensus and open unity” (quoted from Paolo Spriano, Storia del partito comunista, vol. 1 [Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. 294). 50. “But from this it follows that the existence of factions is compatible neither with the Party’s unity nor with its iron discipline. . . . The Party represents unity of will, which precludes all factionalism and division of authority in the Party.” Stalin, Problems of Leninism (Foreign Language Publishing House: Moscow, 1954), p. 106. 51. This explains the obsession of communist parties for organization. A rigidly centralized organization allows them to control the consciousness of militants and guarantee that ideological purity that is essential for a communist party. 52. Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings (London: Cape, 1972). 53. Marxism lends itself to this function of censorship: Being a self-referential system, it is based on the premise that any idea in disaccord with its dogmas is, by deﬁnition, “bourgeois” and therefore hostile to the emancipation of the proletariat. This explains why a Marxist party is a kind of cultural bunker, in which ideological convictions are impervious to external messages, since truth and good can only exist within it.

The Jesuits of Revolution

113

54. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be done? (London: Virago, 1982). This work made an enormous impression on Lenin. It contained an outline of the “ﬁgure of the revolutionary . . . his tasks and . . . the rules of an exemplary life to achieve the objective” (cited from Nikolay Valentinov, My Encounters with Lenin). 55. Alain Besancon, The Intellectual Origins of Leninism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). 56. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 53. 57. Ferdinand Toennies, Community and Association. 58. Hermann Schmalenbach, “Communaute´ et ligue,” in Pierre Birnbaum and Francois Chazel, eds., The´orie sociologique, Paris: PUF, 1975), p. 159. 59. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1964). 60. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. 2. 61. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 1204. 62. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. 63. In direct contrast with Bakunin and Nechaev, Marx and Engels believed that “unity of thought and action simply means orthodoxy and blind obedience. Perinde ac cadaver. We are in the midst of a Company of Jesus” (“L’Alleanza della democrazia socialista e l’Associazione internationale dei lavoratori” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Critica dell’anarchismo, p. 118). 64. Pravda means both truth and justice. Like the pravda of the Orthodox Church, Lenin’s pravda is truth, dispenser of justice, not the axiologically neutral truth of science. Thus it is based on a moral option; rather, it is a moral option. So when a Bolshevik said that something was true, he meant that it was right, that is it was in compliance with the interests of the proletariat, as these had been deﬁned by the party, which alone was authorized to interpret the doctrine of scientiﬁc socialism. 65. Franz Borkenau, European Communism (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p. 26. 66. In “One Step Forward and Two Steps Back,” the professional revolutionary, elevated by Lenin to the rank of demiurgic agent of history, is deﬁned: “A Jacobin who wholly identiﬁes himself with the organisation of the proletariat, a proletariat conscious of its class interests” (Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 383). Likewise, in “Two Tactics of the Social-Democracy,” reference is made to the Bolsheviks as “Jacobins of contemporary Social-Democracy . . . wish . . . to raise the revolutionary and republican petty bourgeoisie, and especially the peasantry to the level of the consistent democratism of the proletariat” (Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 59). 67. As documented in detail by Jean Elleinstein, the Marx-Engels concept of party is not very different from Lenin’s. It contains the essential elements, albeit not fully developed, of what will later be called “democratic centralism.” Marx (Paris: Fayard, 1981), p. 473 et seq. 68. N. S. Timasheff, War and Revolution (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), p. 157. 69. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo (Milan: Giuffre`, 1970), p. 92. 70. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 63. 71. Sigmund Neumann, “Toward a Comparative Study of Political Parties” in Sigmund Neumann, ed., Modern Political Parties (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 419. 72. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 101. 73. Ibid., p. 103.

CHAPTER 7

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

1. From the perspective of Russian revolutionary tradition, the party model illustrated in What Is to Be Done? seems to be little more than a reﬁned version of the many secret societies of “new men” established by the more extreme Populist movements. The same basic elements are present: absolute centralization, a military vision of the class struggle, Jesuit-type discipline, “amoral moralism.” And, in fact, the more authoritative Russian Marxists considered Lenin’s strategic-organizational plan to be a form of unconscious populism, based typically on a Jacobin vision of the relationship between the e´lites and the masses.1 “After driving socialism away from the masses and the masses away from socialism [wrote Plekhanov in 1904] Lenin declared that the socialist intellectuals were the demiurges of the socialist revolution and himself, and his devoted docile followers, the socialist intellectuals par excellence, the ultra-intellectuals, so to speak. Whoever dissents he accuses of anarchy and individualism and, in the struggle to oppose them, he appeals to the masses whose function, in his theory, is to act as inert matter.”2 Along the same lines, Martov’s criticism: Lenin has “imbibed to the marrow the psychology of the conspirator: a politically passive proletariat is the necessary foundation for him to develop his active revolutionary role; cannon fodder that goes to battle under the command of a solid organisation of professional revolutionaries. Yet, he claims that it is he who stimulates the workers to organise themselves, that he is defending the workers by making sure that they are prone to the speciﬁc organisation he preaches, and that he considers workers, not as the actors of a complete political activity, but rather as the objects of the simplistic political action of the committees of professional revolutionaries, as passive tools in the hands of these

116

Revolutionary Apocalypse

committees.”3 Trotsky accused “Maximilien Lenin” of proposing a “ﬂat caricature of the tragic Jacobin intolerance” that was absolutely “foreign to the spirit of Social Democracy” and would lead, not to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but to “dictatorship over the proletariat” by an oligarchy of cruel and pure revolutionaries,4 with the inevitable result that “party organisation would substitute the party, the central committee the party organisation, and, ﬁnally, the dictator, the central committee.”5 Plechanov, Martov, and Trotsky’s harsh words were an extraordinarily lucid prognosis of the liberticidal outcome of the type of revolution Lenin had in mind. Yet, the founder of Bolshevism was perfectly right when he stated that the only way to revive the original revolutionary charge of the European socialist movement was to revive the Jacobin spirit of Marxism, which had been diluted by the leaders of the Second International and had become a generic democratism. Given that the workers’ class, despite the obsessive propaganda of the “modern tribunes of the plebs,” tended to integrate with the structures of the capitalist society spontaneously and that, moreover, this society was obviously not moving toward the ineluctable self-destruction predicted in Capital, the only way to destroy the bourgeoisie was to create a political actor willing to undertake the mammoth task of stopping and overturning the course of history, which was an indirect way of saying that Tkachev’s solution was the revolutionaries’ only option. Naturally, Lenin, being (or liking to think he was) an orthodox Marxist, could not publicly admit that his program was simply an updated version of the policy developed by the revolutionary accused by Engels of not even knowing the “a b c of socialism”;6 nor could he explicitly declare that the manner in which capitalism had actually developed had pulled the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary movement, without going against one of the essential theorems of Marxism and, above all, without making his program pointlessly voluntarist. The fact is that, if it is true that What is to Be Done? constituted the only realistic response to the “Bernstein challenge,” it is also true that its success relied on extremely unlikely circumstances. In other words, Lenin had no alternative but to hope for a miracle. On the basis of his diagnosis of the situation of the revolutionary movement at the start of the twentieth century, it was obvious that the demise of capitalism was virtually impossible. This did not escape the acute eye of Parvus, who rightly accused Lenin of uninhibited idealism: his plan claimed nothing short of “changing the nature of the historical process.”7 Yet, Lenin’s appeal did not fall on empty ears, for the fundamental reason that the invasion of Western culture had generated in Russian society an “enormous mass of cultured, thinking people who were deprived of any status, any career, any prospects: the clergy, the offspring of small landowners and petit bourgeois, the offspring of clerks and ruined nobles.”8 In other words, the plethora of proletarianized intellectuals who felt like foreigners in their

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

117

own country and looked upon the ofﬁcial Russia with hatred and resentment. This “alienated class” was a natural “sociological reservoir” for recruiting what Bakunin called the “chief of staff of the revolutionary army.” Their situation of material and moral deprivation had rendered them “men of denial,” obsessed by the desire to destroy the perverse and degrading “rule of Baal.”9 Hence the importance of focusing our analysis on the Russian intelligentsia. Had it not existed in such massive proportions, it would be impossible to explain the generation of a polemo-hierocratic order of professional revolutionaries, whose objective was to conquer the world and return it to a new life. 2. “To grasp the sources of Russian communism and render the true nature of the revolution intelligible [wrote Nikolai Berdiaev] it is necessary to know who represents that original Russian expression intelligentsiia.”10 The starting point for understanding the real nature of the intelligentsiia is the impact of Western civilization on Russian civilization. The intelligentsia was an induced social phenomenon, the product of the coming together of two distinct civilizations—the European civilization and the Russian civilization. With its formidable radioactive power, the former forced the latter to make constant autoplastic adjustments. Contrary to a widespread but absolutely misleading opinion, Russia came into being not as a peripheral part of our civilisation11 “but (as part) of the Byzantine sister civilisation, of the same Greek-Roman lineage as ours, but nonetheless distinct and different from ours.”12 This explains why Russian history, starting from the early eighteenth century, was the history of a process of “massive acculturation,”13 whose outcome was the formation of a sui generis type of civilization, within which the Byzantine spirit and the European spirit coexisted in conﬂict with each other.14 This explains why Russia, in the last three centuries, has been the stage of a permanent cultural war. This permanent cultural war must be our starting point, if we are to understand the role of the intelligentsia and the historical signiﬁcance of Bolshevism, which was one of the more typical products of the intelligentsia. Even a superﬁcial glance at the Byzantine world—of which Russia, as of its evangelization, was a politically independent but culturally tributary division—reveals that it has typically oriental features. Caesar-papism has always prevailed; that is to say, spiritual power has always been subordinate to temporal power. The latter was considered sacred because the emperor was considered to be “Anointed by the Lord, chosen from birth to fulﬁl God’s will.”15 In compliance with this hierocratic function, his authority “extended to the clergy,”16 which had no autonomy, not even on theological issues. On the other hand, autocracy was also a sort of royal priesthood and its summit— the Autokrator—the supreme priest “in direct relationship with God . . . and the object of a special political-religious cult.”17 Consequently, the will of Basileus was “ﬁnal in both the spiritual and the temporal domain.”18 Nothing escaped his control, not even the sacred sphere, where it was considered ab-

118

Revolutionary Apocalypse

solutely legitimate, indeed, his duty, to intervene for the precise reason that the Byzantines considered “religion and politics to be indissoluble”19 and theology to be a “State matter.”20 Hence the huge, disproportionate power concentrated in the hands of the Basileus—a power before which not only the masses but even the governors had no means of defense. Even the private property of the aristocracy was “precarious in the face of the eminent rights of the Basileus, just as human life was precarious in the hands of God.”21 So it came to pass that the emperor “ruled and actively supervised industry, . . . leaving no room at all for free labour or individual initiative and . . . enforced everywhere an iron regime of protectionism and inquisition.”22 Karl Wittfogel has rightly listed a civilization based on such institutional foundations among the “Asiatic societies.”23 It was as if imprisoned in the “steel cage” of a bureaucratic managerial state with the supreme chief exercising a “triple monopoly.”24 Conversely, from the ﬁfth century, with the disintegration of what remained of the Roman Empire, Europe had become a “stateless society.” The consequences of what has been referred to as “feudal anarchy” were to have an enormous impact on European society, which developed in a manner that was structurally and culturally quite different from the Byzantine world. Precisely because the power of the state was far weaker, the Western sacerdotium escaped the fate of its Oriental equivalent (who was a victim of the autocratic will of Basileus), acquiring complete autonomy and the right to question the imperium, while the “aristocracy of the sword” became a hereditary nobility that the monarchs were never able to bend to their will completely. In the end, a huge network of autocephalic cities developed— the communes—that harbored the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and that speciﬁc self-propulsive mode of production—capitalism—that it had created over the centuries. All these factors contributed to Europe becoming a civilization where dialogue between the state and civil society was the distinctive feature, and essentially, therefore, the permanent conﬂict among the various social forces, none of whom ever managed to attain absolute rule. The state was never able to model society at will. With rare exceptions—for example, the empire of Philip II in which there emerged strong Caesar-papist tendencies and the Inquisition, which greatly reduced the autonomy of civil society—even in an age of so-called absolutism, the pluralistic-competitive logic prevailed in the historical existence of Western civilisation.25 Precisely because of its particular structure, Western civilization was able to unleash a heterogenetic creativity and was free to conduct all sorts of experiments in all ﬁelds, from science to economy. As a result, Europe embarked upon a process of modernization and secularization and became a dynamic and individualistic “open society,” while Byantium—caught in the vice of the bureaucratic managerial apparatus of a state that had successfully granted itself a sacred and virtually unlimited regulatory jurisdiction—remained a rigorously traditionalistic society26 hostile to the typical values of modernity, that were meanwhile germinating and grad-

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

119

ually asserting themselves in what had been the pars occidentalis of the Roman Empire. In looking at the Russia of that period, one is immediately struck by “the almost total symbiosis between the State and the Church . . . The tsar and his subjects are deﬁned by their belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose precepts fulﬁl the function of an ideology in an extremely modern sense. Not surprisingly, discussions or conﬂicts concerning the rights and the precepts of the Church had profound repercussions on the public and cultural life of the country and directly threatened the national identity and spiritual unity of society.”27 In other words, tsarism was simply a variation of the Byzantine system, with which the Russian e´lites had been in contact since the conversion of Grand Duke Vladimir of Kiev. Not only did they try to shape the institutions of their country according to those that existed in Constantinople, but “under the inﬂuence of the Greek Orthodox church, they gradually became accustomed to considering fundamentally heretical everything from Western Europe and rejecting it as such.”28 The result was that the Russian civilization isolated itself from European civilization and for centuries did not participate in its political, economic, and cultural development. It became a world apart. “Seen from Europe [it] looked Asian and seen from Asia, European.”29 The “Asian” features prevailed over the European ones at least until the end of the seventeenth century, in part because, with the sole exception of Novgorod and Pskov, Russia had been ruled by Mongolia, which had practically nothing feudal about it and was based on the unconditional submission of inferior to superior instances, and secondly because the functional imperatives linked to the struggle for independence drove political centralization to its extreme limit and led to the creation of an almighty state.30 The consequence: Russia reconquered its independence and became a great and powerful state, thanks to the autocratic power of the princes of Moscow, but at an exorbitant price: the “suffocation of anything free that existed within it.”31 The great trading cities that had managed to preserve numerous economic and cultural ties with Western Europe, even during the Mongolian rule, were subject to the rule of the Muscovite State just when the hereditary nobility— the boyars—was being eliminated from the picture and substituted with a service nobility ( pomeshchiki) whose members were “nothing more than the servants, if not the slaves, of the sovereign.”32 The same fate befell the church, degraded to the “level of ideological apologist of the autocratic regime.”33 Ivan the Great was responsible for creating the preconditions for the universal slavery of all citizens, including those holding the highest ofﬁces of the state and the church. The process was completed by his grandson, Ivan the Terrible, who ruthlessly exterminated all social forces—landed gentry, entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, free communes—that might have successfully curbed the power of the tsar. In compliance with the speciﬁc logic of despotism, Russian society was also completely sealed off from the rest of the world, to

120

Revolutionary Apocalypse

prevent contamination of its traditional lifestyles. In the end it became a kind of “besieged fortress”34 in which every contact with the external world was considered an act of high treason and punished as such. The underlying philosophy of this monolithic, compact structure was that the Russians were the “custodians of an uncontaminated orthodoxy,”35 and that for this reason Moscow was the Third Rome. “The Church of Ancient Rome fell due to its heresy; the doors of Second Rome, Constantinople, were destroyed by the hatchets of the inﬁdel Turks [wrote the monk Philotheus in a famous letter to Basileus III]; but the Church of Moscow, the new Rome, shines stronger than the sun over the whole universe. You are the ecumenical sovereign; you must hold the reins of government in fear of God. Beware of He who has entrusted it to you. Two Romes have fallen, but the third will stand; there will be no fourth. Your Christian kingdom will never be given to any other sovereign.”36 If Russia’s grandiose soteriological mission was to protect the “real faith” from heresy and spread it all over the world, to save humanity from paganism and heresy, then Russia was a special land, and the Russians the “new chosen people.” Equally extraordinary was the authority of the man who had received the reins of government from God in person. Like the land and the people, he too was sacred and therefore his word was ﬁnal. If it was his charismatic mission to prevent orthodoxy from being contaminated,37 it was his duty to vigilate over everyone and everything so that the lifestyles inherited from the past were in no way changed. The conclusion: citizens had no rights at all before the all powerful state, which could and indeed should “intervene also in the minor details of private life”38 to make sure that the “new chosen people” did not move away from unchangeable sacred tradition. 3. A society that was structured in this way was, by choice, an immobile, closed macrocosm, hostile to everything from without: men, ideas, values, institutions. It lived in the cult of a spiritual superiority conﬁrmed each day by loyalty to “pure and uncontaminated orthodoxy.”39 Not surprisingly, Europeans traveling to Russia discovered a civilization that was quite different from their own civilization and more like the Islamic world than the Western world.40 They effectively were two distinct cultural worlds: Russian society was antithetic to Western society. In the West, society was autonomous; it had developed counterpowers that pursued an “experimental” policy in every domain. Not only did it not fear the “new but it actively searched for it in every sphere, endeavouring to end the inertia of tradition and questioning its sacredness and functionality.” In other words, it was a society that imbibed what Marx has called the “permanent capitalist revolution” that advanced in every direction, generating major changes, through regular growth crises. Charismatic despotism instead had prevented society from evolving in Russia

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

121

and kept it under an inquisition-type regime, cut off from the outside world to avoid contamination from ideas and values foreign to orthodoxy. Of course it was no easy matter for Russia to preserve its traditional lifestyle when the radioactive power of Western civilization was increasing daily. Moreover, Western society had developed a method for the constant growth of technology, and the e´lites of Moscow inevitably felt a frustrating sense of inferiority. It was obvious that Europe’s technological superiority constituted a permanent threat. If Holy Russia was to avoid the danger of becoming a colony of “heretical Europe,” it had to abandon the strategy of isolation. The terms of the new relationship between Russia and Europe were analyzed for the ﬁrst time by Iury Krizhanich in his work Politika. Krizhanich was a Croatian priest who had been appointed political counselor by Tsar Alexis. He looked upon Russia “with the eyes of the ﬁrst panslavist”:41 though acknowledging that Russia was enormously ignorant, corrupt, and inefﬁcient, he praised it for its great spirituality, which was in contrast with the West’s crude materialism. The essence of Krizhanich’s message was this: Russia’s destiny was to save the world; therefore it had to preserve its national traditions. At the same time it had to become familiar with foreign arts and science. Thus, it should open to Europe, but only to steal the secret of its material power and not to borrow and adopt its lifestyles, which were spiritually inferior to the orthodox ones. The tsar’s assistants were not at all keen on Krizhanich’s ideas. The more traditional of them considered them a dangerous concession to a Europe that was currently pursuing a policy of skepticism, having already traveled the road of heresy.42 Of course, the problem was how to prevent Western ideas from ﬁltering through the crack in the door of Russian society along with technology. And, if the ideas did manage to squeeze through, would it be possible to preserve national Russian identity? Krizhanich was removed from the court of Moscow and sent to Siberia like most other bearers of new and dangerous ideas. Yet Krizhanich’s one sin had been to illustrate Russia’s situation in facing the Western challenge. The country had a dramatic but inevitable choice to make: if it was to interpret its soteriological calling in a dynamic sense, it had to eliminate the increasing technological gap that separated it from Europe. We do not know whether Krizhanich’s ideas had an inﬂuence on Peter the Great. However, parts of the revolution proposed by Peter were deﬁnitely based on the suggestions of the Croatian priest. The new tsar ended the isolation of Russia and adopted an open-door policy, with the aim of assimilating superior Western knowhow.43 This strategy was not the caprice of a fatuous lover of foreign things (as the traditionalists liked to claim) but an attempt to solve the problem of “the threat of economic colonisation.”44 Russia had to defend itself from that threat, if it was to preserve its political independence. Peter the Great’s revolution was a response to the challenge posed by Western capitalism. It set

122

Revolutionary Apocalypse

in motion a process of Westernization of Russian civilization. If it was to avoid colonization, Russia had no alternative but to embark upon a self-imposed cultural colonization. The “superhuman move of Peter the Great—to open Russia to the West— completely unhinged the Empire,”45 sparking what the custodians of orthodoxy interpreted as a denationalization of the Russian people. In reality, it sparked a cultural dualism that was to be a dramatic characteristic of Russia’s historical existence. While the vast majority of the Russian people was hardly touched by the process of acculturation, the power e´lites started to imitate the Western lifestyle. The intellectual and moral void that developed between the ruled and the rulers eventually became unbridgeable.46 Peter the Great’s revolution produced a schism in the Russian soul: from then on, it was as if drawn in two opposite and irreconcilable directions: to remain faithful to self and to one’s special calling, or to be absorbed by Western civilization. In short, a process of partial “Europeanization” created an antithesis—between “old” and “new” Russia—that was unknown to previous generations and was to torment generations of Russian e´lites.47 Thanks to Peter the Great’s prompt and dynamic reaction to the Western aggression, Russia became one of the great European powers without ever completely Westernizing its internal organization. The essential features of charismatic despotism survived, thanks to a policy of selective acculturation. The intention was that acculturation should be material but not spiritual. Russia was forced to open to Western knowhow but not to Western ideas.48 A “table of ranks” (tabel o rangakh)—“a veritable statute of the service class”49—was introduced so that Russian society could be organized like an army. Europeans visiting St. Petersburg recognized the Russia they had always known behind a thin superﬁcial layer of Western culture: orthodoxy; hostility toward foreigners; disregard for the values of modern civilization, such as tolerance, freedom of thought, civil rights; and so forth.50 For the foreigner, Russia was an enigma: not completely different from Europe but never completely European, due to the obvious “Asiatic” elements. Russia was an indecipherable, threatening sphinx. The analysis conducted by the Enlightenment culture of the particular historical/cultural nature of Russia was not in any way ideological. Of course, there were the typical prejudices of the time, and it was based on second-hand information, but it identiﬁed the speciﬁc aspect of Russian society with unusual accuracy: the fact that it was neither West nor East; or, better, it was the place where two mutually incompatible models of civilization came together. Which of the two would survive? Would tradition expel the modern spirit or would the latter “Europeanize” Russia and eliminate the “Asiatic” elements?51 The Russians addressed these same issues—albeit from a different perspective, but with the difference that in the face of the cultural pressure of the West, they split into two spiritual families. On the one side were those who considered the revolution started by Peter the Great as the start of a

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

123

process of total denationalization of the Russian people and in the name of orthodoxy rejected anything that came from outside. On the other were those who considered “Europeanization” to be inevitable and strove to continue Peter the Great’s policy of containing the foreign inﬂuence within very precise limits, so that it would not impact on the core of Russian tradition, expressed in the famous triad: “Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Narodnost.”52 4. Peter the Great’s “herodian”-type opening to the outside world rested on a very precarious balance between traditionalism and modernism. This balance broke when Russia, in trying to keep up with the dynamic European convoy, for the ﬁrst time established the university institution as an agency for the production and socialization of knowhow. The inevitable consequence: material acculturation became spiritual acculturation and generated the lay intelligentsia, a completely new class in Russian society. For the ﬁrst time, there was an e´lite that operated not within, but outside (and often against) the civil service, an e´lite that, by its very nature, was beyond that autocratic control that until then had contained within deﬁnite limits the process of selfimposed colonization. In addition, this e´lite was totally absorbed by “exogenous” ideas that were incompatible with the “sacred science” in the custody of the clergy. Inevitably it was perceived as a sort of foreign body, an intruder, that would contaminate tradition. The lay intelligentsia was the undesired side effect of the process of cultural colonization allowed by the e´lites in power to foster technological progress. It was also an inevitable side effect insofar as “every community that tries to solve the problem of how to adjust to the pace of an exotic civilisation needs a special class to act as the human equivalent of the transformer converting electrical current from one voltage to another.” In the case of Russia, this special class was the intelligentsia. It was composed of “liaison ofﬁcers who had become familiar with the wily ways of the intruder civilisation; thanks to them their community had been able to maintain a position in a social environment in which life itself was no longer in harmony with local tradition and increasingly followed a lifestyle imposed by the intruder civilisation.”53 The acculturated minority that comes into being in the society receiving the radiations of an exotic civilization is condemned for that very reason to live in two mutually repulsive spiritual worlds—the world of autochthonous tradition and that of exotic tradition—without identifying with either. The intelligentsia is therefore a class destined to alienation and permanent unhappiness. It cannot identify unreservedly with the “world of its fathers,” which it now judges from the perspective of the exotic civilization, yet it cannot help considering the cultural aggressor as an enemy of the original community. Alienated intellectuals are foreigners in their own country, but foreigners also in a world that is dominated by a civilization whose lifestyle it is forced to imitate, with a mixture of admiration and resentment. In short, the acculturated intelligentsia corresponds for a twofold reason to

124

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Toynbee’s concept of the “intellectual proletariat.” It has to ﬁght on two fronts: against the society that generated it and with which it has strong emotional ties (in order to reshape it according to the new values that it absorbed during the process of acculturation); and against the aggressor society (by which, however, it is attracted). Worse, it has to conduct this battle in a situation of cultural displacement, since it belongs nowhere. The dilemma of the intelligentsia is as follows: should they march resolutely down the “herodian” route until the country has been completely acculturated, or should they opt for the “zealot” solution and assert the spiritual superiority of the national traditions by which they were shaped during the process of primary socialization? The fact that they had absorbed exogenous ideas that were in open conﬂict with the traditions of “old Russia” condemned the Russian intelligentsia to a difﬁcult, indeed, often tragic, situation. They were mistrusted both by the authorities and by the people who were intimately religious and therefore attached to tradition. When the French Revolution made its belligerent and revolutionary call against “Thrones and Altars,” this mistrust became suspicion, fear, open hostility. The relatively open and receptive mental disposition of the Russian nobility vis-a`-vis the Enlightenment philosophy was abandoned and the members of the intelligentsia were perceived as enemies of order and of religion; therefore, as individuals to be eliminated or rendered harmless. Worse still, they were presented to public opinion as a “diabolical force” at the service of the “prince of the darkness” determined to “spiritually assault” all that was sacred that existed in the Russian land. The “prince of darkness,” of course, was Europe, which had used the diabolical “art of the printing press” to spread the cult of “death and hell” all over. Therefore Holy Russia found itself in the midst of a veritable war in which the Western siege was aided by the internal guerrilla warfare conducted by the raznochintsy;54 the only way for the country to win that war was to seal itself off from the other nations that were all, more or less, intoxicated by the “repugnant poison of non-belief ” and introduce a drastic reform of the education system so that not even a crack was left open for the “wave of atheism and corruption threatening all Europe.”55 In a state aspiring to play a primary role in a world dominated by capitalism, a policy of total isolation and purges could not in itself eliminate the diabolical agents of the “prince of darkness.” European technology was equally essential, even though Russia loathed European ideology and considered it a lethal poison. So at least a tiny crack had to be left open for Western knowhow, which inevitably implied permanent contamination of the “world of tradition.” On the other hand, the ideological infection had already spread. Thousands of Russians of every social class—nobility, bureaucracy, clergy, and so on— had drunk at the spring of the “profane science,” gone to European universities, read and reread the classics of Western philosophy, established permanent ties with the “world of the Great Transformation” that so attracted

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

125

them. They already felt morally distant from the society in which they lived, which they now perceived with the “eyes of the Other.” Russia’s social structure was extremely rudimentary, having been barely touched by the capitalist revolution. There was no economically self-sufﬁcient middle class, no class of professionals between the nobles and the peasants, no pressure groups. The entrepreneurial bourgeoisie was too small to count and anyway “was recruited almost exclusively among foreigners.”56 The state was virtually the only employer. “Anyone who had studied and acquired some form of education, possibly knowledge of a foreign language, . . . had no alternative but to become a civil servant,”57 a humiliating prospect for people who had absorbed Western ideas and inevitably felt a profound moral malaise at the “idea of serving a system that was founded on injustice, oppression and poverty.”58 So there came into being a “class of aliens,” of displaced intellectuals, who lived, materially and morally, on the edge of society and had nothing in common with either the power e´lites or the people, because they were “contaminated” by the exotic ideas of the increasingly secularized European culture. By the early nineteenth century, the “herodian” strategy pursued by Peter the Great and his successors had already produced what Martin Malia has called “a rootless internal emigration.”59 On the one hand, this fueled the progressive delegitimation of the tsarist regime—which inevitably appeared to be a “barbarian kingdom” when judged from the perspective of the standards of Western civilization—and on the other, made the alienation of the raznochintsy a permanent phenomenon.60 In these circumstances, any compromise between the power e´lites—the service nobility, the bureaucracy, the army, and the clergy—and the intelligentsia was neither possible nor imaginable. They were condemned to a permanent war, if only to survive. For the power e´lites, Westernized intellectuals were a “poison in the body of Russia”;61 for the Westernized intellectuals, precisely because acculturation had distanced them from traditional ways of thinking and feeling, the surrounding environment had to be completely destroyed in order for it to be regenerated both materially and spiritually. That the intelligentsia should have adopted revolution as their calling should not therefore come as a surprise. In effect, what other option was there, other than the violent overturning of the existing order? What was the sense of moderation in a despotic state that denied its subjects the most elementary rights? Would a policy of reform and gradual liberalization of public institutions have achieved anything? Surely the very nature of tsarism obliged the intelligentsia to think that the only way for “civilization” to destroy “barbarity” was by means of a revolutionary and belligerent call to arms of the people who were opposed to the autocracy and the social forces that sustained it. And, ﬁnally, what alternative other than the total destruction of ofﬁcial Russia did history offer alienated intellectuals for making the social macrocosm and their microcosm compatible?

126

Revolutionary Apocalypse

5. So, from the early nineteenth century, the raznochintsy were dominated by a “hatred for ofﬁcial Russia”62 and adopted the features typical of “a sect, with its own, extremely rigorous morals, an imposed conception of the world, particular habits and customs, and even a physical detail by which members could be identiﬁed.”63 They were a kind of “lay clergy”64 in partibus inﬁdelium, experiencing a painful identity crisis that led them to ask themselves over and over: Who are we and where are we going? What is our fate and the fate of our country? How can we eliminate the abyss that exists between our microcosm and the macrocosm in which we are condemned to live as aliens? As personal and public problems came to be seen as one and the same thing, it was inevitable that political commitment should be seen as a solution for individual existential torment. Politics was conceived as something that would bring deliverance to those for whom it was a Beruf and to Russia as a whole. The objective of transforming the social macrocosm gave meaning and hope to an otherwise empty existence—on one condition: that politics be interpreted as a soteriological mission, as a means for bringing about the radical regeneration of the existing order, from the perspective of the “world of ideas.” In other words, as a palingenesis. Thus, individual and collective salvation came to coincide with the revolution and the revolution with the epoch-making—rather, the apocalyptic—event that would guide the people toward the millenium. What Berdiaev was to call the “eschatological calling” of the Russian soul was spontaneously grafted on Jacobin gnosticism.65 The intelligentsia idolized the revolution, considered the revolutionary activist as a kind of “lay saint” and the protest movement as representing everything noble and worthy. And, since inevitably the ﬁrst phase of the revolution was exclusively negative—how can one regenerate the existing order without ﬁrst destroying its foundations?—the intelligentsia developed a cult of destruction; that is, of nihilism, in accordance with the underlying metaphysical premises of the revolutionary program. “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion” wrote Bakunin in his famous article “Die Reaction in Deutschland,” conﬁrming in Herzen’s eyes what he had told his friend Ogarev as early as 1833: “We feel that the world is awaiting renewal, that the Revolution of 89 is over, but that it is necessary to create a new palingenetic time, that it is necessary to lay new foundations for the societies of Europe, to give them more rights, more morality, more culture.”66 “All or nothing”67 was the battle cry of an e´lite that considered itself to be the “vanguard of the revolution”68 in a country that refused to give up its backward ways and was incapable of understanding its message, an e´lite that fantasized in total isolation about the palingenetic overturning of society that would end its own alienation and free the people from the oppression of the tsars. There emerged a whole set of features considered to be typical of the ethos of the intelligentsia: “extremism, intolerance, maximalism, refusal of the existing order, doctrinarian faith in theory, idealisation of violence, dedication

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

127

to revolution, indifference as to the means used to attain its objectives.”69 All were in the framework of an apocalyptic vision of history in which revolution was the equivalent of “God’s judgment,” both terrible and redeeming. The nihilists possessed all these characteristics in an undiluted state and in their most extreme forms. They “prided themselves on being free, independent individuals, who were superior to the corrupt world around them.”70 They were like the members of Middle Age sects who, while awaiting the Apocalypse, “withdrew from the world, the reign of Anti-Christ and went to live in the remote North or in the steppes of the South.” The “great vagabonds of the Russian land,” as Dostoevsky called them, rebelled “against a history of injustice and a civilization of lies; they aspired for the end of time and awaited the political and social palingenesis of the tsarist empire,”71—with one difference: having no faith in God, they gave an immanent interpretation to traditional Russian millenarianism. “Refusal of the world” was conceived as a veritable declaration of war against the existing order and awaiting the Apocalypse as the Promethean ediﬁcation of the “Kingdom of God on earth without God.”72 The consequence: the nihilists entered the arena as activists of permanent revolution, prepared to sacriﬁce everything—career, happiness, even their lives—to make their palingenetic dream come true. Herzen was responsible for laying the philosophical and moral premises of populism; Chernyshevsky, for sketching the ﬁgure of the lay ascete identifying totally with the cause of liberating the people from oppression and poverty; the nihilists, for taking their lesson to its extreme consequences and proclaiming for all to hear that times were ripe for spreading the new gospel—permanent revolution—of which they felt themselves to be the only consequential interpreters. By now everything was clear; everything had been said: the one task of critical thinkers was “to devote themselves without delay to the sacred cause of exterminating evil, of purifying and cleansing the Russian land with iron and with sword, uniting in brotherhood with those who would do the same all over Europe.”73 6. The nihilistic turning point was fundamental in the evolution of Russian revolutionary tradition. It generated a new anthropological type—“the man of denial”74 who “lived for a great cause” and “refused to bow to any authority other than reason.”75 Turgenev introduced this new individual to the whole world in his novel Fathers and Sons, a satire on the ideas and sentiments of young radical intellectuals.76 The use of the term “nihilistic” to describe the spiritual attitude of people who in no way ﬁt the description of “believing in nothing” is debatable. The revolutionary intelligentsia demonstrated a “passionate dedication, practically a ﬁxation, for their beloved idea.” This explains “on the one side, their abnegation and willingness to make sacriﬁces and, on the other, their monstrous distortion of reality and their determination to destroy every idea that did not ﬁt in with the given idea.”77 Nonetheless, the term “nihilism” came to be the political banner of the intelligentsia thanks to

128

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Dmitry Pisarev, one of the maitres a` penser of Russian youth. It was he who claimed that Turgenev had used his character (Bazarov) to illustrate the psychology and ethics of the “thought proletariat,” condemned by circumstances not to go beyond denouncing the evils of the world. On the other hand— explained Pisarev—“the obstacles in the path of the destruction of Russia were so great, that even a purely negative calling was more than enough to ﬁll the existence of a generation.”78 Those aspiring for a better world had no trouble identifying with the driving force of nihilism, namely that “there existed not one institution of contemporary life, family or social, that should not be totally and ﬁercely denied.”79 To questions about the positive aspects of their program, they therefore had every right to answer as Bazarov had: “It is not for us to build . . . First we have to make room”; that is to say, “destroy all,” because there is not one institution that “should not be totally and ﬁercely denied.”80 The intelligentsia greeted Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? even more enthusiastically. It became “the breviary of every young Russian” (Kropotkin’s deﬁnition). Rakhmetov, the main character, was considered the prototype of the “new man,” an ascetic at the service of the people, willing to forego even love in order to remain loyal to the principles that he described in these terms: “We want men to have a life that is full of well being: we must therefore demonstrate with our own lives that this we do not wish for selﬁsh reasons, for we are not driven by the desire to satisfy our passions, that instead we work for man in general, that we talk on the basis of principles of conviction and duty.”81 Rakhmetov “embarked on a life of austerity. He continued to eat meat in order to preserve his strength, but on everything else he saved down to the last penny. Old bread, no sugar, no fruit. ‘I have no right,’ he said, ‘to throw money away on superﬂuous things. Whatever the poor classes cannot have, I shall not touch either: to understand their life, it is necessary to live it.’ He dressed simply, almost carelessly; he slept on the ﬂoor, without even the luxury of a mattress; he was a spartan, a singular man, an exemplary of a very rare species”: The species of those who “are the pick of the chosen; the engine of engines, the salt of the earth.”82 Chernyshevsky had described the “new man” as being “one with the system.” He was still not the professional revolutionary, totally shaped by ideology, and dedicated body and soul to the holy cause of destroying the existing order, but he was deﬁnitely his moral predecessor. The young raznochintsy saw Rakhmetov as the “incarnation of the ideal revolutionary”:83 a pure and disinterested individual, willing to sacriﬁce all for the emancipation (material and moral) of the people. Although What Is to Be Done? circulated underground, it was extraordinarily successful and became the “bible of the radical intelligentsia, of the raznochintsy, of generations of Russian youth. It inspired their beliefs, their morals, their ideals. It instilled in them the idea that revolution was inevitable and educated the people who would realise it.”84

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

129

In other words, What Is to Be Done? was a manual for alienated intellectuals “possessed” by an ardent desire to transform the world.85 Admittedly, it contained no action plan, but it did advocate—and this was an important aspect for people in desperate need of spiritual guidance—an existence founded on ascetism, personal sacriﬁce, and passionate devotion to a great and noble cause. Above all, it expressed the proud consciousness of the lofty calling of the “men of the future” as exclusive bearers of a “new science” that would enlighten and reshape the existence of the Russian people. 7. Circumstances prevented the generation of Chernyshevsky and Herzen from putting these principles into practice. Instead, for the youth who had received their spiritual education from the pages of What is To Be Done? it was time to put the theory into practice. The “new men” had been proliferating at a dramatic rate ever since the tsarist regime had realized (at the end of the Crimean war) that there was no alternative but to end the isolation enforced by Nicholas I to prevent Holy Russia from “being corrupted by the poisonous atmosphere of the West.”86 There was no alternative, because the technical gap separating Russia from the great European powers was increasing dramatically. The pendulum of the autocracy was moving in the direction of the West: major reforms were launched—among which was the epochal abolition of serfdom—access to higher education was fostered in a variety of ways, and universities were granted exemptions. As an inevitable consequence, the universities became agencies of socialization and recruitment of the politicalideological members of the populist movement. Rather than diminishing, protest increased just when the authorities started a policy of liberalization. A tragic irony dominated the life of Russian society: the closer those Lavrov referred to as “critically thinking people” came to the Western model, the more intolerable became the distance that separated them from Europe. Given that the regime continued to deny all opposition and did not even grant citizens freedom of thought, conspiracy and underground protest were the only tools available to the intelligentsia for having an impact on reality. This meant that the mobilization and the democratization of the Russian nation could take place only through nondemocratic channels and the action of secret societies, whose members were intellectuals who were socially displaced and politically distant from public opinion. The political arena was inevitably transformed into a military arena dominated by two parties: tsarist bureaucracy and revolutionary intelligentsia. Though they were divided on countless issues, their thoughts and actions were based on the same military logic, which was absolutely incompatible with the logic of liberal democracy. Thus, it is easy to explain why the leaders of the revolutionary movement were dominated by an obsession: to ﬁnd the most effective method for destroying the “absolute enemy,” no matter what.87 This search was to lead, in subsequent steps, to Bolshevism. The ﬁrst step was taken by Nikolai Ishutin,

130

Revolutionary Apocalypse

a fanatical admirer of Chernyshevsky88 who, in 1865 in Moscow, founded a secret society he called “Hell.” The goal of the society was to destroy tsarism by means of the methodical use of terror. Chernyshevsky never actually developed a theory explicitly advocating terror as a means for overturning the existing order,89 but circumstances drove the young, ideologically extremist intelligentsia irresistibly toward political extremism. Their only option was to take Bazarov literally and “cleanse” the area of everything that prevented social palingenesis. This implied the transition from “the arms of criticism” to the “criticism of arms.” The issue ceased being one of protesting against what they liked to call the “conventional lies of civilised humanity”90 and became one of destroying existing institutions and physically eliminating the men of “ofﬁcial Russia.” Naturally, this strategy required a peculiar form of organization that could shape a peculiar type of individual. Ishutin’s secret society was organized like a monastery and imposed an iron discipline on its members: “The members of Hell will live under a false name and break family ties; they will not marry, will abandon their former friends and, in general, live with one exclusive purpose: endless love and dedication to their country and to its well-being. For this, members will abandon all personal satisfaction and nurture hatred against hatred, evil against evil.”91 Ishutin conceived his secret society as an agency for the production of “new men,” of professional revolutionaries therefore willing to sacriﬁce life—their own and that of others—to realize the utopia. The same inspiration was behind Sergei Nechaev’s short but intense experiment. Like Ishutin, Nechaev saw everything as a means to create as many “fanatics of destruction” as possible in an organization conceived as a “war machine.” His Catechism of the Revolutionary,92 written in 1869, is essential for understanding the anthropological “type” necessary for revolution. The revolutionary is a man who is a loser from the start. He has no personal interests, private affairs, feelings, personal ties, property. He does not even have a name. One interest absorbs him, to the exclusion of every other. One thought, one passion— revolution. In word and in fact he has broken every tie with the social order and with the entire civilised world, with all the laws, the customs, the social conventions and its moral rules. The revolutionary is an implacable enemy and lives only to be more certain of destroying . . . He knows one science only, the science of destruction . . . He despises public opinion. He despises and detests the morals of current society in its every motive and expression, for he is morally against anything that contributes to their victory; everything that prevents him from acting is immoral and criminal. The revolutionary is a lost man, he has no pity for the State or for educated society in general; from it he therefore expects no mercy. Between him, on one side, and the State and society, on the other, there is a state of war. It may be visible or invisible, but permanent and implacable—a war down to death.93

One can’t help being struck by the absolute amorality of these words, where the author explicitly formulates a theorem that was to become an indisputable

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

131

dogma in the framework of the communist culture: the legitimacy of every means, even the most terrifying, if functional to the sacred cause of the “terrible, total, general and ruthless destruction” of “rotten society.”94 This makes The Catechism of the Revolutionary one of the ﬁrst documents in which the revolutionaries solemnly and ofﬁcially incorporated Machiavellianism and Jesuitism, as a means to achieve the “complete liberation of the people.”95 8. When the “Nechaev affair” exploded,96 Russian and European progressives immediately declared that the author of the Catechism of the Revolutionary was a pathological case and certainly not representative of what the revolutionary world had meant for Russian society, where it had never been more than a “catacomb culture.”97 Dostoevsky, however, considered Nechaev to be a typical expression of the spiritual phenomenon that had become an obsession for him, namely the diabolical aspiration to build a new “tower of Babel . . . without God, not to reach heaven from earth, but to lower heaven so that it reached earth.”98 He abandoned the book he was writing at the time, Vita di un grande peccatore, and started on an ideological novel, Besy, with the ambitious objective of identifying the metaphysical and psychological essence of revolutionism. The two main characters of Besy are Petr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin: vile is the former, who obviously represents Nechaev,99 and tragic and sultry the latter. Shigalev, however, is the character Dostoevsky uses to illustrate what he believes to be the core of the revolutionary program. Shigalev is a “fanatical philanthropist” who takes his egalitarian beliefs to absurd extremes: “He starts with absolute freedom and ends with absolute despotism.”100 Shigalev’s “ﬁnal solution” is the division of humanity into two unequal parts: “One-tenth is free and has unlimited rights. The other ninetenths have no personality and are like a ﬂock of sheep. Through blind obedience they experience a series of re-generations and attain primordial innocence, something like a primordial paradise, albeit one in which it is still necessary to work.”101 In this type of social organization, each member “watches over the other and reports on his or her conduct. Every individual is the property of the others, and the others are the property of each individual. They are all slaves and in slavery are equal. In extreme cases there may be libel and murder, but above all there is equality. The ﬁrst step of the process is to lower the level of scientiﬁc education and talent. Top levels are only possible for the gifted and people who are particularly gifted are people who are unnecessary! They are despots; they corrupt more than they contribute; they will be exiled or suppressed. Cicero’s tongue cut out, Copernicus’ eyes pulled out of their sockets, Shakespeare stoned . . . Slaves must be equal: without despotism there has never been liberty or equality.”102 Dostoevsky was convinced that the revolutionaries were aiming at this type of social system, or at least that this was the type of system they would have been forced to create, had they pursued the logic of egalitarianism and athe-

132

Revolutionary Apocalypse

ism. As for materializing a “terrestrial paradise,” Shigalevshchina imagined a huge network enveloping all society, so that “each of the action divisions would make proselytes and spread laterally ad inﬁnitum, thus constantly undermining the systematic propaganda against them, the status of local authorities, encouraging the people to doubt, generating cynicism and scandals, and a complete lack of hope in a better situation or state and ﬁnally, at a given time, resorting to gun ﬁre, a popular means par excellence, to throw the nation into a state of despair.”103 Reactions to I demoni were hostile. Dostoevsky was accused of distorting the psychology of the nihilists and mistaking what was simply a monstrous phenomenon as the essence of revolutionism. Nechaev was certainly an extreme case, but he had been nourished by the classics of European revolutionary tradition and considered his strategic and organizational program nothing more than a tool for implementing the program illustrated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.104 He had also worked closely with Bakunin, undoubtedly one of the most inﬂuential ﬁgures of the international left. In any event, Nechaev’s ideas cannot be said to have been distant from the revolutionary culture of his time. A glance at Bakunin’s proclamation Agli ufﬁciali dell’esercito, written in the winter of 1869, reveals that what liked to present itself as a program of anarchy was actually quite similar to the Shigalev model. For example, we read the following: In my Speech to Young Russian Brothers I said that the Stanka Razin leading the masses during the obviously imminent destruction of the Russian Empire will no longer be an individual but a collective Stenka Razin. Anyone who is not stupid will know that I was referring to a secret organisation that already existed, and that could already count on the discipline, dedication and passionate abnegation of its members and on passive obedience to all the directives of a single committee that knows all but is known by no one. The members of this committee have completely given up self; this entitles them to expect every member of the organisation to do the same. They have given up everything that is the object of the desire of proud, ambitious and power greedy men; by refusing for once and for all personal, public and ofﬁcial power, and in general all celebrity in society, they have given themselves over to permanent obscurity, leaving to others the glory of appearing and fame, preserving for themselves, and always collectively, only the essence of the undertaking. Like Jesuits, each has given up his will, not out of submission, but for the emancipation of the people. Within the committee, indeed within the whole organisation, it is not the individual who thinks, wants and acts, but the collectivity . . . A serious member complies rigorously and unconditionally with the orders and instructions from above without ever asking, without even wanting to know, the degree to which he contributes to the organisation. He knows that such discipline is an essential guarantee of the relative impersonality of each member and this in turn is the conditio sine qua non of common victory. He knows that only this type of discipline will allow him to contribute to the formation of a true organisation and create a collective revolutionary force which, being based on the impersonal power

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

133

of the people, will be successful vis a vis the formidable power of the organisation of the State . . . The current organisation . . . will outlive all governments and cease activity only on the day in which the whole programme has become the daily life of Russians and the life of the whole world.”105

In a letter to Nechaev ( June 2, 1870), Bakunin described exactly the same revolutionary policy. “Our plan can be illustrated in a few words: total destruction of the public-legalistic world and of the entire so-called bourgeois civilisation, through a spontaneous popular revolution, led not by an ofﬁcial dictatorship but by an imperceptible and anonymous collective dictatorship of the partisans of total liberation of the people from every oppression, united in a secret Society, who act everywhere and always with the same scope and on the basis of the same programme.”106 This secret organization composed exclusively of people who have “sincerely identiﬁed with the idea of being at the service of the people”107 has a huge task before it. “In fact”—continued Bakunin—“try to imagine yourselves before a victory of the spontaneous revolution in Russia. The State and, with the State, the whole social and political system have been squashed. The population has uprisen, has taken what it needs and eliminated whoever was in favour of the old regime and opposed them. There is no law and no authority. A stormy ocean has broken all barriers. The masses—the Russian people—are far from homogeneous; they are extremely varied and extend over the immensity of the Russian Empire. They can now live and act independently, according to what really exists and not to what they are ordered to be, each in his own way: the result is general anarchy. The murky mud that has gathered in enormous quantities in the depths of the people now comes to the surface; new, daring, intelligent, dishonest or ambitious men emerge here and there; each in his own way tries to win the trust of the people and use it to his personal advantage. These men face each other, they ﬁght and destroy each other. One might call it a terrible anarchy, and one for which there is no solution.”108 “Yet”—continued Bakunin—“there is a solution: the presence of the secret society that has spread its members all over the Empire organised in small groups and yet united and inspired by a common mentality, a common scope, pursued in accordance with circumstances and conditions. They act everywhere, according to the same plan. These small groups, unknown as such, have no ofﬁcially recognised power. But they are strong because they can count on their own ideas, that express the very essence of instincts, of desires and popular needs; they can count on men who ﬁght without an ulterior motive, and without a pre-established plan; they can count on the solidarity that unites all the obscure groups in an organically united whole; they can count on the intelligence and energy of the members of their society who have successfully developed a group of people who are more or less loyal to the same mentality and by nature submissive to their inﬂuence—these groups who desire nothing for themselves, no beneﬁts, no honours, no power, will lead the popular movement against all

134

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the disunited, ambitious people ﬁghting among themselves, and lead them towards the most complete fulﬁlment of the social and economic ideal and towards the most complete organisation of popular liberty. This is what I call the collective dictatorship of secret organisations.”109 Admittedly, in this letter Bakunin accused the anarchists of being “the declared enemies of all ofﬁcial power, including ultra-revolutionary power; enemies of every publicly recognised dictatorship.”110 But this only made the paradox on which the program was based more obvious.111 It is a paradox underlying the policies developed by many revolutionary groups in Russia and elsewhere in Europe: like the Shigalevshchina, they all claimed that they would derive total liberty from total power. 9. The action plan prepared by Petr Tkachev conﬁrms that the “Shigalev paradox” was not an invention of Dostoevsky, but the penetrating diagnosis of an intellectual and moral perversion that was common in the secret societies founded by the more extremist and consequential members of the intelligentsia of the time.112 Tkachev was one of the most typical and inﬂuential members of the populist movement. His action was a mix of the most radical (but confused) anarchic egalitarianism and the most rigorous and consequential Jacobin totalitarianism. Tkachev—like Bakunin, Nechaev, and thousands of other professional revolutionaries—believed that the ultimate goal of the revolutionary movement was the creation of a social order in which “all people will be unconditionally equal . . . and between them will exist no difference, from the intellectual, moral and physical point of view.”113 On the basis of this given—according to which the only equality the authentic revolutionary can and should envisage is “physiological, organic equality . . . resting ﬁrmly on the same education and identical living conditions”114—Tkachev observed that this objective would never be achieved via a gradual process of political and cultural evolution of the workers, since “taken as a whole, the masses did not believe, and could not believe, in their own strength. Of their own initiative they would never have started the struggle against the poverty that enveloped them.”115 To fulﬁll the egalitarian principle it was necessary to make a radical change in humanity’s very nature: something that could only be done “by people who understood this and sincerely aspired to ﬁnd a solution; in other words by people who were intellectually and morally educated, i.e., by a minority. And this minority, because of their higher level of intellectual and moral education, would always hold intellectual and moral power over the majority.”116 Therefore, the initiative—Tkachev tirelessly repeated, thus anticipating what would be the starting theorem of the Leninist conception of the party of professional revolutionaries—had to be taken by an actor who was external to the masses. This actor could only be the “thought proletariat”; that is to say, the intelligentsia—people who were morally alienated and suited, thanks to their absolute idealism, to place themselves at the head of the movement that would

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

135

“use the destructive-revolutionary force of the people to destroy the enemies of revolution.”117 Tkachev added that any strategy other than frontal conﬂict was unimaginable given the political circumstances in Russia. The only way to end the diaspora of the intelligentsia was to create a highly centralized organization with a military-type discipline. The tsarist state was a war machine at the service of permanent repression. It could only be destroyed by a party that was organized like an army. Tkachev did not deny the utility of political propaganda and of protest action among the people but considered this form of struggle useless without solving the fundamental issue: the creation of a revolutionary party whose organization was identical to that of the tsarist state. “We don’t need the phantom-like, impossible, fake organisation advocated by the bourgeois and the anarchic revolutionaries, but a proper organisation, an organisation that brings the scattered revolutionary elements together in one single living organism, that follows one general plan and obeys one general direction, an organisation founded on centralised power and decentralised revolutionary functions.”118 Essentially these ideas paraphrased blanquisme though Tkachev probably developed them independently, following in the steps of Marxism.119 The Russian revolutionary’s sociological analysis justifying his strategy was, however, original. What strikes us most is his extraordinarily lucid perception of the signiﬁcance and long-term consequences of the tsarist policy of “controlled modernization.” To the young people it had allowed to be educated according to the Western model, tsarism said: “You are necessary to me and I will nourish you to do nothing. Your ideal principles do not correspond to the interests that I have created for you, but this does not matter; for the development of my principles, I need agricultural entrepreneurs, technicians, industrialists, doctors, lawyers etc. To each of these, I am willing to offer complete freedom in the domain of his specialty and nothing more. You must help me. Develop industry and commerce, make agriculture efﬁcient, teach the people to read, found banks, hospitals, build railway tracks etc; for all this, I will offer you a good, solid reward and I will endeavour to ensure that your activity is not too onerous for you. I will create the conditions that meet your character and will also afford you a sense of satisfaction for your work, thus freeing you of your sadness and melancholy. These are my conditions.”120 Unfortunately, they were conditions that were unacceptable for the radical intelligentsia. They were in absolute contrast with the principles of individuals who aspired for something far grander than a convenient niche within the existing order of things. The intelligentsia wanted absolute equality, not despotism coated with a thin layer of liberalism and contaminated by the bourgeois spirit. Yet the tsarist proposal did express a rationale that, in the long term, might have been fruitful, had it not been so energetically opposed. By setting in motion the engine of capitalism, the state created an excellent opportunity for sweeping the ground from under the feet of the revolutionary

136

Revolutionary Apocalypse

movement. Tkachev added, “albeit slowly and weakly, we too are moving in the direction of economic growth and this growth is subject to the same laws and is going in the same direction as the economic growth of the western States. The obshchina is starting to dissolve, the government is making every effort to annihilate it and destroy it for ever. In the peasant class, a class of kulaki is developing, buyers and renters of peasant and noble lands, a peasant aristocracy. The free passage of land from one owner to another encounters fewer obstacles every day and agricultural income and monetary operations increase all the time, the pomesciki, volens nolens are in a situation where they are forced to improve their agricultural system. This type of progress generally goes hand in hand with industrial development and extends to the life of citizens. Therefore, here and now, there already exist all the conditions for the formation, on the one hand, of a strong conservative class of peasants— owners and farmers—and on the other of a moneyed bourgeoisie of trade and industry, in other words of capitalists. As these classes come into being and gain in strength, the situation of the people will inevitably deteriorate. The chances of success of a violent overturning will become more complex. Which is why we cannot wait. This we why we say that revolution right now in Russia is truly indispensable. We cannot wait. We cannot postpone it. Now, or maybe soon, never. Now the circumstances are in our favour. In ten or twenty years, they will be against us.”121 Franco Venturi has rightly observed that this “page is decisive for understanding Tkachev’s position. A cold and realistic analysis of the situation, the result of his reﬂections on Russian society, coupled with an impassioned will to save what was the core of the populist conception: the peasant obshchina.”122 But it is also a decisive page for understanding the paradoxical nature of the role played by the revolutionary intelligentsia. They claimed to introduce democracy, but using antidemocratic methods; they opposed capitalism because they feared it would generate an independent civil society with numerous counter-powers and therefore difﬁcult for the revolutionary party to shape and inﬂuence. So it came to pass that “two sworn enemies, the radical intelligentsia and the autocratic bureaucracy, were allies in their hostility for a truly civil society, a structure of Russian society that respected the principles of pluralism, autonomous administration, civil law, and liberalism in the domain of political opinions and cultural norms.”123 10. The fact that an independent civil society worried the revolutionary movement as much as it did the tsarist bureaucracy should not come as a surprise. We know that the intelligentsia had a love-hate relationship with liberal civilization. They considered the existence of Western elements in their society a cultural aggression that threatened the historical identity of Russia. Admittedly, the populists did not believe that the European inﬂuence would pollute Russian society and proclaimed that they would rebuild society on the basis of the “German science.” They also refused the revealed religion

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

137

of the orthodox Church and the edifying image of society prior to Peter the Great, based on the sobornost that was so dear to the Slavophiles. Nonetheless, they had no intention of adopting the Western model124 and aspired to create something radically different from European civilization, which, to their horror, was dominated by shopkeepers.125 So theirs was a very sui generis Westernism. In the name of the values and principles of the “profane science,” they rejected “old Russia,” but their “new Russia” was not a copy of the liberal Europe they despised for its individualism and the excessive power of bourgeois money.126 They dreamt of a new type of Gemeinschaft and this led them to ﬁght against both the traditional Gemeinschaft and the modern Gesellschaft. In this they were much closer to the Slavophiles than they imagined: though enemies, they shared the same determination to “face the powerful western culture”127 and guarantee their country a fate that was different from that of Europe.128 Herzen’s Lettere dalla Francia e dall’Italia (1847) is most enlightening in this regard. The spiritual father of the “Westerners” “gave new meaning to the Russia-Europe antithesis. It was no longer a matter of being pro-West: to the bourgeois West Herzen counterposed the Russian people, as loyal custodians of agricultural communes as yet untouched by the bourgeois spirit, uncontaminated by Roman property law, in other words in a situation in which there was nothing to lose and everything to gain from a future revolution,”129 which was no longer conceived as a means for driving Russian society toward the West but as a means for preventing the victory of capitalism, with the result that Herzen refused precisely what was the economic basis of the process of modernization and secularization.130 That Herzen’s attitude spread rapidly among the populists is evident from countless documents, including Mikhail Mikhailov’s particularly enlightening declaration Alla giovane generazione (1865). In direct contrast with the reformist policy of Alexander II, who “insisted on turning Russia into England,” Mikhailov declared: “No! We do not wish for English economic maturity . . . We not only can, but we must, do something different. There are principles in our life that are completely unknown to the Europeans . . . We are a backward people and therein lies our salvation. We should be grateful that fate has spared us the lifestyle of Europe. Its problems, its hopeless situation are a lesson for us. We do not want its proletariat, its aristocracy, its principles of government, its imperial power . . . Europe does not understand, it cannot understand, our social aspirations. For this reason, Europe cannot be our master in economic questions . . . Unlike western Europe, we are not afraid of the future: which is why we move boldly toward revolution, why we desire it. We believe in our energy, we believe we are destined to introduce new principles into history, to express something personal, not to repeat in a pedestrian fashion the European past. Without this faith, there is no salvation and we have an immense faith in our strength.”131 These words convey a sensation of resentment and frustrating inferiority

138

Revolutionary Apocalypse

vis-a`-vis the dynamic and aggressive Western civilization—a resentment that provoked the typical reaction in such cases: the conviction that the last—that is, the Russians—would eventually be the ﬁrst. Precisely because fate had chosen to keep the Russian population behind the others, their role was to be the bearers of a new sense of history, of a message that was unknown and inaccessible to Europeans. In this situation, the Russian revolutionary was more nationalistic than he had ever been and was humiliated and offended by the absolute material superiority of the European powers.132 The reaction was to proclaim the spiritual superiority of the Russian people, drawing more or less consciously on the cultural heritage of its original community that harbored an extraordinarily powerful idea-passion: the myth of “Moscow, the third Rome.” Thus, what was an old idea takes on the guise of something new and modern but without losing an iota of its mythological nature. There is nothing new in this: “Every man of character and lively intelligence wants the social, cultural or natural community to which it is given to him to belong to be worthy of him. In general men like to think that, had they not been born there, they would have liked to be born in that very community, which in turn means that they want their own particular group to stand out from the other groups that are known to them or with which they are often in competition. This is an aspiration that derives from the same desire of self-fulﬁllment that drives men, insofar as members of social groups within the national community or insofar as individuals within their social classes. In fact no one is fulﬁlled in nothing, and indeed each and everyone is fulﬁlled in a group or often in several groups and these are necessary to him, both as a stage and as an audience that approves and applauds. If the group to which this man belongs is in someway inferior to the others, or is humiliated, strong tensions develop which generate intense and dramatic introspection, in a search for the most profound meaning of the group.”133 Martin Malia’s words help us to understand the particular psychology of the acculturated intellectuals of nonindustrialized countries, who are obliged to measure themselves against the forceful, invasive presence of the capitalistic West. They are all more or less anxious to demonstrate that, despite everything, their national community is better than the countries that lead scientiﬁc, technological, and economic progress. Whether they are conservatives or revolutionaries is absolutely secondary, with respect to their deepest desire, which is precisely to prove to themselves, and to others, that their own country has something that renders it not only worthy of respect, but is the bearer of a superior truth that cannot be measured with the parameters of industrial civilization. The Slavophiles believed that the secret of Russia’s superiority lay in Russian tradition, prior to its being contaminated by the “rotten West.” The populists believed that the socialist revolution was the secret of this superiority because it had eradicated the barbaric tsarist civilization and intended creating

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

139

a “new civilization” that was inﬁnitely better than the capitalistic-bourgeois one. Though different, both attitudes attributed a potential primacy to Russia that would be achieved in one of two ways: by pushing the country resolutely toward the past, or toward the future. In fact, neither solution had any realistic foundations. The “harmonious” pre-Peter society was simply a mythological construction of the Slavophiles and their romantic nostalgia for the past; equally mythological was the future homogeneous society dear to the populists. Both were an image-desire that expressed the intense need of Russian intellectuals to ﬁnd something that could attenuate their frustration vis-a`-vis Western civilization, whose complaisant arrogance inevitably provoked their resentment and desire for revenge. Though mythological—or perhaps precisely because they were mythological—both solutions had the advantage of providing the intelligentsia with a way out of the psychological impasse of having lost their self-esteem because they belonged to a nation they inevitably considered to be barbaric and backward, following their encounter with the “profane science.”134 In addition, both solutions provided them with an action plan and an exciting prospect: the possibility of building a civilization superior to Western civilization, precisely because the starting point was the pitiful situation of their nation. The alchemistic transformation of a state of backwardness into a precondition for an extraordinary future gave strength and spiritual drive to people in desperate need of an ethical-political message that would give them the courage to live and to ﬁght. One can imagine the excitement of the Russian intellectuals—“Westerners” and Slavophiles—when they discovered the peasant obshchina.135 It was like a religious revelation: all of a sudden they had a radiant future before them. Russia was no longer condemned to being a “proletarian nation.” It had something precious for the whole world. Russia alone had a positive answer for the many dramatic problems afﬂicting humanity.136 Europe was dominated by what Herzen, citing Blanqui, liked to call “elegant cannibalism”—that is to say, “wild” capitalism: all competition, calculation, and greed. Russia harbored an institution—the obshchina—that would enable it to establish a civilization based on solidarity rather than on selﬁsh passions, once the political superstructure of tsarist despotism had been disintegrated by the revolution. The populists greeted the obshchina as a “sacred and redeeming institution” capable of “preventing a situation in which one social class sucks the blood of another.”137 All this explains why the populists read Marx’s works with such avidity and the energy with which they spread his theories among all social classes.138 Admittedly, Marxism stressed that a period of capitalism was necessary for modern civilization. But it also stressed the horrors of an economic development focused exclusively on the market. And this was what interested the populists most. “They had been so deeply affected by Capital and the description of the atrocities of primitive accumulation, that they had decided to use

140

Revolutionary Apocalypse

every means to avoid the capitalistic development of Russia and therefore, through that conclusion, had become fully-ﬂedged traditional Populists”139 driven by the idea that “by virtue of their temperament, their history, their popular traditions, the Russians were particularly suited to carrying out the socialist ideas.”140 So they took the ﬁrst step along the road that was to lead to the “Asianization” of Marxism and to its conversion into the most powerful “protest ideology” of nations that had been “proletarianized” by the planetary expansion of modern industrial civilisation.141 NOTES 1. See Giorgio Migliardi, Lenin e i menscevichi (Milan: La Pietra, 1979). 2. Georgy V. Plekhanov, “La classe operaia e gli intellettuali socialdemocratici,” in the appendix to Lenin’s What is to be done?, p. 381. 3. Iury Martov, “Proletari e intellettuali nella socialdemocrazia russa,” in the appendix to Lenin’s What is to be done?, pp. 414–415. 4. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (New York: New Park Publications, 1980). 5. Quoted from Isaac Deutscher, Il Profeta Armato (Milan: Longanesi, 1983), p. 494. 6. Friedrich Engels, “Le condizioni sociali in Russia” in K. Marx and F. Engels, India, China, Russia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1970), p. 281. 7. Quoted from P. A. Zvetermich, Il grande Parvus (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), p. 75. 8. Mikhail Bakunin, “Lettera a Necaev” in Michael Conﬁno’s Il catechismo del rivoluzionario (Milan: Adelphi, 1976), p. 97. 9. Dostoevsky, expressing a feeling that was common among the Russian intelligentsia, described the money-god that was idolized and given a prominent position in the bourgeois society of his time in the following terms: “Baal reigns and does not even require submission because of that he is certain. His self-esteem is unlimited: proud and tranquil he concedes organised charity just to get himself out of a difﬁcult situation and hence there is no way one can disturb this esteem. Baal does not hide to himself . . . the existence of certain uncontrolled phenomena of existence that are misleading and a source of concern. Poverty, pain, malcontent, despair do not worry him at all. He allows all these misleading and unfortunate events to co-exist alongside his life, close to it, in the light of day” (Note invernali su impressioni estive [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984], pp. 62–63). 10. Nikolai Berdiaev, Il senso e le premesse del comunismo russo (Rome: Edizioni Roma, 1944), p. 23. Identical is the thesis of Tibor Szamuely: “The history of the Russian revolutionary movement is the history of the intelligentsia. The two are inseparable. The Russian Revolution was the product of the intelligentsia and the revolution was the raison d’etre of the intelligentsia” (The Russian Tradition [London: Secker and Warburg, 1974], p. 143). 11. T. G. Masaryk has condensed this opinion in the phrase: “Russia is of the same species, of the same quality as Europe, Russia is what Europe was . . . ” (La Russia e l’Europa, vol. 1 [Bologna: Boni, 1971], p. 5). 12. Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilisation on Trial (New York: OUP, 1948), p. 166. 13. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilisations (New York: Lane, 1994). 14. “The Russian people are not strictly European nor strictly Asiatic; Russia is

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

141

one whole section of the world, an enormous East-West, it joins two universes. Two principles, the eastern and the western, have always struggled within the Russian soul” (Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea [London: G. Bles, 1947]). 15. N. H. Bayens, Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilisation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948). 16. Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilisation (London: Arnold, 1933). 17. G. Ostrogorsky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). 18. Charles Diehl, La civilta` bizantina (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), p. 26. 19. F. G. Meier, L’Impero bizantino (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960), p. 36. 20. Louis Bre´hier, Les institutions de l’Empire byzantin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1970), p. 348. 21. Alain Ducellier, Les byzantins (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988), p. 136. 22. Charles Diehl, La civilta` bizantina (Milan: Garzanti, 1962), p. 87. 23. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despostism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). 24. On this concept of triple monopoly, see Luciano Pellicani, Il mercato e i socialismi (Milan: SugarCo, 1979), pp. 224–226. 25. See Luciano Guerci, Le monarchie assolute (Turin: UTET, 1986), p. 266 et seq. 26. Giovanni Damasceno described the rigorously traditional principles of the Byzantine civilization thus: “Let the limits set by our fathers not change: we preserve the tradition we received. Therefore we pray the people of God, the faithful ﬂock, to keep the traditions of the church alive. The gradual disappearance of what has been handed down to us would end up undermining the very foundations and in a short time would provoke the collapse of the whole structure” (quoted from N. H. Baynes, Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilisation). 27. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar (Bari: Laterza, 1984), p. 4. 28. Valentin Gitermann, Storia della Russia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980), p. 54. 29. Aleksandr Herzen, Sviluppo delle idee rivoluzionarie in Russia (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971), p. 47. This concept had already been formulated by Petr Chaadaev: “The fact is that we have never walked together with other peoples; we belong to none of the great families of humankind; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we have the traditions of neither” (Lettere ﬁlosoﬁche [Bari: Laterza, 1950], p. 87). 30. See Boris Brutzkus, “The Historical Peculiarities of the Social and Economic Development of Russia,” in Reinhard, Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds., Class, Status, Power: Social Stratiﬁcation in Comparative Perspectives, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1955), pp. 121–135. 31. Aleksandr Herzen, Sviluppo delle idee rivoluzionarie in Russia, p. 52. 32. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 11. 33. Manfred Hellman, Russia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), p. 116. 34. “The Russian government is army like discipline substituting the city order, the state of siege that has become the normal state of society” (Custine, La Russie en 1939, vol. 1 [Paris: Solin, 1990], p. 164). 35. Nicholas Zernov, The Church of the Eastern Christians (London: Macmillan, New York, 1942). 36. According to the historian of Russian theology, G. Florovsky, the phrase “there will be no fourth Rome” presumably means that the event that Philotheus expected

142

Revolutionary Apocalypse

in the near future was the “end of the world.” From Ivan the Terrible on, the deﬁnition “Moscow, third Rome” was understood to mean that Russia was “the centre and the fulﬁlment of world history” (Dmitry Chizhevsky, Storia dello spirito russo [Florence: Sansoni, 1965], p. 120). 37. Typically the autocrats of Muscovy even justiﬁed their international policy as “a defence of the orthodox lands and people from the threat of Roman Catholicism” (R.O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy [London: Longman, 1987], p. 134). 38. Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 39. There is no need to comment on this formula by Avvakum, the charismatic leader of the raskol. 40. See Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza dell’Europa (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), pp. 13 et seq. 41. Lionel Kochan and R. Abraham, The Making of Modern Russia, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 99f. 42. Krizhanich actually made his position unsustainable mainly because of his concept of “moderate aristocracy as the principle defence against despotism” (Alexander Yanov, Le origini dell’autocrazia, p. 54). 43. See R. K. Massie, Pietro il Grande (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992). 44. Rene´ Portal, Pierre le Grand (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1991), p. 291. 45. A. Kolpinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa (Rome: La Voce, 1919), p. 48. 46. The dimensions of this intellectual and moral void emerged very clearly during the pugachevshchina, which was “a revolt against the europeanisation and modernisation of the elites and of the country much more than it was a revolt against serfdom” (Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 85). 47. See Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 48. Peter the Great explained the meaning of his “revolution” in these terms: “We need Europe for a couple of decades, after that we will be able to turn our backs on her” (cited from Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 2nd ed. [London: Penguin, 1995]). 49. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime. 50. “If the Muscovite tsars who increased their power thanks to the involuntary assistance of the Tartar Khans found themselves having to ‘mongolise’ Muscovy, Peter the Great, in his determination to take advantage of the West, was obliged to europeanise Muscovy. When he took over the Baltic provinces he procured the tools he needed for this purpose. Those regions not only provided him with diplomats, generals—that is to say the brains that would see to the realisation of his political and military designs—but also a mass of bureaucrats, primary school teachers and sergeants destined to give a smattering of civilisation to the Russian population, teaching them the necessary technical notions, but preventing them from assimilating the progressive ideas of the West” (Karl Marx, Rivelazioni sulla storia diplomatic segreta del XVIII secolo [L’Milan: Erba Voglio, 1978], pp. 179–180). 51. See Dieter Groh, La Russia e l’autocoscienza dell’Europa. 52. The formula was coined by Uvarov and became the “alpha and omega of ofﬁcial political wisdom, the programme of Russia theocracy, which considered the will of the tsar to be divine revelation and referred politics and the administration of bureaucracy to this divine revelation” (T. G. Masaryk, La Russia e l’Europa, vol. 1, p. 97). 53. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5, p. 154.

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

143

54. And in fact students were considered an “internal enemy” (quoted from Aleksandr Blok, L’intelligencija e la rivoluzione [Milan: Adelphi, 1978], p. 70). 55. This black picture of the situation in Russia in the early nineteenth century was painted by M. L. Magnitisky, a typical inquisitorial agent of tsarist autocracy (see Valentin Gitermann, Storia della Russia, vol. 2, pp. 67–68). 56. Custine, La Russie en 1939, vol. 1, p. 191. 57. N. A. Dobroliubov, “Gente dimenticata,” in G. Berti and M. L. Gallinaro, eds., Il pensiero democratico russo del XIX secolo (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), p. 299. 58. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 147. 59. Martin Malia, “What Is the Intelligentsia?” in Richard Pipes, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 10. 60. At the trial of the Nechaevtsy in 1871, one of the lawyers drew the following sociological proﬁle of the Russian intellectual proletariat: “No matter the income of each of the accused, collectively they belong to that part of the population who received the best education, tasted the fruit of science and absorbed European ideas but was unable to obtain a ﬁtting position in life. They are in a situation where they can earn what they need to live, but they have no rights, no traditions, no security, and therefore new ideas rapidly catch on and grow” (quoted from E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of Russia of the Twentieth Century [London: Faber and Faber, 1971]). 61. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime. 62. A. Kolpinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa, p. 75. 63. Nikolai Berdiaev, Il senso e le premesse del comunismo russo, pp. 23–24. 64. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 117. 65. See Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1966), p. 157 et seq. 66. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1972), p. 10. 67. We ﬁnd these words in a letter Bakunin wrote to his brothers and sisters in 1845. 68. Joseph Roth, Il profeta muto (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), p. 84. 69. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, pp. 178–179. 70. N. V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (Oxford, New York: OUP, 1984). 71. Paolo Angarano, “Introduzione” to M. Bakunin, Liberta` e rivoluzione (Naples: Avanzini e Torraca, 1968), p. 5. Interestingly, Chernyshevsky saw in the “religious madmen” of ancient Russia “a human quality not unlike what so many were to call his ‘Nihilism’” (F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 131). 72. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Gli spiriti della Rivoluzione russa” in AA.VV., Dal profondo (Milan: Jaca Book, 1971), p. 81. 73. Mikhail Bakunin, “I principi della rivoluzione,” in Aleksandr Herzen, A un vecchio compagno (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 45. 74. Aleksandr Herzen, Dall’altra sponda (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), p. 198. 75. Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), p. 23. 76. Turgenev’s attitude toward the Nihilists was ambiguous, however. For example, to a group of radical students from Heidelberg who asked him to explain the ideological meaning of his book, he answered: “If the reader did not like Bazarov for what

144

Revolutionary Apocalypse

he was—rough, insensitive, ruthlessly arid and abrupt— . . . it was his fault” (Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, p. 288). 77. S. L. Frank, “L’etica del nihilismo,” in AA.VV., Vechi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1970), p. 165. 78. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 327. 79. I. S. Turgenev, Padri e ﬁgli (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), p. 53 and p. 57. 80. Ibid., p. 53. 81. N. G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be done?: Tales about new People (London: Virago, 1982). 82. Ibid., pp. ?? 83. Giovanni Piovesana, Storia del pensiero ﬁlosoﬁco russo (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1992), p. 150. 84. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 214. 85. It was also a manual for the young Lenin, who confessed, “I was affected from top to toe” (quoted from Nikolai Valentinov I miei colloqui con Lenin, p. 63). 86. Words uttered in 1849 by Dubelt, the head of the infamous Third Division. 87. See Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (New York: Viking, 1977). 88. Ishutin used to say: “There have been three great men in the world: Jesus Christ, Paul the apostle and Chernyshevsky.” 89. Chernyshevsky defended political freedom as a precondition for all social progress even against his own followers. This is obvious from his words to Stakhevich in the Alexandrovsk prison: “You say that political freedom cannot give a hungry man food. But, take air for example. If we ask ourselves, can air feed a man, the answer of course is no. Yet, without food a man can survive for a few days; without air, he cannot stay alive for more than ten minutes. Just as air is necessary for the life of the human body, so political liberty is necessary for the normal functioning of society” (quoted from Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969]). 90. Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. 91. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 337. 92. Nechaev (like Bakunin) always denied being the author of Catechismo. For sure the work was written by one or both men. 93. Sergei Nechaev, Catechism of the Revolutionist (New York: Violette Nozieres Press, 1991), p. 160. 94. Ibid., p. 161. 95. Ibid., p. 161. 96. The “Nachaev affair” shocked the public opinion of the time. It exploded in the winter of 1869 with the discovery of the body of a certain Ivanov, a former member of Nechaev’s Organisation. Police investigations and the subsequent trial led to the conclusion that Ivanov had been murdered by Nechaev in person with the complicity of a number of his followers and that the crime had been committed as a warning of the importance of revolutionary discipline. Ivanov had rebelled against that discipline and had therefore been ruthlessly eliminated. 97. See Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to A. Herzen, A un vecchio compagno, pp. IV et seq. 98. Fedor Dostoevsky, I fratelli Karamazov (Milan: Sansoni, 1969), p. 64.

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

145

99. And Petrasevsky, the head of the revolutionary sect of which Dostoevsky was a member. 100. Fedor Dostoevsky, I demoni (Milan: Garzanti, 1973), p. 407. 101. Ibid., p. 408. 102. Ibid., p. 422. 103. Ibid., p. 587. 104. In his article, “I principali fondamenti del future regime sociale,” published in winter 1870 of the Narodnaia Rasprava, Nechaev stated that “the end of the current social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can only be attained through the concentration of all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee and the proclamation of compulsory manual labour for all.” After this he acknowledged that he was indebted to Marx and Engels when he wrote, “Those who wish to do so will ﬁnd a detailed theoretical development of our ideas in the Manifesto del Partito comunista that was published by us; our intention is above all to clarify the practical solutions for achieving it.” (Quoted from Michael Conﬁno, Il catechismo del rivoluzionario, p. 57.) 105. Mikhail Bakunin, Agli ufﬁciali dell’esercito, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Critica dell’anarchismo, pp. 210–213. 106. Mikhail Bakunin, “Lettera a Necaev,” in M. Conﬁno, Il catechismo del rivoluzionario, p. 137. 107. Ibid., p. 160. 108. Ibid., p. 161. 109. Ibid., p. 162. 110. Ibid., p. 160. 111. Bakunin’s schizophrenia becomes even more evident if we remember that, on the one hand, he harshly criticized Nechaev’s “Jesuitism” and, on the other, expressed himself along these lines: “Just as the Jesuits, who have built the best organised secret societies in the world, worked tirelessly and with determination for the destruction of all liberty in the world, so we, who want liberty to triumph, have founded a long-term society that must outlive us and only be dismantled when the whole programme has been put into practice” (quoted from Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” a Aleksandr Herzen, A un vecchio compagno, p. XXXIII). 112. See Nikolai Berdiaev, La concezione di Dostojevskij (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Sergio Hessen, Il bene e il male in Dostoevsky (Rome: Armando, 1980); Henri Troyat, Dostoievski (Paris: Fayrard, 1960), p. 305 et seq. 113. Quoted from Le´on Poliakov, La causalite´ diabolique, vol. 2 (Paris: CalmannLevy, 1985), p. 128. 114. Quoted from Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism. 115. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 402. 116. Quoted from Vittorio Strada, URSS-Russia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 237. 117. Ibid., p. 237. 118. Ibid., p. 238. 119. While there is no proof of a direct inﬂuence of Blanqui on Tkachev, we know for sure that he studied Marx’s works closely and was one of the ﬁrst to circulate information about it. But this did not prevent him from taking a personal stand on the problems of the revolution in his country (see Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to Lenin, What is to be done?, pp. XLI et seq. 120. Quoted from Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, p. 411.

146

Revolutionary Apocalypse

121. Ibid., p. 412. 122. Ibid., p. 412f. 123. Marc Raeff, La Russia degli zar, p. 163. 124. Chernyshevsky used to say: “Given that Europe is no paradise, why should we drink the same bitter beverage? We can make a better one.” 125. No one better than Konstantin Leontiev has expressed the profound moral aversion of the intelligentsia for the bourgeois civilization: “Would it not perhaps be a terrible thing, a disgrace, to think that Moses climbed Mount Sinai, the Greeks built their elegant acropolypses, the Romans fought the Punic wars, the clever handsome Alexander with his plumed helmet crossed the Granicus and fought at Arbela, the Apostles preached, the martyrs suffered, the poets sang, the painters painted, the knights shone at tournaments solely to permit a French or a German or a Russian bourgeois in his horribly comic gown to enjoy himself individually or collectively on the ruins of all this past grandeur? It would be shameful for humanity if this vulgar ideal of universal proﬁt, of petty labour and ignominious prose were to triumph for ever” (quoted from Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea). 126. Nor did they like the political liberty that existed in the West: they considered it “bourgeois” and therefore “fraudulent” (Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism). 127. S.N. Bulgakov, Il prezzo del progresso (Casal Monferrato: Marietti, 1984), p. 176. 128. In this they were all disciples of Chaadaev, who in his famous letter to Nicholas I, had solemnly declared: “The Russian nation is great and must not imitate the others, but force the others to imitate it.” 129. Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy. 130. Even in his latest works Herzen continued to express his conviction that “the end of the absolute reign of capital and unconditional right to own property had arrived” (A un vecchio compagno, p. 5). This was an indirect way of stressing that Russia should not follow in the path of Europe. Yet, Botkin had explained to him on several occasions that freedom and democracy would never take on in the Russian land, that it was not even imaginable without capitalism and a solid entrepreneurial bourgeoisie: without these two sociological phenomena Russia would never generate a truly civil society that was autonomous with respect to the state and capable of controlling its decisions (see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy). 131. Quoted from Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, p. 230. 132. “The Westerner is always self-satisﬁed and this arrogance offends us” (Aleksandr Herzen, Childhood, Youth, and Exile [Oxford: OUP, 1980]). 133. Martin Malia, Alle origini del socialismo russo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), pp. 414–415. 134. Nikolai Trubetskoi has remarked that “comparing themselves to the RomanGermanic populations, the europeanised populations will come to acknowledge the superiority of the former over the latter, and this awareness combined with the constant complaints about their stagnation and backwardness, will gradually lead to the result that such populations will cease to have any self respect” (quoted from Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 211). 135. See P. P. Poggio, Comune contadina e rivoluzione in Russia (Milan: Jaca Book, 1976). 136. This idea had already been expressed in a letter Chaadaev wrote to A. I. Turgenev: “Russia has a great spiritual future: one day it will be called to solve all the

The Intelligentsia and the Revolution

147

problems that are currently tormenting Europe.” It is most signiﬁcant that a similar attitude existed also among the representatives of “ofﬁcial Russia” as is evident from the following statement by Benkendorf: “The future of Russia is over and beyond anything that even the most fertile imagination can envisage” (quoted from A. Kolpinska, I precursori della Rivoluzione russa, p. 75). 137. Chernyshevsky’s deﬁnition had a strong inﬂuence on the populist movement (quoted from Andrzej Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism). 138. They even went so far as to use Marx’s Capital “to convince the tsarist government that it was its duty to ﬁght against Russian capitalism” (Andrzej Walicki, “Socialismo russo e populismo” in AA.VV. Storia del marxismo, vol. 2 [Turin: Einaudi, 1979], p. 363). 139. Andrzej Walicki, Socialismo russo e populismo, p. 360. 140. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution, p. 169. 141. See N. F. Cantor, The Age of Protest (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969).

CHAPTER 8

The Revolutionary Gnosis

1. Before taking a closer look at the immense revolutionary experiment conducted by the party forged by Lenin, it seems essential to analyze the doctrine that inspired that revolution. It was a doctrine animated by the profound conviction that it had discovered the “laws and trends that acted and fulﬁlled themselves with bronze-like necessity”1 and led, “with the ineluctability of a natural process,”2 to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of a worldwide revolution of the proletariat. Marx and Engels announced to the whole world that, thanks to their theory, socialism was no longer a “utopia but . . . a science”: socialism was no longer to be conceived as a Sollen, in sterile conﬂict with the existing;3 it had become a hegelian more, a dialectical necessity, “the ultimate form of social organisation of the human family.”4 The “inevitable transformation of capitalist society to socialist society (could be inferred they claimed) wholly and exclusively from the economic laws governing the market in contemporary society.”5 This claim was based on the confusion between the categories of being and of value that modern epistemology, having accepted “Hume’s laws”—which absolutely forbid deducing normative-valuative propositions from descriptive-explicative propositions6—considers typical of animistic visions of the world. Fundamentally, animism projects objectives and values onto reality, in the belief that it is possible to analyze reality “in the same way, and with the same laws, as subjective, conscious and projective human activity.”7 “By completely spiritualising everything,”8 the animist establishes a profound “alliance” between humans and the world, which allows one to consider the world as a whole, regulated by ethical principles. This undoubtedly satisﬁes basic existential needs, the edifying idea being that we live in a sensate universe that is not

150

Revolutionary Apocalypse

completely indifferent to our innermost desires. The problem is that the projection of “the needs of the soul” into reality—which is typical of the mythpoeic conscience—is precisely what is, in principle, incompatible with scientiﬁc knowledge. In fact, the latter “has no regard for ultimate purpose”9 and only became possible once man had lost his “enchanted” conscience and ceased attributing “an intrinsic meaning” to being and to history.10 With Enlightenment, every teleological explanation of natural phenomena had been eliminated and the inhabitants of the secular city had been forced to accept “the fundamental fact that destiny forces [them] to live in an age without God and without prophets.”11 Clearly, from the point of view of the culture of the Enlightenment, a theory claiming to be at the same time descriptive-explicative and prescriptivevaluative knowledge, a science of cause and of purpose, could only be a logical monstrosity. “Scientiﬁc socialism” cannot exist because science cannot deduce categorical imperatives from its theorems. It can only derive hypothetical imperatives; that is, precepts, whose scope is the attainment of objectives that cannot be drawn from science by science. The scientiﬁc adventure started with the acknowledgement of the importance of making a rigorous distinction between what we know and what we desire.12 To endow history with an ultimate purpose—and one corresponding to humanity’s most ardent dream, the “end of alienation”13—means to fall head ﬁrst into the pre-affective prelogic of animism.14 This is precisely what Marx did when he chose to elude “Hume’s laws.”15 Not content to simply play with Hegelian terminology, he sought to apply dialectical materialism to economic science, rethinking Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy in light of The Science of Logic.16 While arguing vehemently against an idealistic interpretation of history, Marx “transferred the logical contradictions of thinking to being . . . [so as to] interpret opposite forces in nature or in history as logical contradictions.”17 Hegelian philosophy identiﬁes being with thought and hence this operation has at least some internal coherence. In Marxian philosophy it is absolutely arbitrary given that it declares itself to be materialistic. To accept reality as being intrinsically contradictory “means to consider real and logical contradictions, reality and thought as one and the same thing,”18 which is the equivalent of surreptitiously assuming the metaphysical presuppositions of idealism. Hence, Hans Kelsen refers to historical materialism as a “tragic methodological syncretism”19 and, after a careful analysis of the logical-methodological structure of Capital, Henri Denis concludes that Marx “tried to conjugate water and ﬁre, the Hegelian dialectic and Ricardo’s naive metaphysics.”20 This incredible synthesis of idealism and materialism made truly extraordinary claims. “Scientiﬁc socialism” does not simply announce that it knows the ﬁnal outcome of the drama playing on the historical stage,21 it proclaims to have actually found a method—permanent revolution—for uprooting alienation. It therefore is a “science of good and of bad,” in the strongest sense

The Revolutionary Gnosis

151

of the term, which explains why Marxism was interpreted not only as a form of animism in disguise, but also as a modern version of apocalyptic gnosticism. 2. Gnosticism is the tradition of soteriological thought that ﬁrst developed in early Christianity22 and periodically reemerged in the subsoil of Western civilization like an underground stream. According to Ioan Couliano, the nature of gnosticism was such that, by following a simple “law of reproduction,” gnosticism developed “all the logical possibilities contained in its sequences, combining them almost always in an original fashion.”23 Hence, the existence of one and several gnosticisms, always identical to self, albeit in the variety of its many doctrinary expressions. In effect, we can identify a set of typical characteristics that, when correlated, make up a speciﬁc and deﬁnite “gnostic syndrome.” 1. Before being a doctrine, gnosticism is an existential disposition of the soul that covers every aspect of life: conduct, destiny, a person’s very being. The gnostic is dominated by a veritable horror of the existing that ﬁlls him with concern, nausea, and anguish. He sees the world as an absurd, unfeeling monstrosity, radically indifferent to his innermost psychological and moral needs. The gnostic is therefore in the world but not of the world. He feels abandoned, lost, impotent; in a word, alienated. The world he sees is radically evil, dominated by extraneous and perverse unknown forces. The institutions of society and its prevailing values can only be looked upon with suspicion. 2. The painful sensation of being abandoned in an absurd and threatening world ﬁlls the gnostic with anguish. He constantly asks fundamental metaphysical questions such as: “Who are we?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” or, “What is the cause of physical, metaphysical, and moral evil?” “What is responsible for the horrors of the world, the injustice, the violence, solitude, and suffering that make the human lot so difﬁcult?” “What is the matrix of the alienation that transforms men into halogens and condemns them to impotence and unhappiness?” 3. For the gnostic, the human condition is not only intolerable, it is abnormal. He is convinced that an accident was responsible for overturning the natural order of things, leading to general confusion and corruption. He considers himself the temporary victim of a cosmic-historic catastrophe: the fall that degraded the world and perverted all things. Although desperately unhappy, the gnostic believes that his true destiny is happiness, the complete realization of his calling. For this reason, he is dominated by a desperate nostalgia for a totally different world, which he has never seen, but from which he feels unjustly exiled. 4. The material and moral misery of his condition does not prevent the gnostic from believing that the ontological condition can be completely overturned. It is possible to eradicate the negative elements that have perverted the world and return to the state of perfection and happiness destroyed by the fall. Life therefore is a state of permanent waiting for radical renewal, which is both resurrection and res-

152

Revolutionary Apocalypse toration. The original ontological status degraded by the fall can be reestablished, alienation suppressed, happiness fully achieved.

5. History is divided into three periods or aeons: (a) the aeon of perfection (the remote past), (b) the aeon of the fall and of alienation (the present) and (c) the aeon of the restoration of great universal harmony (the future). The present belongs to the intermediate aeon—the age of general corruption—and must be transcended, dissolved, annihilated, to permit the passage to the ﬁnal aeon in which there will be no sign of the alienation and evils that oppress humanity. History is therefore a soteriological drama of fall and redemption: it has as terminus a quo— original perfection—and as terminus ad quem—future perfection. The present is none other than the spasmodic expectation of liberation from evil. 6. Gnostic pathos is characterized by the radical refusal of the world in all its perverse and intolerable manifestations and the conviction that there is a solution for escaping from the present situation and regaining paradise lost. This conviction derives from the gnosis, which is a total complete knowledge (descriptive and normative) and contains a diagnosis-therapy of human alienation. Thanks to the gnosis, the gnostic knows the matrix of the (temporary) unhappiness of man—the catastrophe that overturned and degraded the world, ﬁlling it with horrors of all kinds—and the way to the Promised Land. In other words, those in possession of the gnosis know what humanity has been and has become because of the fall, as well as when and how redemption will take place. This knowledge is therefore a veritable soteriology, a liberating science, since, along with the awareness of degradation, it gives humanity the certainty of restoration of original being. This explains why the gnosis produces a radical conversion of the human soul; it also explains why it is counterposed to pistis, the vulgar knowledge that dulls people’s senses, making them like sleepwalkers who wander aimlessly in a monstrous universe, unaware of their unhappy lot and natural destiny. 7. In gnostic soteriologies, humanity is divided into three hierarchies or classes: the pneumatics (endowed with natural perfection), the psychics (able to attain salvation if suitably led), and the oaks ILICI (to be eliminated because lacking spirit and soul). The ﬁrst class (the gnostics) is the only class in possession of the divine seed. Because they possess the right intuition, they alone have the calling. The psychics will ﬁnd salvation provided they are not inﬂuenced by the oaks. Hence, gnostic soteriology is e´litist: it assumes that salvation is at hand for a privileged segment of humanity and that it can be effectively attained only once gnosis has replaced pistis in human conscience, thus bringing an end to their blindness. 8. The science of the gnostic Paraclete—he who is in full possession of the knowledge necessary for salvation—is absolute. It imposes itself on intelligence with a certainty and an evidence superior to faith. It is a rational knowledge developed with purely speculative means and, as such, appeals only to reason. As soon as man recognizes the liberating truth, it imposes itself irresistibly. His state of false awareness comes to an end and he becomes an enlightened being, an individual who knows and, precisely because he knows, has the duty-right to lead the blind masses from pistis to ﬁnal liberation. He is therefore the Savior-Saved who performs his soteriological function by stimulating awareness in the blind so that they too may be regenerated.

The Revolutionary Gnosis

153

9. In Manicheism—which is the most elaborate and perfect form assumed by gnosticism prior to the advent of Marxism-Leninism—the intellectual and moral superiority of those who possess the liberating truth is translated in the organization of a church typically conceived as a tool of salvation. Centralization is extreme, everything is ordered from above and everything rests on the indisputable authority of a spiritual leader who dominates the church completely. He is both “master of masters” and master of the simple listener. His authority is markedly charismatic in that he performs the function of priest and guardian of the message of salvation. Consequently, his power is unlimited. The gnosis places the “master of masters” outside and above common morality, making him the only source of every value and value judgment. 10. Alongside the three aeons—original perfection, fall, and restoration of perfection—there are two further principles in Manicheism. The world is seen as an immense battleﬁeld in which the “children of darkness and evil and the children of light and good” face each other. The latter inevitably win, with the death of the “old man” (corrupt and corrupting) and the birth of the “new man” or, more precisely, the rebirth of “primeval man.” After the ﬁnal battle, the whole cosmos will be overturned and reordered, and Great Universal Harmony will reign forever.24

3. Once “disenchantment with the world” had removed all plausibility from mythical-religious thought, gnosis—that permanent temptation of the human spirit that derives from the ardent desire to possess a knowledge capable of solving every enigma and providing a method for ending the scandal of evil— was as if forced to take on cryptic forms.25 Those whom I call “God’s orphans” had to ﬁnd a surrogate satisfaction of the metaphysical, left unsatisﬁed by the gradual withdrawal of the sacred from the scene. They did so by developing theories in which humanity is like a degraded god, marching toward its original state of perfection.26 Essentially, the romantic reaction against Enlightenment, from Rousseau to German idealism, was a desperate attempt to eliminate the frightful solitude of intellectuals who had been abandoned by faith but had not lost the desire for the ancient alliance between humanity and the world. Gnosis reemerged in the form of philosophies of history. Thanks to the immanentization of the Judeo-Christian eschaton—the millenary Kingdom of God—these philosophies reproposed a “providentialistic” vision of reality, which led to the birth of “new religions often presented as quite the opposite of a religion.”27 Hegel in particular explicitly tried to edify a new theodicy. In his Lessons on the Philosophy of History he deﬁnes his philosophy as “a theodicy, a justiﬁcation of God, such as had been attempted by Leibniz in his own fashion.”28 Hegel substituted the transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition with an immanent God and used a new logic, dialectics, to prove that reality was dominated by a providential hidden plan.29 He opposed dialectical science, conceived as the self-awareness that the absolute had of itself,30 to the positive sciences, a typical product of the abstract intellect, which claimed to read the

154

Revolutionary Apocalypse

great book of history without taking into consideration the end causes. Hegel denied the reality of the ﬁnite31 and presented reason as “the substance and inﬁnite power of the world.” The task of real science could only be to “acquire awareness of the purpose of reason.”32 History is therefore a providential unfolding of reason; it has an immanent telos; the world is no longer a machine without a purpose. Quite the contrary: a spiritual teleologically oriented reality reemerged against every form of materialism and ascended to the “supreme good” through its autocontradictory movements. In other words, Hegel revived an animistic vision of reality and, in so doing, deferred the tremendous moral consequences of “the death of God.”33 He built a “laicised Christian theology”34 whereby he was able to declare that universal history was the “unfolding of the nature of God.”35 Dialectical logic was elevated to the level of superior logic with respect to formal logic, which belonged to the sphere of abstract intellect. It was the “magic operator” by which Hegel successfully reintroduced the end causes into the heart of reality.36 In fact, dialectical logic went hand in hand with the theory of alienation, which in turn was but a variation of the myth of the fall and the redemption. Hegel’s philosophy of history acts in exactly the same way as the gnostic soteriologies: humanity is conceived as a potential god, which, at the end of a difﬁcult pilgrimage, seeks to achieve its hidden divine essence.37 As Marx had placed the problem of alienation at the very heart of his theory, despite his declared materialism, he could hardly refute the fundamental principle of Hegelian idealism that “proclaimed the unity of reason and reality.”38 On the basis of this principle, it was possible to think of being as a totality, marching toward the kingdom of liberty, without resorting to a transcendent God. You could be atheist but still conceive history as an ascendant process toward the “natural destination” of humanity; or as an odyssey from original unity (thesis) to alienation (antithesis) and then ﬁnal reconciliation (synthesis). In this way, the “death of God” ceased being a metaphysical catastrophe: the world went back to being what it had been in the Judeo-Christian tradition: a salvation-producing machine. Toynbee rightly wrote that “the elements which made the Marxian version of Hegelism an explosive force . . . carry on their face their birth certiﬁcate from the atavic Western religious faith—a Christianity which, three hundred years after Descartes’ challenge, was still the milk of every Western baby from birth and exhaled by every man and every woman along with the air they breathed. The elements, which cannot be traced back to Christianity, can be attributed to Judaism, Christianity’s fossilised parent, preserved by the Jewish Diaspora but lost with the opening of the ghettos and the emancipation of Western Jews in the generation of Marx’s grandparents . . . Marx substituted Jahveh and made historical necessity his powerful divinity. His chosen people were the inner proletariat of the Western world, rather than the Jews; his Messianic Kingdom, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nonetheless it is still possible to recognise the salient features of the Jewish Apocalypse through this complex disguise.”39

The Revolutionary Gnosis

155

But let us proceed with order. Marx’s starting point is the idea that the very foundations of capitalist-bourgeois society are polluted, because it had aroused the “furies of private interest.”40 It is a “desert populated by wild beasts,”41 in which the bellum omnium contra omnes”42 dominates supreme. It is the society of “selﬁsh man, of man as member of civil society, namely of the totally self-centered individual, of the individual whose only interest is personal interest and arbritrium, of the individual cut off from the community.”43 And, since “the god of practical need and egoism is money, there can be ‘no other god’ than money. Money is what mortiﬁes the gods of man and turns them into goods. Money is the universal value, constituted per se of all things. Hence it has stripped the whole world, the world of man and of nature, of their peculiar value. Money is the essence, extraneous to man, to his work and his existence, and this essence dominates him and he adores it.”44 It is obvious that in such a universe man can only feel lost, alienated from his original essence and therefore unhappy. He, the creator of the social world, becomes the victim of his own creatures, a slave to their perverse power. The essence of money is not that property is alienated by it, but that, because of money, activity or the movement of mediation is extraneous. The human act, the social act through which the products of man integrate each other mutually is alienated and the quality of a material thing, external to man, becomes a quality of money. Insofar as man himself is responsible for alienating this mediating activity, in this activity he is active only as a man having lost himself, as dehumanised man; even the relationship between things, the operation of man on them, becomes the action of an entity that is outside and above man. Through this extraneous intermediary—man should be the intermediary for man—man sees his will, his activity and his relationship with others as a power independent of himself and others. His slavery therefore reaches its peak.45

There is then something malignant in the “external intermediaries”—ﬁrst and foremost money—that place men in contact with each other: they achieve the “complete domination of the extraneous thing over man. What used to be the domination of people over things [is converted] into the universal domination of things over people, of products over producers.”46 Capital, or “accumulated labor,” is also accused of generating human unhappiness in The Manuscripts of 1844: workers have been expropriated from their product via a process of concentration of ownership of the means of production. It is capital that transforms workers into objects—“the most miserable of goods”—and splits society “into two classes: proprietors and workers without property.”47 It is also responsible for “greed and for the war among the greedy”48—that is to say, competition. Moreover, “the expropriation of the worker from his product”—a process from which capital derives and is fueled—“not only has the meaning that his work becomes an object, an extraneous existence but also that it exists outside him, independent, foreign to him, as an independent power before him and that the life, by him given to

156

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the object, looks at him, as if it were a stranger, a hostile enemy.”49 And thus it comes to pass that in capitalist society, things possess men, and that every social relationship is dominated by the law of market.50 Worse still, “the perversion and confusion of every human and natural thing [insists Marx] the conjunction of impossibility, the divine power of money, consists in its extraneous essence, the alienating generic essence (Gattungswesen) of men. It is the expropriated power of humanity. Money, as an existing and active concept of value, confuses and mixes all things. It is thus the general confusion and inversion of all things, therefore an overturned world, the confusion and inversion of all natural and human qualities.”51 The human condition is therefore atrocious. Humans are condemned to living in a radically evil world, infested by all sorts of horrors, in which prevails sovereign and implacable the law of alienation from which nothing and no one can escape. “We are reciprocally alienated to such an extent [writes Marx] that to us immediate language seems to be a violation of human dignity, and the alienated language of thing-like values moral dignity, justiﬁed and self conﬁdent that recognises itself.”52 And the market society—based on private property, egoism, and competition among the greedy—is the social organization that has brought the intolerable and mortifying perversity of the world to its peak. With its triumph starts the “time in which everything that men had considered to be unalienable becomes object of barter, of trade and alienable; the time in which those very things that up until then had been communicated but never bartered, donated but never sold, acquired but never purchased—virtue, love, hope, science, knowledge etc—everything becomes trade; the time of general corruption, of mercenary values or, to use economic policy terminology, the time in which every moral and physical reality, having become a mercenary value, is taken to the market to be evaluated for its proper worth.”53 So we can say that the emancipation of civil society from the state in the form of autonomization and expansion of trade has produced “the separation of man from his community nature, from himself and from other men, from what it originally was.”54 This implies an exquisitely and irremediably romantic vision of the birth of the market society: division is bad and unity is good.55 It explains the radical and absolute antiinstitutionalism of the Marxian philosophy. Every form of mediation—money, law, private property, and so on—is conceived as an unnatural institution that has split what had been originally united; the existing is perceived as the perverse product of a fall, of a moral catastrophe of cosmichistorical proportions that has subverted and degraded the entire world. Nor can it be said that, following the “epistemological fracture” referred to by Althusser,56 Marx was liberated from the ideological yoke of Feuerbachian humanism and developed a rigorously scientiﬁc vision of society and history.57 Indeed, in Grundrisse once again we ﬁnd the gnostic-valentinian scheme of the original unity that splits and generates the world of alienation. Marx writes: “It is not the unity of living and active men with the natural

The Revolutionary Gnosis

157

inorganic conditions of their natural material cycle that is in need of an explanation or the result of an historic process; it is the separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence from this active existence, a separation that is only fully achieved in the relationship between salaried labour and capital.”58 He also writes: “The historical process consisted in the separation of elements traditionally united—its result is not therefore the disappearance of one of the elements, but the appearance of each of these in a negative relationship with the other—the (potentially) free worker on the one side, capital (potentially) on the other. The separation of the objective conditions at the extreme of the classes that have been transformed into free workers must equally appear as an autonomisation of these same conditions at the opposite pole.”59 Engels shares the idea of the rupture of original unity following the fall: The tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and unviolable, they were a superior power granted by nature, to which the individual was unconditionally subject, in his feelings, in his thoughts and in his actions. Though the men of this age may seem impotent to us, they still do not stand out from each other, they are still attached, to use Marx’s expression, to the umbilical cord of the natural community. The power of this natural community was to be broken; and in fact it was. But it was broken by inﬂuences that, from the very start, appeared to be a degradation, a guilty fall from the simple moral altitude of ancient noble society. The lowest interests—vulgar greed, brutal lust for pleasure, sordid avarice, selﬁsh plundering of common property—inaugurated the new “civilised” society, the society of classes; the boldest means—theft, violence, treachery and betrayal—mine and ruin the ancient noble, classless society. In its two thousand-ﬁve hundred years of existence the new society has never been other than the growth of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority of the exploited and the oppressed, now more than ever.60

4. So a gnosis is not simply a diagnosis of alienation but also and above all a therapy: it is an absolute knowledge that provides an etiology of human misery and a methodology for eradicating it. It is also a soteriological knowledge, since it claims to know how to liberate humanity from “radical evil.” This can be done because the gnosis guarantees that alienation is by no means a natural condition of humanity but is the result of an accident, of the fall that produced the degradation and overturning of the world. The gnosis knows how and when the world was invaded by evil; it knows how and when it will be puriﬁed. This same dual claim is at the heart of “scientiﬁc socialism.” Marx does not hesitate to write that “communism is already known as the re-integration and the return of man to himself, the suppression of human auto-alienation. It is the positive suppression of private property as auto-alienation of man and, however, real appropriation of the human essence by man and for man; it is the complete, conscious, accomplished return to the innermost wealth of historical development, of man per se as social man, i.e. of human man. Communism is this: insofar as accomplished naturalism, humanism and insofar as

158

Revolutionary Apocalypse

accomplished humanism, naturalism. It is the genuine solution of the contrast between man and nature and between nature and man, the genuine solution of the conﬂict between existence and essence, between objectivisation and subjective afﬁrmation, between liberty and necessity, between the individual and genre. It is the solved enigma of history and is known to be such.”61 Clearly, science is conceived not only as self-awareness of the absolute but also as a knowledge that is capable of altering the ontological status of reality; revolutionary practice in the strongest sense of the term: that is to say, as the overturning of the overturned world. The world is radically bad, because private property has produced the inversion, confusion, and alteration of every physical and moral thing; for this precise reason, it is imperative that there be a revolutionary call to arms to combat the perverse institution responsible for universal corruption. And “scientiﬁc socialism” is precisely the absolute knowledge that can indicate the strategy for annihilating the wicked forces of evil, for restoring the natural order of things and, with it, primeval man. Like the apocalyptic gnostic soteriologies, Marxism conceives universal history as a chenotic process62 permeated by humanity’s fervent desire to recover what has been lost—authentic essence, which is divine—when the original state of perfection was disturbed by the violent emergence of evil. Humanity fell into a world of need, of impotence, of alienation and moral corruption but will regain “paradise lost” thanks to the total revolution achieved when Great Universal Harmony overturns the existing. Once the revolution has completed its historic mission, at last humanity will recover “those powers from which he had had to alienate himself in the previous phase of the historical process”63 and will return to being what he was before the fall: the absolute master of the world that is, God. According to Marcuse, the Marxian revolution is “a moment of rift in the course of history, a leap into the Kingdom of liberty, a total break . . . that marks the start of a new time”64 and leads to the “emergence of a new type of man, different by nature and by physiology from the human actor of the class society.”65 The claim that the goal of the revolution is the divinization of humanity may seem far-fetched; yet, when Marx writes that communism will eliminate the conﬂict between essence and existence, he is actually saying that it will materialize the Human-God ideal,66 if it is true (as it is) that thomistic theology teaches us that God is the being in which essence and existence coincide perfectly.67 On the other hand, Marx also declares that communist emancipation affects man’s innermost being since man “only considers himself to be independent when he owes his existence to himself,” when his life “has no foundation outside himself ” but is his “own creation.”68 Marx is convinced that “that which is translated into existence by communism is the real foundation that renders impossible everything that exists independently of individuals.”69 Therefore, communism is proclaimed to be an immense anthropological revolution “founded on a process that can be deﬁned as self-generating, that will

The Revolutionary Gnosis

159

destroy not religion, but the possibility of religion, freeing man from slavery to God”70 and abolishing the principle of reality. Therefore, it is quite legitimate to see Marxism as a religion of the species71 that claims to have found a method for successfully “shaping a new humanity where Christianity had failed.”72 The starting point is the idea that private property is responsible not only for exploitation, but also for the ontological degradation of humanity to dependent being, whose essence is outside self and whose life is not self-generating. As a consequence, “communion of goods” has a metaphysical, indeed, an eschatological, meaning: its introduction coincides with the Promethean construction of what Ernst Bloch liked to call “the Kingdom of god without God.”73 5. Marx’s historical gnosticism was a fundamental step in the long spiritual travail that began when the human of the secular city ﬁrst realized that “the sky was empty”74 and that therefore “supreme values [had] lost value.”75 This left the door wide open for a “disquieting guest”—nihilism76—announcing “liberation in the nothing that substitutes Transcendence.”77 In effect, as Ortega y Gasset correctly wrote, modernity is “life without sacred values,”78 the disappearance of the absolutes that had ruled the historical existence of Western civilization for centuries and centuries, the loss of the normative power of that “ultra sensitive world”—the world of ideas and of ideals—which, from Plato on, had been conceived “as the true, authentically real world.”79 Thus it should not come as a surprise that the anguish of modern humanity should present itself as “anguish in the face of the abyss of a life which inevitably appears to be absurd, once it is deprived of its purpose and values.”80 Equally predictable is that “God’s orphans” should have searched for a functional equivalent of the providential vision of the human adventure with which to revive hope in the advent of a new aeon that would ﬁll the metaphysical void generated by the “destruction of the religious illusion.”81 Marx’s revolutionary program—a veritable “re-eschatologisation of Christianity”82—is part of this spasmodic search. It continues and develops the soteriological argument started by protosocialists in the Enlightenment. This argument is based on denying the Christian concept of the fall—original sin— and promoting (revolutionary) politics to the rank of soul-saving practice insofar as its historical mission is to eradicate alienation on the basis of the following theorem: If man cannot be saved by God, then he will save himself, by abolishing everything that limits and degrades him, by means of the Promethean overturning of the existing.83 In this way, neognosticism transforms the classic problems of theology and theodicy—contingency, evil, meaning of life and death, an so forth—into political problems, or problems that can be eliminated by (revolutionary) politics. This will effectively be, once “divine ﬁnal harmony” prevails.84 Engels’s youthful works conﬁrm this interpretation of the communist revolution: “The question has always been: who is God? German philosophy

160

Revolutionary Apocalypse

solves the problem thus: God is man. Man need only know himself, to ensure that all the relations in his life are commensurate to himself; he must judge according to his essence, organise the world in a truly human manner, according to the instances of his own nature; by so doing he will solve the enigma of our age . . . The essence of man is far more splendid and sublime than the imaginary essence of any possible God, which is none other than a more or less confused and deformed mirror of man himself.”85 Unfortunately, man, that potentially divine being, makes a poor show of himself. He “has lost himself ”:86 he has fallen into the world of moral corruption, because private property and competition have generated a world dominated by the most sordid passions: the “world of Philistines” of the middle-class bourgeois, completely absorbed in tendering their own petty egoism and obtusely satisﬁed with their lot. The contrast between the “man of philosophy” and “the man of reality” could not be more brutal. However, since the present degradation is the product of an institution that can be suppressed—private property—man can recover himself and his true nature, changed by the bourgeois ethos. This will be possible, once he is conscious of the unnatural character of the capitalist way of life and has organized “a revolutionary army” to straighten what has been turned upside down. This awareness will come from dialectical science, “a powerful and unceasingly creative force of thought, conscience of unity of pure thought, conscience of the universal and conscience of God.”87 Dialectical enlightenment will end the state of spiritual sleepwalking in which humanity fell after the original unity had been broken, and this in turn will open the exciting prospect of revolutionary palingenesis. “We have awoken [writes Engels in a state of mystic enthusiasm] the nightmare oppressing our breast has vanished, we rub our eyes and look around in surprise. Everything is different. The world that was so estranged, and nature whose hidden forces terriﬁed us like ghosts, are familiar to us now. The world that appeared to us as a prison, now shows itself as it really is, a magniﬁcent castle; evil, disorder, anguish, division have disappeared” thanks to the “new Grail, the self-awareness of unity.”88 “Our vocation is clear” writes Engels. We are “to be the Templars of this Grail, to gird our loins with the sword for its sake, and happily risk our life in the last holy war, to which will follow the millenarian Kingdom of liberty.” Equally clear: “salvation, redemption” are nigh and inevitable: “the day of the great decision is approaching, the battle of nations, and the victory will certainly be ours.”89 With these gnostic-apocalyptic premises, of course Marx and Engels concluded that the age of religion was over. “The existence of religion is the existence of a defect”:90 it is the most striking manifestation of the separation of man from his original essence. By its very presence, it reveals man’s impotence, his contingency, his unhappiness, his material and moral wretchedness; in a word: his alienation. “Religious wretchedness is both expression of actual wretchedness and protest against it . . . It is the fantastic realisation of

The Revolutionary Gnosis

161

human essence” and, as such, “is the opium of people.”91 Once communism suppresses private property and permanent revolution eliminates “the conﬂict of individual existence with the generic existence of man,”92 religion will automatically be superﬂuous: it will disappear from the scene because “the dream of the unconditioned”93 will become a tangible reality. Therefore, when the communists demand “the abolition of all religions,”94 they do so because they want to substitute “people’s illusory happiness with real happiness.”95 Dialectical enlightenment has shown them that religion will be impossible and even unthinkable in a world that respects the true human nature, since there will no longer be that “distorted reality”96—the world of alienation—of which it is both expression and fantastic compensation.97 They know that the proletarian revolution will build a New World that is radically other than the existing world “by suppressing the contingency of human existence.”98 At that point, the design of the “astute spirit” will be accomplished and the goal indicated by Hegel—the Promised Land of ﬁnal reconciliation—will be attained. 6. Capitalism is what prevents the human family from overcoming the “radical evil of pre-history”99 and regaining its lost unity. Therefore, to ﬁght capitalism is an inescapable duty, a categorical imperative: it means to ﬁght “for a holy and just cause—for the cause of the oppressed against the oppressors; . . . for truth against superstition, against lies.”100 Admittedly, Marx and Engels acknowledge that “without the unleashing of the acquisitive spirit, which in its most mature form becomes the capitalist pursuit of proﬁt—an asocial desire and the source of all the asocial impulses, destined to manifest themselves in all their repellence in the capitalist age— humanity would be condemned to living in the squalor of primitive communism, men would support each other but lack comforts and culture, more like beasts than the angels they must become.”101 In other words, they admit that capitalism, despite its diabolical nature, “has had a highly revolutionary function in history: . . . it has shown what human activity is capable of,”102 by building and setting in motion the machinery for the development of forces of production, without which the very concept of communist society as kingdom of abundance would never have been thought of.103 Capitalism is therefore a historically necessary moment in the “dialectics of salvation that leads to paradise on earth, to the reconciliation of man and society, to complete disalienation, to the disappearance of classes, to the end of the State”;104 but it is a moment that must be transcended so that humanity can recover its original nature, perverted by the spirit of proﬁt. Marx writes: There is a major fact of signiﬁcance for this XIX century of ours that no one would dare question: on the one hand, the coming into being of scientiﬁc and industrial forces, unimaginable in previous eras of human history; on the other, the emergence of symptoms of decadence that are far worse than the horrors handed down to us

162

Revolutionary Apocalypse

about the end of the Roman Empire. Everything seems to bear a contradiction within itself. Machines having the marvellous power of reducing and enhancing human labour make men die of hunger and overwork. A mysterious and fatal spell transforms the new sources of wealth into sources of misery. The conquests of technology seem to be obtained at the price of their very nature. It seems that man, to the extent to which he subdues, is in turn subjected to other men or to his own abjection. Even the pure light of science seems to shine only on the depths of ignorance. Our discoveries and progress seem to give spiritual life to material forces, at the same time dulling human senses and reducing men to a material existence. This antagonism between modern industry and science, on the one hand, and modern wretchedness and chaos on the other; this antagonism between the forces of production and the social relations of our age is a tangible, macroscopic and incontrovertible fact. Some may deplore it; others may wish to rid themselves of modern technology in order to rid themselves of modern conﬂictuality, and might think that the great progress of industry needs to be integrated and corrected by an equally great regression of politics. For our part, we do not deny the astute spirit that is expressed in all these contradictions. We know that, in order to make the new forces of society work, all we need are new men—these new men are the workers. They, like machinery, are an invention of the modern age. In the signs that confuse the bourgeoisie, the nobility and the petty prophets of regression we recognise . . . that old fast-digging mole, the great miner: the revolution.105

Capitalist society is permeated by an intolerable contradiction. On the one side, having generated science and industry, it represents an enormous step forward; on the other, everything within its breast is inverted and perverted. It must therefore be transcended. This cannot be done by means of partial reforms that eventually will produce a better society. There must be a “radical break,”106 because the construction of the future city is a “leap forward,”107 not an evolutionary process. Nor could it be otherwise, since the distance between the bourgeois city and the proletarian city is inﬁnite, as is the distance between present corruption and ﬁnal perfection. The two cities are opposed to each other, just as evil is to good, darkness to light. The class war therefore will inevitably be of cosmic-historic proportions or, to use Engels’s terminology, a “holy war” that will end with the elimination of capitalism and everything—rule of law, parliamentary democracy, autonomous civil society, and so forth—on which, and thanks to, it has developed, with the sole exception of the scientiﬁc and productive machinery, which instead communism will improve and increase. In short, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat incarnate two irreconcilable and mortally hostile principles. The motto of the revolution is inevitably “You or Us.”108 “Heaven on earth”109 awaits humanity, but only when the Communist Party “will have emerged victorious” from “the last harsh battle”110 and the “great miner”—permanent revolution—completed its task and demolished the civilization of the “haves.” Clearly, despite its claim to be in accord with the scientiﬁc spirit, Marx and Hegel’s socialism is a typical expression of a chiliastic mentality, which “is

The Revolutionary Gnosis

163

characterised by its particularly intense faith in the possibility of man’s complete liberation, a liberation radically opposed to the present state of slavery, to the point that between the two there can be no continuity or mediation.”111 When Marx urges the proletariat to “do away with the old spectral world,”112 he is simply reformulating the idea-passion that has always dominated the action of “Apocalypse fanatics,” namely that salvation will come by negation “after a period of trials and terrible cataclysms” that will terminate with the annihilation of the “unjust, abominable, diabolical . . . world of History.”113 On the other hand, the will to destroy all in order to reconstruct all is what deﬁnes revolution. Its objective is the “perfect society”;114 that is to say, a transﬁgured society, in which there is no trace of the negativities that render the human condition intolerable, starting from forced labor that makes life hell, and ending with the division of labor, which divides the human family into those who are masters and those who are slaves. And, in fact, Marx and Engels’s claim that “as soon as labour is divided, everyone has his particular sphere of determined and exclusive activity, that is imposed upon him and from which he cannot escape: he is a hunter, a ﬁsherman, a shepherd or a critic, and so he must remain, if he does not wish to lose the means to live,” is followed by the conﬁdent statement that “in communist society where no one has a sphere of exclusive activity but can choose whichever sphere he likes, society regulates general production and, in this way, allows me to do this thing today, this other thing tomorrow, in the morning go hunting, in the afternoon ﬁshing, in the evening raise animals and after dinner be a critic, just as I wish, without becoming hunter, or ﬁsherman, or shepherd or critic.”115 What strikes us especially in this typically “fantastic description of future society,”116 to use the ironic words used in the Manifesto to refer to utopistic socialism, is that the whole system of needs and constraints enveloping humanity from birth—poverty, division of labor, power relations, social and juridical norms, and the like—is abolished as if by magic with the introduction of a communion of goods, on the basis of the absolutely arbitrary assumption that “division of labour and private property are identical expressions.”117 Marx and Engels were convinced that all one had to do was suppress private property to abolish eo ipso the division of labor, and therefore classes, therefore exploitation and alienation. No doubt this is an exhalting prospect, but it is also irremediably mythological.118 The announced change is of such cosmichistorical magnitude that it can only be deﬁned as alchemistic.119 In fact, communion of goods in the Marx-Engels Weltanschauung is “the means for redeeming humanity”120; that is to say, an agent of universal regeneration identical to the philosopher’s stone. So much so, that Marx even claims that communism is “the true resurrection of nature . . . and the complete emancipation of every human sense and every human quality.”121 Obviously, once the metastatic transﬁguration of the existing has been accomplished, the state and its parasitic, oppressive bureaucracy will extinguish itself and leave the way free for the “harmonious society.”122 Essentially, this

164

Revolutionary Apocalypse

is none other than the “renaissance in a superior form of an archaic social type”:123 the tribal community. So humanity, after crossing the desert of a society divided into classes, will be back where it started, and primitive communism will be transformed into the kingdom of abundance. Thanks to the prodigious development of forces of production achieved by the Industrial Revolution, community life will be regulated by the Christian principle, “To each according to his needs.”124 At that point—as we read in an essay by Lefebvre and Gutermann—“the complete Man will really be what the words suggest he is . . . The human being will arrive at the heart of nature, external and internal, and will become master: nature will be his richness, he will overcome it and raise it to the level of Spirit. The unity of the individual and of the social dimension, possession by man of nature, and of his own nature, deﬁne the complete Man. Only he is the whole that possesses all nature and makes it his richness. Human totality used to be dispersion, contradiction. Now it will achieve its unity, the truth of man, his fulﬁlled essence.”125

NOTES 1. Karl Marx, The Capital I, in Complete Works, vol. 35. 2. Ibid., p. 751. 3. Quite rightly Ernesto De Martino saw in the “Marxian mussen . . . a shameful sollen” (La ﬁne del mondo [Turin: Einaudi, 1977], p. 428), namely a moral necessity disguised as an historical necessity. Hence the fact that Marxism presents itself as a disguised jus naturale (see C. Antoni, Considerazioni su Hegel e Marx [Naples: Ricciardi, 1945]). 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Associazione mondiale dei comunisti rivoluzionari,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 617 (italics added). 5. Lenin, “Karl Marx,” in Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 75. 6. Here an explanation may be necessary. In Hume there is no evidence of the theory so dear to the Neopositivists that the kingdom of facts and the kingdom of values are radically divided. He simply claims that “morality . . . consists not in any matter of fact, which can be discovered by the understanding” . . . “the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of object, nor is it perceived by reason” (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III: Of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896], pp. 468 and 470). This means that while it is complicated to construct a social science wertfrei, it is impossible to deduct a moral from a scientiﬁc theory. Especially because the latter is always permeated by value judgments, and whoever tries to found an axiological system scientiﬁcally ends up deducting what was already present in his theory. 7. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (London: Collins, 1972). 8. Ernst Cassirer, Filosoﬁa delle forme simboliche, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964), p. 81. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, all too Human: A Book for free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

The Revolutionary Gnosis

165

10. Axel van den Berg, The Immanent Utopia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 46. 11. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, p. 153. 12. See Filippo Albergamo, Fenomenologia della superstizione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967). 13. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 344. 14. See Dario Antiseri, Teoria uniﬁcata del metodo (Padua: Liviana, 1981), pp. 207–209. 15. Eugenio Ripepe acutely observed that Marx “succeeded in the wondrous enterprise of ﬁnding a way around the law of Hume in the opposite sense, . . . that is to say, in making being [per force] descend from having to be, and conjugating the sensations of utopia with the certainties of science” (“Socialismo reale” e marxismo reale in Mondoperaio, no. 1 [1992], p. 95). 16. “From the logical point of view, Marx’s theory of value is Hegel Ⳮ Ricardo; it is literally the fusion of the absolutism of the former with the unsolved problems of the latter” (Dante Argeri, La dialettica dissacrata [Milan: SugarCo, 1979], p. 111). 17. Hans Kelsen, The Communist Theory of Law (London: Stevens, 1955). 18. Leo Apostel, “Logique et dialectique,” in J. Piaget, ed., Logique et connaissance scientiﬁque (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 365. 19. Hans Kelsen, Socialismo e Stato (Bari: De Donato, 1978), p. 10. 20. Henri Denis, L’e´conomie de Marx (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 195. See also Vittorio Mathieu, Dialettica della liberta` (Naples: Guida, 1978); Lucio Colletti, Fra marxismo e no (Bari: Laterza, 1979); Marcello Pera “La seduzione del metodo scientiﬁco di Marx,” in Mondoperaio, no. 1 (1982). 21. This claim is expressed with the utmost clarity by Marx: “The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis—the birth act of its empirical existence—is, therefore, also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 297). 22. In reality, gnosticism preceded the Christian age, but its “explosion” only came about with the emergence of “the tragic sentiment of the failure of the Apocalypse” ( Jean Danie´lou, L’e´glise des premiers temps [Paris: Seuil, 1985], p. 108). 23. I. P. Couliano, I miti dei dualism occidentali (Milan: Jaca Book, 1989), p. 22. 24. See C. H. Puech, En quete de la Gnose (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) and Sur le maniche´isme (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); J. Doresse and C. H. Puech, Gnosticismo e manicheismo (Bari: Laterza, 1977); Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Serge Hutin, Les gnostiques (Paris: PUF, 1963); Jacques Lecarrie`re, Les gnostiques; Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); R. M. Grant, Gnosticismo e cristianesimo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976); H. Leisegang, La Gnose e´ternelle (Paris: Payot, 1963); Luigi Moraldi, ed., Testi gnostici (Turin: UTET, 1982); Ernesto Buonaiuti, La Gnosi cristiana (Rome: Atanor, 1987); G. C. Benelli, La Gnosi, il volto oscuro della storia (Milan: Mondadori, 1991). 25. Mircea Eliade has remarked that “the disappearance of religions in no way implies the disappearance of religiousness; the secularisation of a religious value simply constitutes a religious phenomenon illustrating, in the ﬁnal analysis, the law of universal transformation of human values; the profane character of a former behaviour vis-a`-vis the sacred does not presuppose a solution of continuity: the profane is simply

166

Revolutionary Apocalypse

a new manifestation of the same constitutive structure of man which, prior to that, manifested itself through sacred expressions” (The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion [New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959]). 26. Andre´ Gide thus expressed this idea that waves its way in and out so much of the philosophy of the age of secularization—we need only think of Alexander, Whitehead, and Bergson: “If I were to formulate a confession of faith I would say: God is not behind us; he is to come. We must not search for him at the beginning of evolution but at the end. He is terminal not initial. He is the supreme and ﬁnal point toward which nature is projected over time” (quoted from Reinhold Niebuhr, Fede e Storia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1966), p. 61. 27. Jean Brun, Philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Stock, 1990), p. 148. 28. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa della storia, vol. 1 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967), p. 30. 29. “The history of the world simply represents the plan of providence. God rules the world: Universal history is the content of his rule and the execution of his plan” (G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa della storia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966), vol. 1, p. 65. 30. Hegel’s deﬁnition of dialectical science is as follows: “Mind, which, when thus developed, knows itself to be mind, is science” (Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., transl. by J. B. Baille [London: Allen & Unwin, 1949]). 31. “The ﬁnite disappears in the inﬁnite, and what is, is only the inﬁnite” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, vol. 1). 32. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa della storia, vol. 1, p. 9 and p. 14. 33. It is most signiﬁcant that at the end of the essay “Faith and Knowledge” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), written in 1802, Hegel should speak of the “sentiment on which rests the religion of the new era, the sentiment that God is dead.” 34. A. Koje`ve, La dialettica e l’idea della morte in Hegel (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), p. 200. 35. G.W.F. Hegel, Lezioni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa dela storia, vol. 1, p. 29. 36. Lucio Colletti’s work on this point is fundamental, Il marxismo e Hegel (Bari: Laterza, 1973). 37. On the gnostic matrixes of Hegel’s dialectics, see Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham: Duke Press, 1975), pp. 255–270, and G. Hanratty, “Gnosticism and Modern Thought,” in Irish Theological Quarterly, no. 1 (1980), pp. 15–19. Remember also that Hegel himself acknowledged his debt to the gnostic tradition by underlining the importance of the idea, formulated by Valentino, according to which “the active passage from one is constituted by the unfolding” (Lezioni sulla storia della ﬁlosoﬁa, vol. 2, 1 [Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985], p. 26). So it should not be a surprise to observe that even a thinker who moved in the path traced by Hegel should have seen in Hegelism “a Gnosis, with the philosophy and the critique transformed into a cosmogonic vision and with the decadence of the aeon-Adam and of the Idea in nature and redemption thanks to the mercy of the man-Christ or rather of the spirit that leads to the mystic union with God” (Benedetto Croce, Il carattere della ﬁlosoﬁa moderna [Bari: Laterza, 1943], p. 52). 38. Karl Loewith, Da Hegel a Nietzsche (Turin: Eimaudi, 1959), p. 151. 39. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 5, pp. 178–179. 40. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 10. 41. Karl Marx, “Peuchet: On Suicide,” in Complete Works, vol. 4, p. 604.

The Revolutionary Gnosis

167

42. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 155. 43. Ibid., p. 164. 44. Ibid., p. 172. 45. Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill,” in Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 212. 46. Ibid., p. 221. 47. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 270. 48. Ibid., p. 271. 49. Ibid., p. 272. 50. This typically gnostic motive is well-developed in the book by G. Barbiellini Amidei and B. Bandini, Il re e` un feticcio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976). Referring to the Marxian theory of alienation the authors observe that “things that show are today our masters . . . things possess men” because capitalism has raised a “new golem”—utility—and in so doing has transformed society into a huge market system in which there are no longer men but things. Hence, only in a universe without things would alienation not be able to ﬁnd expression and men at last would be themselves and masters of their own destiny. This is undoubtedly true; but it is equally true that a world without things is literally unthinkable. But this does seem to have much of an impact on the gnostic mentality permeated by an existential pathos in which one can see the “ﬁxation” of a childhood trauma experienced as an intolerable narcissistic wound: the discovery that there exists something other than self, that the ego is limited everywhere and in every direction by surrounding objects. 51. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 325f. 52. Ibid., p. 326. 53. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 113. 54. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 155. 55. One of Hamann’s sentences went like this: “What is split is to be condemned, from which we can deduct that only what is one is perfect” (quoted from Luigi Bonomo, La prima formazione del pensiero di G. Gentile [Florence: Sansoni, 1972], p. 73). 56. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1979) and Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibard, Reading “Capital” (London: NLB, 1970). 57. In his last theoretical work Althusser wrote that this thesis was unsustainable (“Il marxismo oggi,” in Quel che deve cambiare nel Partito comunista [Milan: Garzanti, 1978], p. 109). 58. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, vol. 2 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970), p. 114. 59. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 133. 60. Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 204. 61. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 296f. 62. See Adam Schaff, Alienation as a Social Phenomenon (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980). 63. Augusto Del Noce, Il suicidio della rivoluzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1978), p. 5. 64. Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Afﬂuent Society,” in David Cooper, ed., The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 177. Despite this, Marcuse had no problem declaring that “the Marxian concept of revolution is neither utopistic nor romantic” (“Un riesame del concetto di rivoluzione,” in Mario Spinella, ed., Marx vivo, vol. 1 [Milan: Mondadori, 1969], p. 187). 65. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). 66. Jules Guesde captured the profound meaning of the Marxian program when

168

Revolutionary Apocalypse

he wrote that “just as Christianity once made God man, so socialism will make man God” (quoted from Robert Michels, La Sociologia del Partito Polı´tico [Bologna: Il Mutino, 1968], p. 528). 67. Thomas Aquinas’s deﬁnition goes thus: “God is not only essence, but also His very own essence” (The ‘Summa teologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas [London: Burns, Oates and Washbound, 1929]). 68. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 304. 69. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 81. 70. Vittorio Strada, “La ricerca di Dio nel marxismo,” in Mondoperaio, no. 4 (1992), p. 134. 71. “Marx . . . connects with the Species the idea of redemption and, metaphorically speaking, sees only in the Species the infant-God whose cradle is surrounded by the obtuse snakes of the elementary forces of nature.” (Anatoly Lunacharsky, Religione e socialismo [Bologna: Guaraldi, 1973], p. 193). 72. Hugues Portelli, Gramsci e la questione religiosa (Milan: Mazzotta, 1976), p. 199. 73. Ernst Bloch, L’esprit de l’Utopie (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 323. The last note of this work is particularly enlightening. Block admits that Marxism is “a revolutionary Gnosis.” Even more enlightening is what Bloch wrote in a letter to Lukacs: after deﬁning himself a “paraclete” interceding before God’s throne for the sinful world, he concluded the letter: “the men to whom I have been sent, will understand and feel within them a God that returns” (quoted from Joachim Fest, Il sogno distrutto [Milan: Garzanti, 1992], p. 54). 74. J. P. Sartre, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 241. 75. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Frammenti postumi” in The Twilight of the Idols, in Complete Works, vol. 16, ed. by Oscar Levy (Edinburgh, London: Foulis, 1911). 76. See Gianfranco Morra, ed., La scure del nulla (L’Aquila: Japadre, 1984); Giorgio Penzo, Il nichilismo da Nietzsche a Sartre (Rome: Citta` Nuova, 1976); F. Vercellone, Il nichilismo (Bari: Laterza, 1992). 77. Ioan Couliano, I miti dei dualismi occidentali, p. 295. 78. Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, Una interpretazione della storia universale, p. 142. 79. Martin Heidegger, Sentieri interrotti, p. 198. 80. Jean Granier, Nietzsche (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), p. 36. 81. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. 82. Henri Desroche, Sociologie de l’esperance (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1973), p. 176. 83. See Eric Voegelin, Trascendenza e gnosticismo (Rome: Astra, 1979), and Caratteri gnostici della moderna politica economica e sociale (Rome: Astra, 1980). 84. O. K. Flechtheim, Storia e futurologia (Rome: Rumma, 1969), p. 87. 85. Friedrich Engels, “The Condition of England,” in Opere complete, vol. 3, p. 464f. 86. Ibid., p. 465. 87. Friedrich Engels, “Schelling and Revelation,” in Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 236. 88. Ibid., p. 238 and p. 239. It is interesting to note that Giovanni Gentile, another gnostic thinker of our time, has the same Stimmung, the same desire for the absolute and for unity, the same horror for what is divided, split, the same aspiration to cancel alienation. This is particularly evident in the following passage: “The spirit is the Messiah. It must come and it will not come without eradicating the bad plant of evil, which is nature, without destroying this world, in order to establish the kingdom of God. The spirit acquires awareness of self by fulﬁlling itself: not to be fulﬁlled is this

The Revolutionary Gnosis

169

nature that is before us and appears to be all, until we are redeemed and have freed ourselves from the nightmare oppressing us, hour by hour threatening to suffocate us” (Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, vol. 2 [Florence: Sansoni, 1956], p. 369). As if to say: salvation is to gain awareness of the fact that alienation does not exist because all is within the spirit and all is creation of the spirit. 89. Friedrich Engels, Schelling and Revelation, p. 239f. 90. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 151. 91. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 175. 92. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 174. 93. Ernst Bloch, Ateismo nel cristianesimo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), p. 331. 94. Friedrich Engels, “Draft of a Communist confession of Faith,” in Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 103. 95. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 176. 96. Karl Marx, “Lettera ad Arnold Ruge,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 414. 97. Those who consider the Marx-Engels critique of religion to be directed toward the shortcomings of hieratic institutions have completely misinterpreted scientiﬁc socialism. Once the latter believes that is has identiﬁed the method for annihilating “distorted reality,” it has no alternative but to be hostile to the religious spirit as such, if for no other reason than the fact that as long as humans feel the need for “religious opium,” it will mean that the communist revolution has not achieved what it had promised; that is to say, total disalienation (See Gianfranco Morra, Marxismo e religione [Milan: Rusconi, 1976]). 98. Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 99. Karl Loewith, Signiﬁcato e ﬁne della storia (Milan: Comunita`, 1963), p. 63. See also M. Buber, Utopie et socialisme (Montaigne: Aubier, 1977). 100. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Introduzione a ‘Kommunistische Zeitschrift’ ” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Moralismo e politica rivoluzionaria (Rome: Newton Compton, 1972), p. 156. 101. Domenico Settembrini, Il labirinto marxista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1975), p. 19. 102. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 486–487. 103. See Kostas Axelos, Marx pensatore della tecnica (Milan: SugarCo, 1963). 104. Georges Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1962), p. 148. 105. Karl Marx, Discorso per l’anniversario del People’s Paper, pp. 655–656. 106. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 504. 107. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, p. 505. 108. Friedrich Engels, “La questione delle dieci ore,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 271. 109. Karl Marx, “Discorso dell’Aia,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Contro l’anarchismo, p. 99. 110. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Introduzione a “Kummunistische Zeitschrift,” p. 161. 111. Leszek Kolakowski, Lo spirito rivoluzionario (Milan: SugarCo, 1981), p. 8. 112. Karl Marx, Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte, p. 115. 113. Mircea Eliade, Mito e realta` (Turin: Borla, 1966), p. 95. 114. Ernesto Che Guevara, Questa grande umanita` (Rome: Tindalo, 1968), p. 67. 115. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 47. 116. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 515.

170

Revolutionary Apocalypse

117. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 46. 118. See Manuel Garcia Pelayo, Miti e simboli politici (Turin: Borla, 1970), p. 42 et seq. 119. “For the alchemist, man is creator: he regenerates nature and dominates time; he perfects the divine creation” (Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l’alchimie [Paris: L’Herne, 1990], p. 33). 120. We ﬁnd this deﬁnition in Wilhelm Weitling, “L’umanita` come e` e come dovrebbe essere”—in G.M. Bravo, ed., Il socialismo prima di Marx (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 286—a work that exercised considerable inﬂuence on Marx and Engels (see Auguste Cornu, Marx ed Engels, dal radicalismo al comunismo [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964]). 121. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 298 and 300. In perfect harmony with the spirit and interpretation of the Marxian message, Marcuse wrote that “the radical transformation of nature becomes an integrating part of the radical transformation of society” (Counterrevolution and Revolt). Ernst Bloch expressed an identical thesis in the philosophical interview “Mutare il mondo sino a renderlo riconoscibile” (in Marxismo e utopia [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984], pp. 118–119). 122. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Introduzione a ‘Kommunistische Zeitschrift,’ ” p. 161. 123. Karl Marx, “Lettera a Vera Zasulic,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, India, Cina e Russia (Milan: il Saggiatore, 1970), p. 306. 124. The principle “To each according to his needs” is expressed in The Acts of the Apostles. The fact that Marx should place it at the foundation of the highest and last phase of the revolutionary transformation of society is additional evidence that he conceived communism as the materialization of the evangelical promise. This explains why so many scholars have seen Marxism as both the heir and the enemy of Christianity: heir insofar as it picks up the palingenetic program and adapts it to the spirit of the secular city; enemy insofar as the program can only be achieved by rendering every “religious illusion” superﬂuous. 125. Quoted from Henri de Lubac, Alla ricerca dell’uomo nuovo (Turin: Borla, 1964), p. 57. Trotsky described the anthropological mutation to be accomplished in Communist society as follows: “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser and more acute. His body will be more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical; the forms of being will acquire a dynamic representativity” (Letteratura, arte e liberta` [Milan: Schwartz, 1958], p. 107).

CHAPTER 9

Utopia in Power

1. In 1898, I. S. Bloch, a far-sighted Warsaw banker, predicted “with absolute clarity that a great conﬂict could not be deferred for much longer and expressed the belief that, in the event of a major European war, the technological development of arms and the allocation by the major powers of political and economic resources for military purposes, would inevitably lead to a stalemate of the armed forces of the countries at war. The ﬁnal outcome would be a tremendous calamity for the civil population, with the winners suffering as much as the losers, and the ﬁnal collapse of social organisation.”1 Just a few years later, Lenin reached exactly the same conclusion, but with the difference that, while Bloch saw the situation from the point of view of its disastrous consequences for Western civilization, Lenin saw it as a great, indeed, a unique, opportunity for his party to deviate the spontaneous course of history and point it in the direction of communism. The spread of communism clearly required an extraordinary event of some kind, given that capitalism was showing no signs of being on the verge of collapse and the working class obviously had a strong reformist calling. Such an event would shake the foundations of the whole of Europe like a deus ex machina provoking the situation of general social disorder essential for the success of the revolution and the taking of power. Without this extraordinary event, the Bolshevik Party would never break away from the vice that held it. In other words, war was to be the shattering force that Marx had claimed would come from the laws of capitalist growth.2 In a letter Lenin wrote to Gorky in 1913, we read: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a very useful thing for the revolution [throughout Eastern Europe], but it’s not very probable that Franz-Josef and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”3 Lenin was

172

Revolutionary Apocalypse

obsessed by the idea of transforming a conﬂict between two states into a European civil war,4 even though Europe was already involved in a war that would leave it traumatized in material and moral terms, as Bloch had predicted. Civil war did not break out in Europe for the simple reason that patriotic sentiments proved to be much stronger than proletarian internationalism. However, the sudden collapse of the tsarist regime following a huge popular mutiny at the beginning of 1917 provided Lenin with the opportunity he had been waiting for.5 Russia became a “powerless land.” It was an opportunity not to be missed. To do so would have been to commit a crime against history.6 Admittedly, according to Second International Marxism, well-developed forces of production and a large well-organized working class that was conscious of its historical calling were essential for the success of the socialist revolution. But over the years Lenin had learned to consider the conquest of power as a unique and unrepeatable opportunity that had to be exploited with absolute determination and great daring, by “resorting to cunning with history” to use the formula coined by the young Trotsky.7 The task of the Bolshevik Party was to transform the February democratic-bourgeois revolution into a socialist revolution, directed toward the “conscious avant-garde” of the working class.8 Such a strategy might well have been in open conﬂict with that of the proletarian revolution illustrated in Capital, but it was in perfect harmony with the Indirizzo del 1850 in which Marx and Engels illustrated their strategy for the conquest of power. Neither Marx nor Engels ever linked that strategy to the situation of the forces of production; essentially it was an updated version of the Jacobin model.9 At least until the “turning point” of September 1850, Lenin quite legitimately presented himself as the most coherent interpreter of the theories of the founders of scientiﬁc socialism. After April 1917, the combination of Lenin’s boundless voluntarism, fanatical faith in communism, and political genius was to determine the destiny of Russia10 and launch a new era in world history: the era of the planetary expansion of revolutionary gnosticism. Even his own followers were surprised when Lenin raised the banner of civil war, when he descended from the armored carriage placed at his disposal by the German government: no support for the provisional government, radicalization of the class struggle, passage from bourgeois revolution to proletarian revolution. The charismatic leader of Bolshevism broke the front of the democratic forces and proposed his party as the sole leader of Russian society. “I will never forget that resounding speech [wrote Sukhanov after Lenin’s ﬁrst meeting with the leaders of the Bolshevik Party]. It came as a surprise not only to me, a heretic who was there by chance, but to all the faithful. It was as if all the elements of universal destruction had come out of hiding, overcome barriers, doubts, difﬁculties and personal considerations, and been let loose above the heads of the fascinated disciples in the rooms of the Kshesinskaya.”11 Josif Goldenberg was equally surprised by Lenin’s speech

Utopia in Power

173

at the Tauride Palace the next day: “For many years, the great anarchist Bakunin had no worthy successor. His place has now been occupied. What we have just heard is a complete denial of the whole social democrat doctrine and the whole theory of scientiﬁc Marxism. We have just heard a clear and unmistakable declaration of anarchy. Its herald, Lenin, is Bakunin’s heir. Lenin, the Marxist, Lenin the leader of our social democrat party exists no more. A new Lenin has been born, Lenin the anarchist.”12 In other words, Lenin the voluntarist, who “staked his life on a mighty wager, a gigantic act of faith”13 and with a coup de main, which was as daring as it was fortunate, had conquered the Winter Palace, since Russia had precipitated into the “anarchy of dualism of power”14 and the democratic forces were, as Sukhanov correctly stated, in a “state of disarray.” But the occupation of the Winter Palace did not mean the conquest of power. It was simply a gesture of great symbolic value: it “charged” the souls of the Bolsheviks, showed them that “paradise was within reach” and that revolutionary determination was capable of veritable miracles.15 Nonetheless, 1918, not 1917, was the decisive year. It demonstrated that, with the active support of the population, the October coup could become a real revolution and make Lenin’s dream come true—forcing all Russia to adapt to the rigid mold of collectivist Utopia in order to accomplish the great revolutionary experiment. The ordinance of October 26 (November 8) 1917, instituting the Council of People’s Commissars, deﬁned the Council as “a provisional government of workers and peasants” that would exercise its authority “until the convening of the Constituent Assembly.”16 When the Constituent Assembly was convened—Bolshevik representation was only 25 percent—it was immediately dissolved by order and stamped as a “factory of gossip.”17 From the very start, the “machine of revolution”18 patiently constructed by Lenin brutally destroyed all opposition. The ﬁrst to go was freedom of the press. As early as November 17, 1917, an ofﬁcial Bolshevik resolution deﬁned the free press as a weapon in the hands of “capitalists, poisoners of the minds of the people.”19 V. D. Bonch-Bruevich introduced a principle that was rigorously followed by the new regime: “During the revolution there can be only one press, the revolutionary press.”20 Ergo, all nonaligned publications should be suppressed. The liberal press went ﬁrst; the axe of the Bolshevik Party then fell in rapid succession on the press of the parties of the left, accused of being “bourgeois,” no matter the social composition of their following.21 So, “Lenin nationalised the means of communication even before [he nationalized] the means of production.”22 The Bolshevik Party did not limit itself to denying the opposition the right to express its opinions freely; it denied its very right to exist.23 Gradually the real meaning of the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” became clear: it meant total domination by the sect that believed it was endowed with the historical calling of freeing humanity from the corrupt and corrupting bour-

174

Revolutionary Apocalypse

geois spirit. It was a domination that had no limits and tolerated no opposition. Whoever refused to bend to its will was annihilated or at least rendered harmless.24 It knew one method only: “extermination of the opposition in every form.”25 Lenin pursued the method with absolute brutality, repeating constantly: “The resistance of the exploiters is crushed,”26 and established a “rule that is unrestricted by any laws”27 and concentrated in the hands of “a full-ﬂedged ‘oligarchy’ . . . the Party’s Central Committee.”28 This was the indispensable condition for conquering an enemy—capitalism—both powerful and insidious, which even when beaten “is disintegrating . . . polluting the air and poisoning our lives, enmeshing that which is new, fresh, young and virile in thousands of threads and bonds of that which is old, moribund and decaying.”29 2. The ﬁrst one-party dictatorship of the twentieth century30 was also the ﬁrst dictatorship based on terrorism. The CHEKA—“one of the most formidable institutions for the perpetration of state-organised homicide that the world has ever seen”31—concentration camps, summary trials, mass shootings were the tools and the practices used by the Communist Party to “remake the Russian population and all humanity,”32 bending everyone and thing to its demiurgic will. Not even the workers on whose behalf the Bolsheviks claimed to rule were safe from “class terrorism.”33 If they refused unconditional acceptance of the new regime, they were stamped as “impure proletariats, contaminated by the petit-bourgeois mentality”34 and treated as “enemies of the people.” Lenin in person directed the “infernal machine” of total terror. In November 1917—that is, during the revolutionary “honeymoon”35—he issued the following instructions: “In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work . . . will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with ‘yellow tickets’ after they have served their time, so that everyone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons. . . . In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a ﬁfth place mixed methods may be adopted. . . . The more variety there will be, the better and richer will be our general experience, the more certain and rapid will be the success of socialism.”36 The instructions issued in June and July 1918 were even more chilling: “Comrade Zinoviev, only today we have heard at the C.C. that in Petrograd the workers wanted to reply to the murder of Volodarsky by mass terror and that you . . . restrained them. I protest most emphatically. . . . We must encourage the energy and mass character of the terror against the counterrevolutionaries. . . .” “You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms. Mass deportation of Mensheviks and unreliables.” “Essential to crush the kulak rising with great energy, speed, and ruthlessness. . . .” “Act in the most resolute way against the kulaks and the Left SocialistRevolutionary scoundrels who have made common cause with them.” “Essen-

Utopia in Power

175

tial to suppress the kulak extortioners mercilessly.” “Essential to combine ruthless suppression of the kulak Left Socialist-Revolutionary. . . . ”37 These instructions were music to the ears of the Bolsheviks, who had been mentally prepared by Lenin in person “for the day in which they would defend the achievements of the dictatorship of the proletariat using the most radical and effective means of revolutionary struggle: red terror.”38 They unleashed a general offensive against the “bourgeois,” the “suspects,” the “harmful elements,” and “useless citizens,” using the tribunals as a “revolutionary weapon” and complying with the principles of the “new moral” and the “new law,” as they had been codiﬁed by Krylenko: “In times of civil war, action [against Soviet power] and inaction are equally criminal . . . The tribunal is not the body for generating new legal reﬁnements and casuistry . . . We are creating a new law and new ethical norms . . . We don’t need legal reﬁnements because we don’t have to establish whether the accused is guilty or innocent: the concept of guilt, an old bourgeois concept, has been eradicated . . . A tribunal is an organ of class struggle of workers directed against their enemies . . . it must function from the perspective of the interests of the revolution, . . . taking into account the most desirable results for the worker and peasant masses.” In other words: men are no longer men but “bearers of certain ideas. Whatever their individual qualities, one can assess them on the basis of one criterion, namely that of class convenience.”39 Naturally, judgment as to what constituted “class convenience” was made by the “conscious avant-garde”; that is to say, the Bolshevik Party. “Every worker with a class consciousness [stated Zinoviev to justify the “protective function” the Bolsheviks claimed to have over the proletariat] must realise that the dictatorship of the working class can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the avant-garde, ie. through the Communist party . . . All issues concerning reconstruction, economic growth, military organisation, popular education, supply policies etc., all these issues upon which depend the outcome of the proletarian revolution are decided ﬁrst of all in Russia and, in the majority of cases, within the party organisation . . . The control of the party over the Soviet bodies, the unions, is the only guarantee that corporate or group interests do not prevail over the interests of the proletariat as a whole.”40 So to be against the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist Party was to be against the historical interests of the “general class.” The Communist Party identiﬁed itself with Marxism by deﬁnition; Marxism, with the proletariat; and the latter, with the “will of History.” So the Bolsheviks believed—quite logically given the ideological world of “organic lying” in which they operated—that by establishing terror they were using violence in the manner of an obstetrician: their function was limited to that of assisting the delivery of the new society (Marx’s famous metaphor). They were authorized to do all in the name of their gnosticism, given that they alone were aware of what was required to restore the original unity of the human race and end exploitation and oppression.

176

Revolutionary Apocalypse

All this had a deﬁnite historical precedent: Jacobin terror. The Communist Party was inspired by Robespierre41 in building a system that it considered to be the most advanced form of democracy,42 but which in fact was based on the “extreme concentration of power implemented under the banner of militarisation that imposed an iron discipline upon its followers and terror on its enemies.”43 The Communist Party went a step beyond the Jacobin model: it took Jacobin Manicheism to its extreme logical consequence, adding to the “model of Terror” an institution that was destined to become the very symbol of Communist Utopia in power: the gulag. The Bolsheviks were literally obsessed by the issue of “ideological purity.” A revolutionary party—so Lenin had preached in What is to be done?—would only remain such if it avoided being polluted by the ideas of the surrounding environment, which were all “bourgeois” and therefore contaminating of revolutionary consciousness. A revolutionary party therefore had to be structured like an “ideological bunker” in order to prevent infection from the intellectual and moral miasma of the external world. Since there was no way of guaranteeing that the bourgeois spirit would not penetrate the consciousness of individual militants, it was imperative to institutionalize ideological censorship and conduct permanent purges to “liberate” the party from everything that was incompatible with its historical mission. Hence the importance of ﬁghting on two fronts: externally, against the declared enemies of communism, and internally, against those who claimed to absorb “bourgeois ‘freedom of criticism,’ within the Party.”44 As soon as the Bolshevik Party took over power, it created a special “unloading area” in which to concentrate all the impure and nonassimilable elements to prevent them from contaminating society.45 The gulag was a place for unloading impurity: an extensive system of concentration camps to imprison those who, for one reason or another, the party considered to be carriers of negative tendencies. And, since the Bolsheviks accused entire social classes—entrepreneurs, traders, kulaks, and so forth—of being incompatible with the social organization that was to replace the capitalist bourgeois society, the gulag obviously had to assume huge dimensions. It became a “world apart,”46 destined to remain in existence until “universal puriﬁcation” was achieved. Revolution therefore was conceived as a struggle for the destruction of the external enemy and as a “mortal war against the internal enemies.”47 Fear and suspicion grew in the heart of the Bolshevik Party. The so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not even spare the Bolshevik leaders; “the fact that a guilty or supposedly guilty person was at the top of the party or of the institutions required exemplary forms of punishment.”48 3. Of course, if the Bolsheviks had limited themselves to terrorism, they would never have obtained the mass support they needed to destroy the other parties and extend their rule throughout Russia. They promised peace, power to the Soviets, land for the peasants; they propagated the chiliastic utopia of

Utopia in Power

177

a society without class and without state. Maria Spiridonova’s stirring words immediately after the conquest of the Winter Palace are revealing: “New horizons that history has never known lie before the workers of Russia. In the past workers movements have always failed. This movement is international and therefore invincible. No force in the world can extinguish the ﬁre of revolution! The old world is collapsing, a new world is rising.”49 This message was uttered again and again all over Russia, opening exciting new prospects that ﬁred the enthusiasm of millions of individuals, giving them the fanatical conviction that times were ripe for the social palingenesis. After a purifying bloodbath, a “golden age would start and men would live without laws, without punishment, spontaneously doing what is right and good.”50 The Bolshevik revolution was successful because it combined utopianism and terrorism and convinced the masses that terror was the most effective means for materializing that ideal of a classless and stateless society that generations and generations of socialist activists had injected in the hearts of the workers. The other factor that contributed to the success of the Bolsheviks was a unique phenomenon that dominated the world arena starting from 1917: the rapid and practically total disintegration of civil society under the dual impact of the Great War and internal war. Russian civil society was too fragile to withstand the impact of the sudden collapse of the tsarist regime. The industrialization policy had only just been introduced. The professional groups stamped by communism as incompatible with the type of society it wished to create were paralyzed by fear.51 Two and a half million citizens abandoned Russia in the space of only four or ﬁve years. They were the “more active and creative members of the population and this deprived the country almost completely of its leaders.”52 A huge social void in combination with the political void made Russia easy prey for the one force, the Bolshevik Party, endowed with strong internal cohesion and animated by an iron will to impose itself on every other force. With the active support of “almost half the army, which then numbered at least ten million men,”53 the Bolsheviks ruthlessly exterminated all the other political forces and “took their place in the civil society liquidated by civil war and world war.”54 Six hundred thousand rigorously selected, carefully indoctrinated, and periodically “puriﬁed” partiny surrogated the bourgeoisie who had ﬂed the country. In Pareto’s terms, this meant the very rapid substitution of an “elect” bourgeois class with a new “elect” class composed of the professionals of permanent revolution. The destruction of civil society was completed by a savage nationalization policy55 willed and implemented by the Bolsheviks for ideological reasons. They were convinced that the liberation of humanity from all material and moral misery required the elimination of private property and free enterprise. For political/power reasons, it also required the existence of a small organized minority within a disorganized hostile world. The Bolsheviks lived in fear of a Thermidor-type reaction and protected themselves from that danger by dispossessing society of all its resources.

178

Revolutionary Apocalypse

In 1917, Russia therefore experienced a military, political, and social collapse. The ﬁrst marked the end of tsarism; the second made the October coup possible; the third—the spontaneous dissolution of bourgeois society following the diaspora of its leaders—opened the way for the Bolshevik policy of total substitution of civil society by the all-possessing state. The outcome was the creation of universal charismatic bureaucracy: “charismatic” because it derived its right to rule from an idea of collective salvation; “universal” because it claimed unlimited power of jurisdiction. Nothing was private: not the economic or organizational resources, not institutions, nor ideas, nor even people. Everything was public; that is to say, state property and therefore the property of the charismatic bureaucracy. “We recognise nothing private,” wrote Lenin to Kursky, the people’s commissar “In the economic sphere, for us everything is public and not private. We acknowledge only state capitalism, but we are the State.”56 “We,” meant namely the gnostic group of professional revolutionaries elevated to the rank of “spiritus rector” [Bukharin’s deﬁnition]57 of the New Order guided by the fundamental principle: “The party rectiﬁes, prescribes and builds according to a single principle—to enable the communist elements linked with the proletariat to imbue the proletariat with their own spirit, win its adherence, and open its eyes to the bourgeois deceit.”58 Inevitably, the methodical application of this principle produced the militarization and idealogization of every expression of human life. A state is ﬁrst and foremost a war machine; if everything is nationalized, there is a strong thrust toward universal militarization. And if, at the same time, a doctrine proclaiming it knows the method for accomplishing nothing short of the “resurrection day of mankind”59 is made the compulsory state philosophy, society becomes one huge militarized convent. This is exactly what happened in Russia as soon as the Bolshevik Party started to extend its hold to all the institutions and resources of society, after outlawing all the other parties including those driven by the ideals of socialism. With the result that “the State—that is, the government—became the sole carrier of every truth, the sole proprietor of all material and spiritual goods, the sole initiator, organiser, animator of the country’s entire life, in all its ramiﬁcations.”60 The operation was successful—this must be stressed—because the huge diaspora of Russian bourgeoisie had led to the almost complete dissolution of civil society. There were no independent social forces capable of resisting the Bolsheviks. The workers, upon whose shoulders the Bolsheviks came to power, tried to break away from the totalitarian yoke. But their attempt at Kronstadt to restore the power of the Soviet and the fundamental liberties eradicated by the policy of “absolute centralization”61 ended in a bloodbath.62 The “bureaucratic revolution”63 triumphed; the workers became the servants of the all-proprietor state, which, in the name of socialism, demanded the “unquestioning subordination of the masses to a single will which directs the process of labour.”64 Through a series of “compulsory stages” masterfully de-

Utopia in Power

179

scribed by Rosa Luxemburg, the dictatorship of the proletariat was converted into a dictatorship over the proletariat, before the totalitarian metastasis had became fully evident.65 It was exercised by a sect of gnostic activists who claimed to express the “real interests” of the working masses, on the basis of the following reasoning: The Communist party is part of the working class: it is its most progressive, most aware and therefore most revolutionary part. The Communist party is created by means of the selection of the best workers, the most aware, the best equipped, in terms of spirit of sacriﬁce and far sightedness. The interests of the Communist party are no different from those of the working class. The Communist party stands out from the mass of workers insofar as it is capable of seeing the historical path of the working class in its entirety and in every moment of crisis it tries to defend the interests of the working class as a whole, and not those of groups or categories of workers separately. The Communist party is the lever of political organisation thanks to which the most aware part of the working class guides the entire proletariat and semi-proletariat mass along the right path.66

4. The peasants were the only social group that escaped the direct control of Lenin’s gigantic bureaucracy. To obtain their support, the Bolsheviks promised ownership of land and embraced the policy of the revolutionary socialists,67 even though private ownership of land was obviously incompatible with communism and was the seed of capitalism, since it implies free trade and “freedom of trade is capitalism.”68 After they had swept away all the other parties, the Bolsheviks were then forced to wage a veritable war of extermination against the small farm owners “animated by universal class hatred against capital.”69 The declared objective was “the destruction of individualism”70 through the eradication of ownership of small plots of land by farmers. Given that “socialism . . . means the abolition of commodity economy”71 and given that the market economy is closely linked to private property, land must also be nationalized and controlled by a central planner. Otherwise, the laws of competition inevitably lead to the spontaneous generation of large property from small property and the “weed” of capitalism can ﬂourish and eventually spread to all society. A military communism—a pleonastic expression, given that communism and military organization of society are one and the same thing72—was not therefore imposed by circumstance but was a rational, rigorous, and ruthless attempt to eradicate what Marx and Engels had indicated as the sole cause of exploitation and individualism: the production of goods for commercial purposes.73 On this point the literature is absolutely clear. In a speech on May 19, 1919, Lenin explained that the “total victory of communism” required giving priority to “the struggle of oppressed working people for the complete overthrow of capital and the abolition of commodity production stands in the forefront.”74 He reiterated the concept on July 20 of that same year:

180

Revolutionary Apocalypse

We are ﬁghting a real battle against capitalism and we assert that no matter what concessions capitalism may force us to make we are still in favour of the struggle against it and against exploitation. We shall ﬁght in this ﬁeld as ruthlessly as we are ﬁghting Denikin and Kolchak, because they draw fresh strength for themselves from the might of capitalism, and this might, of course, does not fall from the sky, it is based on freedom to trade on grain and other goods. . . . If we win in this ﬁght there will be no return to capitalism and the former system, no return to what has been in the past. Such a return will be impossible so long as there is a war against the bourgeoisie, against proﬁteering and against petty proprietorship. When we have got the peasant away from his property and we have made him turn towards the work of our state we shall be able to say that we have covered a difﬁcult section of our road.75

To destroy the seed of capitalism—that is to say, what remained of civil society: small peasant property and free trade of wheat—and subject economic life to the imperatives of state planning, the Bolshevik Party adopted the following policy: 1. maximum expansion of public property and of state authority 2. compulsory allocation of labor and introduction of military-type discipline in factories 3. centralized management of production 4. distribution of goods and services according to political/ideological criteria 5. naturalization of the economy through the suppression of currency

Inevitably, this model of economic organization was incompatible with freedom of choice of occupation. If this “bourgeois” freedom were not eradicated, the productive process would never be managed according to the imperatives of the central plan. Hence, Bukharin’s very explicit theory of the dictatorship over the workers: “Given that the tasks of the revolution have to be accomplished at whatever cost, understandably so-called freedom of labour must be limited from the point of view of the proletariat, in the name of the effective and non-ﬁctitious liberty of the working class. For such freedom is not suited to a closely organised planned economy and the corresponding division of the labour force. Hence, a regime of compulsory labour and of state distribution of the workforce under the dictatorship of the proletariat is already an expression of a relatively high degree of organisation of the entire apparatus and of the solidity of proletariat power in general.”76 Even more brutal was Trotsky’s description of “militarised proletarian production.”77 The army has suitable means for forcing soldiers to do their duty. In one form or the other, it is necessary to do the same with workers. Undoubtedly, if we want to talk seriously about a centrally planned, uniform economy and if we want the labour force to be distributed according to the needs of economic development, we cannot allow the mass of workers to move freely from one part of Russia to another. The workers must be directed and ordered in the same way as soldiers are. This is the basis of the

Utopia in Power

181

militarisation of workers;78 We are heading towards a type of labour that is regulated socially on the basis of a central plan, a labour that is compulsory for the whole country, ie., imposed on the workers, having established that fundamentally, ‘not formally but fundamentally’, we recognise the right of the worker State to send workers, male and female, wherever their labour is most necessary for the attainment of the economic objectives. Hence we acknowledge that the State has the right to punish the worker who refuses to carry out the orders of the State, who refuses to subordinate his will to that of the working class and its economic responsibilities. The militarisation of labour in the profound sense I referred to constitutes a fundamental and indispensable means for organising our work-force.79

Obviously, the one conclusion to be drawn from the above is that the union must cease performing its traditional role of “tribune of the plebs” and become an institution at the service of the central planner state, docile to its desires and willing to implement its orders without question. On this point Trotsky is, as always, brutally frank: “Without the general service of labour, without the right to give orders and have them executed, the unions would be transformed into an empty, unreal form. The young Soviet state needs unions, not from the perspective of the struggle to improve the conditions of labour— which is the scope of social organisation and of the State as a whole—but to organise, educate, discipline, distribute, and bring together the working class for the purposes of production. In a word, they exercise their authority in conjunction with the State and guide the workers in accordance with the single economic plan.”80 5. The project of creating a gigantic militarized convent and extending the Jesuit-like discipline of the Bolshevik Party to the whole of Russian society81 clashed with the laws of the economy and the resistance of the peasant world. Requisitioning led to a black market economy82 and was boycotted by the farm owners who considered themselves to have been betrayed by the Bolsheviks. This was followed by the immediate collapse in the production of food, and by famine. Cannibalism was common in many parts of the country. “People [we read in an investigation by Mikhail Osorgin] mostly ate those who died closest to them; they fed on the older children, but also on babies, who had not even learnt to live; they were not spared either, no matter how small the yield. People devoured in their own little corner, not at the common table, and no one mentioned it.”83 The devastating famine that cost the lives of no fewer than ﬁve million people84 was the result of requisition and nationalization policies that smothered any incentive to produce. Yet, Lenin claimed that the perverse nature of the farm owners was responsible for the famine and, at least until late 1920, suggested that the only solution was “to butcher the kulaks.”85 Naturally, the consequence of such an outrageous solution was that what had been peasant resistance became armed revolt all over the country. The Bolsheviks avoided

182

Revolutionary Apocalypse

collapse because “the party saved the situation in extremis by suppressing the requisitioning of cereals and substituting it with a tax in kind, it revived free trade and introduced a system of liberation of the economy known as NEP.”86 The revival of a mini-market economy implied the revival of currency, of trade, of private enterprise, and proﬁt—of course, under the rigid control of the ideological power of the State-Party. In this way it was possible to increase the production of food and therefore overcome the famine generated by the blind doctrinarianism of the Bolsheviks.87 The Russian economy acquired the features of a mixed system with two separate spheres: a state sphere of huge proportions, regulated by the principles of central planning, and an extensive private sphere governed by the law of demand and supply.88 Obviously, it was a compromise solution, but it worked. The concessions granted to the farm owners and the improvement in the situation of the people extinguished the hotbeds of revolt and the Bolshevik Party managed to recuperate the support it had lost in the attempt to reorganize Russian society according to collective principles. But a market communism is a hybrid system that operates with the seeds of capitalism and is therefore intimately contradictory. When Giacinto Menotti Serrati underlined this contradiction in a conversation with Evgeny Preobrazhensky, he was promptly reassured. The party, argued the Bolshevik leader, was ever vigilant and had a ﬁrm hold on all the levers of power. For this reason it was able to control the evolution of Russian society. The nepmany are the minus habentes of the Soviet regime. They have no vote. The do not participate in public life. They are like those animals that are fattened up to be killed for Christmas. At the appropriate moment, the Communist government will put an end to the NEP and to those who take advantage of them. Of this they are so aware, they feel this so strongly that they don’t save, they don’t accumulate but squander. It is as if their instinct tells them that their end is not far off . . . They are not a class yet, and we will not let them become one. They are individuals whose goal is to exploit a situation for pleasure and to become rich . . . We are too strong: we can play cat and mouse with them . . . Today we feed the nepmany, like the nobles fed the muraena. With this difference: we feed them on their own ﬂesh, we let them eat each other. The big ones eat the smaller ones . . . But we know who these sharks are, and their life is in our hands. One ﬁnd day we will close the outlets and make a huge catch. That will be a new phase of the revolution.89

The intimate conviction of the man responsible for the perekachka theory— the forced “pumping” of the agricultural sphere to the industrial sphere—was that socialism would only be achieved in the framework of a completely nationalized and centrally planned economy, conceived as “a unitarian complex moulded with the political power in conditions of systematic limitation until the total elimination of competition.”90 This conviction was common within the Bolshevik Party. At the end of 1929, Stalin was to make it reality by “unleashing a wave of terror on the countryside.”91

Utopia in Power

183

On this point, Stalin’s loyalty to Lenin was absolute.92 His ruthless massacre of millions and millions of peasants was simply the execution of the death sentence pronounced by the charismatic leader of Bolshevism every time he harangued his followers.93 As early as May 1918, he stated, “There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarreled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never. That is why we call the ﬁght against the kulaks the last, decisive ﬁght. . . . The kulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters. . . . These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants. Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them—the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today’s Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand.”94 In the mind of the leaders of the “iron detachment of the proletariat, classconscious and boundlessly devoted to communism,”95 who had occupied the country like an invading army, Russia was a gigantic laboratory in which to conduct the alchemistic experiment of extracting new humanity from the “mass human material which has been corrupted,”96 from capitalism. The NEP therefore was simply a “strategical retreat.”97 It was impossible for Lenin to change his attitude toward the small entrepreneur without giving up what was the fundamental idea of communism: the eradication of competition and of everything linked to competition: proﬁt, currency, private property, contracts, and laws of value: all things Marx and Engels abhorred and considered agents of spiritual corruption to be ruthlessly destroyed. So at the VII party conference of the Governorship of Moscow, Lenin developed the following reasoning in perfect harmony with the lessons of the founding fathers of “scientiﬁc socialism”: “The private market proved too strong for us,” placing us before the “problem of our very existence”: “That is why we ﬁnd ourselves in the position of having to retreat still further, in order, eventually, to go over to the offensive.”98 Again and again, Marx reiterated the principle that the communist revolution was forced to wage a war against free trade, which was the very foundation of capitalism. Therefore the NEP had to be conceived as a mere armistice. Hostility would be renewed in the near future and on a vast scale, until the “ﬁnal assault,” which would end with the annihilation of all independence in the peasant world and the triumph of collectivism. At that point only would the victory of communism be complete. Nothing would be private and everything would have become public. It was only a matter of time. The main thing was that the party should remain ﬁrmly anchored to its

184

Revolutionary Apocalypse

convictions and retain its monopoly of power—hence the need to institutionalize what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the system of “permanent purge,”99 for it was an essential tool for guaranteeing the spiritual unity of professional revolutionaries and their absolute identiﬁcation with party orthodoxy. 6. The “war communism” experiment was such a disaster for the Russian economy that only a perverse spirit could have envisaged repeating it. But, for Lenin’s Diadochi to admit the importance of the market would have been to acknowledge the folly of the communist idea. This would have been the equivalent of political suicide, since it would have destroyed the very principle that legitimated their power. Moreover, democratic centralism made it impossible for the party to abandon Marxist ideology. It had been introduced precisely to block in embryo any temptation to revise “scientiﬁc socialism”; the permanent purge system had been introduced speciﬁcally to eliminate anyone who “entertained” any doubts at all about the ultimate goal of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had no alternative but to follow the route indicated by Lenin. They were prisoners of the system they themselves had created. The “second Bukharin”—the man responsible for the NEP—was convinced that communism and the market were mutually incompatible. In a speech authorizing the farm owners to sell their surplus products on the market, in which he repeated Guizot’s famous slogan: “Get rich!” he was careful to stress his unconditional loyalty to the fundamental lesson of the father of Bolshevism. “In the pamphlet Sull’imposta in nature [the “Party favorite” wrote in an article published on April 24, 1924, in Pravda] Lenin writes that, in progressing toward socialism, the ﬁrst step is to overcome widespread petitbourgeois spontaneity. Petit-bourgeois spontaneity, the small entrepreneur is our main enemy and to get the better of him, it is necessary to have the courage to make an alliance with big capital, especially through concessions. The proletariat, the socialist element of the economy, plus large capital will form a bloc that will break that widespread petit-bourgeois spontaneity.”100 “We must achieve socialism, ie. a centrally planned economy. This is our ultimate goal. But petit-bourgeois spontaneity, our main enemy, we shall overcome in alliance with its major ally, concession capitalism: with State capitalism. Cooperation is the element that works in association with the capitalist elements, the kulak elements, in the countryside. But we are adding this ring to the system of State capitalism; in so doing, with the help of these capitalist elements we will be able to curb the advance of petit-bourgeois spontaneity.”101 The underlying idea of Bukharin’s strategy—which, according to a highly imaginative interpretation fostered the permanent coexistence of communism and the market102—was that it would be possible to solve the catastrophic crisis of the Russian economy generated by “war communism”103 by means of a “peasant Brest,” a compromise with the farm owners. They would be allowed to trade, but, at the same time, the one-party dictatorship would be consolidated, thus avoiding a revival of capitalism104 by “enhancing economic controls which

Utopia in Power

185

are an integral part of the state machinery”105 and controlling the kulaks by means of a totally nationalized bank system and the “monopoly of external trade.”106 The barriers would be such that it would be unthinkable for Russian society to abandon communism. In other words, shut the “golden-egged chicken” in a cage [that is how Bukharin referred to private enterprise] exploit it for as long as possible, and let it gradually die. This is what the “Party favorite” meant by “snail-pace communism”: a “gentle death”107 of the micro-market economy revived in 1921 with the declared objective of avoiding a “peasant Vende´e” by increasing the production and productivity that had collapsed following requisition and rationing. Stalin disagreed. He ﬂirted very brieﬂy with the theory of “snail-pace communism” but then adopted the strategy advocated by Trotsky and Preobrazhensky and attacked the small entrepreneur as the “principal enemy of socialism.”108 Stalin hoped to arrive at the “ﬁnal solution” of the peasant issue by eliminating all evidence of private property in the countryside.109 With compulsory collectivization of land, the military logic practically prevailed over the economic logic and “administrative coercion [penetrated] the heart of production”110 transforming all society—precisely as foreseen by Bakunin in direct polemic with Marx and Engels—into one immense barracks.111 Contrary to Trotsky’s opinion,112 this second assault was by no means a Thermidor. In 1794, the Thermidor reaction in France had restored at least part of the civil powers conﬁscated by Jacobin terror, with the introduction of the ideological control of production and distribution processes. The “Stalin revolution” instead enveloped the peasant world in the coercive structures of the centrally planning state and transformed the “red bureaucracy” into an all-powerful class. It was the complete triumph of the monopolistic logic over the pluralistic-competitive logic. Stalin succeeded where Lenin had failed.113 The “widespread petit-bourgeois spontaneity” was destroyed on the basis of the principle of ontological incompatibility between communism and the market.114 In human terms, the price paid for the revival of “war communism” was devastating.115 More than 12 million peasants died in the concentration camps. Other millions of wretches starved to death as a result of the famine provoked by the requisitioning of agricultural goods on the basis of the so-called “Preobrazhensky law,”116 which required covering the food requirement of those allocated to the industrial sector.117 It was the biggest bloodbath in the history of humanity, far worse than the horrendous Nazi holocaust.118 Even “from the agricultural perspective it was also . . . a complete failure”119 from which the Soviet Union would never recover. Nonetheless, the “red bureaucracy” attained its political objective:120 the peasant class was suppressed as an independent social force and transformed into a mass of regimented workers. “State serfdom”121 was a form of rule even more total than oriental despotism. What remained of civil Russian society was disintegrated by the “infernal machine” built by Lenin and assimilated

186

Revolutionary Apocalypse

by the structures of the new all-owning state, which became a ruthless and all devouring Moloch. The market was almost completely eradicated and the State-Party became the sole regulator of social life. Lenin’s dream came true: “society [was transformed] into one big ofﬁce and one big factory” as a “necessary step for the thoroughly cleaning society of all infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation.”122 The result was the creation of a “civil/state society [in which the State] was not divided from civil society by a Chinese wall: one crossed into the other and from a certain perspective the countless—even extensive—organizations of civil society were peripheral organs of the State.”123 The Communists called the new social formation—comparable to the Inca system for the total control of the state over human life124—“dictatorship of the proletariat.” But this typical “ideological formula” hid a very different reality. The logical and inevitable consequence of the complete destruction of the market was the equally complete destruction of civil society and therefore universal bureaucratization; this predictably generated what Max Weber in a prophetical conference on Marxist socialism had called the “dictatorship of the clerk over the worker.”125 In conclusion, the homo ideologicus shaped by the party ideated and created by Lenin pursued a policy of total planning to produce the structural and cultural conditions for the triumph of the “man-function”;126 that is to say, of the homo burocraticus.

NOTES 1. Montgomery, Storia delle guerre (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970), p. 479. 2. In the preface to Bukharin’s pamphlet “The World Economy and Imperialism” (1915) Lenin writes: “Inevitably imperialism will burst and capitalism will be transformed into its opposite” (Complete Works, vol. 22, p. 107). 3. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 35, p. 76. 4. On this point, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant work, Lenin in Zurich (London: Bodley Head, 1976). 5. Anatoly Lunacharsky has left us the following description of Lenin’s departure from Zurich: “Lenin was relaxed and happy. Watching him as he stood smiling on the step of the departing train, I had the sensation that he was thinking more or less this: “Finally, ﬁnally, that has arrived for which I was born, for which I prepared, for which I prepared the entire party, without which our whole life would be merely prepatory and unﬁnished.” (Quoted from Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], p. 110.) 6. “History [wrote Lenin to the Central Committee of his party] will never forgive the revolutionaries for putting off what they could have gained immediately.” 7. Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks. 8. In fact, for a long time Lenin believed that the revolution would be composed of two phases and was even critical of Trotsky for believing that the socialist phase would start immediately. But, as soon as the tsarist regime collapsed, he adopted the same attitude as Trotsky.

Utopia in Power

187

9. “When much later I read Bourgeart’s book on Marat, I discovered that in many ways we had simply copied without knowing it the great example of the true ami du peuple (not the one falsiﬁed by the monarchists) and that all the fuss and all the historical falsities handed down to us for almost one hundred years described a completely deformed Marat had a reason, that the ruthless Marat removed the mask from Lafayette, Bailly and the other idols of the moment and revealed them as perfect betrayers of the revolution and that he like us did not want the revolution to be considered over, but declared it to be permanent” (Friedrich Engels, “Marx e la ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung”” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Il partito e l’Internazionale [Rome: Edizioni Rinascita, 1948], pp. 83–84). So it should be no surprise that Lassalle should have considered Marx to be “the Marat of the [socialist] movement” and that Lenin should have deﬁned Marxism as Jacobinism “fused with the working class movement” (see B. D. Wolfe, Marxism: One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine [New York: Dial Press, 1967], p. 164.). 10. This was a destiny predicted by Prince Tolstoi with amazing accuracy. In 1884, during a conversation with Bulow, the future German chancellor expressed himself in these terms: “If tsarism is ever overturned, it will be substituted by the communism of a certain Mr. Marx of London who died recently and to whose works I am devoting time and attention” (quoted from J. P. Nettl, The Soviet Achievement [London: Thames & Hudson, 1967]). 11. Quoted from Leon Trotsky, Storia della Rivoluzione russa (Milan: Mondadori, 1969), p. 326. 12. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin (Milan: Longanesi, 1966), pp. 294–295. 13. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1977), p. 140. On the nature, the functions, and the methods of the CHEKA, its leader wrote: “The CHEKA is not a tribunal. The CHEKA is the defense of the revolution in the same way as the Red Army. Like the Red Army, in the civil war it cannot stop to ask itself if its actions might damage single individuals but it must pursue one thing only, that is the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the CHEKA must defend revolution and destroy the enemy even if its swords sometimes fall on the head of the innocent” (quoted from Ugo Scuotto, La dittatura del proletariato [Naples: Conte, 1976], p. 94). 14. Leon Trotsky, Storia della Rivoluzione russa, p. 233. 15. In early 1921, Lenin stated that “in certain respects, a revolution is a miracle . . . a miracle took place. . . . ” (“Speech at a Moscow Soviet Plenary Meeting,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 153). 16. Quoted from E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1950). 17. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984), p. 45. 18. Quoted from Adam B. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (London: Collins, 1965), p. 235. 19. Quoted from John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1961). 20. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 67. 21. “The Mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries are nothing but a variant of a petty-bourgeois democracy” (Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 18, p. 196). So there exists only one proletarian and socialist party: the Communist Party; hence, the cynical

188

Revolutionary Apocalypse

deﬁnition of the so called “proletarian democracy” by Tomsky: “One party in power, the others in prison.” 22. Enzo Bettiza, Il mistero Lenin (Milan: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 157. 23. Enlightening in this regard is the following anecdote: “In April 1917, Volin met Trotsky in New York. He told him he intended travelling to Russia to take part in the revolution even though he was convinced that the ‘left wing Marxists’ after taking power would exterminate anarchists ‘like partridge.’ ‘You are imaginative, obstinate and incorrigible dreamers’ answered Trotsky; ‘there are only very vague differences between you anarchists and we communists.’ What he meant became clear in December 1919 when Volin was arrested by the Bolshevik military authorities, given that Volin was considered a major enemy, Trotsky was informed of the arrest. His brutal, not to say laconic response: ‘Shoot Volin immediately.’” (Daniel Gue´rin, No God, No Master [New York: A. K. Press, 1998]). 24. Even those who had contributed to building the Soviet State were considered dangerous elements to be rendered impotent as soon as they expressed a position that did not agree with the general line of the party. About Angelica Balabanova, Lenin had this to say: “If she perseveres in scandal and intrigue, we’ll send her to Siberia” (quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Re´volution sovie´tique [Paris: Editions Complexe, 1980], p. 66). 25. Angelica Balabanova, La mia vita di rivoluzionaria (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), p. 150. 26. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 71. 27. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 236. 28. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 47. 29. Lenin, Letter to American Workers, p. 72. 30. “Yes [declared Lenin on August 3, 1919] it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position.” (Complete Works, vol. 24, p. 535.) 31. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 67. 32. B. D. Wolfe, “Le´ninisme,” in M. M. Drachkovitch, ed., De Marx a` Mao TseToung (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1967), p. 82. 33. Lenin illustrated the meaning of dictatorship of the proletariat to Fossart and Cachin, two of the founders of the French Communist Party: “The dictatorship of the proletariat is not exercised only on the bourgeoisie but also on the still not conscious and reluctant part of the proletariat and their allies; as for the reformists, they are shot” (quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Re´volution sovie´tique, p. 61). And in fact the reformists were exterminated on the basis of the following reasoning: “Permit us to put you before a ﬁring squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difﬁcult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements” (Lenin, “Eleventh Congress of the RCP (B),” in Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 283). 34. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 71. 35. This was not marked, as claimed by Marcel Liebman, by “relative but very real moderation in the repression of the counter-revolutionary elements” (Leninism under Lenin [London: Merlin Press, 1975]). Liebman forgets that as soon as the Bolshevik

Utopia in Power

189

party came to power, the ascete Feliks Dzerzhinsky said this to his comrades: “Do not believe that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; in this moment it is not justice that we need. Now it is a question of direct warfare, of ﬁghting to the last drop of blood. Life or death! I propose, indeed I demand, a body for the revolutionary showdown with the counter-revolutionaries” (quoted from Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievski, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev [London et al.: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990]). 36. Lenin, “How to Organise Competition?” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 414. 37. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 37, pp. 336, 349, 350, 353, 354. The historian Dmitry Volkonogov recently came across a letter of instructions from Lenin to the Soviet of a village: “Kill at least one hundred kulaks, take their bread from them, so that the others live in terror.” The adjective Volkonogov uses to describe the personality of the charismatic leader of world bolshevism is “satanical.” 38. Bonch-Bruevich (quoted from Robert Conquest, “Le origini del terrore,” in AA.VV., Il costo umano del comunismo [Rome: Edizioni del Borghese, 1972], p. 31). 39. Quoted from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (London: Fontana, 1974). No less horrifying were the instructions given by Latsis to the agents of the CHEKA: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is useless to seek proof to demonstrate that such and such is guilty of words or actions against the interests of Soviet power. The ﬁrst words you address to the person arrested must reveal: the class to which he belongs, his origins, his education and profession. These elements should mark the destiny of the accused. This is the essence of the red terror” (quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 496). 40. Quoted from Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). 41. The uncovering of a statue of Robespierre in the vicinity of the Kremlin was one of the ﬁrst public actions of the Bolshevik regime. 42. “The democratic republic, the Constituent assembly, general Assembly, general elections, etc, are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bourgeois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.” (Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 370.) 43. Giuliano Procacci, Il Partito comunista nell’Unione Sovietica (Bari: Laterza, 1974), p. 43. 44. Lenin, “Party Organization and Party Literature” in Complete Works, vol. 10, p. 47. 45. On this issue, see Vittorio Strada’s fundamental essay “Dissenso e socialismo” in AA. VV., Socialismo e dissenso (Turin: Einaudi, 1977). 46. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (Heinemann: London, 1951). 47. Barrington Moore Jr., Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 154.

190

Revolutionary Apocalypse

48. Marco Tarchi, Partito Unico e dinamica autoritaria (Naples: Akropolis, 1981), p. 254. 49. Quoted from John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World. 50. The slogan was coined by Lunacharsky and approved by Lenin. 51. See Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Sociology of Revolution (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1925), pp. 215 et seq. 52. Martin Malia, La Rivoluzione russa e i suoi sviluppi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974), p. 156. 53. Lenin, “Third Congress of the Communist International,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 471. 54. Ibid., p. 471. 55. This is Bonch-Bruevich’s description of the orgy of collectivisation that followed the conquest of the Winter Palace: “The course of revolutionary events so changed our social relations that it was considered an absolute good to nationalise absolutely everything from the large factory to the barber shop with one worker and one pair of scissors and two razors and even down to the last carrot in the shops. Barriers were raised everywhere so that no one could get food through, everyone was subject to rationing” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 63). 56. Lenin, Opere complete, vol. 41, p. 487. 57. Nikolai Bukharin, Economia del periodo di transformazione (Milan: Jaca Book, 1971), p. 78. 58. Lenin, “Speech at Conference of Political education,” in Complete Works, vol. 31, p. 367f. 59. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, dedication in The ABC of Communism, transl. by E. and C. Pane (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1922). 60. Volin, The Unknown Revolution: Kronstadt 1921, Ukraine 1918–21 (London: Freedom Press, 1955). 61. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 47. 62. See Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 63. See Max Shachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution (New York: Donald Press, 1962); Cornelius Castoriadis, La socie´te´ bureaucratique (Paris: Union Ge´ne´rale d’Editions, 1973); Claude Lefort, Ele´ments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Gene`ve: Droz, 1971); Pietro Grilli di Cortona, Rivoluzioni e burocrazie (Milan: Angeli, 1991). 64. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” in Complete Works, vol. 27, p. 271. 65. “Lenin and Trotsky have substituted the representative bodies elected by universal suffrage with the Soviet, as the only true representation of the working masses. But, by suffocating public life throughout the country, it is fatal that life should become increasingly paralysed within the Soviet themselves. Without general elections, without unlimited freedom of press and assembly, without the free exchange of opinions, life dies in every public institution, it becomes an apparent life where bureaucracy remains the only active element. Public life hibernates; a few dozen party leaders of tireless energy and unlimited idealism direct and govern; among these in reality the leadership is in the hands of a dozen superior minds; and an elite of the working class is summonsed from time to time to meetings to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to vote unanimously the resolutions put forward to them—so deep down it is

Utopia in Power

191

government by a gang, a dictatorship certainly, but not the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the Jacobin sense” (Rosa Luxemburg, “La rivoluzione russa,” in Scritti politici [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970], pp. 590–591). 66. The ofﬁcial deﬁnition of the Communist Party contained in an order of the day voted at the second congress of the Communist International (1920). 67. “Small extensions of land, cultivated independently by the peasants and the Cossacks, were excluded from conﬁscation. That was one of Lenin’s more intelligent political moves, whether one considers it a strategy to obtain the support of the peasants or a prelude to the plan to divide and weaken the revolutionary socialists, by removing their supremacy in the Russian countryside” (Edward H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution). Without the euphemisms, this means that Lenin, even though he knew that small ownership was incompatible with the objectives of his revolution, rode the tiger of “land for the peasants” for purely strategic reasons; in other words, he willfully tricked the people with the deliberate objective of leading it into the trap of totalitarian power. 68. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 357. 69. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980), p. 224. 70. Ibid., p. 222. 71. Lenin, “Agrarian Question in Russia,” in Complete Works, vol. 15, p. 138. 72. With his usual brutal frankness Trotsky explained this theory at the IX congress of the RBCP of March 1920: “Militarisation is inconceivable without the militarisation of the unions as such, without the creation of a regime under which each worker feels that he is a soldier of labour who is not free to do as he chooses; if he is ordered to move, he must obey; otherwise he becomes a deserter to be punished. This is the militarisation of the working class” (quoted from Gianfranco Dellacasa, La controrivoluzione sconosciuta [Milan: Jaca Book, 1977], p. 33). 73. On this point, see the particularly enlightening monograph by Laszlo Szamuely, First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems: Principles and Theories (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado´, 1974). 74. Lenin, “First All-Russia Congress on Adult Education” in Complete Works, vol. 29, p. 352. 75. Lenin, “The Food and War Situation,” in Complete Works, vol. 29, p. 525f. On the basis of such statements of principle it is hard to claim, as Maurice Dobb does, that “war communism was an empirical creation and not the a priori result of a theory” (Soviet Economic Development since 1917, 6th ed. [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966]). The truth of the matter is that “NEP is explained by the force of things, war communism by the force of false ideas” (Raymond Aron, In Defence of Decadent Europe [Regnery/South Bend: Gateway, 1979]). 76. Nikolai Bukharin, Economia del periodo di transformazione, p. 83. 77. Ibid., p. 130. 78. Quoted from Laszlo Szamuely, First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems. 79. Quoted from Ugo Intini, Se la Rivoluzione d’Ottobre fosse stata di maggio (Milan: SugarCo, 1977), p. 191. 80. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Kautsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). 81. Bertrand Russell made the following comment on Bolshevik Russia: “The country comes to resemble an immensely magniﬁed Jesuit College. Every kind of

192

Revolutionary Apocalypse

liberty is banned as being ‘bourgeois’” (The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism [Nottingham: Spokesman, 1995], p. 104). 82. One of the ironies of the history of the October Revolution is that it was precisely the black market that “allowed the Bolsheviks to retain power in their ﬁrst one hundred days of life” (Roy Medvedev, Dopo la Rivoluzione [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978], p. 479). 83. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich Storia dell’URSS, p. 132. 84. Nothing demonstrates the ruthless cynicism of the Bolshevik “morals” in the face of the frightful consequences of “war communism” better than Gorky’s words: “I suppose that most of the 35 million who are starving will die . . . The people who are destined to die are semi savage, stupid brutes from the Russian villages . . . and will be substituted by a new race of educated, reasonable, people full of energy” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 136). 85. Lenin’s answer to Gorky in 1919 when asked how he intended getting bread for the people. 86. Robert Linhart, Lenin, i contadini e Taylor (Rome: Coines, 1977), p. 81. 87. See David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 204 et seq. 88. Luciano Cafagna, “Bucharin e la rivoluzione immatura,” in Mondoperaio, (1976), p. 12. 89. Quoted from Rodolfo Mondolfo, Studi sulla Rivoluzione russa (Naples: Morano, 1968), pp. 207–208. 90. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, “La legge fondamentale dell’accumulazione originaria socialista,” in Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, L’accumulazione socialista (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), p. 91. 91. Jean Elleinstein, The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976). It should perhaps be stressed that the Stalin terror was not directed only against the kulaks but also against farmhands. This is not too much of a surprise, since in Lenin’s time—as we read in a document prepared by the Kronstadt rebels—“the entire mass of peasants had been declared enemies of the people and assimilated to the kulaks” (quoted from Gianfranco Dallacasa, La controrivoluzione sconosciuta, p. 52). 92. See Angelo Tasca, Autopsia dello stalinismo (Milan: Comunita`, 1958). 93. Lenin had pronounced this death sentence many years before the October Revolution. In 1907 for example, he wrote, “In the peasant lives the instinct of proprietor—if not of today, then of tomorrow. It is the proprietor’s, the owner’s instinct that repels the peasant from the proletariat, engendering in him an aspiration to become someone in the world, to become a bourgeois, to hem himself in against all society on his own plot of land, on his own dung-heap” (“Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.,” in Complete Works, vol. 12, p. 467). 94. Lenin, “Forward to the Last Decisive Fight,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 56f. 95. Lenin, “On the Famine,” in Complete Works, vol. 27, p. 398. 96. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 388. 97. Lenin, “The NEP and the Tasks of the Committees for Political-Cultural Education,” in Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 63. 98. Lenin, “Seventh Moscow Gubernia Conference of the RCP,” in Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 96.

Utopia in Power

193

99. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). 100. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 36. 101. Ibid., p. 48. 102. Stephen Cohen is notably the most ardent supporter of this interpretation (Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888–1938 [Oxford: OUP, 1980]). For an opposite interpretation, see C. Salmon, Le reˆve mathe´matique de Nicolai Bukharin (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980). 103. The most complete analysis of the causes of the famines experienced by Russian society between 1918 and 1920 remains that of B. Brutzkus, Economic Planning in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 1935). This text was the ﬁrst empirical corroboration of the theory developed theoretically by Ludwig von Mises, namely that a command economy is intrinsically irrational. 104. Bukharin’s response in October 1926 to the worker Iakov Ossovsky, who advocated recognition of the legitimacy of free exchange of opinion and even demanded the institution of a second party: “Discussion is inadmissible, because it would shake the very foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the unity of our party and its dominant position in the country, because it would take water to the mill of the groups, large and small, aspiring to political democracy” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 326). 105. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 36. 106. Ibid., p. 48. 107. A. Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–28 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). 108. Lenin, The Tax in Kind, p. 330. 109. General Grigorenko described “the enthusiasm and passion” generated in the communists by the “ﬁnal offensive” in the following terms: “Bread was scarce, you had to queue, famine and rationing were just behind the corner, yet we allowed ourselves to be dragged along by Stalin and were pleased: Yes, truly, a great change, the elimination of small farm owners, the destruction of the very soil on which capitalism could revive. Let them try to attack us now, those imperialist sharks! We are on the right path, the route leading to the triumph of socialism” (quoted from Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievski, KGB: The Inside Story). 110. David Rousset, A Critical History of the USSR (London: Allkison and Busby, 1982). 111. “The communists will take over the reins of government because the people need proper protection; they will create one State Bank that will concentrate in its hands all trade, industry, agriculture and even scientiﬁc production while the popular masses will be split in two armies: the industrial and the agricultural army, under the direct command of the engineers of State who will constitute a new politicalknowledgeable cast of privileged” (Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (Cambridge: CUP, 1990). 112. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1937), p. 105ff. 113. According to Roy Medvedev, the Stalin revolution violated “the leninist principle of voluntary collectivisation” (On Stalin and Stalinism [Oxford: OUP, 1979], 323). He refrains to mention that as early as January 1919 Lenin had explained to his most direct assistants that the objectives of Communism could not be attained “without the

194

Revolutionary Apocalypse

use of terror” (quoted from He´le`ne Carre`re d’Encausse, Stalin: Order Through Terror [London: Longman, 1981]). 114. A principle illustrated by Gorky in the early thirties that contained a death sentence for the farm owners: if the entrepreneur farmer does not realize that “the term granted him by history” is over, then “we are entitled to consider ourselves still in a situation of civil war. And the consequence is obvious: if the enemy will not surrender, let him be eliminated” (quoted from Aleksandr Tsipko, Le radici della perestrojka [Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990], p. 119). 115. For an idea of the horrors that accompanied compulsory collectivisation, one need refer only to the heartbreaking confession made by a colonel of the OGPU: “I am an old bolshevik. I fought against the tsar and I fought in the civil war. I did all this to surround villages with machine guns and order my men to ﬁre indiscriminately on the crowd of peasants? Oh, no, no!” (Quoted from Isaac Deutscher, Stalin [New York: Vintage Books, 1962], p. 325.) 116. Yuri Ambartsumov, NEP: A Modern View (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988), p. 63. 117. According to Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1968]), the overall balance of the Stalin revolution was no fewer than 20 million victims. Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) indicates 60 million. 118. Ste´phane Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme (Paris: Laffont, 1997). 119. Moshe Lewin, Storia sociale dello stalinismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. 89. 120. Victor Zaslavsky has rightly observed that “if one accepts the ofﬁcial Stalin interpretation of collectivisation as a painful but inevitable measure for modernising the country and increasing the productivity of soviet agriculture, it is not clear why the kulaks, who constituted the most active and productive group of peasants, had to be eliminated. The interpretation of the Stalin government is much easier to understand if one considers that the real objective of its policy was not to increase productivity per se, but the total control of peasants and the total integration of agriculture in the centrally planned system” (Storia del sistema sovietico [Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientiﬁca, 1995], p. 100). 121. Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World: The USSR: Bureaucratic Collectivism (London: Tavistock, 1985). 122. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” in Complete Works, vol. 25, p. 474. 123. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 253. 124. See Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru (Princeton, NJ: D. van Nostrand Company, 1961). 125. Max Weber, “Socialism” in Political Writings (Cambridge: CUP, 1994). 126. Aleksandr Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism (London: Gollancz, 1984).

CHAPTER 10

The Proletarian Church

1. The October Revolution was a veritable declaration of war against Western civilization and all its institutions, from private property to parliamentary democracy. While Europe seemed intent on destroying itself in a ghastly bloodbath, an e´lite of revolutionaries, trained at the rigid school of Lenin, announced that, at last, they had found a way for making the “Event” prophesied by the holy scriptures of scientiﬁc socialism—the end of capitalism— become a reality. A new era was about to start: “the era of the global offensive, the era of the triumph of the global socialist revolution”1 that would culminate with “the liberation . . . of the entire proletarian world . . . and of all oppressed peoples and countries.”2 Essential for this grandiose program—“to remake the world”3 by turning it completely upside down—was the creation of a supranational body to which to entrust the role of chief of state of the proletarian army. The Comintern was established at the start of 1919, with the idea that it would be a global party, with separate divisions in each country—the individual communist parties operating outside the Soviet Union—shaped “by the extremely severe, truly iron discipline”4 of democratic centralism and subjected to “periodical purges, . . . with the purpose of eliminating personal and petit-bourgeois interests.”5 Part of the program of “bolshevization” of the European workers’ movement was “the mass action of the proletariat to start armed conﬂict against the ruling force of capitalism.”6 The declared objective was to create a centralized party system willing to “subordinate the interests of the movement of each country to the common interests of Revolution on an international scale.”7 Since the only country in which the communists were in power was the Soviet Union, it was inevitable

196

Revolutionary Apocalypse

that the “hegemony of the revolutionary International should have been in the hands of the Russians.”8 The Bolshevik party was the only party that had established a dictatorship of the proletariat, and leadership of the revolutionary movement was its by right. In any event, who else was there to lead the planetary battle to abolish the “ﬁnal form of slavery: salaried slavery”?9 So it came to pass that, following the October Revolution and the creation of the Comintern, “an insigniﬁcant sect, ignored or denigrated by the Western socialists” was transformed “in a world power, the object of endless admiration or profound hatred.”10 The historical event that had begun in 1789 now had a new chapter. “Do as in Russia” became the magic password of the more extreme elements of the European socialist movement. All of a sudden, Bolshevism had become a political-ideological force of continental dimensions, to which no one—rich or poor, strong or meek, educated or ignorant—could remain indifferent. It was imperative to take a stand, to declare oneself for or against, to take sides. Thus began what Ernst Nolte has called the “world civil war.”11 A formidable new historical actor—the Communist International—had made a revolutionary call to arms, to form a planetary army composed of the “internal proletariat” and the “external proletariat” of modern industrial civilization, with the declared goal of rebuilding the whole world from its foundations. For the ﬁrst time ever, the history of civilization was one. At its core, the existential duel between two mutually repulsive models of society: on the one side, the society that rotated around the market, on the other, the planned society controlled by the state. The Bolsheviks made no mystery about their intention to spark a civil war, wherever possible. In 1918, Zinoviev triumphantly announced: “Civil war has broken out all over Europe: in Germany, the victory of communism is absolutely inevitable; within the year, Europe will be communist; then the ﬁght for communism will start in America, possibly in Asia and in the other continents.”12 “Soon [echoed Lenin] we will convince the whole world that justice is on our side.”13 In Europe hope in the communist palingenesis went parallel with fear of the revolution. The bourgeois governments did not miss an opportunity to mock the Bolshevik experiment, claiming it would end in a rapid, total failure, but in fact it made them nervous. “Bolshevism [wrote a worried Clemenceau to Pichon] has become a force that threatens, with its Red Army . . . to extend the Soviet regime to all the territories, ﬁrst of ancient Russia, and then of Europe. This monstrous new form of imperialism is a danger that looms over Europe just when the end of the war will inevitably determine an economic and social crisis in each country. The allies must bring about the fall of the Soviets and place Bolshevism in quarantine so that it is isolated and condemned to wasting away.”14 In effect, the call to arms and the hopes stirred by the Bolsheviks inevitably exercised a strong inﬂuence on the proletarian masses of Europe, for a variety

The Proletarian Church

197

of reasons. For generations, they had been educated to expect a revolt of liberation. The Great War had had a traumatic impact on all forms of traditional authority, and the conﬁdence of workers in the leadership of the Socialist International and its gradual, legalistic methods of battle had weakened. This contributed in no small degree to the revival of extremism that had never completely died out. Moreover, life in the trenches had had a profound impact on the psychology of the soldiers, encouraging the spontaneous growth of what Martov referred to as “consumer communism”:15 millions of individuals had come to see politics as a battle whose purpose was the complete destruction of the opposition. This obviously facilitated the penetration of Bolshevik propaganda, completely centered on the idea of war among classes. For all these reasons, the Soviet experiment was charged with extraordinary meaning and millenarian hopes16 and the Comintern was perceived as a charismatic institution. On the other hand, the leaders of Soviet communism were responsible for giving the Comintern its soteriological role, by presenting it as the historical actor destined to “prepare the resurrection of humanity.”17 Even Gramsci, in referring to and developing a remark by Engels,18 indicated that the “communist party was . . . the only institution that could seriously compare itself to the religious communities of primitive Christianity,”19 with the one fundamental difference that, whereas the Christian church gathered together the “militants of the City of God,” the communist church—“the home of faith” and “the repository of doctrine”20—organized the “militants of the City of Man” in “iron-like battalions,”21 always on “the warpath,”22 and driven by the ﬁrm conviction that the “nucleus of a new society” had been created in the Soviet Union and that the “reconstruction of the world” was possible and would start from there.23 Despite its militant atheism, this movement had all the elements necessary to be considered the “third great Judaic religion,”24 born from the union between traditional Russian messianism and Marxian messianism. In effect, “like other new religions, Leninism did not derive its power from the multitudes, but from a small minority of enthusiastic converts, to each of whom willpower and intolerance gave the strength of one hundred apathetics. Like other new religions, Leninism was led by those who had been able to combine, possibly sincerely, the new spirit with the capacity to see much further forward in time than their followers: politicians with an at least average dose of political cynicism, . . . agile experimenters that religion had freed from the commitment to truth and pietas but who were not blind to the reality of facts and convenience, and so liable to being accused of hypocrisy . . . Like other new religions, it seemed to remove all the warmth, all the fun and freedom from daily existence, leaving a dull, morose expression on the face of its faithful. Like other new religions, it mercilessly and unjustly persecuted anyone who put up an active resistance. Like other new religions, it had no scruples. Like other new religions, it was permeated by missionary ardour and ecumenical ambitions.”25

198

Revolutionary Apocalypse

In other words, at last the prophecy made by Lassalle had come true: “The proletariat will be the rock on which the church of the future will be built,”26 founded on the “union of the workers class and of science for the salvation of humanity.”27 The eschatological pathos of Marxism had found its most suitable institutional guise: the Comintern as a global organization of the revolutionary proletariat, led by the sect of true believers—the “experts of liberation”—who had transformed the whole of Russia into an immense laboratory for the most extraordinary experiment ever undertaken: the metastatic transformation of human nature, through the annihilation of all the institutions—ﬁrst and foremost private property—and spontaneous impulses that had made the world a “desert populated by wild beasts.” 2. The Bolshevik leaders were very aware of the charismatic nature of their movement and lost no opportunity to enhance it. “Lenin was considered the leader of . . . a priestly hierarchy”28 and, already in 1921, Stalin explicitly described the Communist Party as a “sort of Order of sword-bearing knights within the Soviet State, directing its bodies and inspiring its activity.”29 The party was promoted to the rank of “infallible” institution,30 the absolute ruler of History,31 which would extend its jurisdiction to the whole world. How could it have been otherwise? After all, Lenin had proclaimed that “the doctrine of Marx was omnipotent because it was right.”32 The logical conclusion was naturally that the Comintern, insofar as institutionalization of the revolutionary gnosis, always moved in the right direction. Its every action had to be in accordance with the immanent purpose of reality and of its supreme leaders. Insofar as they provided the correct interpretation of the Holy Writings of scientiﬁc socialism, they were none other than the impersonal agents of History, “the only representatives of revolutionary Good.”33 Lukacs provides us with the most complete and philosophically aggressive theorization of the soteriological nature of the revolutionary undertaking. It was “a total break with all the institutions and dominant life styles of the bourgeois world,”34 and therefore essentially a “horizontal” version of chiliasm. Consequently, the Communist Party is described as a sacral institution, an exclusive and intolerant Ecclesia militans that claims the historical right to build a planetary dominion to free humanity from the capitalist-bourgeois ethos. In other words, citing Hegel’s famous formula, the Communist Party is “the entrance to God’s entrance to the world.”35 Admittedly, Lukacs places the proletariat at the core of his eschatological dialectics, but it is the “supposed proletariat”—as Irving Fetscher called it36— not the actual workers’ class as such. The proletariat to which Lukacs entrusts the historical mission of building the Marxian kingdom of liberty is not an empirical reality but a more hegeliano; that is, a metaphysical category created in the laboratory of dialectics: the proletariat, “according to his concept,” the proletariat as it would behave if it were conscious of its true interests and of the role assigned to it by history.

The Proletarian Church

199

So much so that, after stating that “only class can penetrate social reality with its action and change it in its totality”37 and that “the class consciousness of the proletariat is the truth of the historical process as actor,”38 Lukacs adds that this consciousness is of a “latent and theoretical character” and is only aroused through the demiurgic intervention of the party. The Communist Party therefore has “the lofty function of being bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat, and . . . of its historical mission.”39 In other words, the party is responsible for instilling revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. And, since this consciousness—in accordance with the principle that subject and object coincide—is consciousness of the absolute of self, insofar as teleologically oriented toward communist society, the logical conclusion is that the Comintern is the sole and exclusive holder of the truth of History. In fact, Lukacs writes that “the communists are the class consciousness of the proletariat in visible form”40 and that for this reason they must “enlighten the masses on their actions”41 and also exercise “the dictatorship of the proletariat, . . . the only possible route for allowing the salvation that allows salvation.”42 As with Lenin, the party vis-a`-vis class is “what idea is with respect to matter in Plato’s theory: what gives shape to the shapeless.”43 It converts “class in se” into “class per se” and in this way makes the empirical existence of the proletariat coincide with its concept. For this reason, the Communist Party—the “incarnation of the idea of revolution” and uniter “of the conscious avantgarde”44—has the historical right to lead “the men spiritually ruined and corrupted by capitalism”:45 a right that derives from no formal mandate but exclusively from the consciousness that the party has of its own revolutionary mission, a consciousness that coincides in the Hegel manner with the science of the ultimate purpose. From that point on, the empirical class is considered to be affected by a particular social trachoma, a “false consciousness,” and the party assumes eo ipso the role of gnostic paraclete whose task is to protect the proletarian masses from “the corrupting inﬂuence of . . . bourgeois thought.”46 This is like saying that the “empirical class” thinks and acts in a different manner from the “supposed class”; that by nature it is reformist, whereas scientiﬁc socialism wants it to be revolutionary in order to destroy bourgeois society. For this precise reason, the proletarian masses must have the ideological protection of the party. Only the party can prevent the “spontaneous” reformism from prevailing on revolutionary “consciousness.” Lukacs’s theory is, to say the least, paradoxical: his “class consciousness” is not a consciousness of class but the “absolute consciousness” that derives from a philosophy of history, to which, however, the workers contributed nothing, given that it was a typical product of the bourgeois culture. Be that as it may, Lukacs writes that “class consciousness is the ethics of the proletariat, the unity of its theory and practice, the point in which the economic necessity of its battle of liberation is dialectically converted into freedom. The party is recognised as an historical ﬁgure, as an active vehicle of class consciousness,

200

Revolutionary Apocalypse

and at the same time is the vehicle of the ethics of the ﬁghting proletariat. This function must determine its policy. Even if it were not in accord with the empirical reality of the movement, and its passwords not used, in the end the necessary course of history will give it satisfaction and the moral force deriving from the appropriate class consciousness of appropriate class action will bear its fruits.”47 So there is an insuperable ontological and gnoseological asymmetry between class and party. It is true that, initially, class was given an extraordinary power: to bring to an end the prehistory of humanity with its collective action, and make the “dialectical leap from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty.”48 However, immediately afterward there is the statement that only the party, insofar as “incarnation of the union of theory and practice,”49 can indicate the route to salvation. In a world dominated by bourgeois liberty—which is a “corrupt and corrupting privilege”50—and “false consciousness”—which blinds the exploited, preventing them from perceiving the route to salvation—only the “conscious avant-garde” has a clear vision of the immanent purpose of reality. Its superior knowledge derives from its monopoly of the tools for correctly decoding the theory—Marxism—that has at last broken “the chain of errors and ruses” and made it possible to “unveil the essence of society.”51 The Communist Party is therefore the institutionalization of a superior knowledge that is both scientiﬁc and soul-saving. In a world turned upside down by private property and transformed into a huge prison dominated by the perverse laws of reiﬁcation, salvation is still possible, as indicated by the dialecticalrevolutionary gnosis. The party must vigilate constantly to ensure that the soteriological message is not adulterated and must ﬁght both against the bourgeois ideology and “the dangers of opportunism”52 that tend to keep reemerging in the revolutionary movement. “It is essential [insists Lukacs] that the class consciousness of the proletariat be kept pure as it is the only instrument capable of staying en route in a stormy sea.”53 Were it to be contaminated by SocialDemocratic opportunism—“the class enemy that hides within the very ranks of the party”54—the titanic battle of humanity to free itself from reiﬁcation would be destined to fail. Hence, Lukacs’s defense of Leninist “iron discipline”55 based on the “conscious submission” of the ascetics of the revolution to the “overall will of the party”56 and on the Jacobin method of “purges”57 in order to uproot in embryo every “deviation (from) the end to be achieved.”58 3. History and Class Consciousness is a work indispensable for understanding the intellectual and moral world of revolutionary gnosticism. It develops in the best possible fashion all the corollaries implicit in the immanentization of the Judeo-Christian eschaton accomplished by Marx following the path drawn by Hegel. The underlying formula is clearly a reelaboration of the gnostic-Manichean vision of history: (a) two principles engaged in a mortal battle between “revolutionary consciousness” and “false consciousness”; (b) three phases: original unity, fall, and restoration of the harmony destroyed

The Proletarian Church

201

by the bourgeois ethos; (c) an actor-pariah charismatically elected by history: the proletariat conceived as Messiasklasse; and (d) a Paraclete—the party of the conscious and active revolutionaries—with the mission of guiding humanity through the moral desert of the “society of egoism” toward the “society of affection.”59 The absolutely logical conclusion, given the metaphysical promises of the Hegel-Marx theodicy, is that the jurisdiction of the revolutionary party is total, indeed totalitarian in the strongest sense of the term, since it has a cosmic-historic mission to fulﬁll: the salvation of humanity depends on its planetary expansion.60 One can understand why the proletarian church adopted the maxim: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. “The party [Trostky declared in 1924] is always right. We can only be right together and with the party, since history has given us no other way of being in the right. The English have a motto, My country, right or wrong. We have a better historical justiﬁcation when we say: it may be right or wrong depending on the individual case, but it is my Party, and if the Party makes a decision that one or other of us believes to be unfair, it is my Party, and I must tolerate the consequences of its decisions to the end.”61 Even more enlightening is the description of the religious nature of the Communist Party made by the Bolshevik Grigory Piatakov: According to Lenin, the party is founded on a principle of coercion that knows no limit or impediment. And the central idea of this principle of unlimited coercion is not coercion itself, but the absence of any limit—moral, political or even physical— no matter what. Such a party is capable of miracles and acts that no other human collectivity could perform . . . A true communist, that is to say a man educated in the party who has profoundly absorbed its spirit, becomes in a certain sense a miracle maker. For the party, a true Bolshevik will willingly free his mind of ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik buries his personality in that of the collectivity, the Party, to the point of eradicating his opinions and convictions and agreeing honestly with the party—this is the proof that he is a true Bolshevik. There can be no life for him outside the ranks of the party and he is prepared to say that black is white and white is black, should the party desire it. In order to become one with this party, he will be amalgamated with it, will abandon his personality, until there remains within him not a single particle that is not one with the party, that does not belong to it.62

In these words of Piatakov, it is hard not to recognize exactly the same spirit that we ﬁnd in a letter written by Loyola describing the mental disposition of the true Jesuit: “In the hands of my superior, I will be like soft wax, something from which he can demand what he wants . . . and I must use the utmost care, in carrying out each order. I will consider myself a dead body without discernment or will; a mass of matter, that passively allows itself to be placed wherever anyone wishes, like a walking stick in the hands of an old man, who uses it according to his needs, and places it wherever he chooses. So will I be in the hands of the Order, so that I may serve it in the manner it sees most ﬁt.”63

202

Revolutionary Apocalypse

The hierarchy in the Leninist party closely resembled that of the Manichean church. Just as in the Ekklesia eklekte, the catechumens could only “hope in salvation, if they remained in contact with, and at the service of, the Perfects,”64 so in the Comintern the proletarian masses could only escape “opportunism” and “bourgeois corruption” if they accepted without reserve the leadership of the ascetes of permanent revolution. Hence, the importance of extending centralization to its extreme limits, guaranteeing on the one side that the “body of consecrated” was intellectually and morally united and, on the other, that the base obeyed the orders of the summit of the charismatic community. Everything in the Comintern—in this, too, it was a kind of avatar of the Manichean church—is ordered from above and rests on the absolute authority of one leader, who is outside and above the hierarchy. He is the supreme Auctoratis spiritualis, whose speciﬁc function is to guarantee unity of theory and practice because he alone has the capacity to interpret the holy writings correctly. This is an indispensable condition, if the impersonal dominion of the revolutionary gnosis is to be effective and the party is to fulﬁll its mission of opposing the perverse rule of capital until it has been annihilated on a world scale. Now, a political body that aspires to be the “compact and militant formation of an idea”65—the deﬁnition is by Gramsci—must perforce harbor within its breast a body of “doctors of law,” the “guard dogs of orthodoxy.” They alone are equipped with the special symbolic code and have the institutional role of addressing three classes of user: “(1) the proselyte, who has identiﬁed with the organisation and considers it to be the bearer (and only guarantor) of reality; (2) the propagandist, who circulates the messages professionally, in accordance with the auditorium, guaranteeing unity of language by means of a didactic system authorised by the organisation itself; (3) the enemy, who talks of reality in terms of empirical or traditional points of reference. To the three classes of user correspond the three stylistic genres that evolve in the language of the charismatic bureaucracy: (1) slogans or verbal expression of the commitment that derives from identifying with the charismatic organisation, (2) manuals, indicating the commandments and (3) the apologia, the ritual language used before the enemy.”66 Orthodoxy increasingly becomes a rhetoric that has no link with reality. At a certain point it becomes what Alain Besanc¸on has suggested calling “ideological surreality”;67 that is to say, an institutionalized lie to be accepted as truth in order to remain part of the charismatic community. On the other hand, an orthodoxy “can only survive by being immobile: the tiniest crack can make the whole building tumble down.”68 This also explains why hunting down deviation and excommunication played such a central role in the Communist movement.69 Inquisition was essential for preserving the orthodox spirit and for preventing reality from breaking in, inevitably weakening the perception of the militants and their fanatical determination to see the undertaking triumph no matter what the price. Equally essential for the party-

The Proletarian Church

203

gnosis was the methodical use of censorship and ideological terrorism: without which the agents of corruption—revisionism, opportunism, deviationism, and so forth—would have gradually led the revolutionaries to slide into the “bourgeois bog.” Yet, none of this can be interpreted as a degeneration, a perversion, of the authentic inspiration of scientiﬁc socialism. From the very beginning, the philosophy of Marx claimed to be “History that has acquired consciousness of self.”70 This derives directly from the “false consciousness” theory, according to which in modern industrial society every spiritual product—none excluded—is deformed, polluted, and poisoned by the malignant institution— private property—which has split humanity and sparked the civil war between the haves and the have-nots. In other words, a kind of social trachoma prevents people from seeing the world as it really is: divided, upside down, bewitched. This would explain the existence of a bourgeois consciousness in which social actors and the relations between them “are as if back to front, as if in a camera obscura.”71 Fortune would have it that certain individuals—in our speciﬁc case, Marx and Engels—are able to capture the hidden essence of reality and draw back the “Maya veil” with which private property had covered the eyes of men. For this precise reason, they are in the right and the bourgeois, always and inevitably, in the wrong, since their ideas can only be the expression of an ideological consciousness that is, by deﬁnition, distorted and distorting. The situation is the one described in the platonic cave myth: at last truth has been revealed to the dialectical-revolutionary philosopher; he has abandoned the world of shadows that men mistake for reality—the “chimeras” and the “dogmas” of bourgeois society;72 he alone knows the “only practice capable of changing the world.”73 This explains the privileged epistemological status of scientiﬁc socialism: “because of its principles, [it is] . . . above the dissent between the bourgeois and the proletariat since it considers it warranted, in its historical meaning, only for what concerns the present, not the future; in fact it intends to suppress this dissent. It acknowledges that, as long as the dissent persists, the resentment of the proletariat against its oppressor is a necessity, indeed that at the start it is the most important lever of the workers movement; but it goes beyond this resentment, for communism is a cause that concerns all humanity and not only the workers.”74 It is evident that Marx and Engels reformulated, in sociological language, the classic gnostic distinction between pistis (overturned conscience of the overturned world) and gnosis (conscience-liberating science) to conclude that any idea that is foreign to their doctrine must be polluted and polluting, and expressed in the interests and illusions of that part of society—capitalists, landowners, lower middle class—about to be swept away by the necessary, progressive march of history. This theory is a perfect example of the particular intellectual perversion that Popper called “re-inforced dogmatism.”75 It is structured in such a way

204

Revolutionary Apocalypse

that the theorems can never be confuted by reality: even if the whole workers’ class were to turn its back on revolution, this could always be explained as a “bourgeois infection.”76 In any event, any objections to the communist idea are meaningless, since those who express such objections are enveloped in their “bourgeois skin”77 and, on principle, excluded from truth. Their science is pseudoscience, insofar as the necessary expression of a “false consciousness” from which there is no escape other than by accepting the theorems of scientiﬁc socialism. Marxism is therefore an airtight, rigorously self-referential system—“it does not recognise criteria of truth that are external to it.”78 Its theory of ideology as false conscience is a tool of psychological warfare that can be, and in fact is, used to censure and demonize whoever has not yet identiﬁed with the revolutionary undertaking. Ernst Topitsch rightly claims that the Marxian Weltanschauung has “ﬁrst and foremost the task of conferring upon its ideator an absolute authority in the context of knowledge, of power and, above all, of morals, not only with respect to the aristocracy and the bourgeois, but also to other socialists and communists and, to some extent, even the proletariat. Whoever opposes the Messiah, or even doubts of him, is blind and abject in the double sense, destined to come to an end, and morally corrupt.”79 Not surprisingly, as soon as the Bolsheviks took possession of power, they institutionalized what Evgeny Zamiatin was to call “The Unique State Science”80 based on a triple identiﬁcation: of the party with the proletariat, of the proletariat with Marxism, and of Marxism with the truth of history. Hence, dissent was inadmissible. For the “guard dogs of orthodoxy,” dissent was a sinful relapse, a return to the blindness preceding the Annunciation of the message.81 It was essential to exercise a relentless, inquisitorial control and conceive the party as the “tribunal of History.” Whoever “objectively” was considered to harbor dangerous ideas was to be brought before this court. Naturally, ﬁrst and foremost, the institutional guardians of religious traditions against whom the order was to “ﬁght a war with determination and without pity.”82 Nor was a claimed allegiance to Marxism sufﬁcient to avoid the excommunication used by the proletarian church to expel deviants and protect the depositum ﬁdei from pollution. Much more was necessary: absolute acceptance of everything that the church—or rather, its supreme leader, the true “prince of believers,” in whose hands was concentrated both temporal and spiritual power83—considered to be true and right, opportune and necessary. In other words, what was required was total identiﬁcation with the collective thought, which was the spiritual engine of the process of revolutionary transformation. As collective thought was the institutionalization of the “only scientiﬁc conception of history,”84 logically, anything outside that was considered to be “confusion and lies.”85 The fact that through its ofﬁcial interpreters collective thought declared that it was a “party science” does not mean that it did not possess the “objective, unique, ﬁnal truth.”86 While “bourgeois science” expressed the selﬁsh

The Proletarian Church

205

interests of a class condemned by history, “proletarian science” expressed the interests of the “general class” and therefore of all humanity. So “the Marxists had every right to consider proletarian science to be the true science and to demand that it be generally recognised as such.”87 They also had every right to insist that the party could make every expression of spiritual life submit to its imperatives, for these were irremediably “of a biased character”88 and simply the ideological dimension of the mortal duel between proletariat and bourgeoisie, socialism and capitalism, revolution and reaction. Autonomy was out of the question: whoever raised the ﬂag of “art for art’s sake” or “science for science” was simply deluding him or herself and others. In a world poisoned by private property, neutrality and objectivity were illusions. A cosmic-historic war was under way and nothing could escape its martial logic. The moral: the Partiinost principle was supreme, and the Communist Party had the right and the duty to decide spiritual production in light of the tactical and strategic requirements of the class war. Every symbolic form had to be politicized, controlled, and directed by the collective actor—the “chief of staff” of the revolution—whose role it was to lead the proletariat of the world to the ﬁnal victory. On the other hand, as the party was by deﬁnition “the bearer of truth,”89 it naturally insisted on exercising ideological custody over all spiritual activities, from science to philosophy, to literature, to the ﬁgurative arts. “Even if (it had been) weak in terms of numbers, with its ideology it still represented the workers class [and] incarnated the class consciousness of hundreds of thousand or millions of men.”90 It rightly believed that “it knew the genuine desires, interests and thoughts of society better than society.”91 In conclusion, the party was entitled to exercise complete control over everyone and everything because Marxism was the “science of the general laws of social evolution” that led the proletariat in the “grandiose historic battle for communism.”92 The ﬁrst duty of the “soldiers of the revolution” was to defend the dogmas of Marx to the bitter end. “The banner of the proletarian revolution [proclaimed rhetorically the ‘Bolshevik’ immediately after Lenin’s death] the banner of Marxist dogma (had to be preserved) in all its purity. There was nothing wrong with the word dogma. Criticism of dogmatic Marxism had always been the work of reformists of the Bernstein type, who were the absolutely removed from Marxism. The best of the workers movement has always fought for the dogma of Marx, which has gathered together millions of men and been conﬁrmed in the course of over one hundred years of class war. Criticism of dogmatism was really a form of revisionism disguised: the duty of every Marxist is to defend the dogma of Marx at whatever price.”93 For all these reasons, the Communist Party was a sui generis institution. It was quite “different” from every other party. Indeed, it wasn’t a party at all, it was a charismatic community that brought salvation, and, for this very fact, it transmitted to its militants an extraordinary moral charge. They became the instruments of the absolute, were mystically united to the undertaking.

206

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Hence, their existence was transﬁgured, ﬁlled with meaning, and made an integral part of a lofty cosmic-historic process. For the conscious, active militant, the party was “truth, communion, the way, the conscious agent of history”94 as is so typical in the communist world. The party tried to guarantee the above result by developing a strategy that tended “(1) to make sure that [its members] would ﬁnd [in the party] all the satisfaction that previously they had found in a variety of organisations, breaking all the links between party members and other cultural organisations and (2) to destroy all the other organisations or incorporate them in a system in which it was the only ruler.”95 In this way, the Communist Party effectively became the only object of desire of the activists of permanent revolution whose lives gravitated exclusively around the party. It also invaded and shaped their personality. There was no longer any distinction between public and private, between politics and morals. Strictly speaking, “there could be nothing but party life”96 since the party was the incarnation of the absolute, which was history conceived as an irresistible march toward the “natural destination” of humanity: a classless, stateless society. There was no limit to the totalitarian vocation of the revolutionary party. Everything had to come under its jurisdiction: opinions, actions, interests, feelings, values, value judgments. The militant guaranteed absolute obedience to the point of “abnegation.”97 To sacriﬁce self for party was the supreme and, in a sense, the only virtue of whoever had the honor of being a “militant of the City of Man.” For a brilliant description of the psychological mechanism leading to the voluntary abnegation of self in the Great Collective Soul, see Arthur Koestler’s Buio a mezzogiorno (Darkness at Noon). The mechanism resembles the one governing life in religious orders where every act, thought, sensation is assessed on the basis of the price the individual is expected to pay for the redemption of all. It is evidence of absolute loyalty to the undertaking, which is sacred. The only morally acceptable attitude is sincere, enthusiastic dedication to the complete sacriﬁce of individuality. Once again, the Leninist party proves itself to be a functional equivalent of the religious institutions, driven by a spirit that has nothing in common with the lay spirit of the secular city. It is no coincidence that its historical parable contains all the elements that nourished 20 centuries of Christianity: “collective enthusiasm, individual sacriﬁce, fanatical heroism, persecution suffered and inﬂicted without pity, but with noble motives. As they were massacred, the communists shouted to their murderers the message of the early Christians: Fools! It is for you that I die.”98 Wherever they went, they testiﬁed to the transﬁguring and mobilizing power of a doctrine whose mask of science hid the salient features of the Jewish Apocalypse and Manichean gnosticism. 4. The gnosis-party, created by Lenin as soon as he took over power and started building “proletarian civilization,” exercised an irresistible fascination for religious spirits, disoriented by the death of God; for idealists, searching

The Proletarian Church

207

for a cause to which to dedicate their existence; for authoritarian personalities, looking for an exclusivistic and intolerant doctrine; for frustrated intellectuals, hungry for power; for the workers, ensnared in the machinery of capital and transformed into goods among goods. The party that proclaimed to the whole world that it was the materialization of the Great Hope sparked by the prophetical message of Marx and Engels, and propelled by the constant proselytization of the parties of the Second International, proved to have all the qualities necessary to ﬁll the spiritual vacuum that had come into being with the progress of rationalism, whose corrosive acids had destroyed the system of religious beliefs professed for centuries by the people of the West. Of course, the Comintern waved the banner of science, materialism, and atheism. However, its most profound aspiration—which it proclaimed for all to hear—was to uproot faith in religious institutions and substitute it with faith in the party. It was convinced that it possessed the formula to eradicate religions and materialize their promises of salvation in the next world, by means of a continuing revolution of every existing form of life: “Let priests of all confessions [declared Trotsky, as if to eliminate any doubt as to the religious nature of the communist undertaking] talk of Heaven in another world, we say that it is in this world that we must create a real Heaven. We must not lose sight of our great ideal for one instant, for it is the most beautiful ideal humanity can have. All that is most beautiful and noble in the ancient religions and in the doctrine of Christ is incarnated in our doctrine of socialism,”99 which “opposes a terrestrial Messianism to celestial Messianism; the commitment to edify a terrestrial City to the sterile expectation of the celestial City.”100 So it should not surprise us to read in an article by Gramsci that “socialism is the religion that will kill Christianity.”101 After all, what chance is there for a Christian faith based on hope in the hereafter, once the revolution has transﬁgured the here and now into a world in perfect harmony with humanity’s innermost desires? This exaggerated promise—the Promethean construction of a “real heaven”—is precisely what gave the communist church its extraordinary appeal. On the other hand, its coming into being had been prepared throughout the nineteenth century by the many revolutionary sects that had conjugated the “problem of salvation” and the “problem of justice,” the desperate search for a functional equivalent of the lost faith in transcendence and a diagnosistherapy of the abysmal conditions of workers, which disturbed the more sensitive spirits to the point that they wanted a complete regeneration of society. This point cannot be stressed too often: in identifying the reasons that led to the foundation of the proletarian church and guaranteed it an extraordinary spiritual authority for a whole historical age, it is important to remember two aspects in particular: the situation of general anomy that persisted in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and the moral trauma generated by the Great War. The tremendous changes produced by the war generated the blind (and sincere) conviction that the socialist ideal was not a dream but a powerful

208

Revolutionary Apocalypse

force that had the power to shake the whole world and reshape it from scratch. A civilization in the midst of traumatic change, devastating conﬂicts, and injustices of every type greeted the communist promise with enthusiasm. It came to be the only raison d’etre of millions of unfortunates, allowing them to glimpse the chance of transcending a reality that offered them virtually no gratiﬁcation and attaining harmony and peace. Remember also that the Communist International was the church of the proletarians not only because it delivered a message of hope to the victims of the transition from traditional society to modern society, but also because it promised them what they had been deprived of by the impersonal logic of the self-regulated market and secularization: a community founded on solid moral and affective ties and driven by the Promethean pathos of building the City of Man. In a world where religious tradition had lost its normative cogency and where a painful process of social and cultural marginalization and unrest was underway, a huge increase in the proletarized masses, who for various reasons had been “shaken up and left to themselves without material or moral sustenance,” was inevitable. They were individuals desperate for a surrogate of the Gemeinschaaft they had lost, for something that would give “value and meaning to their futile, empty existence.”102 Their cathexis was ready to ﬁx itself on a new object of desire. So, it is easy to understand why the both the “internal proletariat” and the “external proletariat” of capitalist-bourgeois civilization were particularly sensitive to the revolutionary message of the communist movement. With its exclusive, all-pervasive organization and its eschatological tension, it was in a certain sense the “natural” response to the problems of transition and the millions of material and moral difﬁculties besieging the masses “proletarianized” by the progress of anomy. It ﬁlled the axiological and normative vacuum with new values and new norms; it soothed the anxiety of individuals who had been split up and expelled from their traditional community; it ended the state of anarchy, by imposing a new spiritual hierarchy; it gave people motivation, showing them that at last their desires could become reality. In a word, it transformed chaos into kosmos. According to Hannah Arendt, the totalitarian movements—“organisations of marginalised and isolated individuals”103—constituted a global response— affective, moral, organizational, and so forth—to the process of massiﬁcation. In fact, they did not limit themselves to giving mass-man—a “proletarized” and therefore alienated individual—identity and solidarity; they also gave him a highly gratifying mission. Admittedly, they demanded total sacriﬁce, but, in exchange, they offered the solidarity of comradeship, a raison d’etre, the courage to ﬁght, hope in the future. Which explains why mass-men are willing to completely annul their personalities when they join a totalitarian movement and accept the will of the movement, even to the point of joyfully making the supreme sacriﬁce—death—if it will help build the New World.

The Proletarian Church

209

The revolutionary party comes to represent the one certainty, the only escape from anomy. It is light in the night, an oasis in the desert, a refuge from the storm. It is everything that society no longer is: a community that protects and sustains the individual; an authority that orders and assigns tasks; a spiritual force that indicates the values and the goals of existence. It is a “therapeutic” institution, particularly suited to curing the ontological anguish generated by the condition of radical insecurity in which proletarized individuals are condemned to live. Alienated intellectuals play a role of great strategic importance in this process. They are particularly sensitive to what they consider the “irrationality” of the world, in part because the “search for meaning” is their speciﬁc mission and in part because as “marginal men” they cannot but look at the world with a radically critical eye. The Great Transformation has taken from them the two things without which life becomes intolerable: faith and community. They aspire to recover both but to do so need the help of a charismatic institution that is able to recreate the lost sense of belonging and give meaning to their lives. The alienated intellectual thus becomes active ideologue and organizer of the proletarianized masses. He ceases being a mere producer of symbols and participates “actively in practical life as builder, organiser, permanent persuader.”104 He becomes a professional politician or, better, a professional revolutionary, ascetically dedicated to the sacred-holy cause of permanent war against the cruel forces that prevent humanity from breaking away from the world of corruption and alienation. Thus, the proletarianized intellectuals play a leading role in the process of construction of the revolutionary church. In addition to being intensely motivated to enter into conﬂict with the establishment, they have mastered the symbols indispensable for drawing up the message that will “bring hope and fulﬁlment to those who are alienated, frustrated and excluded from what they believe to be their rightful place in the community.”105 The revolutionary church is the organization that gives the proletarianized intellectuals the tool for materializing their program of regeneration. 5. The Communist International was both proletarian and ecumenical church, because of the charismatic fascination it exercised on all men. This charisma is explained by what Janke´le´vitch calls “la vocation inﬁniste,”106 which is not linked to any particular social, existential condition, but which responds to a universal need that is part of man’s very nature: the aspiration for a world that is radically different from the present one,107 where there is no room for contingency, impotence, insigniﬁcance, or death. It is part of man’s nature to wish for and imagine an afterlife that is “exceptional,” “extraordinary,” “out of the ordinary,” and in total contrast with the “usual routine, cursed a thousand times over.”108 No matter how gratifying or comfortable, everyday living109 is tormented by obligations, repression, frustration, banalities. Using Heidegger’s terminology, it is completely dominated by the anonymous dic-

210

Revolutionary Apocalypse

tatorship of Das,110 which levels everything and makes everything insigniﬁcant. So it is an “inauthentic” life, constitutionally incapable of satisfying what makes a person human, what renders man an irremediably metaphysical being: the wish for an ultrabiological life, where everything has meaning and value and everything is in accordance with one’s wishes. This explains why a “frightfully large number of men is dissatisﬁed with civilisation, and unhappy in it, feeling it as a yoke from which to free themselves.”111 It also explains the many desperate attempts made throughout the history of humanity to eliminate the horrors of the world—or at least make them more bearable—and to give meaning to what is meaningless, starting from the frightening enigma of death. It explains the proliferation of religious illusions “built using the material from the memory of the impotence of one’s own childhood and of human kind” and whose essential function is to “protect man in two directions: against the dangers of nature and of fate and against all the offences of human society.”112 The desire to give meaning to existence produces the idea that “life in this world serves a higher purpose, one that is certainly not easy to guess but deﬁnitely strives for the perfection of the human being.”113 It is an idea that is most comforting, for it satisﬁes (at least to some degree) the aspiration to live in a world “different” from a world dominated by routine and the tyranny of reality. When the desire of the totally “other”—which is felt by all human beings in varying degrees—can no longer be a satisﬁed by the traditional religious institutions, the search inevitably begins for what Weber calls the “ideal surrogates” of religion.114 This happens wherever the “faith of the fathers” appears implausible and “God’s orphans” are forced to direct their cathexis and hopes toward the revolutionary promise. Jules Monnerot describes the phenomenon; he refers to as the “shift of the sacred,” thus: “the fervour and the energy, let loose and freed from religious beliefs, are poured onto other objects: it is as if the formation of a new type of sacredness comes by chance to compensate the loss of the former beliefs.”115 So it should not surprise us to hear Paul Eluard declare: “Without the party? I wouldn’t even light the gas.”116 Or to learn that, after a visit to the Soviet Union, Paul Nizan confessed to Sartre: “A revolution that does not free us from the obsession of death is no revolution.”117 Nor less to read in a famous essay by Herbert Marcuse: “A philosophy that does not operate in the manner of a servant of the repression reacts to death with the Great Refusal— the refusal of Orpheus, the liberator.”118 These statements, revealing the typical psychological mechanism of “defence from existential anguish,”119 lead us to the heart of the revolutionary undertaking, which is as much of a metaphysical nature as of a social nature. It promises to rid the world of exploitation and violence, but it also aspires to solve the enigma of death, by eliminating it as a problem, or at least stupefying militants with total commitment to the political cause, so that they never have a chance to reﬂect upon their condition.120 The objective of the undertaking—

The Proletarian Church

211

the end of the aeon of alienation and the start of the aeon of universal happiness—is of such cosmic-historic signiﬁcance that it confers an absolute value upon those who have devoted all their intellectual and moral energy to the cause; for this, in a certain sense, cancels their ﬁniteness.121 On the other hand, the revolutionary party cannot tolerate that horror of death should absorb the thoughts of its militants, because it would prevent them from dedicating themselves body and soul to the undertaking.122 Death must be removed from the ﬁeld of perception of the revolutionaries. Hence, the both “extraordinary” and “amazing” fact, observed by Louis Aragon in Les communistes: the communists “seem to absolutely ignore metaphysical anguish” and “death occupies so little space in what they write.” However, communism did not stop at solving the problem of death by stupefying the militants with total political engagement and enveloping them in the compact solidarity of the revolutionary community, so as to prevent them from feeling alone and abandoned. It went further than that. It elaborated a philosophy that made men think of death “at the level of the species.” Death was no longer lived as an absurd scandal but as a dialectically necessary moment in the “inﬁnite youth of humanity.”123 The starting point of this philosophy, similar to that of Durkheim,124 was developed in great detail by Langevin: “The individual who is aware of being mortal cannot live in isolation without falling into despair . . . There exists a close link between the vice of egoism, of which our species has so much trouble freeing itself, and the tenacious illusion of a future life.”125 This illusion will disappear, without man being assailed by ontological anguish, as soon as he ceases considering himself an individual and—the words are of the communist martyr Jacques Decour—becomes accustomed to perceiving himself “as a leaf that falls in order to form the earth.” In other words, this will happen as soon as there is no longer any distinction between individual ego and the “Great All,” which is humanity marching toward complete self-fulﬁllment. This will be achieved at the conclusion of the great revolutionary change, with the “inﬁnite victory over hell.”126 Meanwhile, the task of the proletarian church is to fuel the “idolatrous cult of the ecumenical community,”127 preannouncing the ﬁnal triumph over impotence and contingency. In its breast, the church will raise the “red hero” who “lives to refuse the limits imposed by objective reality, . . . who ﬁghts to redeem those defeated by history, who acts to achieve the Marxian utopia of socialist liberation, humanisation of nature and naturalisation of man.”128 As Ernst Bloch puts it, the “red hero” opposes death with the consciousness of solidarity that “is extended simultaneously to the victims of the past and to the winners of the future,” which “means immortality of the person insofar as immortality of his best intentions.”129 6. In accordance with its gnostic-Manichean vocation, the proletarian church is totalitarian with respect to both the “faithful” and to non-believers, to be converted to the Marxist gnosis by persuasion, if possible; otherwise by

212

Revolutionary Apocalypse

force. There is no limit (there cannot be) to the planetary expansion of its passion of regeneration. Its historical mission is to create the kingdom of God on earth, and it cannot tolerate the existence of traditions, institutions, resources, interests that do not fall within its normative jurisdiction. Everything must submit to its cathartic power in order to be reshaped and returned to new life. The policy of the proletarian church therefore is totalitarian in the strongest and most complete sense. In general, an authoritarian policy requires only one thing from its subjects: ready and automatic obedience. The proletarian church requires much more: unconditional compliance with the values it incarnates. Since universal metanoia is its goal, it “is not exclusively interested in conquering power and bringing about political and social changes; it wants absolute domination over every sphere of life, spiritual and secular,” since it is guided by the doctrine that “it is the only true guide of action, the only [doctrine] destined to achieving justice among men and also shaping all knowledge and human behaviour.”130 This makes revolutionary policy a demiurgic, indeed a divine practice. And, in effect, it is impossible “to conceive a totalitarian policy without presupposing its divine character.”131 For there to be a totalitarian system, it is essential that the state and the church, and its leader, be perceived as the vicar of God on earth. On this condition only does power have the right-duty to vigilate over every aspect of the life of its subjects, without distinction between public and private, politics and morals, action and thought, behavior and intentions. After deﬁning the communist movement the “Islam of the XXth century,” Monnerot correctly suggests that “the sacralisation of policy is the original element of modern totalitarianism with respect to tyranny; it presents itself as an expansionist, secular Islamic-type religion: no distinction between the political, religious and economic sphere, concentrated power, initially without form.”132 Certainly, we are looking at a very particular type of religious movement, since denial of the existence of God is an absolute article of faith of the communist credo. We see no lay conception of life but the determination to substitute the traditional objects of cult with a new one: the cult of humanity, conceived more gnostico as a degraded God aspiring to recover its true nature corrupted by the bourgeois spirit. This aspect, which is present in all the sects sparked by revolutions, found its most rigorous and fascinating conceptualization in Marx’s philosophy. “Religious alienation (sin), that cannot be eliminated by anything other than grace, so that the kingdom of liberty can never be of this world, is substituted with economic alienation (exploitation of men by men) that can be eliminated by man himself, with the suppression of private property, therefore the kingdom of liberation in the near or distant future will come about in this world. The moment of violence and the moment of liberation are inexorably counterposed: where there is one, there cannot be the other; the positive destiny of many—in traditional religions: religious trans-

The Proletarian Church

213

valuation; in the proletarian church: terrestrial transformation—lies in the passage from one condition to the other.”133 Of course, the relations between the children of light and the children of darkness will be dominated by the imperatives of the “holy war” until the dialectical leap into the millenarian kingdom of liberty has been successfully accomplished. It will be a most horrendous war with terrible material and human costs and unheard of sacriﬁces and horrors but, in the end, the aeon of universal happiness will begin: the soteriological design of what Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, called the “astute spirit” will be accomplished, and the whole of humanity will enter a land-without-evil. Obviously, this vision of the battle for socialism leaves no room for tolerance, pluralism, or coexistence with “anyone different.” The “class enemies” must be annihilated and “proletarian science” must reign sovereign over all and everyone, so that the prophecy of the revolutionary writings can be fulﬁlled. For this to be possible, there must be a phase of transition so that the party can reshape the existing, in the light of the doctrine of which it is the priestly guardian and the only authorized interpreter. This is why it must exercise a revolutionary dictatorship, over things and especially souls, in the name of and on behalf of the proletariat, in order that they may be emptied of their former ideas and values and be remodeled. This is explained with almost brutal clarity by Gramsci: “In developing, the modern Prince upsets the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, because his development means that every action is conceived as useful or harmful, virtuous or wicked, only insofar as referred to the modern Prince in person and to increasing his power or lessening it. In consciences, the prince takes the place of divinity and of the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis of modern laicism and of a completely lay life and all its relations and customs.”134 Naturally, this grandiose intellectual and moral reform promised by the founding fathers of scientiﬁc socialism—to bring “heaven on earth”—will only be successful if the leadership of the revolutionary party is in the hands of the minority that understands the revolutionary doctrine. Suffering as it does from the devastating effects of “bourgeois opium,” the proletariat is incapable of appreciating its full meaning without the help of this minority. Therefore, to that minority “endowed with a greater awareness and a more precise historical perception [must be] entrusted the future of the entire class, which it will protect from every external and internal danger. It is therefore the natural leader of the historical movement through which the proletariat will be led to power. It understands the many different phases, assesses every action in the light of the ﬁnal goal, exercising criticism and providing clariﬁcation for action.”135 In other words, the historical role of “the conscious avant-garde” is to offer the workers their pedagogical protection until they have been freed of all the elements deposited in their conscience by the past. A gap therefore exists between the proletariat and the “gnostic aristocracy.” Nor could it be otherwise. “When it comes to intervening on overall social

214

Revolutionary Apocalypse

organisation, it is necessary to have a scientiﬁc knowledge of society and its development, in all its complexity at every level (political, ideological, economic etc.).”136 The only people equipped with this scientiﬁc knowledge are those who are professionally responsible for the elaboration, accumulation, and socialization of knowledge. In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat can only take shape through the dictatorship of Marxist intellectuals who are in possession of the hermeneutic key—dialectics—to interpret the meaning of the human adventure and are scientiﬁcally equipped “to defend the class interests”137 of the proletariat: only they, “on the basis of a scientiﬁc interpretation of the social organisation and of a given historical situation can establish the passwords, the objectives and the alliances that are necessary at a given point of time.”138 Thus we ﬁnd ourselves facing the following sociological paradox: the revolutionary party proclaims itself to be “the party of the workers’ class.” However, the leaders and chosen troops of this party are not workers.139 They are mostly members of the small intellectual bourgeoisie that increased enormously and more or less everywhere with the planetary expansion of capitalism. On the other hand, the very nature of the revolutionary undertaking requires the subordination of the workers to the elite monopolizing “general knowledge.”140 The gnostic revolution needs the masses to overturn the existing order, but it cannot allow them to act spontaneously and without guidance, lest they be reinfected by the bourgeois spirit. Once the revolution becomes state, it is forced to operate like an immense intellectual and moral censor and repress in embryo, if necessary using violence, ideas and behaviors considered to be incompatible with the communist organization of society and its essential values. Democratic centralism is precisely that: “an organizational weapon” conceived to prevent “spontaneity” from prevailing over “consciousness” or—which basically is the same thing—to guarantee that the revolutionary intellectuals dominate the proletarian masses.

NOTES 1. Lenin, “IV Extraordinary Congress of the Soviets,” in Complete Works, vol. 27, p. 199. 2. Nikolai Bukharin, Il programma dei comunisti (Rome: Tindalo, 1970), p. 211. 3. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution,” in Complete Works, vol. 24, p. 88. 4. Lenin, Left-Wing Radicalism, p. 23. 5. This was established in one of the “Twenty-one points” of the Third International. 6. From the telegram sent on January 24, 1919, by the Bolshevik Party to the revolutionary socialists of every country (quoted from G.H.D. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. 4). 7. Letter from Lenin to European Communists (quoted from Piero Melograni,

The Proletarian Church

215

Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reason of State, 1917–20 [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989]). 8. Lenin, “The Third International and its Place in History,” in Complete Works, vol. 29, p. 310. 9. Ibid., p. 307. 10. A. S. Lindemann, Socialismo europeo e bolscevismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1988), p. 89. 11. Ernst Nolte, Nazionalsocialismo e bolscevismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1988), p. 3. 12. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 139. 13. Lenin, “Speech on the Conference of the Workers and the Soldiers of the Red Army,” in Opere complete, vol. 31, p. 137. 14. Quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Re´volution sovie´tique, p. 41. 15. Iury Martov, Il bolscevismo mondiale (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), p. 5. 16. In 1919, the French Communist Louis-Oscar Frossard described the chiliastic hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution thus: “Besieged by a hostile world, reduced to starvation in an atmosphere of anarchy and disorder, Russia was ﬁghting to build the country of justice and harmony that we had all dreamt of. Ostracised and hated by all, in Russia socialism triumphed. The Russian socialists animated by a ﬁrm will were achieving what socialists the world over had been desiring and waiting for in vain. On the ancient empire of the czars ﬂew the red banner of the International. The exploitation of man by man was over! At last capitalism had been suffocated, beaten, put to one side. Onward! Humanity was no longer condemned: on Russia was rising the dawn of a new day!” (Quoted from C. Andrew and O. Ogordievskij, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev.) 17. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, dedication. 18. “Still, Ernest Renan did say one good thing: if you want to have a good idea of what the primitive Christian communities were like, do not compare them to the parochial church congregations of our time; they were more like the local divisions of the International Workers Association. This is correct. Christianity conquered the masses in exactly the same way as modern socialism, by the formation of various sects and especially by opposing individual ideas, some clear, others more confused, . . . but all opposed to the dominant system of established interests” (Friedrich Engels, Sulle origini del cristianesimo [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974], p. 64). 19. Antonio Gramsci, Sotto la Mole (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), p. 228. 20. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 11. 21. Ibid., p. 115. 22. Ibid., p. 121. 23. Ibid., p. 9. 24. K. E. Boulding, A Primer on Social Dynamics (New York: The Free Press, 1970), p. 134. 25. J. M. Keynes, Esortazioni e profezie (Milan: Garzanti, 1975), p. 223. 26. Quoted from Jean Jaure`s, Questioni di metodo, pp. 191–192. 27. Quoted from Henri de Man, Au de la` du marxisme, p. 214. 28. Leon Trotsky, My Life. Trotsky forgets to mention that Lenin had always been idolized by the activists of the Bolshevik Party, as is evident from the following words of Nikolai Sukhanov: “The whole Bolshevik effort was kept inside the iron frame of the spiritual centre abroad, without which the party workers felt themselves completely

216

Revolutionary Apocalypse

helpless, in whose presence they were proud to stand, and to which the best of them regarded themselves as devoted and dedicated servants, like knights of the Holy Grail” (quoted from Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History [Collins: Fontana, 1972], p. 459). 29. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 131. 30. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). For a Communist Party “there are never any mistakes in the present, but only in the past, and even then they only become mistakes, if they are acknowledged to be so by the party itself; the mistakes of the past are those recognised by the party and not by others” (Ferenc Fehe´r, Agnes Heller, and Giorgy Ma´rkus, Dictatorship over Needs [Oxford: Blackwell, 1983]). 31. Of future but also past history, in the sense that the leader of the world proletarian revolution soon believed it had the right to modify the past, by canceling anything that proved to be incompatible with its policy. In this way, by continually rewriting history, it implicitly stated that it considered its power to be superior even to that of God. 32. Lenin, “Three Sources and Integral Parts of Marxism,” in Complete Works, vol. 19, p. 23. In absolute accord with Lenin’s gnosticism, Gramsci did not hesitate to declare that the superiority of the Communist Party with respect to the bourgeois and reformist parties was based on the fact that it was in possession of an “infallible method” for analyzing and transforming reality (La costruzione del Partito comunista [Turin: Einaudi, 1971], p. 13). 33. Heinz Abosch, Trockij e il bolscevismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), p. 10. 34. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Materialist Dialectics (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. XIIIf. 35. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996). 36. Irving Fetscher, Marx and Marxism (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), p. 82. 37. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 39. 38. Ibid., p. 40. 39. Ibid., p. 41. 40. Gyorgy Lukacs, Lenin, p. 27. 41. Ibid., p. 36. 42. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 226. 43. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little and Brown, 1960), p. 421. 44. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 107. 45. Ibid., p. 106. 46. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 20. 47. Ibid., p. 55. 48. Gyorgy Lukacs, Cultura e rivoluzione, p. 226. 49. G.E. Rusconi, La teoria critica della societa` (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968), p. 64. 50. Giorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 65. 51. Ibid., p. 66. 52. Ibid., p. 67. 53. Ibid., p. 328. 54. Ibid., p. 328. 55. Ibid., p. 339. 56. Ibid., p. 327. 57. Ibid., p. 326.

The Proletarian Church

217

58. Ibid., p. 396. 59. Gyorgy Lukacs, “I fondamenti morali del comunismo,” appendix to AA. VV., Storia e coscienza di classe, oggi (Milan: Edizioni Aut Aut, 1977), p. 121. 60. Gyorgy Lukacs, Lenin, p. 11. 61. Quoted from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 182. 62. Ibid., pp. 187–188. Therefore, Sergio Quinzio correctly observes that “modern totalitarianism has no trouble recognising itself in the famous statement: ‘In order not to make mistakes, we must always consider what we see to be white as black, if the Church hierarchy says so’” (Radici ebraiche del moderno [Milan: Adelphi, 1990], p. 83). 63. Ignatius Loyola, Constitutions de la Compagnie de Jesus, vol. 1 (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1966), p. 171. 64. H. C. Puech, “Il manicheismo,” in H. C. Puech, ed., Storia delle religioni, vol. 2, 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1977), p. 685. 65. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo, p. 69. 66. Vaclav Belohradsky, “Burocrazia carismatica,” in Luciano Pellicani, ed., Sociologia delle rivoluzioni (Naples: Guida, 1975), p. 227. 67. Alain Besanc¸on, Present sovie´tique et passe´ russe (Paris: Hachette, 1980), p. 198. 68. Jean Grenier, Sur l’esprit d’orthodoxie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 17. 69. Typical was the terrible anathema uttered during the Spanish Civil War by Dolores Ibarruri: “No repression will ever prove to be excessive if taken to purge the proletarian ﬁeld from the poisonous plant of Trotskyism” (quoted from David Caute, The Left in Europe since 1789 [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966]). 70. J. P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 1982). 71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 36. 72. Ibid., p. 23. 73. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Use of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). 74. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, p. 581f. 75. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, One Volume (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 445f. 76. “Letter of April 9, 1863,” from Marx to Engels, in Complete Works, 41, p. 378. 77. Karl Marx, Il Capitale, vol. 1, 1, p. 259. 78. Jules Monnerot, Sociologie de la re´volution, p. 80. 79. Ernst Topitsch, Per una critica del marxismo, p. 167. The strategy adopted by Marx to afﬁrm his superiority over all the leaders of the socialist movement was devastatingly simple: whoever did not agree with him was automatically labeled as a petitbourgeois who defended interests that were foreign to those of the proletariat, under the banner of socialism; therefore a “class enemy” in disguise (see Luciano Pellicani, Miseria del marxismo, p. 56 et seq.). 80. Evgeny Zamiatin, Noi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963), p. 28. 81. In fact, “whoever is convinced that at a certain moment in history he has been revealed the absolute truth and thereby understood once and for all the natural response of history, will never agree that it is a good thing to let others think otherwise. With respect to those who think differently, he will consider that it is his right and duty to intervene, with violence if necessary, to make them change their mind or at least refrain from expressing it and, in this way, risk ruining the minds of others and restoring them to their former situation of blindness. Thus apocalyptic Marxism re-

218

Revolutionary Apocalypse

turns to being medieval, as was the spirit of intolerance, the system of inquisition, prohibition and repression of thought” (G. Calogero, Il metodo dell’economia e il marxismo [Bari: Laterza, 1967], pp. 96–97). 82. These are the words used by Lenin to incite the Bolsheviks to shoot the “members of the reactionary clergy” to eliminate every trace of Christianity from Russian society (see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime [London: Harvill, 1994], pp. 337 et seq.). 83. Richard Lowenthal considered Communism in power to be a new form of “Caesar-Papism” (World Communism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], p. 235). In effect, “the Head of State was confused with the Head of the Church both in the byzantine tradition and in the Soviet regime” (Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectual [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977]). 84. Lenin, “What Are the Friends of the People?,” in Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 142. 85. Lenin, “Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” in Complete Works, vol. 14, p. 132. 86. Ibid., p. 133. 87. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 12. 88. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, p. 354. 89. Pierre Herve´, La rivoluzione e i feticci (Milan: Longanesi, 1956), p. 111. 90. Victor Serge, Vigilanza rivoluzionaria (Milan: CLUED, 1970), p. 27. 91. Leszek Kolakowski, “Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” in R. C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 293–294. 92. AA. VV., Les principes du marxisme-le´ninisme (Moscow: Editions du Progres, n.d.), p. 128. 93. Quoted from Kostas Papaioannou, La metamorfosi del marxismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1972), pp. 39–40. 94. Franc¸ois Fejto, L’he´ritage de Le´nin (Paris: Casterman, 1973), p. 95. 95. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 98. 96. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties, p. 127. 97. Lenin, “Ninth Congress of the RCP (B),” in Complete Works, vol. 30, p. 447. 98. Dominique Desanti, L’International Communiste (Paris: Payot, 1970), p. 11. 99. Quoted from Manuel Garcia Pelayo, Miti e simboli politici, pp. 47–48. 100. Giulio Girardi, Marxismo e cristianesimo (Citta` di Castello: Cittadella Editrice, 1970), p. 50. 101. Anatonio Gramsci, Sotto la mole, p. 228. 102. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, p. 24. 103. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1964), p. 323. See also William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959). 104. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 113. 105. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community. 106. Vladimir Janke´le´vitch, La mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), p. 162. 107. When Beaudelaire was asked where he would have liked to live, he answered, “Anywhere, providing it is not in this world.” 108. Leon Trotsky, My Life. 109. Kant remarked that with these words: “Give a man all that he wishes and then he will discover that that ‘all’ is not truly all.” 110. Martin Heidegger, Essere e tempo (Turin: UTET, 1969), pp. 214 et seq.

The Proletarian Church

219

111. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (London: Norton, 1961). 112. Ibid., p. 27 113. Ibid., p. 28. 114. Max Weber, Economy and Society, p. 486. 115. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo, p. 502. 116. Quoted from Edgard Morin, Autocritica (Bologna: IL Mulino, 1962), p. 110. 117. Quoted from J. P. Sartre, Ribellarsi e` giusto (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 67. Sartre remarks: “It is not wrong. If you are involved in some undertaking that takes many years to achieve and you think of death, your anguish is less marked, if you think that your comrades will bring it to conclusion after you. But you must really believe in this undertaking and identify it with your own life.” This is precisely what Sartre himself tried to do in endeavoring to escape from suicide, which was the only logical conclusion of his desperate and despair-inducing philosophy. Having always refused the fundamental metaphysical principles of Marxism, he was forced to play the disconcerting role of “believer without faith” (see Girolamo Cotroneo, Sartre: rarete` e storia (Naples: Guida, 1976). 118. Herbert Marcuse, Eros e civilta` (Turin: Einaudi, 1968), p. 248. 119. See Luigi De Marchi, Scimmietta ti amo (Milan: Longanesi, 1984). 120. Andre´ Malreaux observed that “when a man is alone, he cannot help himself from thinking about the problem of his destiny; and death is always there before him as proof of the futility of life” (quoted from Jacques Choron, Death and Modern Man [New York: Collier Books, 1964], p. 161). So it becomes clear why the revolutionary party is able to remove the problem of death: with its strong, all-enveloping solidarity, it makes sure that its militants are never alone, never alone with themselves, always absorbed by the great collective task. 121. See Robert Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality (London: Penguin Books, 1971). 122. In Incontro con il comunista (Milan: Adelphi, 1978), Guido Morselli captured the grotesque consequences of the Leninist conception of dedication to party, placing in the mouth of the main character of his novel the following words: “To make love with you is a step forward. With the others, kisses and the rest had no political justiﬁcation. And it is not pleasant for a man such as I am to perform an activity, even under the sheets, that does not fall within the objectives of the party, to feel for months on end that the most important thing for us has nothing to do with the class war.” 123. Michel Verret, L’ateismo moderno (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 192. 124. So similar that Marx—on the basis of a study by Jacques Peuchet—developed an explanation of suicide that anticipates that of Durkheim. Suicide is presented as “one of the thousand symptoms of the general social battle permanently under way from which many ﬁghters withdraw because they are tired of being among the victims, or because they rebel against the idea of earning a place of honour among the slaughterers” (Del suicidio, p. 550); therefore as an expression of the loss of social solidarity, the direct consequence of the liberation of possessive-competitive individualism. 125. Quoted from Michel Verret, L’ateismo moderno, p. 189. 126. Ibid., p. 198. 127. A. J. Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 312. 128. Stefano Zecchi, Utopia e speranza nel comunismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), p. 200. 129. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

220

Revolutionary Apocalypse

130. Waldemar Gurian, Introduzione al comunismo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1962), p. 71. 131. Ugo Spirito, Il comunismo, p. 36. 132. Jules Monnerot, Sociologia del comunismo, p. 447. 133. Norberto Bobbio, Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 187. 134. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 117. 135. Palmiro Togliatti, Opere, vol. 1 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967), p. 196. 136. Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 137. Ibid., p. 85. 138. Ibid., p. 86. 139. In fact, in the Lenin strategy “the militant revolutionary type is conceived in such a way as to make the worker a mere executor who will never be able to perform concrete tasks within the organisation” (Claude Montal, “Il proletariato e il problema della direzione rivoluzionaria,” in M. Baccianini and A. Tartarini, eds., Socialisme ou barbarie [Parma: Guanda, 1969], p. 232). 140. A communist theoretician wrote, “It is the distinction between particular knowledge and general knowledge that is the foundation of democratic centralism: it is a tool of knowledge prior to being a tool of action. If we remember this, we can reject as demagogy the appeal sometimes made to the base with the idea of offsetting centralism: the point of view of the base is indispensable for formulating the right policy and the expression of this point of view must be organised as an element of knowledge; but the knowledge of the base is partial” ( J. Arnoult, “La nouvelle critique,” December 1963, quoted from Pierre Rosanvallon, L’age de l’autogestion [Paris: Seuil, 1976], pp. 62–63).

CHAPTER 11

Building the New World

1. Even after seizing power, the communist revolution has to continue to live in a state of permanent war, for it is then that it has to fulﬁll its deepest calling, which is to annihilate the perverse forces that prevent humanity from entering the “millenarian Kingdom of liberty.” Before being able to “construct a new life,”1 tradition must be completely overturned, with all its interests, values, beliefs, institutions, uses, and customs. Such a huge undertaking requires concentrating unlimited power in the hands of the gnostic aristocracy, for two essential objectives have to be achieved, one negative and the other positive: the destruction of bourgeois society by means of “a war of extermination”2 and the production of “new people, or cleansed of the ﬁlth of the old world.”3 Given its objectives, the revolution has no alternative but to resort to Terror in the negative destructive phase. Terrorism and revolution go together, for a variety of reasons. The powers of the old world have to be rendered impotent; the “class enemy” is an absolute enemy and revolutionary justice requires its destruction; the existing order must be completely overturned in order to “grasp the root of the matter,”4 to uproot evil wherever it lurks and make a complete break with the past. For the gnostic revolution, it is as if terrorism is inevitable. Not to use it would be considered evidence of unwillingness to pursue its goals and willingness to compromise with the old world: in other words, an unforgivable betrayal. Clearly, the Bolshevik pantoclastic policy was no different from that of the many European millenarian movements that came into being between the Low Middle Ages and the start of the modern age, which all proclaimed that a holy war was the only way to uproot evil from the world. Equally clearly, the Bolshevik revolution was dominated by the same “idea-passion” as the

222

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Jacobin revolution. In his Report to the Committee of Public Safety of February 5, 1794, Robespierre stated very clearly that terror had to be the speciﬁc modus operandi of the revolution: “Two opposite geniuses [wrote the Incorruptible on that particular occasion] contend the empire of nature”: liberty and tyranny. The two are absolute enemies. The revolutionaries are therefore compelled to follow a simple and at the same time terrible maxim: “to guide the people, with reason, the enemies of the people with terror” until history has issued its verdict: the defeat of the republic or the “suffocation of its internal and external enemies.”5 So thought Robespierre, and so thought the founding fathers of scientiﬁc socialism who simply radicalized the Jacobin lesson and proclaimed with devastating logic that genocide was a necessary step to “realize (their) philosophy.” “With the victory of the ‘red republic’ in Paris [we read in an article by Marx in the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” of November 7, 1848] armies will be rushed from interior of their countries to their frontiers and across them, and the real strength of the ﬁghting parties will become evident. We shall remember this June and this October and we too shall exclaim: Vae Victis! The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacriﬁces since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counter-revolution will convince the nations that there is only one means by which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simpliﬁed and concentrated—and that is by revolutionary terror.”6 Engels promptly associated with this chilling proposal of revenge: “One day we will achieve the bloody revenge of the Slaves,”7 he repeated six months later (May 19, 1849) in an article that concluded with these words: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”8 Even more chilling is Engels’s formulation of the “moral” principles of the communist revolution in February 1849: “To the sentimental words directed toward us by the more counter-revolutionary European nations, we respond that hatred for the Russians was, and still is, the ﬁrst revolutionary passion of the Germans. After the revolution, to this hatred for the Russians was added hatred for the Czechs and the Croats. It will only be possible for us to safeguard the revolution together with the Poles and the Magyars by using the most ruthless terrorism against these Slavonic populations . . . ﬁght then, implacable ﬁght for life and for death, against Slavism, the betrayer of revolution: total annihilation and terrorism; not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the Revolution.”9 In an article written a month earlier (which has rightly been said to emanate “the odor or stench of pre-Nazism”),10 Engels had explained why the revolution required exterminating the reactionary classes and even genocide: “Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality—the Germans, the

Building the New World

223

Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary . . . these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.”11 The inexorable conclusion is the following: “The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”12 These delirious words did not fall on deaf ears, although the vast majority of the socialists of the Second International cultivated a profound moral aversion for anything resembling Jacobinism.13 Mindful of the Marx-Engels lesson, Lenin tried to justify the use of terrorism as early as 1901: “In principle we have never rejected, and cannot reject terror. Terror is one of the forms of military action that may be perfectly suitable and even essential at a deﬁnite juncture in the battle, given a deﬁnite state of the troops and the existence of deﬁnite conditions.”14 A few years later, Lenin reminded the socialists that they were waving “the scarecrow of Jacobinism before the eyes of the SocialDemocratic workers”; that is to say, Marx’s statements on the indissoluble bond between revolution and terrorism, and added “[We] want the people, i.e. the proletariat and the peasantry, to settle accounts with monarchy and the aristocracy in the ‘plebeian way,’ ruthlessly destroying the enemies of liberty.”15 We know from Bonch-Bruevich and Valentinov that the man who built the ﬁrst totalitarian state of the twentieth century prepared his comrades, psychologically and morally, for the idea that the transformation of “sordid reality” required ruthless terrorism and violence. The true revolutionary had constantly to bear in mind the lesson learned during the Jacobin Terror. Lenin was in open disaccord with the “soft” wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Party: Jacobinism does not mean ﬁghting with white gloves, but ﬁghting without sentimentality, without being afraid of the guillotine; it means ﬁghting without being discouraged by failure. Of course Bernstein and company would never be Jacobins because they supported democratic principles. Hostility for the Jacobin methods inevitably generates hostility for the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat, namely violence, which is inevitable if the socialist revolution is to triumph and the enemies of the proletariat be annihilated. If the Jacobin purges are indispensable for the success of the bourgeois revolution, they are all the more indispensable for the successful outcome of a socialist revolution. A Jacobin spirit is essential to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This point is fundamental: the dictatorship of the proletariat can only be founded on Jacobin violence.16

On the other hand, this political-ideological attitude was widespread among the Russian revolutionaries.17 For generations, Bakunin, Nechaev,

224

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Tkachev, and countless others had preached the cult of violence as a means of regeneration. Zaichnevsky, a fervent supporter of Chernyshevsky and author of a violent manifesto, perhaps deserves special mention. In the opinion of the Soviet journal Proletarskaia Revoliutsia, he was one of the spiritual fathers of Bolshevism: Let us not forget the lesson that comes to us from Europe. We will not repeat the errors of the whimpering revolutionaries of ’48 and the terrorists of ’92. We will be more coherent. We will squash the Czarist tyranny even at the cost of bloodshed. We will be three times more inﬂexible than the Jacobins were in 1790 . . . We have conﬁdence in ourselves, in our strength, in the people. We believe in the glorious mission assigned to Russia: ediﬁcation of socialism. To the cry of: To the executioner’s axe! Without pity we will kill the followers of the czars who today kill us. We will kill them in the squares, if these scoundrels dare to show their face; we will kill them in the houses, in the alleys, in the streets! Let us not forget that whoever is not with us, is against us, that whoever is against us, is our enemy and enemies will be exterminated by every means. Long live the social and democratic Russian republic.18

As soon as the Bolsheviks took over power, Lenin predictably declared that “ruthless struggle-terror”19 was their password. Later he stressed that “terrorism and the CHEKA were absolutely indispensable.”20 Socialism could only ﬂourish “in the course of the most intense, the most acute class struggle—which reaches heights of frenzy and desperation—and civil war,”21 since its objective was the “bloody extermination of the rich.”22 The words of the closest collaborators of the charismatic leader of global Bolshevism were no less explicit and brutal. Latsis: “It is necessary to show the greatest strictness, pitilessness, directness . . . Shooting must be applied when the work of counterrevolutionists ﬁnds expression in open armed activity, when plots are revealed, when there are uprisings. . . . But it is very often necessary to resort to this measure when there is still no direct danger.”23 Zinoviev: “We are the only legal party in Russia; we hold, one might say, the monopoly of legality. We have torn political liberty from our enemy. We will not allow a situation in which people can legally try to compete with us. We have padlocked the lips of the Mensheviks and revolutionary socialists. We could do no otherwise. Comrade Lenin tells us that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a tremendous undertaking. There can be no victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat without breaking the back of every enemy of the dictatorship. No one can predict when we will be able to review our attitude in this regard.”24 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky: “The principal task of the workers’ government is to crush this opposition ruthlessly. Precisely because the opposition will inevitably be so embittered, it is necessary that the worker’s authority, the proletarian rule, shall take the form of a dictatorship. Now ‘dictatorship’ signiﬁes very strict methods of government and a resolute crushing of enemies. It is obvious that in such a state of affairs there can be no talk

Building the New World

225

of ‘freedom’ for everyone. . . . The proletarian dictatorship must be harsh and stern. . . . In the extreme cases . . . use the method of the terror.”25 Trotsky: “Revolution insists on the revolutionary class achieving its objective with every means at its disposal, if necessary armed insurrection; if necessary, terrorism . . . War, like revolution, is based on intimidation. Revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the red terror is no different from an armed insurrection, of which it represents the direct consequence.”26 “Russia is split into two unreconcilable ﬁelds: that of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat . . . There is nothing immoral in the fact that the proletariat is the class to give the coup de grace to a class in agony: that is our right. You are indignant at the open terror that we exercise against the class enemy, but let us tell you that within a month at the most, it will be much more terrible and based on the example of the Great French Revolution. Not prison, but the guillotine awaits our enemies.”27 2. Throughout the history of humanity, civilizations have used terror, especially in periods of consolidation of new regimes and of revolt against the existing order, as a rule brutally repressed by those in power.28 The radically new aspect of the revolutionary millenarian movements is the use of terror as a means for the regeneration of human nature. In other words, terror is not only justiﬁed but legitimated29—rectius: sacralised—insofar as an instrument of catharsis. Lenin wrote that the ﬁrst task of revolutionary terror is to “cleanse of any harmful ﬂeas . . . the damned capitalist society.”30 Disinfestation of this “swamp” requires the use of “systematic . . . coercion to an entire class [the bourgeoisie] and its accomplices”:31 a cruel, ruthless but absolutely necessary operation if “grasping, malicious, frenzied ﬁlthy avidity of the money-bags”32 is to be eliminated. On the other hand, what right do beings who are not men but ﬁlthy “spineless hangers-on” have to exist,33 people who like “vampires”34 feed off the blood of the workers? Their elimination is a moral obligation and essential for the complete destruction of “bloodstained, sordid, rapacious, shopkeeping capitalism.”35 If state terror is indispensable in the phase of consolidation of revolutionary power, it is no less indispensable when it comes to constructing the new order. Engels justiﬁes the use of terror on the grounds that the “fall”36—the genesis of private property—had corrupted human nature, ﬁlling it with vices such as greed, envy, love of leisure. It is unthinkable to construct socialism without ﬁrst ﬁghting the spontaneous, widespread acceptance of the (dis)values of the capitalist society. Thanks to the Marxian gnosis, the members of the Communist Party have managed to escape universal corruption and will conduct the “last holy war” against the civilization of the “haves.” Constant vigilance is necessary. It is essential to remain in a state of permanent war even after the exploiters and their accomplices have been eliminated. The bourgeois spirit is not only responsible for creating “corrupt human material,”37 but it

226

Revolutionary Apocalypse

possesses a formidable power of attraction and temptation that is expressed in countless ways and to be fought with every means, and at whatever price. Clearly, this is simply another version of the doctrine of the homo naturalis. According to moral Christian theology, man is a mixture of sinful desires, one of which is a particularly pronounced desire for possession, which destroys solidarity and the idea of universal brotherhood. Mindful of the words of its founding fathers, “Love not the world nor the things of the world” (St. John), the church went to great lengths to tame l’homo naturalis with a rigid moral code that systematically repressed the worldly desires that undermine universal love and prevent salvation.38 The proliferation of sinful worldly passions— ﬁrst and foremost, avaritia—coincided with the genesis and growth of the market economy that “liberated” homo naturalis from the protection of the church. The planetary expansion of the market economy is what produced the capitalist-bourgeois civilization. Communism reacted against the triumph of the homo naturalis, alias the bourgeoisie, dominated by self-interest and proﬁt, in exactly the same way as all the other heretical Christian sects. It accused the church of having abandoned the struggle against sin and gave itself the historical mission of uprooting evil, institutionalizing terror. The declared objective was to extirpate the acquisitive spirit and force men to strip themselves of “old Adam.”39 In a word, to create the New Man. With these givens, Marxist-Leninist communism inevitably acquired all the features of an immense crusade against modern civilization. The church was no longer able to placate the acquisitive spirit and the desire for worldly pleasures; the civilization, ediﬁed by homo naturalis, became a veritable regnum perditionis, to be demolished stone by stone, with the exception, of course, of its scientiﬁctechnical machinery that was essential for building the kingdom of plenty. Moreover, Marxist-Leninist communism had to conduct its crusade on a planetary scale. If one tiny corner of the planet earth escaped the ideological hold of the party, sooner or later the acquisitive spirit would revive and infect humanity, driving it back into the swamp of corruption, lies, and selﬁshness. For the acquisitive spirit is most contagious. Though unnatural and sinful, it is spontaneous. “Small production [wrote Lenin in the margin of Bukharin’s text on transition economy] generates capitalism and bourgeoisie constantly, every day, every hour, in a spontaneous manner and in vast proportions.”40 Consequently, “it is the revival of the petty bourgeoisie and of capitalism on the basis of some freedom of trade (if only local)” since “freedom of trade is capitalism.”41 The conclusion is inevitable: revolution cannot limit itself to suppressing the plutocratic bourgeoisie and nationalizing large industry; it must do something far more radical and difﬁcult: it must ﬁght widespread, small production and trade in every way possible, bearing constantly in mind that the “pettybourgeois element as the principal enemy of socialism.”42 In other words, it must destroy spontaneity, an undertaking that can only be accomplished by

Building the New World

227

means of a “latent form of civil war between the government and the people.”43 If it wishes to remain faithful to its soteriological mission, the revolutionary party must exercise permanent terror until the Great Change has occurred and New Man has risen from the ashes of the ruins of the old world. In 1922, when Soviet power had annihilated all its enemies, Lenin wrote the following letter to the commissar for justice: “Comrade Kursky, Further to our conversation. I herewith enclose the draft of an article supplementary to the Criminal Code. It is a rough draft and, of course, needs altering and polishing up. The main idea will be clear, I hope, in spite of the faulty drafting—to put forward publicly a thesis that is correct in principle and politically (not only strictly juridical), which explains the substance of terror, its necessity and limits, and provides justiﬁcation for it. The courts must not ban terror—to promise that would be deception or self-deception—but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalise it as a principle, plainly, formulated in the broadest possible manner, for only revolutionary law and revolutionary conscience can more or less widely determine the limits within which it should be applied.”44 According to Lenin, the justiﬁcation and legitimation of terror as a constitutive feature of the revolutionary government were beyond discussion. With the psychology typical of the “cold fanatic,” he was convinced of the absolute scientiﬁcity of Marxism and equally convinced that the party incarnated the inexorable laws of history. Nothing else counted: not the false, hypocritical principles of bourgeois morality, not sentimentality, not compassion. It was the sacred right of the proletarian dictatorship to eliminate everything that was incompatible with communism, for the moral puriﬁcation of the world was at stake. In 1922, in a letter to Stalin, Lenin wrote: “We will cleanse Russia for a long time to come.”45 In this situation, the ﬁrst duty of the professional revolutionary was to prepare himself psychologically for the use of mass terror. This was essential given that it was not conceivable to build a communist society without ﬁrst liquidating the petit bourgeoisie. “It was the bourgeoisie that opposed the great clariﬁcation willed by History, the decisive clash between exploiters and exploited that the Revolution had to take to its extreme, in order to solve it brutally by annihilating the former.”46 The kulak, that is to say the small land proprietor, who had no other concern but his own plot of land and his petty selﬁsh interests, was the main obstacle to the creation of the New World. As long as he was able to contaminate society with his “squalid, hateful, crazy greed of the pile of money,” humanity would never know moral regeneration. The party could have only one cry before this “poisonous spider”: “Death to them!”47 Revolution and genocide are therefore one and the same thing. Revolution cannot accomplish its historical mission, the eradication of self-interest, without exterminating the millions of individuals—a veritable “hylic mass” destined to annihilation—who have no desire but “to obtain a place in the market,

228

Revolutionary Apocalypse

or a higher price for his product or his labour.”48 According to the man rightly considered to be the “little Lenin,”49 these individuals constituted a “barrier of corrupt, dissolute, putrid humanity used by capitalism to defend its economic and political power”; therefore they must be expelled from “the social ﬁeld, just as one would use iron and ﬁre to expel locusts from a half destroyed ﬁeld.”50 3. Given the Marx-Leninist theory of corruption (bourgeois) and puriﬁcation (revolutionary), the Bolshevik Party inevitably placed mass killings on its agenda as soon as it took over power. “In order to tame our enemies [declared Zinoviev during a meeting of the Soviet of the ﬁrst urban district of Petergrad in September 1918] we must create a militarism of our own, a socialist militarism. Ninety of the one hundred million inhabitants of Soviet Russia must be won over to our cause. As for the others, there is nothing to say to them: they must be annihilated.”51 This insistence on the need for purgative terror demonstrates the profoundly totalitarian nature of communism. Terror, as Hannah Arendt has observed, is the “real essence” of totalitarianism and what deﬁnes this truly unique form of government. Even when a totalitarian movement successfully “gains absolute control and substitutes propaganda with indoctrination, it uses violence not so much to terrify the population (this is necessary only in the initial phases when political opposition still exists) as to continually implement its ideological doctrines and practical organization.”52 The epochal novelty of the Bolshevik conquest of power was that for the ﬁrst time in history (with the exception of the Jacobin experiment) a political regime used terror not only to dominate society but also, and especially, to “possess” it intimately and just as intimately “purify” it. The genesis of the Soviet State is singular in that a minority of gnostic paracletes—the saviorsaved aristocracy—endeavored to instill its revolutionary drive in the human masses it wanted to rule, in order to liberate them of the layers of corruption deposited upon them by centuries of lies. Russian society became one huge laboratory in which tens of millions of individuals were used as guinea pigs for the most extraordinary experiment ever conceived by a human mind:53 to completely reshape the existing in order to create a radically different reality. The ﬁrst step of the Great Revolutionary Change was to liberate the Russian land from the “harmful insects” that infested it like parasites. Those not crushed by the party’s “iron hand” were “removed” from the population to avoid the spread of infection. Dzerzhinsky euphemistically referred to these places of removal as “labour camps”; in fact, they were extermination camps, used by the party to get rid of whoever it considered contaminated and contaminating and for whatever reason. Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have described in detail the organization and cruelty of the concentration camp world that has come to be known as the gulag archipelago.54 It was a veritable society within society—

Building the New World

229

a “world apart” as Gustav Herling called it55—split up into hundreds of lagers, whose gates bore these words: “Labour is a question of honour, of value and of heroism.” Given that millions of individuals were interned in this social subsystem, one can only conclude that it was not “a penal institution created for the punishment and the repression of crimes, but a political structure for altering the social fabric, by removing and cancelling entire sectors and groups from society.”56 In other words, the quantitative hypertrophy of the concentration camp world is inexplicable unless one remembers that the ultimate goal of the Marxist-Leninist revolution was to purify the existing by eliminating any element that might pollute society “not unlike the carrier of an illness.”57 The fate of these polluting elements was irremediably marked:58 they had to die; or rather, they had to disappear. The communist lagers were organized like “dens of oblivion where anyone could come to an end, without leaving any of the usual traces of the existence of a person, a body or a grave.”59 How could it have been otherwise? If the historical mission of the revolution was to purify the existing, it had to place on the agenda the extermination of whoever had been contaminated by the moral miasma of “putrid capitalism” and ensure that even the memory of them was eliminated. This leads us to another typical characteristic of Communism in power: concentration camps have to be a permanent institution,60 at least until the metamorphosis of the existing is complete and the goal for which power was taken over has been achieved. Once the spontaneous tendencies of “old Adam” have been eradicated, the party can do without the purges, confessions, and lagers, which are simply instruments of “social prophylaxis.”61 In other words, the revolution needs terror to render the enemy impotent, but also and essentially “to free the present of the past.”62 Centuries and centuries of corruption and lies have left a layer on consciences. It is virtually impossible— so reasons the man who identiﬁed totally with the Marxist-Leninist revolution—to imagine regenerating “the mass human material which has been corrupted by hundreds and thousands of years of slavery, serfdom, capitalism, by small individual enterprise”63 without resorting to an intensive, violent therapy. This is a huge educational undertaking in which it is necessary to destroy the harmful effects of “religious illusion” and “bourgeois deception,” uproot men from the tradition in which they have been socialized, and free their minds from the classist culture. 4. In addition to the purges, the murders, the summary trials, and concentration camps, communism in power also needed brainwashing to achieve its palingenetic ends. Brainwashing was an unprecedented practice of paramount importance. Its purpose was to break the spirit of the victim, to disintegrate his personality to the point that he was willing to grasp the only hope of salvation available, and accept the doctrine being forced upon him. Brainwashing,64 unlike torture, was not a technique for making people confess. The purpose was to provoke a strong sense of guilt, which in turn produced uncon-

230

Revolutionary Apocalypse

ditional, impassioned faith. In other words, brainwashing was used to “provoke conversions.” By exercising intense material, mental, and moral pressure on individuals, the party tried to produce artiﬁcially the mystic experience experienced by the “true believers” when they ﬁrst heard the message of salvation of the charismatic leader. When the guilt became particularly intense, the brainwashed victim was psychologically ready for conversion. The fact that this was the only way to end complete isolation of course contributed. Reduced to absolute impotence, mortiﬁed daily by “reeducators,” the victim’s only hope was to agree to be regenerated by the party, to embrace the revolutionary ideology and reject anything in conﬂict with it. The process of spiritual regeneration followed ﬁve phases:65 1. Complete isolation: the victim “is dead to the world.” 2. Guilt: the victim acknowledges his mistakes and feels shame. 3. Surrender: the victim’s resistance breaks down completely, and he takes all the blame for what he is accused of (usually in the presence of a benevolent and understanding inquisitor). 4. Change of perspective: the victim starts to express “the popular point of view.” 5. Moral renaissance: the positive conclusion of the purgative process.

Jean Pasqualini’s report on his horriﬁc experience in one of Mao’s laogai is a particularly lucid description of how the party used brainwashing to keep the “bad element of society” in a state of permanent childhood, until the guilt and anguish became intolerable: “Our relationship with the State was a relationship between a child and parent rather than between an adult and another adult . . . The child is forced to place all his trust in the parent because he has no other choice . . . There was no other solution but to follow the movement, to do as it asked . . . What else is there to do against an omnipotent authority?”66 The innermost intentio of revolutionary pedagogy was clearly the redemption of those corrupted by the bourgeois spirit. The party gave them the opportunity to acknowledge their intellectual and moral crimes and show sincere repentance, by accepting the uniform collective will of the people on the basis of the following diagnosis-therapy of evil: “All crimes have deﬁnite ideological and social roots. The negative ideology and bad habits left over from the old society (pursuit of personal advantage at the expense of others and leisure without toil) continue to be part of the mentality of certain individuals to a marked degree. If we are to eradicate crime, in addition to inﬂicting due punishment on criminals, we must also introduce a variety of effective measures to transform the various negative ideological concepts in the minds of men, so that they can be educated and reformed, transformed in new men.”67 In short, correction is possible even though dissent, error, lack of revolutionary passion are unforgivable crimes against the community. Once the “bad

Building the New World

231

element of society” has acknowledged its guilt and placed itself in the hands of the party, the process of reshaping his personality can begin. The process is intellectual, moral, and affective. The cathexis of the repentant individual will be completely reshaped and liberated from the traditional objects of desire—irremediably corrupt and corrupting—and become absolutely “available.” Nothing will stand in the way of measureless love of revolution and the soteriological institution incarnating it: the party.68 This explains why revolution in power is literally obsessed with confessions.69 They are organized periodically according to a precise ritual in the knowledge that they offer a gratifying spectacle to those who have been regenerated and offer conﬁrmation of the absolute validity of the values and objectives of the revolution. They are also conﬁrmation of the perversion of whoever resists and continues to feel and reason according to the ideology governing the bourgeois culture. Moreover, the rite of public confessions allows the party to demonstrate its benevolence and willingness to save whoever has fallen into abjection.70 It offers the possibility of a total catharsis (intellectual, moral, and affective) and relief from “guilt, especially in association with the masochistic tendencies that draw pleasure from personal degradation. Moreover . . . it can create an orgiastic sense of unanimity . . . and the dissolution of Self in the great ﬂux of the Movement.”71 5. Revolution in power devotes all its energy to the “systematic annihilation of the individual.”72 When the gradual process of spiritual lobotomy is complete, “dangerous ideas” and “bad thoughts” are no longer a threat, or a potential source of moral infection. Revolution acts as it does for the puriﬁcation of society. It frees society from everything that corrupts and degrades it.73 Only people with a “bourgeois” mentality consider the manipulation of the psyche, so well described by George Orwell in his masterpiece 1984, to be a monstrosity. To the militant communist, who sees reality from a Marxist-Leninist perspective and has been suitably resocialized via a process of what Arthur Koestler has called “emotional saturation,”74 brainwashing is an indispensable tool of spiritual regeneration and therefore a technique for creating the New Man. Indeed, brainwashing can legitimately be said to be part of the genetic code of the communist ideological system in which the world is divided into two spheres: the “sphere of the pure,” or the aristocracy of the saviors-saved, and the “sphere of the impure,” containing the hylic elements. Direct conﬂict is the only conceivable relationship between the two. It ends once the former has absorbed the latter. Puriﬁcation means exterminating the impure elements75 and converting those who are not completely lost though not enlightened. These people are between lightness and darkness; rather, they live in darkness but can still be enlightened and therefore redeemed. The partygnosis has a moral obligation to educate and transform them. This is essential if catharsis is to be universal. No one is exempt from ideological re-education.

232

Revolutionary Apocalypse

The very nature of the revolution requires it. And, in effect, revolutionary gnosticism believes in collective salvation and is hostile and suspicious of whoever claims to have found salvation, in isolation from the corrupt and corrupting world. Although it reveals the intimately totalitarian nature of the communist revolution, brainwashing is not a routine practice of the Marxist-Leninist party, at least not statistically speaking.76 It tends rather to invest huge resources (organizational, ﬁnancial, and human) in young people. The reason is obvious. Young people are the future. The revolution will have a future if the young people are spiritually won over. The adults who have been corrupted by the bourgeois culture have to be reeducated, whereas young people are like soft wax in the hands of the agencies of socialization of the state party and can be shaped at will. Properly indoctrinated, they can be convinced that their morals are the same as those of the state-party and that there exists no truth or value outside the revolutionary ideology. The process is easier if special organizations are created to educate and train young people to be the future “guardians of the revolution.”77 The regime uses these organizations to implement its policy of intensive indoctrination to achieve permanent psychological mobilization and the creation of a fanatical youth impervious to any counter-messages.78 In any case, such messages are systematically eliminated because the media are monopolized by the party whose censorship ensures that nothing and no one disturbs the program of education of the “executor of the law of History.”79 A completely nationalized (or duly controlled) press, radio, and cinema has the responsibility of producing a constant ﬂow of messages, whose overall result is the creation of a uniform and compact symbolical universe in which the individual—presuming that this term means something in a society modeled by Marxism-Leninism—has no choice but to acknowledge that the image of the world built and conveyed by the regime through the media80 in fact corresponds to the real world. In effect, ideology and reality become one and the same thing—in the sense that the former squashes and hides the latter—and the manipulation of minds can be total.81 The “gigantic undertaking of re-orienting spirits, converting consciences and spreading faith”82 by imposing the “catechism of revolution” is accompanied by another important strategy: the conversion of professional associations and trade unions into transmission belts of the will of the party, and the organization of popular celebrations in favor of the regime and its infallible charismatic leader. In the end, this produces what Friedrich and Brzezinski called the “totalitarian psychic ﬂuid”83 and an environment favorable to the revolutionary transformation of society. The process is still not complete. The gnostic dictatorship now needs an Absolute Enemy. In fact, hatred is another powerful factor of unity and mobilization. The propaganda “needs a situation in which the enemy of the State, the enemy of class, the enemy of the people, can no longer do any harm, but

Building the New World

233

has not completely disappeared and can still be ridiculed.”84 This is the only way it can justify its constant reminders to vigilate, control, suspect, denounce: all essential to preserve the psychological “state of siege” climate typical of totalitarian regimes. Of course, the revolution in power claims to be driven by humanitarian motives and, in fact, Gorky rightly deﬁned it as socialist humanism. However, this love of humanity “cannot be dissociated . . . from hatred for the enemies of humanity.”85 Of course, humanity is an abstract concept and the “enemies of humanity” are rather more concrete. The result is that “love of humanity” becomes rhetorical. Its function is to legitimate that particular form of moral tribalism based on the “pedagogy of hatred” that Zamiatin and Orwell described so brilliantly in their dystopiae. The most decisive strategy for preventing the spiritual pollution of the people is, however, cultural isolation. It is imperative to protect the masses from any potential source of “ideological contamination.” This can only be done by interrupting all communication with the corrupt and corrupting bourgeois world. Socialist society is structured like a “fort under siege” in permanent war with the outside world and therefore ever suspicious of exogenous messages. Besieged by the bourgeois world, it must have the protection of an “iron curtain” if it is not to be invaded by the propaganda of the class enemy and the moral miasma of putrid capitalism.86 6. Such a state is an ideocracy or a logocracy87 in which the population is endlessly bombarded by revolutionary doctrine. The purpose of propaganda is to “make it possible to believe in what does not exist and deny reality.”88 Since this situation is extremely unpleasant for whoever happens not to belong to the new class, “the present must no longer be perceived as experience but become pure expectation, a political and spiritual hibernation.”89 This explains why revolution in power is obliged to build a “kingdom of lies.” If reality were to be perceived for what it is, the gap between everyday life and the extraordinary expectations fueled by party propaganda would be too great90 and the ideological foundations collapse. Revolution in power is forced to lie systematically91 and to institutionalize the “Shigalev model”: “Every member of society jealously spies on the other and controls each . . . Public control at every hour and moment. Everyone must spy on the other and denounce him.”92 Given the aspiration of the party to create a spiritual unity of the people, at whatever price, it inevitably has to use the same inquisitorial methods used by the church to combat heresy in the Counter-Reformation.93 Equally inevitable is the use of a particular type of language. This political language—in which there is “co-existence of opinions within a system of opinions that are logically contradictory”94—exists in every culture.95 With the genesis and development of the Marxist-Leninist ideology we witness the apotheosis of “duplicitous thought.” It is so pervasive that revolutionism becomes institutionalized schizophrenia. The communist claims

234

Revolutionary Apocalypse

that he is ﬁghting for a real democracy, but his true goal is dictatorship; he claims that his only aspiration is to liberate the oppressed but demands the total compliance of the workers to the will of the party; he constantly spouts theories on the primacy of science but systematically sacriﬁces science to the dogmas of the (compulsory) state ideology.96 No opportunity is missed to demand that the people should participate in decisionmaking processes, but every spontaneous movement of society is regarded with suspicion and fear; he utters ﬁery invectives against the privileges of the bourgeoisie but pretends not to perceive the rigorously classist structure of socialist society. In other words, the communist uses a lexicon in which words have a meaning that does not correspond to consolidated usage and as a result lives in a state of permanent “false consciousness.” In Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy everything is duplicitous; everything runs on different levels, and the levels never meet. However, while the simple militant is a “cheated cheater”; that is to say, a victim of the lies and deception, higher up the party hierarchy there is increasing awareness that lying is essential for the conquest of power and the ediﬁcation of socialism. Note that Marxist-Leninist ideology does not limit its theory to the plutocratic bourgeoisie and its organic allies. It does something more radical when it extends the theory to include the workers. In a secret document written by Lenin in 1902 we read: “The more ‘indulgence’ we show, in the practical part of our programme, towards the small producer (e.g. to the peasant), the ‘more strictly’ must we treat these unreliable and double-faced social elements in the theoretical part of the programme, without sacriﬁcing one iota of our standpoint. Now then, we say, of you adopt this, our, standpoint, you can count on ‘indulgence’ of every kind, but if you don’t, well then, don’t get angry with us! Under the ‘dictatorship’ we shall say about you: there is no point in wasting words where the use of power is required.”97 This is surely a most peculiar form of Machiavellianism that is only comprehensible if we remember that the starting point of revolutionary gnosticism is that we are all in a state of “false consciousness,” with the exception of a small minority. In order to attain the superior objective to which it has dedicated itself—the demolition of the “ediﬁce of deception and prejudice”98— this small minority cannot withdraw from its obligation to use lies. Of course, the function of a revolutionary lie is nothing like the function of a bourgeois lie: the former acts for the triumph of truth, the latter for the eternalization of self. In other words, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, the professional revolutionaries can and must use the “noble” lie. So paradoxically—and yet absolutely logically given the metaphysical premises of revolutionary gnosticism—lies are a means for edifying the “kingdom of truth.”99 It goes without saying that the masses must not realize they are being lied to. It is imperative they believe they are being told absolute selfevident truths. This is only possible if the party develops a new type of lan-

Building the New World

235

guage that is structured in such as way as to make reality systematically comply with the needs of “duplicitous thought.” This is exactly what the party did. Barely two years after the conquest of the Winter Palace, Kisselev published a “language reform plan.” In this document he stressed that the old mentality would never be overthrown, if the structure of the Russian language was not also transformed and purged. Inevitably, it expressed a bourgeois, reactionary spirit. For the communists it was “compulsory” to create a lexicon that was in harmony with Marxism, the only “scientiﬁc conception of life and society.”100 This was the ﬁrst step of a process that eventually led to the development of what George Orwell referred to as “neo-language.” In addition to fostering the spread of the “right” mentality, this neo-language had the function of blocking the genesis of heterodox ideas and ﬁnding a linguistic guise suited to “duplicitous thought.” In absolute accordance with the nature of the revolutionary project—to make a clean slate of the existing in order to purify it—the party appointed itself “demiurge of the word,” the absolute lord of language. This allowed it to better control the spiritual activities of society, obliging everyone to use a means of expression that had been carefully sterilized to prevent the emergence of individual ideas and feelings, on principle considered “bourgeois” and, therefore, corrupt and corrupting. Thus the imperative of orthodoxy generated the imperative of orthogloxy, which in turn generated a “wooden language”: a stereotyped jargon consisting of formulas and empty slogans, whose purpose was to prevent people from thinking outside the boundaries of collective thought.

NOTES 1. Lenin, “Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 385. 2. Lenin, “Gli insegnamenti dei fatti di Mosca,” in Opere complete, vol. 9, p. 360. 3. Lenin, “Second All-Russia Trade Union Congress,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 424. 4. Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 182. 5. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours, p. 221. 6. Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-revolution in Vienna,” in Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 505f. 7. Friedrich Engels, Il panslavismo democratico, p. 377 (italics added). 8. Karl Marx, “The Summary Suppression of the ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’” in Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 453. 9. Friedrich Engels, Il panslavismo democratico, p. 381. 10. Francesco de Aloysio, Engels senza Marx (Naples: Liguori, 1979), p. 143. 11. Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” in Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 230 and 234 (italics added). 12. Ibid., p. 238. 13. See Karl Kautsky, Terrorismo e comunismo (Milan: Bocca, 1946).

236

Revolutionary Apocalypse

14. Lenin, “Where to begin?,” in Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 19. 15. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in Complete Works, vol. 9, p. 59 (italics added). 16. Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin. 17. This was so widespread that even a moderate such as Herzen published an appeal of a Russian revolutionary in his journal “Kolokol,” claiming that “liberation could come only from the executioner’s axe.” 18. Quoted from Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin. 19. Lenin, “Moscow Party Workers’ Meeting,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 211. 20. Lenin, “Discorso conclusivo del VII congresso dei soviet,” in Opere complete, vol. 20, p. 207. 21. Lenin, “Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 401. 22. Lenin, “Draft of a Manifesto to the Peasantry,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 373. Lenin insisted on the extermination of the rich to such an extent that a young revolutionary socialist asked him, “Why have a Commissar for Justice then? Let us just call him what he is, the commissar for social extermination, and be done with it!” At which Lenin’s face lit up: “Well said, that is exactly how it should be, except that we cannot say it” (quoted from Orlando Figes, La tragedia di un popolo [Milan: Corbaccio, 1997], p. 645). 23. Quoted from W. H. Chamberlin, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 78. 24. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 510. 25. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. 80f. 26. LeonTrotsky, Terrorism and Communism. 27. Quoted from Pierre Broue´, La rivoluzione perduta (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991), p. 172. 28. See J.C. Chesnais, Histoire de la violence (Paris: Laffont, 1981). 29. While “justiﬁcation is made in relation to urgent situations, legitimation is made in relation to the requirements of law or of reason” (Dominique Colas, “Lenine et la dictature du parti unique,” in Maurice Duverger, ed., Dictatures et le´gitimite` [Paris: PUF, 1982], p. 312). 30. Lenin, “How to Organise Competition,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 410. The “harmful ﬂeas” were the “bourgeois intellectuals,” but also the “rich, the roughs, the idlers and the rowdies . . . these dregs of humanity, these hopelessly decayed and atrophied limbs, this contagion, this plague, this ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism.” 31. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 402. 32. Ibid., p. 402. 33. Ibid., p. 402. 34. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 241). 35. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works, vol. 28, p. 388. 36. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, p. 204. 37. Lenin, “Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems,” in Complete Works, p. 388. 38. See Walter Ulmann, Medieval Foundations of Renaissance and Humanism (London: Elek, 1977).

Building the New World

237

39. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 403. 40. Quoted from Stalin, “Questioni di politica agraria nell’URSS,” in Questioni del leninismo, vol. 1 (Rome: Societa` editrice “L’Unita`”, 1945), p. 334. 41. Lenin, “The Tax in Kind,” in Complete Works, vol. 32, p. 344 and 357. 42. Ibid., p. 330. 43. Milovan Djilas, The New Class. 44. Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 33, p. 358. 45. Quoted from Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York: Free Press, 1994). 46. Michel Henry, Du communisme au capitalisme (Paris: Jacob, 1990), p. 84. 47. Lenin, Forward to the Last, Decisive Fight!, p. 57. 48. Lenin, Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems, p. 388. 49. Giuseppe Bedeschi, “Il piccolo Lenin. Antonio Gramsci e l’ ‘Ordine Nuovo,’” in Nuova Storia Contemporanea, no. 6 (1998), p. 39 et seq. On Gramsci’s totalitarianism, see Luciano Pellicani, Gramsci: An Alternative Communism? (Stanford, CA: The Hoover Institution Press, 1981). 50. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine Nuovo (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 61. 51. Quoted from David Shub, Lenin, p. 494. 52. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 341. 53. The “experimental nature” of Communism in power was promptly captured by Gorky in an article published on December 23, 1917: “What characterises Lenin is an absence of morality and a profound lack of compassion for the life of the popular masses. Lenin is a leader, a Russian aristocrat, who has no lack of the attitudes, the feelings, of this social class in the process of disappearing. This is why he thinks he has the right to conduct a cruel experiment on the life of the Russian people . . . For Lenin and his followers the workers class is what iron is for metallurgists: let us see if we can extract a Socialist State from this material in these given circumstances. At ﬁrst sight it does not seem possible, but why not try?” (Quoted from Domenico Settembrini, Fascismo, controrivoluzione imperfetta [Florence: Sansoni, 1978], p. 59.) 54. Roy Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (London: Fontana, 1974). 55. Gustav Herling, A World Apart (London: Heinemann, 1951). 56. Domenico Fisichella, Totalitarismo (Florence: La Nuova Italia Scientiﬁca, 1987), p. 57. 57. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 423–424. 58. To the extent that the ex-common prisoner, Minaev, reports that the guards of the Gulag went to great lengths to let it be known “on every possible occasion . . . that criminals were not completely lost for the motherland; prodigal sons so to say, but still sons. But for the fascists and for the counter (revolutionaries) there was no place on the face of the earth, nor would there ever be” (quoted from Roy Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism). 59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism p. 434. 60. Even after Stalin’s death, dissidents—or rather those who did not share the (compulsory) ideology of the state, thus demonstrating that their mind was still prisoner of the bourgeois ideology—were interned in special psychiatric clinics. This alone would confute the theory that totalitarianism was not a constitutive element of the communist revolution but an unfortunate deviation from Marxism-Leninism. Some even claimed that it could be proved that totalitarianism is not a scientiﬁc category

238

Revolutionary Apocalypse

but an ideological weapon shaped in the cold war. This claim overlooks the fact that the adjective “totalitarian” was used in a positive sense by the Fascist Giovanni Gentile and the Communist Antonio Gramsci (see Luciano Pellicani, Rivoluzione e totalitarismo [Rome: Pagine, 1993], pp. 33–34). 61. J. G. Gliksman, “Social Prophylaxis,” in C. J. Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), p. 61. 62. Regis Debray, A Critique of Arms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 63. Lenin, Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems, p. 388. 64. Edward Hunter was the ﬁrst to use the term “brainwashing” in a text containing an enlightening anecdote. Pavlov had been invited by Lenin to write a report on conditioned reﬂexes. After reading the report, Lenin congratulated the famous psychologist for indicating a method for “saving the Revolution” (Brainwashing [New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957], p. 40). Of course, the method referred to involved the total manipulation of the human psyche until it took the shape dictated by revolutionary gnosis. 65. O. Re´boul, L’indottrinamento (Rome: Armando, 1979), p. 104. 66. Jean Pasqualini, Prisonnier de Mao (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 54 and p. 141. 67. From an article published on the “Quotidiano del Popolo” (quoted from A. Devoto, La tirannia psicologia [Florence: Sansoni, 1960], p. 350). 68. See Hongda Harry Wu, Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 69. See F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1951). 70. Lenin spoke of the heretic Paul Levi in these terms: “If he submits to the discipline, if he performs well (he might for example collaborate anonymously with the ofﬁcial Party organ, write some useful pamphlets etc.) I will not wait longer than three or four months to write an open letter asking that he be rehabilitated. This is the trial he must accept. Let us hope that he ﬁnds an honourable solution” (quoted from Clara Zetkin, Lenin (Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1968), p. 40. 71. R. J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 426. 72. Pin Yathay, L’utopie meurtrie`re (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), p. 69. This book report was written by one of the few victims of the Cambodian Revolution who managed to escape. Along with Pasqualini’s book, it is absolutely essential for understanding the nature of the “infernal pedagogy” institutionalized by communism in power. 73. The Khmer Rouges obsessively reminded the people being reeducated: “We must try and purify you. L’Angkar will make real revolutionaries of you” (quoted from Pin Yathay, L’utopie meurtrie`re, p. 91). 74. Arthur Koestler, Le yogi et le commissaire (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1946), p. 177. 75. On August 4, 1919, Pravda wrote: “Workers and poor, take up your arms, learn to shoot, be ready to ﬁght the revolt of the kulaks or white guards, insurge against whoever acts against the power of the Soviet, ten bullets for whoever raises its hand against them . . . the rule of capital will only be extinguished with the last breath of the last capitalist, of the last nobleman, of the last Christian, of the last ofﬁcer” (quoted from Boris Levitsky, L’inquisizione rossa [Florence: Sansoni, 1969], p. 21). 76. Brainwashing was used almost exclusively by Asian communism. The reason

Building the New World

239

is to be sought in the persistent inﬂuence of Confucianism, according to which humanity is naturally good and therefore always redeemable, at least in theory. 77. See Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 283 et seq. 78. See A. Haynal, M. Molnar, and G. de Puyme`ge, Le fanatisme (Paris: Stock, 1980). 79. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). 80. In the “Russian proletarian dictatorship [wrote Joseph Roth in 1926] the newspaper is at the service of censorship: not so that it can suffocate truth but because it diffuses the will of the censor. The will of the censor is the will of the government. The newspaper is the ofﬁcial organ of the censor because it is the ofﬁcial organ of the government” (Viaggio in Russia [Milan: Adelphi, 1992], p. 116). 81. In fact, the complete socialization of individuals requires abolishing the family. Communism certainly never managed to do that but it did deﬁnitely develop a theory that went in this direction. Immediately after the conquest of the Winter Palace, Aleksandra Kollontai proclaimed: “The family is no longer indispensable. It is no use to the State because it prevents women from doing useful work, or to the members of the family itself, because the State will gradually take over responsibility for the education of children” (quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 64). 82. Franc¸ois Fejto, Storia delle democrazie popolari, vol. 1, p. 539. 83. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 107. 84. Ernst Junger, Trattato del ribelle (Milan: Adelphi, 1991), p. 15. 85. Quoted from Mikhail Heller, La machine et les rouages (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1985), p. 124. 86. On January 29, 1958, Pravda published an editorial containing the following words: “When we Communists fail to do our political work with the masses, we allow conditions to be created for the penetration of the inﬂuence of foreign bourgeois ideology, for the revival of the remains of capitalistic ideas among the Soviet people” (quoted from A. L. Unger, The Totalitarian Party [London: Cambridge University Press, 1975], p. 9). 87. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 88. Mikhail Heller, La machine et les rouages, p. 231. 89. Constantin Dumitresco, La cite´ totale (Paris: Seuil, 1980), p. 95. 90. The expectations were described by the Soviet writer, Leonid Leonov, as follows: “The world we imagine is more concrete and better suited to the needs of man than the Christian paradise” (quoted from Andrei Siniavsky, Che cos’e` il realismo socialista?, p. 60). 91. An anecdote of the French anarchist Gaston Leval is most enlightening in this regard: “In Petergrad I met the former anarchist Victor Serge. He has now been converted to Bolshevism. In his articles he talked of a liberated world. He already had to hide what he really thought”: “There are no trade unions, compulsory payments are exacted on salaries, the workers are militarised. It is worse than it was during the war under the czars, but we are obliged to lie in order to save what can be saved of the Revolution” (quoted from Marc Ferro, L’Occident devant la Re´volution sovie´tique, p. 81). 92. Fedor Dostoevsky, Taccuini per “I demoni” (Sansoni: Florence, 1958),

240

Revolutionary Apocalypse

pp. 1098–1099. Communism had to create a huge and powerful police system for the same reason. In the end, the following paradox was produced: The “Party, the master of politics, becomes the slave of the police” (Pierre Naville, Burocrazia e rivoluzione, p. 99). 93. See A. Alcala´, ed., Inquisicion espanola y mentalidad inquisitorial (Barcelona: Ariel, 1984). 94. Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 36. 95. See Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reiﬁcation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). 96. See T. J. Blakely, La escolastica sovietica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974). 97. Lenin, “Materials for the Elaboration of the Programme of the Russian SDLP,” in Complete Works, vol. 6, p. 53. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the communist leaders of Eastern Europe demonstrated that they had learned Lenin’s lesson to perfection. In fact, they used a “strategy of lies” to achieve their objective of introducing a one-party dictatorship but made statements such as the following: “We support the principle that to impose the Soviet system on our country would be a mistake, since this method does not correspond to the present conditions of our development. What we say instead is that the priority interest of our people in the present situation imposes the use of a different method, namely the introduction of an anticlassist democratic regime, of a parliamentary democratic republic, with full democratic rights and liberty for all individuals” (quoted from Henry Kissinger, “Communist Parties in Western Europe,” in A. Ranney and G. Sartori, eds., Eurocommunism [Washington: American Enterprise Institution, 1979], p. 186). 98. Karl Marx, Discorso dell’Associazione di Cultura di Londra, p. 619. 99. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Letter to Soviet Leaders (London: Collins, Harril Press, 1974). 100. Quoted by Daniel Siniavsky, La Civilisation Sovie´tique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), p. 76.

CHAPTER 12

The Cultural War between West and East

1. According to a theory that was so common in the sixties that it was almost a cliche´, the October Revolution was a process of “defensive modernization” that fueled an ambitious policy of social change with a view to eliminating the technological, scientiﬁc, and economic gap that separated Russia from the capitalist countries.1 In their effort to build a classless, stateless society, the Bolsheviks had developed a method for ending stagnation and showed the countries of the Third World that underdevelopment could be overcome. Although authoritarian, the historical role of the Bolsheviks was progressive and quite different from the one they had envisaged: they created “a modern industrial State” on the ruins of the old feudal order.2 The economic bankruptcy of the Soviet Union has of course completely destroyed this theory, which was shared even by people who were horriﬁed by totalitarian communist regimes. In fact, the planned dictatorship acted as a “brake mechanism”3 on productive forces rather than a propeller. We know that early in the century, czarist Russia had embarked upon industrialization with such enthusiasm and success that the editor of the Economiste Europe´en, E. The´ry, concluded his monograph on the Russian economy with these words: “If, between 1912 and 1950, things in the great European nations continue as they have between 1900 and 1912, by around the middle of the century, Russia will dominate Europe both from the political point of view and from the economic and ﬁnancial point of view.”4 In light of The´ry’s documented forecast,5 we can only conclude that by eliminating the market and everything to do with the market—private property, private enterprise, competition, and so forth—the October Revolution led the Russian economy into a dead end, cutting it off from the advanced

242

Revolutionary Apocalypse

industrial countries. Moreover, even if the Bolsheviks had achieved their economic goal, the idea that their revolution was a “defensive modernization” would still be debatable. Contrary to a widespread but quite arbitrary theory, modernization and industrialization are not one and the same thing.6 The Industrial Revolution undoubtedly permitted modernity to spread like a huge cultural avalanche, sweeping away everything it found en route: interests, beliefs, traditions, institutions, consolidated practices, and the like. Nonetheless, there should be a rigorous distinction between the concept of modernization and that of industrialization. The former is a global social phenomenon, of which industrialization is only a particular dimension. We can say that industrialization is a product of modernization but not vice versa. Modernization is possible without industrialization—for example, Pericles’s extraordinary experiment in Athens7—though modern civilization indisputably was able to become a mass civilization thanks to the Great Transformation. Industrialization can also work against modernization, as illustrated particularly dramatically by the Soviet example. We usually understand modernization to be a historical process that leads in successive stages to the transition from a traditional society to a modern society. In order to clarify the semantic value of the concept of modernization, it is important to deﬁne as precisely as possible the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of that transition. In this context, the expressions “traditional society” and “modern society” indicate two ideal-types that are at the extremes of a theoretical continuum within which real societies are situated. This procedure has the function of producing the conceptual grid for interpreting historical phenomena of such vast dimensions, though of course there is never a perfect match between the ideal type and reality. What we ﬁnd are “impure types”; that is to say, social formations that contain traditional and modern elements in varying degrees The process of modernization is never over: it is like exploring a territory without borders. This is why Marx conceived modern society as a society in a state of “permanent revolution” and Schumpeter described the modus operandi of capitalism, the material base of the modern world, as a continuous “creative destruction.” In short: modern society is in perpetual movement and perpetual metamorphosis. With this perhaps not superﬂuous methodological premise, we can examine the set of interrelated and mutually supportive elements that constitute the core of modernity. There are seven essential elements: (1) elective action, (2) nomocracy, (3) citizenship, (4) institutionalization of change, (5) cultural secularization, (6) autonomous subsystems, and (7) rationalization. Elective action is perhaps the most typical cultural element of modernity. In traditional society, elective action is reduced to the minimum: traditio has such normative cogency that there is no way the individual can escape its orders and prohibitions. Tradition rules over everyone and everything; the status of each member of society; every thought, feeling, and action, is estab-

The Cultural War between West and East

243

lished beforehand. The classic example is Sparta, where even the members of the ruling class could not have a personal life project. The freedom of modern humanity—which is precisely the freedom to plan one’s own life—was unknown to the people of Sparta. The only freedom they knew was collective freedom, or the right/duty to participate in political decisions.8 The Spartan culture was therefore holistic, whereas modern culture is individualistic. An individualistic culture is particularly sensitive to the rights of individuals. They must be defended, protected, guaranteed. This is only possible if there are certain limits to the power of the state. The state cannot be omnipotent. In other words, the individualistic culture postulates the government of law, or a nomocracy, the only system that guarantees some protection of individual rights. Modern society is a society not of subjects but of citizens, of people with certain unalienable rights. The people themselves guarantee that these rights are respected, by participating, directly or indirectly, in the making of laws. Elective action and individual rights therefore imply nomocracy and participation, as well as democracy, which is the “natural” political organization of a society on the way to modernity. Universal citizenship rights (civil, political, social) are not automatic but are the product of the battles conducted by the population, which feels that it has been “excluded” and wants to increase the bourgeois border of liberal democracy. In this sense, class battles—not to be confused with class wars—are an essential element of modern society, so essential that modern society has rightly been deﬁned as a society based on the institutionalization of conﬂict. From this derives another typical characteristic of modernity: willingness to change. In traditional societies people do not have much chance to modify the normative structure, which is all-pervasive. It shapes and regulates every aspect of human life; being sacred, it is intangible. The ideal of traditional society is to avoid change and anything that might upset the present equilibrium. This does not mean that traditional society is absolutely immobile but that innovations cannot be in open conﬂict with tradition.9 The creativity of a traditional society is therefore prevalently orthogenetic but never, or almost never, heterogenetic. Classical India is one of the purest and most evident examples of how a traditional society is hostile to change. It aspired to be an immobile, “ﬁxed society.” Its spiritual e´lite—the professional Brahmin custodians of the sacred, unchangeable tradition—ruled out even the smallest break with the “eternal yesterday.”10 In modern society, change is a value to be methodically pursued in all ﬁelds: in the areas of technology and economy, but also in fashion, philosophy, and art. The modern age is dominated by a veritable mania for things new and different. Unlike traditional civilization, which hates anything new, by nature it favors novelty. For modern society, tradition is not an intangible heritage but a complex system of knowledge, techniques, institutions, models of behavior, and values, that can, and must, be constantly modiﬁed, renewed, challenged, and even

244

Revolutionary Apocalypse

rejected. In modern society, the sacred element does not pervade every aspect of life, as it does in traditional society. Its jurisdiction is rigorously limited. This makes modern society a secular city, where vast spheres of action and thought are independent of religious institutions and imperatives, to the extent that one of the most signiﬁcant dimensions of the process of modernization is “disenchantment,” or the loss of plausibility of the religious Weltanschauungen that accompanied the development of the lay culture. And this brings us to the sixth element of modernity: subsystems are autonomous. With the reduction of the sphere of the sacred and of its normative cogency, social practices become independent of religious institutions. They tend to regulate themselves according to codes that are not imposed from without but are the expression of speciﬁc requirements. As a result, economy, science, art, and the like are emancipated from the sacred—they are secularized—and structured in a set of relatively autonomous subsystems. The very spirit of modernity can be expressed as “art for art,” “economy for economy,” “politics for politics,” “science for science,” and so forth. In this process of emancipation of social practices from religious imperatives, the spontaneous self-regulation of the economy that led to the institutionalization of the capitalist mode of production and the triumph of the capitalist ratio played a particularly important role. The capitalist ratio was not restricted to the economic world. It extended to other spheres of conduct and thought, stimulating a Promethean approach that perceives the world as a kind of huge machine to be dominated, manipulated, exploited, transformed. This was a fascinating, but worrying development, which was responsible for extraordinary results in technology and knowledge, but for equally dramatic mental and moral aberrations; for example, universal marketization and the use of utility as the only criterion for assessing people and things. 2. What structural conditions generated modern civilization? The best answer is probably “the autonomy of civil society from the state.” This autonomy is only possible in the framework of a social organization in which at least some material resources are managed in a competitive regime. This means that both historically and logically the market is the economic base of civil society.11 A society cannot be autonomous if the state controls all the means of production. This is obvious if we accept that these are “sources of life” (Marx’s deﬁnition is correct). To monopolize the means of production means to control life, the domination of the “universal entrepreneur,” the bureaucratic managerial state. Autonomy is therefore a key element. Without autonomy, the adventure of modernity—the exploration of the neverending “world of possibles”—cannot even begin. A state that exercises a “triple monopoly”—over the political, the economic, and the spiritual spheres—prevents the development of any spontaneous movement of society. Society is kept in cultural isolation, to avoid infection from exogenous messages. The result is the undisputed and indisputable rule of tradition.

The Cultural War between West and East

245

The market is the main agent of modernization and of secularization because, by deﬁnition, it is a system that knows no boundaries. It breaks down barriers, places populations in permanent contact, stimulates spiritual and material contacts. The expansion of trade goes hand in hand with cultural exchange. An “open society” is precisely that: a cultural universe “fertilized” by dialogue with other cultures. Experiments are possible, insofar as the state does not curb the spontaneous movements of society. A society is only open if it is not chained to the “eternal yesterday” and individuals are free to explore new routes and open new horizons. Even a very ﬂeeting look at the history of Western civilization conﬁrms my thesis.12 The process of modernization—that is to say, the transition from a closed to an open society—was made possible by the permanent capitalist revolution, which not only permitted the prodigious development of productive forces but also the growth of civil society. To use Gramsci’s fortunate metaphor, society became a diversiﬁed system of “fortresses and asylums” and for this precise reason was able to oppose the natural despotism of the state. What came into being was a type of civilization based on a dialogue between state and civil society13 and on the set of institutions and values that are referred to as the secular city. Analogously, and inversely, Oriental societies— with the sole exception of Japan—did not experience modernity, because they failed to free themselves from the control of the state. The only form of rule they experienced—the Weberian “iron cage”—prevented economic growth and the building of the secular city. Given the above, the Soviet regime was undeniably the absolute negation of the secular city. It eliminated elective action and destroyed civil society. By sanctifying Marxism it blocked the process of secularization and prevented the passage from a “society of subjects” to a “society of citizens.” It froze the sources of orthogenetic creativity and eradicated the ratio whose foundations lay in the market. In short: the October Revolution was a titanic effort to arrest the Western cultural invasion, expelling all the essential elements of modernity from Russian society.14 It strove to absorb the material culture of modern civilization—industry, technology, and science15—but refused its spiritual culture, attributing to the concepts of liberty, secularization, citizenship, democracy, and so forth, a meaning that was opposite to the one that prevailed in the West. This explains why the Bolsheviks proclaimed their determination to learn from the advanced industrial countries, in order to accelerate economic growth, but at the same time demonized the “bourgeois” institutions and pivotal values of the “rotten West.” Essentially, it was a selective zealot reaction. They tried to achieve two antithetical objectives: material acculturation but preservation of Russia’s spiritual identity, threatened by the “forceful immigration of Western ideas.”16 They gave the impression that their objective was modernization. Instead it was the ruthlessly scientiﬁc “puriﬁcation” of the Russian people from every external inﬂuence: ideas, values, institutions,

246

Revolutionary Apocalypse

and so on. The only way to prevent the Western cultural invasion was to make the country impenetrable, to seal its borders, to build an “iron curtain.” The former ex-Soviet diplomat Dmitrievsky captured the spirit of the Bolshevik revolution with extreme lucidity: “A victory of the peasants in the countryside [he remarked when the Kulaks were being liquidated] would be a victory of the West: of its fundamental conception of individualism and liberalism in political life,”17 a prospect that was most alarming for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). By eliminating microcapitalism in the countryside, the last vestige of civil society, they were convinced that they would “save” Russia from being infected by the West. Dmitrievsky stressed the profoundly anti-European message of Russian policy: “For many years the Russian people [he wrote] have been drinking a terrible poison: hatred and mistrust of anything to do with the West.”18 Stalin’s bloody tyranny seemed “popular” because it presented itself as a permanent war against Western civilization: “It is necessary to catch up with, and overtake, the hated West, in order to squash it and break its arrogant strength. For this objective, Stalin is willing to sacriﬁce not only the people menu, from whom he was born, but also all present generations.”19 Proletarian internationalism was clearly a disguise for a resentful, aggressive form of nationalism.20 This explains what Nikolai Trubetskoi has called the “nightmare of the ineluctability of universal Europisation”21 that carried so much weight in Russian spiritual life from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In reality, the ﬁght against capitalist imperialism was a ﬁght against Western modernity, perceived as a foreign and threatening presence. Communist Russia urged proletarians all over the world to join the revolution. They promised to emancipate colonized populations from Western hegemony. Psychologically, this role was particularly gratifying for a nation mortiﬁed by the arrogant European hegemony. Moreover, Marxian messianism had much in common with the messianism of the Christian-Orthodox tradition and revived the secular aspiration of the Russian people to be the charismatic actor destined to “realising the historical destiny of humanity.”22 The Russian population is the “theophanic population” to whom Providence has assigned a soteriological role of planetary dimensions, Dostoevsky proclaimed, after stressing that “every great population believes and indeed must believe, if it wishes to have a long life, in its own priority among nations and in its mission of redeeming the world.”23 He added: “The destiny of the Russian is paneuropean, universal. To become a true Russian means none other than to be the brother of all men, universal man; . . . to be a true Russian means to seek the reconciliation of all European peoples; this is suited to the Russian race, the eternally unifying Russian soul that can embrace all populations with the same brotherhood and at last utter the Word of Christ’s Gospel. Yes, to us has befallen the task of uttering the new word: it will be uttered to consecrate at last the brotherhood of all men.”24 This was a eu-

The Cultural War between West and East

247

phemism for stating that the Russian people were spiritually superior and therefore it was their historical mission to conquer and dominate the world. Forty years later, the revolution gave Gorky a chance to express an updated version of the Dostoevsky theory of Russia’s historical mission, which in turn was none other than the ﬁnal expression of the myth of Third Rome:25 “There is almost no population that has not at some time or other considered itself to be a kind of messiah, destined to saving the world and mobilising the best forces for life and for action. Everything points to the fact that history has now assigned this important role to the Russian people.” It is true that Russia gave the impression of being a backward nation but, continued Gorky, using a typically populist approach, it is precisely this being backward that entitles Russia to become the demiurge of the New World: “We Russians are a nation that is rightly considered to be culturally backward. We are a nation without traditions and for this we are more daring, more docile, less subject to the inﬂuence of the past; we are the ﬁrst to follow the route of the ﬁnal destruction of the obsolete structures that are typical of the capitalist State.”26 These feelings were shared by the General Bolshevik Staff. At the First Congress of Oriental Peoples held in Baku in 1920, Radek, the keynote speaker, concluded his diatribe against the West with the words: “The capitalist culture implies the death of every other culture. The sooner that culture dies the better . . . Comrades we call upon the ﬁghting spirit that always animated the people of the East, when they invaded Europe under the leadership of the great conquistadores. Comrades, we know that at this point our enemies would say that we are referring to Gengis Khan and the great caliphs of Islam. But we are convinced that you will unsheathe your scimitars and not be conquered.”27 Zinoviev was even more explicit: “The real revolution will explode when the 800 million people of Asia join us, when the African continent joins us, when we set in motion thousands of millions of men. It is up to us to proclaim a veritable holy war against the British and French capitalists . . . We will be able to say that the time is ripe when workers the world over arouse tens and hundreds of millions of peasants, creating a red army in the East and arming and organising revolts behind the backs of British armies, poisoning the existence of each British ofﬁcer arrogantly lording it in Turkey, in Persia, in India, in China.”28 Stalin expressed the mission of Communist Russia in these terms: “Paraphrasing Luther’s famous words, Russia could say: I am at the divide between the old capitalist world and the new socialist world. On this divide I bring together the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasants of the East, in order to bring about the collapse of the old world. May the God of History assist me.”29 At the end of 1918, in two short but enlightening articles, Stalin illustrated the essential elements of the “Asianization” of Marxism that 10 years later was to ﬁnd its greatest interpreter in Mao Tse Tung.30 The future dictator of

248

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the Soviet Union stressed that Asia had a decisive role to play in preventing a eurocentric vision of the revolution. He stressed that the “wave of liberation was advancing from the East to the West”31 because “the Russian Revolution had been the ﬁrst to stir up the oppressed peoples against imperialism.”32 Stalin illustrated the strategic consequences of the fact that, contrary to the expectations of Marx and Engels, the communist revolution had not broken out in the heart of the capitalist system but in a peripheral country, midway between Europe and Asia: “To awaken oppressed peoples from a centuriesold delay, to instill the liberating spirit of the revolution in the workers and the peasants of Asian countries, to involve them in the ﬁght against imperialism and so deprive global imperialism of its safe backwaters, of its inexhaustible reserve.”33 In other words, by breaking the chain of imperialism where it was weakest, the Russian Revolution had opened a new historic era, the building of the New World. This justiﬁed reviving the formula previously used by the Slavophils, “Ex Oriente lux.” As for the West, “with its imperialistic cannibals it had become a hotbed of ignorance and slavery”34 and therefore had to be swept away without hesitation. Lenin reached exactly the same conclusion as soon as he realized that the communist revolution had no hope of success in the West. “In the ﬁnal analysis, the outcome of the battle [he declared in one of his last speeches] depends on the fact that Russia, India, China etc. constitute the vast majority of the population. And it is precisely this majority that has recently and with unprecedented rapidity joined the battle for its liberation. So in this sense there can be no shadow of a doubt as to the ﬁnal outcome of the global battle. In this sense the ﬁnal victory of socialism is undoubtedly assured . . . The next armed conﬂict will be between the imperialistic counter-revolutionary West and revolutionary nationalistic East, between the more civilised States of the world and the more backward States, such as those in the East.”35 The meaning of these messages is clear: the West was no longer the epicenter of the movement to liberate the oppressed and was now the main obstacle preventing the revolution from achieving its purpose. This did not mean there was no communist future for Europe. The policy was conceived in such a way as to induce a Leninist of absolute obedience such as Krasikov to draw the following scenario. It contains the essence of the imperialist calling of what Mikhail Agursky called national-bolshevism: “Just as the planets rotate around the sun, so all the European and also Asian countries that embark upon socialism will feel increasingly attracted to Russia, as if it were the sun, the natural core of the system of socialist states of Europe and of Asia. It is no coincidence that the social revolution started precisely in Russia.”36 3. If the objective of the regime produced by the October Revolution was to industrialize the nation, this does not mean that its goal was also to modernize Russian society. Quite the opposite. Lenin’s party simply used the know-how of Western civilization to suffocate the spirit of modernity37 that

The Cultural War between West and East

249

had been “shaping” Russian society for decades and to build a social system that was completely impervious and hostile to everything Western. Like all the other revolutions inspired by it, the Bolshevik revolution was not modernization by revolution38 but a defensive reaction against the invasive presence of Western civilization. The strategic objective was the creation of a social organization that was antithetic to that of modern society.39 In order to identify the roots of the communist revolt against modernity and the magnetic attraction it exercised on the people of the Third World, we must go against the tide of history, back to the era in which the expansion of European nations was at its peak and “other cultures” succumbed to the irresistible pressure of industrial civilization. No civilization, not even particularly traditional ones, is ever impervious and impenetrable. All civilizations absorb exogenous cultural elements, which they reelaborate and adapt. Civilizations are complex systems that export and import cultural goods of various natures. As such, they are mutually contagious, albeit within precise limits and in varying degrees. As there is a constant interchange, dialogue is the rule that governs relations between civilizations. And precisely because there is that dialogue, civilizations are enriched with knowledge, new ideas, technologies, institutions, and values from outside. Obviously, this does not mean that there is no conﬂictuality. History books document that cultural interchange often takes place because of the violence of the impact between civilizations. War has always been a powerful factor of communication and cultural hybridization. Reference need only be made to what Europe received from the Arab-Islamic civilization during the Crusades. It is no less true that every civilization refuses those cultural elements that threaten—or seem to threaten—its identity. The reason for this is intuitive: the law of continuity dominates the existence of a civilization. Civilizations need to have a strong link with the past, since the past—cultural tradition— is what deﬁnes their identity. Too rapid and generalized a process of acculturation can even lead to the extinction of a civilization as an historic entity distinct from the others. Civilizations refuse the idea of reshaping every form of life. The borrowing of cultural goods from other civilizations involves a careful process of selection and a lengthy process of assimilation. Civilizations change gradually, without losing their cultural identity. They remain in intimate contact with their tradition and especially with the essential core of that identity that is always of a religious nature. In effect, with the term “civilization” we refer ﬁrst and foremost to a set of collective values, which are considered to be permanent and untouchable, in a word, sacred.40 This is true even for modern industrial civilization. Even though secularization has reduced the normative jurisdiction of the sacred to the minimum, our civilization owes much more than is generally thought to Christian tradition. Deep down, what is Kant’s ethic, if not Christianity without dogmas? And what did Benedetto Croce mean when he said that we could call ourselves Christians, if not that Christianity is one of the essential elements of our civilization?

250

Revolutionary Apocalypse

What strongly characterizes the contemporary age is the fact that for the ﬁrst time in the history of humanity we are living in a civilization that is planetary. Civilizations have always operated within a limited geographic area. Western civilization knows no borders. Its power of expansion is unlimited. After a difﬁcult labor, it came into being on the promontory of Asia known as Europe. From the ﬁfteenth century on, it has been overﬂowing, breaking down boundaries, ﬂooding the whole world in successive stages. The most signiﬁcant consequence of the expansion of Western civilization is not linked to scientiﬁc and technological expansion or to the fact that a good part of the planet is under the political-military control of the West. It is that Western civilization possesses a quite extraordinary radioactivity that makes it particularly “contagious.” It is an imperialistic civilization whose main institution is the market. Thus it has an “ecumenical” vocation, in that it tends to subject everything it ﬁnds in its path to the impersonal imperatives of its logic and ratio. Penetration of the market inevitably produces huge changes that spare nothing and no one. Its “destructive creativity” and unrestrainable, self-propulsive dynamism place other non-Western civilizations before a dramatic “challenge”: either they ﬁnd an adequate “response” or they are degraded to the rank of satellite of the capitalist system. Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression41 is useful for understanding the particular relationship that developed between the West and the East after the Industrial Revolution. According to Toynbee, when two civilizations come into permanent contact, the one with the most radioactivity forces the other civilization to make a radical change, directing its attention to the exterior rather than to the past. The weaker civilization starts to imitate an alien mode of life, to take the other civilization as its model, in part because of its overpowering attraction but also because it has no alternative if it wishes to avoid humiliation and degradation. If this “mimetic” process comes into being promptly, the attacked society has a chance of neutralizing the external threat. This is not easy, however: if it wants to evolve at the same pace as the stronger civilization, it has to make radical changes in its internal organization and speciﬁc forms of life. This means that an efﬁcient response to the external challenge requires institutional changes that can be compared to painful surgery. An example is the “Meiji revolution,” whereby Japan transplanted a great number of exotic cultural elements and so avoided the threat of being dominated by Western civilisations.42 There is no guarantee of success, however. The society attacked by alien cultural radiations may be decadent or its basic structures too rigid to permit a prompt and effective response. In that case, the cultural aggression produces a dramatic situation in which the attacked society obstinately and resentfully opposes the intrusion of the allogenous culture, considering it an attack against its core values and therefore a threat to its spiritual identity. At that point, the diffraction of the elements of the radioactive culture is diluted so

The Cultural War between West and East

251

that they acquire differentiated speed and power of penetration. Acculturation, rather than being a planned, harmonic process becomes a gradual process of penetration of isolated cultural fragments, without monitoring their longterm effects. Toynbee formulates three laws or empirical generalizations. The ﬁrst is that the power of penetration of a cultural element is proportional to its futility and superﬁciality. This is a sinister law. The receiving society is unable to escape from the inﬂuence of the radioactive culture and ends up accepting those elements that seem easier to imitate or less dangerous. So, the process of forced acculturation produces diffraction and superﬁcial selection, with the worst or inferior elements insinuating themselves into the body of the host society with disastrous effects. In fact—and this is the second law of cultural aggression—a cultural element that is beneﬁcial or at least harmless in its own social system tends to have devastating new effects in the social system that hosts it, like an exotic, isolated intruder. Toynbee’s third law is that “one thing leads to another” during the process of radiation-reception because a culture is not simply an aggregate but a system of interrelated elements. So all the efforts of the society to prevent the penetration of undesirable cultural elements are destined to fail. Once it starts, the process of acculturation is irreversible. Attempts to at least slow down the process simply prolong the agony. Once it becomes obvious that acculturation is inevitable and that the receiving society’s capacity of self-determination is rapidly disappearing, “Herod’s Party” comes onto the scene. Unlike the “zealots,” it supports a deliberate planned acculturation. The “Herodians” do everything in their power to stimulate a kind of autocolonization rather than accept a militarily imposed colonization. The fundamentalist zealots believe that this option will destroy the spiritual identity of their civilization. Conﬂict between the “modernizing party” and the “traditionalist party” is inevitable. The modernists believe that salvation lies in stealing the secret of the power and creativity of the aggressor. The traditionalists consider anything that comes from outside to be a poison for the forms of life consecrated by tradition. The only way to avoid the incumbent cultural catastrophe is to expel the intruder and seal the frontiers. 4. Although ideal-typical, Toynbee’s theory of cultural aggression provides us with useful empirical material. Essentially, it illustrates the devastating consequences of the penetration of modern industrial civilization into the countries of the Third World. Nothing is left untouched: institutions, customs, and values. Worse still, people are deprived of their ancestral habitat and condemned to live in a foreign or even hostile environment. Modernity has attacked the societies outside its area of endogenous development, uprooted millions of beings, transforming them into a huge, resentful “anomic mass.”

252

Revolutionary Apocalypse

In every cultural area touched by this diabolical exogenous force, these millions of beings make up the “external proletariat” of Western civilization. The permanent contact between modernity and traditional societies has had such a devastating impact on traditional societies that one can, and must, talk of an induced cultural catastrophe generated by the “imposition of a market economy on the population of Asia and by the consequent gradual revolution of almost every aspect of their life.”43 In traditional society, the function of the market was secondary with respect to existential issues. With the process of forced acculturation, “existence and existence-related issues became secondary with respect to the market.”44 This freed the colonized populations from community bonds45 but subjected them to the impersonal laws of competition and proﬁt. This “liberation” and the consequent divide between the economic and other spheres of social life deprived the colonized populations of their cultural roots. We have already seen that the institutionalized separation of the economic sphere from other social spheres had traumatic anomic effects in Europe. However, after decades of conﬂictuality, thanks to a spectacular increase in material wealth and the reintegration and protection offered by trade unions and socialist parties, the “internal proletariat” gradually ceased to be a humble outcast of bourgeois society. In the Third World this did not occur. The human cost of the intrusion of the self-regulated market into the vital fabric of the traditional community was increased by the cultural heterogeneity between aggressor and those aggressed against. The invaders exploited labor more or less intensively, depending on the speciﬁc historical circumstances, but inevitably the exploitation was atrocious, since there was not that minimum degree of solidarity between the leaders and the inferior classes that had at least attenuated the negative effects in Europe. For obvious reasons, in the colonized countries there could be no affective identiﬁcation or moral communion between exploiters and exploited, other than that based on a patronizing hypercritical form of protection. For generations, the “white man’s burden” was the rhetorical formula used by Europe to disguise the degradation of the colonized populations considered biologically inferior and requiring a discipline imposed by others.46 Inevitably, this led to what has been called the “clochardization” of the countries of the Third World.47 Naturally, in Oriental societies the resentment against the cultural aggression of the West was huge. The acculturated intellectuals appointed themselves the “ofﬁcial” interpreters of that resentment. Nor could it have been otherwise. One of the most important consequences of the planetary expansion of modernity has been the formation of a special category of individuals whom we refer to as “acculturated intellectuals.” These individuals were caught between two worlds—that of their ancestral culture and that of invasive modernity—but could not identify completely with either. The deﬁnition of intelligentsia is precisely that: a class of “cultural half-castes,” if we may use

The Cultural War between West and East

253

the term, that developed spontaneously from the penetration of secular values and ideas into traditional environments, composed of individuals of dual socialization and therefore inevitably cut off and equally inevitably alienated. We are talking about an “intellectual proletariat,” people who were painfully aware of being excluded from the society in which they lived—in that spiritual trading with the lay culture had made them critical of ancestral customs and habits—and excluded from modern civilization whose arrogance mortiﬁed their pride daily. Added to this, the dominant oligarchies mistrusted the acculturated intellectuals for their “dangerous” ideas and kept them away from positions of leadership. They had no chance of ever acquiring the social status they felt was their right. In their eyes, their superior knowledge made them the moral aristocracy whose destiny was to emancipate the country. But the material and spiritual backwardness of their environment forced them to occupy a precarious and marginal professional position and therefore to suffer a permanent lack of status, which inevitably aroused in them the resentment typical of “outcasts of the intelligentsia.” The result: the intelligentsia was condemned to live in a macrocosm that was not, or was hardly, homogeneous with their spiritual microcosm. For this precise reason, they had no alternative but to transform reality and make it suit their needs. Politics exercised an irresistible attraction. To reshape the macrocosm was the only activity that gave them conﬁdence in the future and the chance to escape alienation. The more radical the strategic objectives, the more attractive politics was for them. The barricades of revolutions became their natural habitat. Revolution was the only alternative to humiliation. In order to be able to revolutionize everything around them they needed an impact mass to reshape and use as a tool for overturning the dominant oligarchies and breaking the siege of the aggressive Western civilization. In semiindustrial or even preindustrial circles, where else could they ﬁnd this mass other than among the peasants?48 “To go to the people” became the ethical-political imperative of the alienated intellectuals. That was no easy matter, however. Extenuating propaganda was necessary to “infect” the peasant masses and mobilize them against established order. Nothing could be done until the “crust of customs” had been broken. Fortunately, the cultural invasion worked in favor of revolution. The intrusion of the market gradually broke up the “world of tradition,” weakened the normative cogency of religious institutions, deligitimated the power and privileges of the dominant oligarchies, swelled the ranks of the intelligentsia, “proletarized” peasants, and modiﬁed their ancestral habitat. In short, by turning everything upside down it created the preconditions for the overturning of established order. 5. So the “imperialism of the industrial States of the West passed over the tropics like a rainstorm destroying great civilisations in its frantic race, levelling and reducing all populations to an undifferentiated exploited mass.”49

254

Revolutionary Apocalypse

It also created a new historical actor, the intelligentsia, which took upon itself the task of waking the peasant masses from their ancestral stupor, giving them a reason to ﬁght and build a new social order. To do so, it used the “spiritual arms” of Western revolutionary tradition, ﬁrst and foremost those shaped by Marxism. The intelligentsia found what they were looking for in Marx’s grandiose Weltanschauung: a ferocious critique of traditional forms of rule; a denunciation of the horrors of modern civilization; and, above all, the exalting prospect of creating, through permanent revolution, a social system capable of combining the maximum growth of productive forces and the elimination of bourgeois individualism, a generator of anomie and alienation. Marxism’s eschatological vision of the historical process provided the intellectual proletariat of most Western civilizations with a “political religion” whose goal was the demiurgic reshaping of reality. By proclaiming the ineluctable catastrophic collapse of capitalism and combining sociological determinism and political voluntarism50 in an illogical but effective theoretical synthesis, Marxism gave hope to the revolutionary e´lites: at last the future was on their side. The ﬁnal victory of socialism was written in the providential plan of history. This “modern version of Manicheism, according to which one’s party represents simultaneously moral good and the wave of the future,”51 became a formidable political force, once the Third World e´lites adopted the model of organization and the strategic plan developed and tested by Lenin. Both served the purpose to which the intelligentsia aspired: to guide the destiny of the “peoples of the East enslaved by imperialism,”52 to destroy the much hated traditional order and the equally hated Western capitalism, fomenting what Samuel Eisenstadt has called a “totalitarian-ideological change.”53 The Leninist concept of party, based on the idea that professional revolutionaries are the “lieutenants of the working class,”54 therefore the only authentic interpreters of the real interests of the exploited masses, on the one hand gave ideological legitimacy to the totalitarian dictatorship and, on the other, satisﬁed the intense need of the proletarized intellectuals to feel that they were part of an “alternative community” that had substituted the traditional community invaded by modernity.55 The Marx-Lenin sociology was also an excuse to blame the West—this “Moloch that claims the whole world as is its victim”56—for the backwardness of the East. All one had to do was show that the “transfusions of wealth” obtained by exploiting the colonies had allowed Europe to really take off but, at the same time, had “upset the whole development of the donor countries [compromising] drastically the subsequent course of events.”57 At that point, the destruction of capitalism came to be a precondition for the emancipation of the “damned of the earth.” So the e´lites of the Third World consumed and propagated a myth58 that eased their frustration and inferiority vis-a`-vis the industrial world. Moreover, by placing all the blame on the West,59 they felt morally superior to the arrogant “rulers of the world.”

The Cultural War between West and East

255

In other words, Marxism came into being as the revolutionary consciousness of the “internal proletariat” of liberal civilization. In the hands of the intelligentsia it became a major resource of the “external proletariat” for combating the West60 and refusing its culture.61 To the “proletarian nations” it offered an operational model—planned society structured like an impenetrable fortress—to resist the capitalist invasion and spiritual arms for responding to the challenge of the industrial world, transforming the aggressor into aggressee.62 In fact, Marxism calls all modern civilization before the Weltgericht and condemns it forevermore as a “bewitched, deformed and upside down world,” split by “unnatural scissions” and based on a self-destroying anarchy; a world therefore that was profoundly irrational and immoral, destined to die, suffocated by its own unsolvable internal contradictions. With its spiritual arms and power technology, communism gave those besieged by industrial civilization the tools they needed to become the besiegers.63 With these tools they would conduct a revolutionary war, conceived both as war of class and of national liberation,64 against a world from which they felt excluded.65 The authentic meaning of the Marxist message was not changed by “Asianization.” On the contrary, the revolutionary intelligentsia made exoteric what had been esoteric. Behind the mask of futurism and idolatry of the progressive character of the Industrial Revolution, Marx hid an intense desire to annihilate the modern Gesellschaft and return humanity to the protective womb of the primitive Gemeinschaft. Modern liberty was the main enemy, an enemy that could only be destroyed by eliminating every inviolable area and making “all the resources (depend) on an ideologically inspired central bureaucratic power, guardian of paradigmatic truth.”66 Hence, the “elective afﬁnity” between the Marxian program and the aspirations of the acculturated intellectuals who “consciously or not, found in communism certain elements that revived a tradition with which they kept strong ties,”67 ﬁrst and foremost a holistic vision of the “good society” permanently hostile to individualism.68 The outcome of what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “love affair”69 between the intellectuals of the Third World and Marxism was the generation of a type of social organization that, to the extent to which it more or less completely nationalized civil society, “perfected” traditional despotism, conferring virtually unlimited power on managerial bureaucracy. In this, Karl Wittfogel was perfectly right when he pointed to an “Asian restoration”70 in the communist revolution. In effect, the new class that emerged from the bureaucratization of the intelligentsia that began immediately after the revolutionary conquest of power71—to prevent a “caricature like . . . and obscene imitation”72 of Western civilization—closed the “proletarian nations” inside the “iron cage” of the planned state and adopted the Bukharinist principles according to which “the question of where to go (back to capitalism or ahead to communism) cannot be the object of discussion.”73 Thus, although they destroyed traditional order,

256

Revolutionary Apocalypse

the revolutionary Third World e´lites revived its holistic spirit. This conﬁrms Germani’s theory that authoritarianism became totalitarianism every time a “deliberate attempt (was made) to reconstruct the community artiﬁcially.”74

NOTES 1. See C. E. Black, “The Modernization of Russian Society,” in C. E. Black, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 661 et seq. 2. H. F. Achminov, “Da Marx a Lenin,” in Sovietica, nos. 16–17 (1969), p. 17. 3. See Luciano Pellicani, “L’anti-economia collettivistica” in Le sorgenti della vita (Rome: SEAM, 1997). 4. Quoted from Domenico Settembrini, Socialismo e rivoluzione dopo Marx, p. 561. 5. A forecast also made by the Russian minister Kokovtsov in his budget report of 1913. 6. One example will sufﬁce: David Apter identiﬁes modernization with the “diffusion and use of industrial type roles in non-industrial environments” (Some Conceptual Approaches to the Study of Modernization [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968], p. 334). Although Apter does acknowledge that “choice” is one of the most important characteristics of modernity, he claims that the typical values of modernity can be incarnated in the system of “the sacred collectivity” (The Politics of Modernization [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965], p. 24) thus overlooking a point demonstrated by Howard Becker in his penetrating essays, namely that freedom of choice is incompatible with the sacred model of society (Through Values to Social Interpretationi [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950]). 7. See Luciano Pellicani, “Il primo disincanto del mondo,” in Modernizzazione e secolarizzazione (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997). 8. See H. Michell, Sparta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). 9. In fact, there is another possibility: the sudden appearance on the scene of a charismatic leader whose extraordinary personality and message is capable of breaking the “crust of custom.” 10. See Luciano Pellicani, I Rajput (Rome: Newton Compton, 1994). 11. This escaped Gino Germani completely, despite his very enlightening studies on processes of modernization. 12. For an analytical expose´ of this thesis, see my book The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity. 13. See Jean Baechler, De´mocraties (Paris: Calmann-Le´vy, 1985), p. 520 et seq. 14. That the restoration of the closed society was the goal of the communist revolution is particularly evident from the words in praise of humanism of the Soviet writer V. Ilenkov: “Russia followed along the path of universally uniform thought. For thousands of years men have suffered from not thinking in the same manner. For the ﬁrst time we Soviets understand each other, speak the same universally comprehensible languages, our thoughts on major issues are identical. This unity of thought gives us strength. Therein lies our superiority over other men who are divided, torn apart by pluralism of thought (quoted from Andrei Siniavsky, Che cos’e` il realismo socialista [Novara: EPIDEM, 1977], p. 74). 15. This is science but not the scientiﬁc spirit, which is essential for producing

The Cultural War between West and East

257

science. One of the most dramatic contradictions of the Soviet system was that it claimed to develop scientiﬁc knowledge by eradicating free investigation in compliance with the Leninist principle of “particity,” which required an inquisitorial control over all spiritual activity, described by Karl Korsch as follows: “The materialistic philosophical protection of all the sciences of nature and of society and the further overall development of cultural consciousness in literature, drama, the ﬁgurative arts etc., driven to the most absurd consequences by Lenin’s epigones ended up producing a singular ideological dictatorship that ﬂuctuated between the revolutionary progress and obscure reactionarism which is practised in the Soviet Russia of our time in the name of so-called Marxism-Leninism. It is exercised not on the spiritual life of the bureaucracy in power but on that of the workers’ class. Recently attempts have also been made to extend this spiritual control beyond the frontiers of Soviet Russia to the communist parties of the West and of the whole world” (Marxism and Philosophy [London: NLB, 1970]). 16. Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Oxford: Polity, 1994). In a conversation with the actor Nikolai Cherkassov, Stalin praised Ivan the Terrible for “having preserved Russia from the penetration of foreign inﬂuence” (quoted from Alexander Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy). No less revealing of the antimodern spirit of the Bolshevik revolution is Andrei Zhdanov’s description of the role assigned by CPSU to “the engineers of souls”: “an organic group of militant philosophers armed to the perfection by the Marxist philosophy who conduct a vast offensive in the conscience of the Soviet people against hostile foreign ideologies and the remains of bourgeois ideology” (Politica e ideologia [Rome: Rinascita, n.d.], p. 114). 17. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 280. 18. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), p. 336. 19. Quoted from Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Storia dell’URSS, p. 285. 20. This is so much so that Lenin used to say, “Scratch at a Bolshevik and you ﬁnd a Panrussian nationalist.” 21. Nikolai Trubetskoi, L’Europa e l’umanita` (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. 66. It is interesting to note that resentment against Western civilization led the anti-Bolshevik Trubetskoi to draw up a program whose essence coincided with that of the Third International: “If humanity, not the one of which the Romano-Germanics like to talk, but real humanity that is made up of Slavs, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Africans and other races which all, without distinction of colour, suffer under the oppressive yoke of the Roman-Germanics and waste their national effort for European factories, if all this humanity were to join forces against the oppressors, the Romano-Germanics, it is probable that sooner or later they would manage to break the hateful yoke and eliminate from the face of the earth these predators and all their culture.” 22. Giuseppe Guariglia, Il messianesimo russo (Rome: Universale Studium, 1956), p. 15. 23. Fedor Dostoevsky, Diario di uno scrittore (Milan: Garzanti, 1943), p. 549. 24. Ibid., pp. 805–806. 25. Berdiaev wrote: “The Russian people have not achieved their messianic idea of Moscow Third Rome: nor less the empire of Petersburg. But at times their messianic ideas are called to take on an apocalyptic form, at others a revolutionary form; this produces a surprising event for the destiny of Russia: instead of Third Rome Russia will achieve the Third International, and this will contain more than one aspect of

258

Revolutionary Apocalypse

that. It is hard to make the West understand that the Third International is not an International but a national Russian idea, a transformation of Russian messianism” (Il senso e le premesse del comunismo russo, p. 190). 26. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 211. 27. Ibid., p. 226. 28. Quoted from W. H. Chamberlin, History of Russian Revolution, vol. 3, p. 392f. 29. Quoted from Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome, p. 226. 30. See Rocco Pezzimenti, Il marxismo asiatico (Milan: SugarCo, 1984). 31. Stalin, “Dall’Oriente la luce,” in Opere complete, vol. 4 (Rome: Rinascita, 1951), p. 201. 32. Stalin, “Non dimenticare l’Oriente,” in Opere complete, vol. 4, p. 195. 33. Ibid., p. 195. 34. Dall’Oriente la luce, p. 206. 35. Lenin, “Meglio meno, ma meglio,” in Opere complete, vol. 33, pp. 457–458. 36. From the course held at the Academy of the Staff of the Red Army and published in London in 1922 under the pseudonym Pavlovitch, with the title Foundations of Imperialist Policy. 37. In light of Radek’s statement according to which “the West started with the Mensheviks” (quoted from E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution [London: Macmillan, 1950]) we can undoubtedly say that the Bolsheviks were aware of the anti-Western spirit of their revolution. In fact, Martov always claimed that socialism could not be “the denial of individual liberty and individualism but on the contrary its most noble incarnation” (quoted from Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 19). Lenin had an opposite opinion: in his view, the freedom of the moderns had to be eradicated from the Russian land. Therefore it should not come as a surprise that one of the ﬁrst acts of the Soviet regime was to “liquidate” the Menshevik party in which the Bolsheviks inevitably saw a kind of ﬁfth column of Western culture. 38. The formula is Samuel P. Huntington’s (Political Order in Changing Societies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968], p. 264). Still more misleading is Robert Daniels’s formula “totalitarian modernizing revolution” (The Nature of Communism [New York: Vintage Books, 1962], p. 178) given that totalitarianism and modernization are antithetic. Daniels acknowledged that the Bolshevik revolution was animated by a violently anti-West spirit that led to the creation of a new and more perfect form of Asian despotism. 39. So one is inevitably perplexed to read that there exists a “matrix of Modernity . . . common to historical capitalisms and communisms” ( Jacques Bidet, Teoria della Modernita` [Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992], p. 45). 40. See Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (New York: Lane, 1994). 41. See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 8. 42. See E. H. Norman’s classic, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State: Political and Economic Problems of the Meji Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). 43. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953). 44. E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). 45. See J. H. Boeke, “The Village Community in Collision with Capitalism,” in J.

The Cultural War between West and East

259

C. Davies, ed., When Men Revolt and Why (New York: The Free Press, 1971), p. 34 et seq. 46. See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Roger Bastide, Noi e gli altri (Milan: Jaca Book, 1990); Guy de Bosche`re, I due versanti della storia, vol. 1 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973). 47. See Ludovico Garruccio, L’industrializzazione fra nazionalismo e rivoluzione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1969), p. 54. 48. This generated the following paradox: so-called “proletarian revolutions” were carried out by uprooted peasants under the leadership of a minority of alienated intellectuals. 49. Jan Romein, The Asian Century: A History of Modern Nationalism in Asia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962). 50. From a strictly logical standpoint, the combination of “sociological determinism and political voluntarism” is unsustainable. However it conferred upon the Marxian doctrine an out-of-the-ordinary power of mobilization. In effect, nothing is more gratifying for a man who has made permanent revolution his Beruf than the idea that his cause is destined to triumph. Tom Bottomore quite correctly deﬁned Communism the “Calvinism of the XX century” (Elites and Society, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 1993]). 51. Robert Waelder, “Protest and Revolution against Western Societies,” in M. Kaplan, ed., The Revolution in World Politics (New York: Wiley, 1966), p. 8. 52. Ho Chi Minh, On Revolution (New York: The New American Library, 1968), p. 293. 53. Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 106. 54. Isaac Deutscher, The Unﬁnished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 55. See Edward Shils, “The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States,” in J. H. Kautsky, ed., Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Wiley, 1967), p. 205. 56. Karl Marx, “Teorie sul plusvalore” in Opere complete, vol. 36, p. 491. 57. Paul Baran, Il surplus e la teoria marxista dello sviluppo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970), p. 158. 58. On the mythological character of Third World sociology, see Luciano Pellicani, “La scoperta del modo di produzione asiatico,” in Le sorgenti della vita. 59. See Peter Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: Free Press, 1986). 60. Interestingly, just before he died Khomeyni wrote to Gorbachev asking him to acknowledge that only Islam could lead Eastern populations against the Great Western Devil, which indicates that the charismatic leader of Islamic fundamentalism was aware of the zealot inspiration of the Bolshevik revolution. Basically, that revolution was an “Asian reaction” against modernity and therefore a chapter in the cultural war between West and East that dominated the twentieth century and may well continue in the twenty-ﬁrst century (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996]). 61. “A study of the history of battles of liberation reveals that in general they were preceded by an increase in the number of cultural events that gradually took on a more

260

Revolutionary Apocalypse

concrete form in the more or less successful attempt to assert the cultural personality of the dominated population as an act of denial of the culture of the oppressor” (Amilcar Cabral, Cultura e guerriglia [Milan: Collettivo Editoriale, 1976], p. 67). 62. Luis Diez del Corral correctly deﬁned “Asianized” Marxism as a “tool of revenge” (El rapto de Europa [Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1974], p. 239). 63. See Carlos Rangel, Third World Ideal and Western Reality: Manufacturing Political Myth (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1986). 64. Irving Horowitz has remarked that Lenin internationalized the class war by turning it into a conﬂict between the “have and have not nations rather than the have and have-not classes” (Three Worlds of Development [London: Oxford University Press, 1972], p. 167). 65. Mao expressed better than any other revolutionary leader the aspiration of the “external proletariat” to escape from their humiliating situation with a colossal armed revolt against the West: “American imperialism is now under close siege from the people of the whole world . . . Peoples the world over join together to defeat the American aggressors and their grovellers. Peoples all over the world be daring, dare to ﬁght, defy difﬁculty and advance in waves. In this way the whole world will belong to the people and every kind of monster will be destroyed” (quoted from S. R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969]). 66. Francesco Alberoni, Movement and Institution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984,) p. 371. 67. Robert A. Scalapino, “Communism in Asia,” in Robert A. Scalapino, ed., The Communist Revolution in Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 7. 68. “Individualism [said Ho Chi Minh] places a big obstacle in the way of socialism. The victory of socialism cannot therefore be separated from success in the ﬁght to combat individualism” (“La moralita` rivoluzionaria,” in Il Calendario del Popolo, no. 377 (1976), p. 4764). 69. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p. 64. 70. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). 71. See Ge´rard Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World: Myths and Prospects (Haasocks: Harvester Press, 1977). 72. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: MacGibbon and Lee, 1965). 73. Nikolai Bukharin, Le vie della rivoluzione, p. 253. 74. Gino Germani, “Ideologie autoritarie e crisi di transizione,” in Luciano Pellicani, ed., Sociologia delle rivoluzioni, p. 346. Identical is the thesis of Pierre Birnbaum, “Individualisme, holisme et totalitarisme,” in Guy Hermet, ed., Totalitarismes (Paris: Economica, 1984), p. 119 et seq.

CHAPTER 13

The Annihilators of the World

1. For well over two centuries revolutionary gnosticism dominated the world arena, before the conquest of the Winter Palace, as expectation of the Great Event; after, as the Great Experiment. The declared purpose was to transform Russian society into one “immense fraternal community.”1 The “building of socialism” aroused extraordinary expectations. Nothing seemed able to stop the spectacular advance of communism. Nothing indicated its equally spectacular and sudden demise. For more than half a century the Soviet Union threatened the very existence of Western civilization, with its formidable military power from without and its devastating spiritual arms from within. Yet, it melted like snow in the sun, leaving a trail of material and moral ruin and monstrous bloodshed.2 Its initial goal had been a noble one: to end oppression and exploitation, introducing universal brotherhood. A greater contrast between promises and results is hard to imagine. Heterogeneous goals? The cruel irony of history? Social conditions not mature? Misinterpretation of the Holy Scriptures? Corruption of the original idea by petty human passions? Or could the inﬁnite horrors generated by the communist revolution wherever it triumphed have been implicit, at least potentially, in the doctrine itself? The fact that all the classics on revolutionary tradition stress that the only way to destroy the old world is to use violence and even mass terror would seem to indicate that the crimes committed by communist parties were the direct consequence of the doctrine. That the liberticide consequences of the spread of communism were predicted with amazing precision several decades before the Bolshevik October should also make us suspect that “the worm was in the fruit.”3

262

Revolutionary Apocalypse

In fact, the most amazing aspect of the historical experiment referred to as the “building of socialism” is its total sterility. As a movement, it created nothing, other than a dazzling mythology and a formidable “power technology.”4 After only a few decades, it simply dissolved, acknowledging before the whole world the folly of the principles that had governed it. Hence, it is into those principles that we must look for the determinants of what Brzezinski called the “great failure.”5 Taken literally, the communist idea requires eliminating trade among social actors. This is easier said than done, given that trade is essential to economic life. Indeed, John Stuart Mill suggested using the term “catalytics to refer to the discipline that studies the ways in which men produce, distribute and consume goods and services.”6 An economy without trade is a contradiction in terms: it is like saying “square circle.” Of course, trade does not create the material of wealth. As Jevons correctly stressed, it gives “utility to matter”7 and, above all, it shows the value of goods and makes it possible to make the necessary economic calculations. Trade is also a “physiological” practice. “Some of the so-called primitive economies are able to meet” the conditions envisaged by the model of a perfectly competitive market “better than our economic systems for which the theory was built.”8 According to Marcel Mauss, the economic market is a natural thing that “is present in every known society.”9 For Georg Simmel, man is “the animal that practises exchange.”10 For Marx, the market is a diabolical intrusion that is responsible for the disintegration of “original unity” and the “age of universal corruption.” Fundamentally, Marx’s whole work was an immense, fanatical attempt to prove, ﬁrst, that “in commercial society men lose their quality as men and this quality can only be re-discovered by suppressing trade”;11 second, that a planned system is much more productive than the anarchy and spontaneity of the market. Unfortunately, Marx never developed a positive theory to prove that a planned economy was better than a competitive economy, for the very simple but fundamental reason that such a theory is impossible. An economic system cannot exist without the market. Marx’s theory on the inevitable catastrophic collapse of capitalism was simply a way to avoid having to prove his theory. There probably was no alternative. Communism cannot be described using the lexicon of sociology because it is a “society with no social structure.”12 Like the Millennium of the Apocalypse fanatics, of which it is simply a different version,13 it can only be deﬁned in negative terms. Marx was aware of this from the start. As early as 1843, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, he wrote that rather than “dogmatically anticipating . . . ﬁnd the new world through criticism of the old world.” He felt authorized not to concern himself with the form the future city would be likely to take. “The astuteness of History” would see to that. Scientiﬁc socialists should concentrate on “an unbiased critique of everything that existed”14 and leave the utopians the task of fantasizing about the institutions of terrestrial Jerusalem. The communist

The Annihilators of the World

263

alternative was “immunized” by Marx when he stated that whoever drew up a program was, eo ipso, a reactionary.15 The objective of this very successful strategy was obviously to keep the communist ideal out of the “tribunal of reason.” By the time Marxism had gained ideological hegemony over the entire European workers’ movement, all socialists were convinced of the superiority of the planned economy, although they had not a single positive reason to support this conviction.16 When asked “what was meant by socialism, in the best of cases the answer was a description of capitalism, and the remark that socialism would eliminate capitalism by socialising the means of production. All the emphasis was on the negative aspect, namely that capitalism had to be eliminated; even the expression, socialisation of means of production, essentially means denial of private ownership of the means of production.”17 Despite this, every Marxist alive was convinced of the validity of the scientiﬁc doctrine underlying social democracy and that a planned economy was “necessary because of the incumbent bankruptcy of the production of goods.”18 The Bolsheviks had one idea in their head when they took over the city of command: the only way to build a socialist society was to shatter the ediﬁce of capitalism stone by stone. All we knew [Lenin admitted in May 1918] and this we learned from those who were best informed about capitalist society, from the best minds that had anticipated its development, was that the transformation was historically inevitable, that it would follow a master plan, that capitalism would crumble and the exploiters would be expropriated. This had been established with scientiﬁc precision. And we knew this when we took the banner of socialism in our hands, when we declared ourselves socialists, when we founded the socialist parties, when we started to transform society. We knew it, when we took over power in preparation for the socialist re-organisation. But what we could not know was the form that the socialist transformation would take . . . Of all the socialists who have written about this, I remember not a single work or phrase of a famous socialist regarding the future socialist society, that refers to the practical, concrete difﬁculty that the workers’ class will have to face after taking power.19

If words mean anything, Lenin was practically confessing that the revolution he had in mind was a revolution “in the dark,”20 a revolution that had no idea whatsoever on how the economy of Russian society was to be organized. Its only certainty was an iron will to accomplish “the destruction of everything that was old, the implacable annihilation of all forms of capitalism.”21 Nor could it have been otherwise. Marx’s deﬁnitions of communism—“real circulation that abolishes the present state of things,”22 “the abolition of private property,”23 “denial of denial”24—did not go beyond stressing that it would end the rule of capital. Branko Hovat has quite rightly deﬁned Marxism “a [critical] theory of capitalism and of its destruction, not a theory of socialism.”25 By nature, communism therefore is an antithesis, a negation, a refusal, a cry against the existing.26 It can only express itself with the language of criti-

264

Revolutionary Apocalypse

cism.27 When it tries to outline the type of social organization it intends to build on the ruins of the civilization of the “haves,” it simply lists the evils that will disappear from the face of planet earth once the cyclopic task of the revolution has been completed. In the course on Marxism organized for the militants of the French communist party, communist society is described in these terms: “It is undoubtedly hard to give a complete representation of what the new society will be like, but one thing is certain. In the new society, in the Communist society, there will be no police. There will no longer be prisoners. Of course there will be no churches. There will no army. There will be no form of prostitution, there will be no criminals . . . Every idea of constraint will disappear. Men will have the sensation of having ridded, freed, themselves of what once constituted their slavery. They will be completely new men.”28 The ultimate goal of revolution is a transﬁgured reality that transcends all predications. The inhabitants of the “world of alienation” have no words for describing it. “Everything that belongs to the old aeon must be dissolved, . . . of the functioning of the future society we cannot talk, except in terms of denial.”29 Being simply a different term for indicating the “totally Other,” communism is forced to deﬁne itself with formulas that are typical of negative theology. In this it is identical to anarchy, but with one fundamental difference: the creation of an all-powerful state is indispensable to sweep away the old world. 2. An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since the total destruction of civil society is the only way to destroy capitalism. By civil society we mean the “society of industry, of general competition, of freely pursued private interest, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality alienated from self.”30 But since capitalism—Lenin’s deﬁnition is correct—is a phenomenon that is generated spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes its watch,31 the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be permanent. It is a matter of annihilation that requires mass terror, since the main enemy of communism is “widespread petit bourgeois spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolutionary project challenges the normal course of history.”32 It is a huge effort to prevent humanity from moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society. This is only achieved through permanent terror. Lenin insisted on having the principle of terror included in the Soviet penal code because he knew that it would impossible to eliminate something as natural and spontaneous as trade without it. But to eliminate trade—this can never be stressed too much—means to annihilate the economy. This explains the presence in the history of communist countries of a typical phenomenon, brilliantly analyzed by Alain Besanc¸on:33 ﬂuctuation between the war model of communism and the NEP model. The latter comes into being whenever the ideological power is forced to loosen its hold, in order to avoid the total paralysis of production. Private

The Annihilators of the World

265

initiative is allowed to revive to a certain limited degree, while civil society remains ﬁrmly enclosed in the “iron cage” of the bureaucratic-totalitarian state.34 An authentic curse dominated the existence of communism in power. Whenever it was absolutely loyal to its principles, production collapsed catastrophically. The many famines—in 1918 and 1930 in the Soviet Union, in 1959 and 1967 in China, in 1977 in Cambodia, just to mention the worst— were generated not by natural calamities or negative economic cycles, but by the ruthless determination of communists to achieve the objective of scientiﬁc socialism: the annihilation of the market. Added to this, capitalism will reemerge to infect humanity with its moral miasma, if even the remotest corner of the globe somehow manages to avoid the totalitarian rule of the conscious avant-garde of the global proletariat. Both Marx and Engels tirelessly proclaimed that to achieve its historical mission, the communist revolution had to be of planetary dimensions.35 A communist revolution in one country only is a contradiction in terms. It is but one step of the historical process whose ﬁnal objective is to eliminate capitalism from the face of the earth. This explains why Lenin conceived revolution as a planetary war between the army of imperialism and the army of socialism, a war that would end only once every trace of the “sordid, hateful, spasmodic desire for the purse”36 had been eliminated and men had got rid of “old Adam.”37 So, as long as, and to the extent to which, a communist regime remains faithful to its principles, it must inevitably conduct a dual war of annihilation: one against internal capitalism that tends, like the Arabian phoenix, to arise anew on its ashes; the other against external capitalism by which it is besieged. And it is for this reason too that the communist revolution must aspire to planetary rule: its mission—“to purify the earth from all exploitation, violence and slavery”38—forces it to bend “the entire terrestrial sphere to the power of the Unique State.”39 This is a war that communism cannot win without destroying itself. To annihilate capitalism means to annihilate the “real economy,” substituting it with an “imaginary economy.” In fact, all the Marxist-Leninist parties in power— with the exception of Pol Pot’s Angkor—were forced to tolerate some degree of capitalism in the form of a parallel and/or hidden economy. This prevented production from collapsing completely but also produced schizophrenic regimes condemned to live by what they denied, to feed off goods and services produced by their “predestined victim”: the market.40 Hence, in a Communist regime the people are like guinea pigs. By virtue of the superior consciousness they owe to their having been enlightened by the “great science of victory,”41 those in power feel entitled to conduct their experiment: to regenerate human nature by methodically liberating it from every vestige of tradition, including the “spectre of religion.”42 The partygnosis will exercise its inquisitorial control over society until the process of

266

Revolutionary Apocalypse

regeneration is complete. In this way the spontaneous tendencies of society that are all negative will not develop. If the party-gnosis were to leave too much space to spontaneity, hunger for money would inevitably raise its head, and that is precisely what the communist revolution wants to eradicate from the human soul.43 Extra moenia there is an imperialistic capitalist system that is one gigantic hotbed of ideological infection. Hence, the imperative for every communist party in power to raise an insuperable protective barrier to avoid contamination. An open communist society is inconceivable. Either it is an hermetically sealed militarized convent or it risks being invaded by spiritual forces—the so-called “bourgeois ideas”—that are incompatible with its fundamental project, which is to eliminate everything personal.44 From this derives another typical trait of communist regimes: power is concentrated in the hands of a small minority that, unlike the unskilled masses and the vast majority of militants, knows the secrets of the doctrine. These regimes cannot function without institutionalizing a system of “dual truth”: an esoteric dogmatic truth that knows no revisionism and is in the custody of a group of experts in interpreting the Holy Scriptures; and an exoteric realistic truth that makes numerous concessions to the bourgeois world. The function of the latter is of course purely strategic. Its main purpose is to cheat the enemy, but also the people. If the masses were to be aware of the immense cost of the undertaking, they would be reluctant to make the sacriﬁce. So the following situation comes into being: the majority of those who declare they are communists, or in any event somehow support the ﬁght against capitalism, are intentionally kept in the dark as to the long-term objectives of the revolution. In other words, they are cheated. On the other hand, how else could the custodians of the revolutionary temple eradicate all spontaneity from the minds of men? 3. The reasons for the total sterility of the Marxist-Leninist experiment are more than evident. Given that its objective was the implacable annihilation of every form of spontaneity, communism was forced to institutionalize a rigorous state monopoly of enterprise and exercise an oppressive political-ideological control. The combination of the two inevitably sterilized every source of creativity.45 Since the economy and the market go hand in hand, the obvious conclusion is that, taken literally, the communist project destroys the conditions for the production and reproduction of material life and eventually destroys itself. This is more than corroborated by the outcome of the Cambodian Revolution, which has been wrongly interpreted as an expression of homicidal folly. The atrocious genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge would be incomprehensible, if we did not know that, during their sojourn in Paris, the leaders of the Angkor—typical proletarianized intellectuals—had been schooled by the masters of Western Marxism. They had been told that the only way to create a communist society was “to extirpate alienation by attacking the mar-

The Annihilators of the World

267

ket.”46 Convinced, therefore, that the only way to eliminate evil was to make a clean slate of the bourgeois world, as soon as they took possession of power, they abolished private property, trade, and currency and introduced a regime based on the idea that rigorous economic equality could only be achieved by predetermining needs ideologically. Other communist countries had already attempted this experiment, but unsuccessfully. The black market had always found a way around the so-called “dictatorship over needs.” Something more radical had to be invented to make the collectivistic utopia and reality coincide. The Angkor decided that one solution would be to distribute cooked rice so that the population would no longer need to trade or store it. They also decided to end the division of labor by deporting the urban population to the countryside. The result was that the whole system of production collapsed and the Cambodians suffered an atrocious famine. The dire consequences of this “naturalization” of the economy were not a matter that overly concerned the Khmer Rouge. The “fanatical . . . followers of the Maoist theories of integral communisation”47 were convinced this was the price to pay for a classless society. Their strategy to accelerate the “crossing of the desert” was based on the following theorem: “If you want to pull up the weeds, then you must pull up the roots of those weeds in order to purify the people.”48 They split the population into two large groups: the bourgeoisie (to be exterminated because they were corrupt and corrupting) and the masses (to be regenerated). Regeneration meant imprisonment in “correction camps” until every “bourgeois prejudice” and “religious illusion” had been eliminated.49 In the end, the “patient industry of death”50 established by the Khmer Rouge led to a veritable autogenocide. It would probably have culminated with the total extinction of the Cambodian people, had the Vietnamese not decided to bring the atrocious experiment to an end, forcing Pol Pot and his fanatical followers to seek refuge in the jungle. Given that the experiment in Cambodia was “the logical development of the Soviet model, a re-thinking of that model and its ruthless implementation down to the last detail,”51 it seems legitimate to presume that the genetic code of revolutionary gnosticism contains a powerful drive toward destruction and self-destruction. Of course, the declared objective is to create a New World, but it is also the apokatastis panton—the regeneration of all—that means the annihilation of “the old and putrid global regime.”52 Not one of the customs, values, ideas, institutions, and practices was to be spared. Total regeneration requires razing everything to the ground before embarking on the process of innovation. “War on the bourgeois models! War on ideologically putrid production! Revolutionary masses, repudiate the customs of the classes dedicated to exploitation!”:53 these words seen in a shop window summarize the objectives of the great proletarian cultural revolution: to make a clean slate of tradition and create a “white page”54 on which to draw the “totally Other.” Nothing is

268

Revolutionary Apocalypse

to be spared: “everything was destroyed . . . Libraries public and private, works of history, geography, literature, philosophy, science, art . . . Everything was set on ﬁre. In every region, in every district, province, city, level and unit: schools, barracks, hospitals, everywhere. For centuries and even millennia, libraries had been the historical heritage of the ancient [Chinese] civilisation, containing priceless treasures of culture and art . . . the fury of the Red Guards spared nothing.”55 Maoist ideology had taught the young activists of the Chinese Communist Party “to consider the past negative and responsible for the problems and underdevelopment of China.”56 If the symbols of the old world were razed to the ground,57 a radiant future would be assured, as if by magic. On the other hand, when the Red Guard embarked on the frantic policy to demolish the “four ‘olds’”—old ideas, old culture, old traditions, old habits58—they were simply applying what they had learned from European revolutionary tradition. Saint-Etienne ﬁrst declared the destructive nature of the gnostic program during the French Revolution: “Tout de´truire, pour tout refaire a neuf.”59 A few years later, Babeuf explained the need for a “tabula rasa” policy: “Evil has reached its peak; it can get no worse; there is no remedy other than total subversion! May everything be turned upside down then! May all the elements be entangled, mixed up, in conﬂict! May everything be part of chaos and a new and regenerated world come forth from that chaos!”60 Generations and generations of revolutionaries were to follow this advice, in the blind belief that there was no other way to end “the want, squalor, pain and shame of a miserable existence”61 than “terrible, complete, general, ruthless destruction”;62 that there was “one science only, the science of destruction”;63 it did not ask what form future society might be expected to take64 but simply sought the most suitable means for “overturning from top to bottom” the old world “that had become impotent and sterile,”65 urging for “civilisation to be placed under iron and blood.”66 The slogans they shouted were: “Hurrah for chaos and destruction! Hurrah for death, and may the future assert itself.”67 A new divinity—the god of revolution, possessed by what Hegel called the “fury of disappearing”68—had emerged on the European arena: I will destroy the existing order of things that splits humanity, which is one, into people who are enemies, into the strong and the weak, into men with all the rights and men with no rights, into rich and poor, because this only makes everyone unhappy. I want to destroy the order of things which renders millions of men slaves of the few and those few, slaves of their very own power, their very own wealth. I will destroy the order of things that separates pleasure from work, that makes work a burden, pleasure a vice; that makes men unhappy because they are deprived, and unhappy because they have too much. I will destroy this order because it devours the strength of men at the service of the rule of the dead, of inanimate matter. I want to annihilate the very memory thereof, destroy every trace of this monstrous order composed of force, lies, worries, hypocrisy, need, sufferance, pain, tears, dupery and crime. At times, it issues a gust of stinking air but almost never a ray of authentic joy. May everything that

The Annihilators of the World

269

oppresses you and makes you suffer be destroyed, and from the ruins of this old world arise a new world of undreamt happiness. No more hatred, envy, disgust or rivalry. You who live on this earth must recognise each other as brothers and be free . . . On your feet! Follow my footsteps in the crowd, because I make no difference among those who follow me. From now on there are only two people: those who follow me and those who hinder me. I will lead the former to happiness, the latter I will tread upon and squash because I am the revolution, I am life that creates in eternity, I am the one God that all beings recognise, that embraces everything that exists, that gives life and happiness.69

Despite their claim to have transformed socialism “from utopia to science,” Marx and Engels’s revolutionary program was negative: to annihilate the civilization of the “haves,” declaring the “last holy war.”70 We know from the founding fathers of scientiﬁc socialism that two parties at war faced each other on the world arena: the “conservative party” and the “destructive party.”71 They were mortal enemies. The unnatural division of alienated humanity will only be transcended in a new superior unity—“harmonious society”—once the entire ediﬁce of liberal civilization (with the exception of productive forces) has been razed to the ground. With the explosion of the communist revolution, “a general ﬁre will burn down the old institutions”72 and make “a clean slate of the old spectral world.”73 The meaning is clear. Communism cannot accomplish its historical mission—the total liberation of humanity—without annihilating in Europe a cultural condition that has been irremediably contaminated by “bourgeois infection.” The password of permanent revolution is “repudiate the past and look solely at the future.”74 “Being the most radical break with traditional property relations” it is inevitable that it should also be “the most radical break with traditional ideas.”75 Marx and Engels’s program is therefore not that different from the program of those they scornfully referred to as the “alchemists of revolution”: It is a pantoclastic program with no conception as to the form of the future city, other than the conviction that it is necessary “to start from zero,”76 to the extent that, although stressing his absolute trust in the “rationality of the real,” Engels adopted the nihilist theorem placed by Goethe on the lips of Mephistopheles: “Everything that exists is worthy of perishing.”77 This is like saying that the “fury of disappearing” is something that concerns everyone and thing, since it is history that ensures that the destruction of the old world is the antichamber of the “millenarian Kingdom of liberty.”78 The function of “historical providentialism” is clearly to endow a nihilistic program with at least a semblance of scientiﬁcity. The idea of “making a clean slate so that society can be radically re-generated”79 is based on the crazy assumption that by exploiting his power of destruction man can recreate the totality of his being. Essentially, this is a sophisticated rationalization elaborated on the basis of a futuristic and activistic interpretation of Hegel’s the-

270

Revolutionary Apocalypse

odicy of pathos, dominated by a horror of the existing80 that is perceived as the kingdom of general corruption and therefore as “an abominable thing” that must be “substituted with something new.”81 This conﬁrms the theory that, even when it claims to be scientiﬁc, revolutionism is the last manifestation of Judeo-Christian millenarianism, hybridized with Manichean gnosticism: two religious traditions animated by faith in the regenerating capacity of total denial, which have produced legions of “Apocalypse fanatics” over the centuries. “Everything is about to collapse! We are on the verge! Let us increase the chaos! Let us exasperate contradictions and suffering! Let us destroy everything. This will speed up the catastrophe that precedes the Event!”82 4. From the enthusiasm of the response to the “science of destruction,” it is evident that this “science” must have answered a profound existential need. Otherwise the history of revolutionary gnosticism would be inexplicable. In analyzing the spirit of revolutionary gnosticism, one is immediately struck by its passionate hatred of the bourgeois world.83 For whoever has made revolution his calling, the bourgeois world is intrinsically evil; worse, perverse.84 In Marx, in particular, it has all the features that Rene´ Gue´non attributes to the anti-Christ:85 it is the kingdom of contradiction, of evil powers that prevent humanity from returning to its “original unity.” It is “a Moloch that claims the whole world as its rightful victim”86 and wants “to make the wheel of history turn backwards.”87 Despite its formidable power, capitalism is so close to disintegration that it is as if it has already been annihilated. Its destiny is marked, for it “carries its death within it.”88 Its great historical function was to create a method for increasing production so that humanity could be released from its dependence on nature. Unfortunately, capitalism was also responsible for unleashing the acquisitive spirit, whereby “money has deﬁled all the Gods of man and turned them into goods.”89 That is the capital sin of bourgeois civilization: to have deconsecrated the world and turned it into one big market, where every physical and moral thing is but a good among goods. In effect, the “silent revolution” of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie did something far more radical and dramatic than substituting the static feudal form of production with a self-propulsive one. It privileged the utilitarian and rational spirit and by so doing profaned everything. The sacred dimension of existence became impossible. The inﬁnite capacity to manipulate things using science and technology and the equally inﬁnite capacity to produce goods converted the world into a “system of objects”90 deserted by the gods and by everything that gives meaning to life. The revolutionary rebels against such a process. His aim is “to straighten a reality turned upside down by the bourgeoisie”;91 the declared objective is to restore the sacred by creating a “new immanent and non-transcendent religiousness of the human community and of history.”92 He hates bourgeois society not only, or not so much, because it is selﬁsh and degrades workers,

The Annihilators of the World

271

who become mere goods among goods, but also, and especially, because it has killed all hope in the “totally Other.”93 The revolutionary wants to annihilate the existing, because he has an ardent desire to transcend his own impotence and contingency. He is mobilized against the bourgeois world and its (dis)values by that need for the inﬁnite, which Feuerbach considered to be the source of the religious spirit.94 There is no surprise then that “the revolutionary impulse comes into being precisely when religions fail to satisfy man’s need for the inﬁnite. Prior to this, the speciﬁc need that generates revolutions—the need to be God and not simply to be his ally in order to receive grace—was expressed in an anti-religious spirit perhaps, but always in the context of religion itself. If man was not satisﬁed with the idea of God as his Saviour, he could deny the existence of God, but this is still a form of religion. . . . In recent centuries, we have instead abandoned heretical religiousness for a revolutionary spirit. Religiousness is no longer the centre of man; to entrust one’s self to another hope becomes inevitable.”95 This other hope is “hope in revolution,” hope in the self-redemption of humanity. This hope can only become reality if the “world is puriﬁed, re-created”96 and humanity is able to reshape being so that it corresponds to the principle of pleasure. In fact, this is the revolutionary’s metaphysical challenge to the world: “We will reach everything! We will dominate everything! We will rebuild every thing!”97 Trotsky’s words reveal an insatiable libido dominandi and express all the hubris of the communist revolution and its ambition to transﬁgure reality, through a catabolic change that spares nothing. In Greek tradition, hubris is the excessive arrogance of man in the face of the gods, the desire to be as and more than the gods, the refusal of man’s ﬁniteness. On the basis of Sartre’s well-known theory that “man is fundamentally the desire to be God,”98 hubris is inevitably a natural and constant temptation. Probably the most radical and decisive experience that man has in the course of his life is the discovery that he is limited, dependent, impotent. This is particularly painful because “the very fact of comprehending the external world or parts of that world in self makes the ego start to feel omnipotent.”99 As soon as humanity perceives his dependence on reality, he experiences an intense need for psychological compensation. This might be some kind of fantastic reality where the painful existential experiences, ﬁrst and foremost death, that so humiliate the original narcissism of the ego, are not possible. So “in man the postulatory conscience of his own relativity is inseparable from the postulatory conscience of the Absolute. In him is therefore generated a strong and equivocal desire to be precisely what he is not: the Absolute, to participate in this other superior reality, to be able to bring that reality back to his limited and needy reality, to make omnipotence part of his native impotence.”100 In other words, man feels that he is impotent and at the mercy of a hostile and ungratifying world. He is condemned to live an insensate life and destined to be the food of time. For this precise reason, at the very moment in which

272

Revolutionary Apocalypse

“he feels a profound disgust for his existence and . . . for the conditions that accompany it,”101 he aspires with all his might to live in a transﬁgured world. This is the existential source of all religions of salvation and all metaphysical needs.102 It is also the source of the revolutionary spirit and of its demiurgic project to reshape the totality of being. In other words: the objective of revolution is the divinization of humanity. 5. That the “secret passion” of the revolutionary is a measureless “hubristic” desire of self-divinization is more than evident in the poems written by Marx between 1836 and 1839. For example, the amazing: I want to build myself a throne, cold and immense will be its covering its bastion, superhuman trembling, dark sorrow, its master. Whoever with healthy eye looks up will return mortally pale and silent, caught by the blind breath of cruel death happiness will dig its own grave. I would destroy the whole world by force because I myself cannot create. If a god has taken all from me made me cursed, under the yoke of destiny I give up his world—everything—everything! All that is left me is revenge, yes that I have I shall revenge myself with pride. I seek revenge against that Being on high may my strength be patched up weakness even my own good without reward103

Psychoanalysts are familiar with this kind of language. The narcissistic desire for omnipotence is considered a symptom of egomania.104 Alfred Adler stressed that the sense of inferiority experienced by the individual when he realizes that the external world limits him on all sides and denies his original sense of omnipotence generates a “virile protest” that leads him to “identify with God,105 in order to gain “supercompensation”106 for the painful wound inﬂicted upon his ego. This is the start of an interminable battle between narcissism and reality in which the hypertrophic ego creates the defense mechanisms, notably “domination, triumph, scorn”107 that such personalities develop to offset an intolerable dependence. Thus, they unleash “the desire to control the object, the sadistic satisfaction of beating it, of getting the better of it and of triumphing . . . over it.”108 Such desires are often too intimate and personal to confess, not only publicly but even to the individual himself. But Marx’s desire to be God is un-

The Annihilators of the World

273

containable.109 In the Quaderni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa epicurea, he could not help formulating this aphorism: “Upon he who has not the pleasure of reconstructing the whole world with his own means, of being the creator of the world, but prefers to eternally turn over in his own skin, upon he the spirit has pronounced his anathema.”110 The “secret passion” of whoever has made permanent revolution his calling is to be the “king of the world,”111 to be able to recreate it from its foundations. The reactionary De Maistre112 and, most signiﬁcantly, also the revolutionary Bakunin both declared such a passion to be “diabolical.” The latter even declared that the symbol of the revolution was “Satan, the eternal rebel, the ﬁrst free thinker and emancipator of the worlds, who makes man ashamed of his animal-like ignorance and obedience, and emancipates him, driving him to disobey and eat the fruit of science.”113 In Christian tradition, Satan is the angel who refuses his own existential condition and turns against God, aspiring to take his place. His pride and desire for power are immense. Creative acts fail to satisfy that desire and are transformed into a desire for destruction and self-destruction.114 This is exactly what Marx cries in his youthful tragedy, Oulanem: Oh! I must be part of the ﬂaming wheel, to dance in the circle of pleasure of eternity! If there were something outside that could swallow me I would jump in, were I to shatter the world that stands between me and that! Explode it would, for the huge curse. My arms I would put around the hard Being and embracing me it would be silent and vanish and then, down, into nothingness totally down, not to be, that would be life.115

We know that in psychoanalysis, the theory of inversion suggests we should look for subconscious desires behind declared objectives. What Marx is saying with a crudeness that is almost offensive is this: if the world refuses to be reshaped by the demiurgic will of Marx, then it might as well sink into nothingness. Oulanem preannounces the immense tragedy of communism in power. It was a tragedy dominated by the desire of gnostic activists to build “the Kingdom of God on earth, but without and against God”;116 a desire to make reality adapt to their own personal ideological design, so that humanity will attain the happiness promised by religions of salvation. Such a project inevitably had a strong impact on people who had become the “wretches of the earth” and “God’s orphans” following the traumatic advance of modernization. On the basis of a diagnosis-therapy that it claims to be rigorously scientiﬁc, the gnostic revolutionaries promise the imminent materialization of a state of completeness and mystical absorption of the indi-

274

Revolutionary Apocalypse

vidual soul in the collective soul,117 which is known in psychoanalysis as Nirvana. It is described as the overcoming of the trauma of birth through a “return to the womb”:118 for the individual this means “to regain paradise lost . . . and identify with God.”119 Igor Shafarevich declares that, if it is true, as thousand of symptoms suggest, that Nirvana is the ultimate goal of communism, then it is legitimate to say that thanatos (death) is the driving spirit of revolution. What it really wants is the self-destruction of humanity.120 However, Shafarevich may have misunderstood the meaning of the revolutionary undertaking. He accepts the Freudian version of the principle of Nirvana, according to which it expresses “the tendency of the throb of death”121 and “the goal of every life is death.”122 This would seem a form of rationalization rather than a scientiﬁc theorem that offered “some comfort . . . and alleviated the fear of death,”123 which tormented Freud. The truth is that humanity has a horror of death and desperately seeks comfort from the unacceptable prospect of annihilation. Basically, religious doctrines and many philosophical doctrines are simply a desperate attempt to ﬁnd an answer to what for humanity is the problem of problems.124 Nirvana therefore is not the desire for death—that does not exist, at least not as an original desire125—but for the millenarian end of time. It “does not imply expectation of the end of being, the anguish of nothing; instead, end of time is man’s access to the real being and the end of all negativity; it is the death of death, the negation of non being.”126 In this case, it is logical that Marx’s apocalypse should present communism as the “negation of negation.” Every “image of paradise in the history of religions shows evidence of a dialectical negation or of a will to overturn.”127 In the religious conscience, paradise is always presented as an inversion of the profane, or as a paradise lost, due to the assault of the profane. Consequently, to restore the kingdom of the sacred means to overturn the existing. This is exactly what the communist revolution is: the overturning of the overturned world so that primordial reality—the great universal harmony that lives more or less intensely in all humans in the form of nostalgia for paradise lost—can return to the being.128 When that happens, the principle of reality will be abolished through the unio mystica of humanity with nature129 and life will be regulated exclusively by the principle of pleasure. There will no longer be contradictions, conﬂicts, anguish, fear, frustration. Above all, there will be none of the guilt that so oppresses humanity.130 Scientiﬁc socialism went so far as to deﬁne communism as “the level of development that renders all existing religions superﬂuous and abolishes them.”131 It does so by “Prometheically” bending being to desire, by eliminating the reasons that cause humans to aspire to live in another world. The new world that will come into being once the revolution “has left not one stone upon stone of the . . . inert and putrid daily life.”132 It will be what desire orders it to be, what it absolutely must be, if man is not to feel alienated, split apart, impotent, “in the way.”

The Annihilators of the World

275

From the ruins of the old world will come into being “a Superman”133 similar to God:134 “master of his destiny,”135 born of self, for self, ens causa sui. Once all this has come into being, the great truth revealed by Feuerbach will at last be visible: “Man is the god and the saviour of man.”136 On one point Shafarevich was undoubtedly right: Marx effectively expresses a violent desire for destruction and self-destruction. However, this is not an original desire for death, but a reaction against intolerable frustration. Not being able to have and be all—that is, not being able to be God—Marx is willing to be swallowed up by nothingness, dragging the world with him. His need for the absolute was so great that he thought of suicide. He changed his mind when the savior he invoked137 appeared to him as a revolutionary apocalypse and gave him the certainty that the painful odyssey of humanity would come to a providential end with the ﬁnal reconciliation between the individual and the species, between the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite. This self-constructed certitude satisﬁed his ego—his delirium of omnipotence—and his superego— his moral conscience—which required him to devote his life to the cause of those who were victims of the “have” civilization. His “egolatric” passion was sublimated and his sense of guilt appeased.138 Thus, Satan was transformed into the redeemer of a humanity degraded by mammon. In conclusion: the profound aspiration of revolutionary gnosticism is not death but life; rather, a super life that is in accordance with desire. But this aspiration requires a pantoclastic policy139 given that it is not possible to “reconstruct the whole world” without ﬁrst destroying everything that exists.140 The “inﬁnite immensity of the ends”141 of revolution requires the creation of a “situation in which there can be no going back,”142 razing to the ground anything—ideas, values, institutions, people—that willfully opposes the aspiration to modify the human condition ab imis fundamentis, bringing to the surface the one-all.143 Once the necrophilic144 drive has been unleashed, the end result is inevitably self-destruction. This can only be avoided if the absolute enemy of the revolutionary spirit, the principle of reality, enters the scene. At that point, the fury of destruction is somehow alleviated and all that is left is totalitarian rule as a surrogate of divine omnipotence and “the desperate simulation of paradise.”145

NOTES 1. Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p. 70. 2. See Stephane Courtois, ed., Le livre noir du communisme. 3. On the truly prophetical pages by Proudhon and Bakunin on the inevitable liberticide outcome of communism, see Luciano Pellicani, Miseria del marxismo, pp. 163–177 and 198–209. 4. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, La technologia del potere (Milan: La Casa di Matriona, 1980).

276

Revolutionary Apocalypse

5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1989). 6. John S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, Books 3–5, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and Buffalo: Routledge and Kegan Paul, University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 455. 7. Stanley Jevons, Economica Politica (Milan: Hoepli, 1880), p. 126. 8. H. K. Schneider, Economic Man: The Anthropology of Economy (New York: Free Press, 1974). 9. Marcel Mauss, “Essay on the Gift,” in A General Theory of Magic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). 10. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd enlarged ed. (London: Routledge, 1990). 11. Henri Dennis, L’e´conomie de Marx (Paris: PUF, 1980), p. 204. 12. Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 201. 13. See Ge´rard Walter, Les origines du communisme (Paris: Payot, 1975), and Roberto Gobbi, Figli dell’Apocalisse (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993). 14. Karl Marx, “Letters from ‘Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher,’” in Complete Works, vol. 3, p. 142. 15. The Manifesto actually does present a program set out in 10 separate points, but it has nothing to do with the ﬁnal goal of the revolution: it is a purely reformist program whose purpose is simply to disguise the embarrassing fact that communism is a “negative ideology” incapable by its very nature of formulating constructive ideas. 16. For example, whenever anyone asked Kautsky to elaborate on Marx’s policy of social reorganization, his answer was that “social democracy could make positive proposals only for the present society, not for the future society” (Il programma di Erfurt, p. 127). 17. Karl Korsch, Scritti politici, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 5–6. 18. Karl Kautsky, Il programma di Erfurt, p. 111. 19. Lenin, “Speech at First Congress of Economic Councils,” in Complete Works, vol. 27, pp. 410 and 412. 20. “On s’engage et puis on verra” were the revealing words used by Lenin to summarize his imminent undertaking. 21. Lenin, “Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets,” in Complete Works, vol. 26, p. 471. 22. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, L’ideologia tedesca, p. 34. 23. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 498. 24. Karl Marx, The Capital I, p. 751. 25. Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk: Sharpe, 1982), p. 124. 26. Things being thus, one can say that the function of student protest has been to reveal what Marxism had artfully hidden behind the theorems of economic science, namely the nihilistic character of total revolution, whose motto can only be: destroy all so that all can be regenerated. 27. That the only language Marxism is capable of using is the language of negation is conﬁrmed by the approach of the gnostic Paracletes of the School of Frankfurt: in their works we ﬁnd not one page of constructive criticism. So much for the principles of so-called “critical theory.” This led Thomas Mann to write a letter to Adorno

The Annihilators of the World

277

inviting him to formulate “at least one positive statement.” To no avail: Adorno revealed nothing on the nature of the “puriﬁed communism,” in the name of which he condemned the present. Kolakowski correctly observes that “it is hard to imagine a more convenient position. The negative dialectic announces ﬁrst that he cannot be criticised, from neither a logical or a factual point of view, as he has already stated that these criteria do not concern him; secondly, that he is intellectually and morally superior precisely because he does not respect these criteria; thirdly that the negation of these criteria is the essence of the negative dialectic. In other word it is simply a blank cheque, signed and turned by History, by the body, the Actor, the object, in favour of Adorno and his supporters; on this blank cheque you can what you like. Everything is valid” (Nascita, sviluppo e dissoluzione del marxismo, vol. 3, p. 328). 28. Quoted from Jean Servier, Histoire de l’utopie (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 300. 29. Augusto Del Noce, Lezioni sul marxismo (Milan: Giuffre`, 1972), p. 75. 30. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, p. 122. 31. “Communist morality . . . unites the working people against all exploitation, against all petty private property; for petty property puts into the hands of one person that which has been created by the labour of the whole of society. In our country the land is common property. But suppose I take a piece of this common property and grow on it twice as much grain as I need; and proﬁteer on the surplus? Suppose I argue that the more starving people there are, the more they will pay? Would I then be behaving like a Communist? No, I would be behaving like an exploiter, like a proprietor. That must be combated. If that is allowed to go on, things will revert to the rule of the capitalists, to the rule of the bourgeoisie” (Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Associations, vol. 31, pp. 293). 32. Jacques Ellul, Autopsie de la re´volution (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1969), p. 68. 33. Alain Besanc¸on, Pre´sent sovietique et passe´ russe, p. 195 et seq. 34. It is interesting to read Tiziano Terzani’s observations on the idea that the Chinese communists had of the relationship between State and market. “The basic concept, constantly repeated by the Communist leaders, is that the economy must remain socialist, while the private sector must move in the framework of national planning. It is like a bird—a top Peking economist told me—that is free to ﬂy, but only inside a cage” (Behind the Forbidden Door: Travels in China [London: Allen and Unwin, 1986]). 35. “Empirically, Communism is only possible as the action of peoples who dominate everybody at once and at the same time, which presupposes the universal development of the productive force and global relations that Communism itself implies . . . The proletariat can only exist on the level of universal history, just as Communism, which is its action, cannot exist other than as universal historical existence.” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, L’ideologia tedesca, p. 34). 36. Lenin, Fear of Collapse of the Old and Fight for the New, p. 402. 37. Ibid., p. 403. 38. Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets, p. 480. 39. Evgeny Zamiatin, Noi, p. 21. 40. Referring to the many experiments conducted by communist parties in power, Rene` Se´dillot speaks correctly of the “clandestine revenge of the market economy” (Storia dei socialismi, vol. 2 [Rome: Armando, 1977], p. 358). 41. Mikhail Suslov, Il Marxismo-Leninismo (Varese: Dall’ Oglio, 1976), p. 320. 42. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p. 98.

278

Revolutionary Apocalypse

43. On this point it is particularly enlightening to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Cuore di cane, in which the description of the grotesque efforts of Professor Preobrazhensky to “transform animals into men” is a violent satire of the claim of communism to achieve an alchemistic transformation of human nature. 44. Here reference should be made to the words used by Karl Heinzen, who was in direct contrast with Marx and Engels, to describe the inevitable liberticide consequences of the communist revolution: “Removing all private property from the individual, communism also eliminates individual existence. The consequence of this is again, perforce, the regimentation of every individual in a collective economy built possibly in the shape of a community. Thus communism destroys individuality, destroys independence, destroys liberty, while seeming to want to establish it (in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Moralismo e politica rivoluzionaria, pp. 42–43). 45. In one ﬁeld only did the Soviet system show any form of rationality and even creativity, in an effort to keep up with the United States: in the ﬁeld of military technology (see Fritjof Meyer, Il tramonto dell’Unione Sovietica [Milan: Longanesi, 1984]). 46. Roger Garoudy, Progetto Speranza (Assisi: Cittadella, 1976), p. 43. 47. Luciano Vasconi, Da Mao alla Tiananmen (Rome: EDIM, 1989), p. 163. 48. Quoted from S. Prasith in Panorama, 13 September 1977. 49. See Pin Yathay, L’utopie meurtrie`re. 50. Jacques Lacouture, Cambogia: i signori del terrore (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), p. 100. 51. Ferenc Fehe´r, “Cambogia: l’utopia omicida” in Mondoperaio, no. 3 (1983), p. 100. 52. Lenin, Third All-Russia Congress of the Soviets, p. 488. 53. Quoted from A. Zelokhovtsev, La Rivoluzione Culturale vista da un sovietico (Milan: Rusconi, 1971), p. 191. 54. Mao’s words. He never tired of repeating that the “revolution would change all,” including human nature (see R. H. Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971]). 55. The description of the destructive fury of the Red Guards of a Chinese intellectual to Bruno Neroni. Between 1968 and 1971 he was subjected “to a massive Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, extenuating interrogations, to humiliations, threat and torture” (Prigioniero di Mao [Rome: Il Borghese, 1973], p. 9). 56. Tiziano Terzani, Behind the Forbidden Door. 57. The symbols of the “old world” to be ruthlessly eliminated included also a good “35 million bad elements” as Mao indicated in 1967 (quoted from C. W. Cassinelli, Total Revolution [Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Books, 1985], p. 187) after boasting that he “had outdone Chin Shihuang a hundred times over” (quoted from Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978], p. 208). So it is not surprising that, in an interview with the journalist Oriana Fallaci, Teng Xiaoping should have implied that the Maoist revolution had made even more victims than Stalin’s revolution (see Luciano Vasconi, Da Mao a Tiananmen, pp. 148–149). 58. See J. K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800–1985 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 367f. 59. Quoted from Wilhelm Muhlmann, Messianismes re´volutionnaires du Tiers Monde, p. 299. Saint-Etienne was simply making more explicit the destructive nature of the revolutionary program that Robespierre had described as follows on May 7, 1794: “Everything has changed in the physical order: everything has to change in the

The Annihilators of the World

279

moral and political order.” So he, Carlyle, was absolutely right when he wrote that the revolution was the “black desperate battle of Men against their whole Condition and his Environment” dominated by the uncontainable desire to destroy “all that was destructible,” to annihilate the “Untruth of an Existence had become insupportable” (The French Revolution, vol. 3, Book 5 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 333f). 60. F. N. Babeuf, Il tribuno del popolo, p. 244. 61. Mikhail Bakunin, Dio e Lo Stato (Pistoia: RL, 1974), p. 32. 62. Sergei Nechaev, Catechism of the Revolutionist. 63. Ibid. 64. This aspect of revolutionism has been well summarized by Riccardo Bacchelli: “The scope, destruction; the method, terror; the programme, nihil. To give a deadline, a purpose and a statute to Revolution, is to betray it before starting” (Il diavolo a Pontelungo [Milan: Mondadori, 1965], p. 32). 65. Mikhail Bakunin, “Appello agli slavi,” in Carlo Doglio, Bakunin, una vita avventurosa (Milan: IEI, 1945), p. 121. In the same work Bakunin predicted that the “star of revolution” would rise “high and free over Moscow from a sea of blood and ﬁre” and would become the “polar star” that would guide the “liberation of humankind.” 66. E. Coeurderoy, Pour la re´volution (Champ Libre: Paris, 1977), p. 37. 67. Aleksandr Herzen, Dall’altra sponda, p. 98. 68. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., transl. J. B. Baillie (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), p. 604. 69. Richard Wagner, Scritti Scelti, p. 107. 70. “War on the German conditions! By all means! They are below the level of history, beneath any criticism, but they are still an object of criticism like the criminal who is below the level of humanity but still an object for the executioner. In the struggle against those conditions criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refuse but to exterminate.” (Karl Marx, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, p. 177.) 71. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, p. 36. 72. Friedrich Engels, “Lettera dalla Germania,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 16. 73. Karl Marx, Il diciotto Brumaio di Luigi Bonaparte, p. 115. 74. Friedrich Engels, Il discorso di Louis Blanc a Digione, p. 430. 75. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 504. 76. Augusto Del Noce, L’epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffre`, 1970), p. 52. 77. Friedrich Engels, “Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Complete Works, vol. 21, p. 359. 78. Friedrich Engels, “Schelling and Revelation,” in Complete Works, p. 239. 79. Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1984). 80. In this regard the words of the terrorist Bommi Maumann are particularly enlightening: “To us life seems senseless, boring, empty, inhuman. We try somehow to escape, to experience sensations of happiness, tenderness, of being together, that this bourgeois society denies us. The prospect of having to live and work for ever more in these conditions seems so horrible that we remove ourselves from it, we abandon ourselves to drugs and enter a state of apathy, without worrying about anything. But we soon realise that, even there, the system won’t leave us alone . . . this ﬁlthy, shitty society has managed to arrange everything so that every individual is forced either to integrate or to die in the sewers. Here [in prison] I see the victims of this repression

280

Revolutionary Apocalypse

every day and, through their history, I understand the history of capitalism” (quoted from Enrico Bernard, Il privato terrorista [Rome: EA, 1988], p. 61). 81. Gyorgy Lukacs, L’uomo e la rivoluzione (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), p. 67. 82. Elemire Zolla, Che cos’e` la tradizione (Milan: Bompiani, 1971), p. 207. 83. Sartre’s statement is typical: “In the name of the principles that it has driven into me in the name of humanism and humanists, in the name of liberty, of equality and fraternity, I have consecrated a hatred for the bourgeoisie that will only die when I die.” 84. “Small or big, the proprietor is marked in his essence . . . [For this], revolution is useful as an agent of destruction; even if it were bad, there is one aspect that will always redeem it: it alone knows what sort of terror to use to shake the world of proprietors, the most atrocious of all possible worlds” (E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia [London: Quartet, 1991]). 85. Rene´ Gue´non, Le regne de la quantite´, pp. 265–267. 86. Karl Marx, “Teorie del plusvalore,” in Opere complete, vol. 36, p. 491. 87. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 494. 88. J. P. Sartre, Les communistes et la paix, op. cit., p. 92. 89. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 172. 90. “To desacralise an object means to limit one’s self to understanding it in its utilitarian and rational dimension and that is precisely to not to see it as anything other than an object” (Alain de Benoist, L’eclisee del sacro [Rome: Edizioni Settecolori, 1992], p. 146). 91. L. Rozitchner, Morale borghese e rivoluzione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), p. 94. 92. Lucien Goldmann, L’illuminismo e la societa moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. 95. 93. “Destroyer of eternity [remarked Berdiaev], the bourgeois spirit is the opposite of the Absolute” (quoted from Andre´ Ste´phane, L’univers contestationnaire [Paris: Payot, 1969], p. 101). Even more drastic is Baudelaire’s thesis, later adopted by Nietzsche: “By its essence, trade is satanic” (The Will to Power). 94. “Man wants to be, to be happy, independent, unlimited, omnipotent; he wants, in a word, to be God” (Ludwig Feuerbach, L’essenza della religione [Turin: Einaudi, 1982], p. 90). 95. Vittorio Mathieu, La speranza nella rivoluzione, p. 189. 96. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Religione e socialismo, p. 121. 97. Lev Trotsky, Letteratura, arte, liberta`, p. 198. 98. J. P. Sartre, L’eˆtre et le ne´ant, p. 653. 99. Otto Fenichel, Trattato di psicanalisi (Rome: Astrolabio, 1951), p. 51. 100. Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, “Maschere,” in Meditazioni del Chisciotte (Naples: Guida, 1986), p. 188. 101. Ludwig Feuerbach, La morte e l’immortalita` (Trento: Melita, 1990), p. 17. 102. See J. J. Wunenburger, Le sacre´ (Paris: PUF, 1981). 103. Karl Marx, “Poesie e saggi letterari giovanili,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 581 and p. 620. The young Bakunin was devoured by the same delirium: “My destination is God. Great storms and thunder, move land, I fear you not, I despise you because I am a man! My invincible and proud will serenely make its way through your tremors to reach its supreme predestination! I am a man and I will be God!” (Quoted from Vittorio Strada, “Introduzione” to Aleksandr Herzen, A un vecchio compagno, p. LII).

The Annihilators of the World

281

104. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 38 et pass. 105. Alfred Adler, Il temperamento nervoso (Rome: Newton Compton, 1971), p. 65. 106. Alfred Adler, Conoscenza dell’uomo (Milan: Mondadori, 1954), p. 74. 107. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth Press, 1952). 108. Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis: 1921–1945 (London: Hogarth, 1950), p. 318. 109. The same applies to Bakunin. In a letter to his sisters he confesses, “I suffer because I am a man and I wish to be God” (quoted from E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin [New York: Octagon Books, 1975]). Like Marx, Bakunin found a solution to his existential problems when he saw revolution as a “sacred and priest-like mission” aimed at the “total transformation of the structure of the world” and the creation of an “essentially new, hitherto unknown life” (La reazione in Germania [Ivrea: Altamurgia, 1972], p. 34). Declared objective: “the man-God, that we must all be.” 110. Karl Marx, “Quaderni sulla ﬁlosoﬁa epicurea,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 501. 111. Saint-Just expressed himself thus in a youthful essay in which he imagined himself as universal executioner (quoted from Mario Mazzucchelli, Saint-Just [Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1980], p. 46). 112. De Maistre was notably the ﬁrst to underline the satanic nature of the revolution, imagining a conversation between God and the revolutionary activists in which the latter declared the following resolution: “Everything that exists displeases us because your name is written on everything that exists. We want to destroy everything and re-make everything without you” (Saggio sul principio generatore delle costituzioni politiche e delle istituzioni umane [Milano: Il Falco, 1982], p. 92). 113. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State. Bakunin was very inﬂuenced by George Sand’s novel Consuelo in which Satan was introduced as the “archangel of legitimate revolt.” But, before him, William Blake had already exalted Satan as a prodigious “redeeming force” in The book of Urizen. 114. See AA. VV., Satan (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 1978) and Giovanni Papini, Il diavolo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1953). 115. Karl Marx, “Oulanem,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 659. Bakunin was possessed by an identical devil: “I no longer belong to myself, the genius of destruction has taken possession of me” (quoted from A. Reszler, Mythes politiques modernes [Paris: PUF, 1981], p. 41). No less revealing of the destructive nature of the “revolutionary passion” are the words noted by Moses Hess after his meeting with Engels in Cologne: “He left me transformed in a supermilitant communist. This is how I cause havoc!” (Quoted from Richard Wurmbrand, Mio caro diavolo [Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1979], p. 52.) 116. Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971), p. 26. 117. “Once everything is one [says Woland, the satanic character of Il Maestro e la margherita by Mikhail Bulgakov] everything will be fair”; more precisely, there will be no problem of justice. So John Rawls was right, when he deﬁned Marx’s kingdom of liberty as “a society beyond justice” (A Theory of Justice [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], p. 281). 118. Otto Rank, Il trauma della nascita (Bologna: Guaraldi, 1972), p. 79. 119. Bela Grunberger, Il narcisismo (Bari: Laterza, 1977), p. 25. 120. Igor Shafarevich, “Le phe´nome`ne socialiste,” p. 324 et seq. and “Passato e avvenire del socialismo” in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Voci da sotto le macerie (Milan:

282

Revolutionary Apocalypse

Mondadori, 1981), p. 69 et seq. It may not be superﬂuous to remember that in a note written in 1884, Nietzsche had already deﬁned socialism as “the negation of life.” 121. Sigmund Freud, “Il problema economico del masochismo,” in Opere complete, vol. 10, p. 6. 122. Sigmund Freud, “Al di la` del principio del piacere,” in Opere complete, vol. 9, p. 235. 123. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). 124. An example chosen from many: Giovanni Gentile even wrote that “death is not frightening because it does not exist, just as nature and the past do not exist; just as dreams do not exist. The man who dreams exists, but not the things he dreams. And so death is the negation of thought but what is implemented by the negation that it makes of itself cannot be real. In fact thought can but conceive itself as immortal, because it is inﬁnite” (Sistema di logica, vol. 2, p. 200). Here, Gentile’s philosophy shows itself to be like all idealistic philosophies, namely a sophisticated form of animism whose core is the desire to deny the contingency of man. 125. That is if the desire of death does not exist; what, however, does exist in us is what Cioran called the “temptation to die,” for suicide presents itself under the “tempting” guise of “sudden liberation: nirvana through violence” (Il funesto demiurgo [Milan: Adelphi, 1986], p. 72). 126. Vladimir Janke´le´vich, “La presenza e la ﬁne dei tempi,” Antonio Cavicchia Scalamonti, ed., Il senso della morte (Naples: Liguori, 1984), p. 237. 127. T. J. J. Altizer, “Il sacro e il profano,” in T. J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, La teologia radicale e la morte di Dio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 160. 128. See Mathilde Niel, Psychanalyse du marxisme (Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1967), p. 123 et seq. 129. Ernst Bloch summarized the idea behind Marx’s gnosis in these terms: “Only with knowledge, by being in accord with the trends and latency of the process of the world in the present phase, is it possible to attain victory. Thus there opens a prospect for which neither optimism nor pessimism constitute a sufﬁcient category, but where at last the world is positively changed, until it becomes recognisable; where at last it has become identical to self, no longer persisting in the state of being distant, not only from us, but from things themselves” (Mutare il mondo, p. 120). 130. “If it destroys everything, this is the proof that everything must be destroyed, because everything is bad; hence the proof that only society is bad and that I am not aggressive, but innocent” (quoted from Serge Lebovici, I sentimenti di colpa nel bambino e nell’adulto [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973], p. 152). Rudy Dutzschke’s words are a deﬁnite conﬁrmation of the theory according to which the revolutionary plans to destroy the world to reconquer a state of Eden-like innocence, freeing himself of guilt (see V. Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967]). 131. Friedrich Engels, Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, p. 103. 132. Leon Trotsky, Letteratura, arte, liberta`, p. 105. 133. Ibid., p. 107. 134. He will also be a man who is “biologically incapable of causing war and creating suffering” (H. Marcuse, La liberazione dalla societa` opulenta, p. 186), an angelic man then at last liberated from his beastliness. He will also be an omnipotent man, ready to “ascend the biblical throne of God and take the sceptre” (Adam Schaff, Il Marxismo

The Annihilators of the World

283

e la persona umana [Feltrinelli: Milan, 1963], p. 249). Evidently, Dostoevsky was right when he identiﬁed the revolution with the program to put an end to the kingdom of the biblical God by fomenting the birth of the “new man, happy and proud.” “Whoever conquers pain and fear [of death] will become God [these words Dostoevsky placed on Kirillov’s lips]. Then there will be new life, new man, everything will be new . . . Then history will be divided in parts: from the ape to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to the physical transformation of man and earth. Man will be God and will be transformed physically: and the world will be transformed too and actions will be transformed and thoughts and all feelings” (I demoni, p. 117). 135. Augusto Del Noce, Il problema dell’ateismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1964), p. 164. 136. Ludwig Feuerbach, L’Essenza del Cristianesimo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), p. 292. 137. “My head spins, if Mephistopheles were to appear, I would be Faust because it is clear that we are all Faust and therefore our life is a circus; we run around, we look everywhere until we fall on the ring and the gladiator, more precisely life, kills us; we must have a new Saviour since—torment you steal my sleep, you steal my health, you kill me—we are unable to distinguish the left side from the right side, we don’t know where they are” (Karl Marx, “Scorpione e Felice,” in Opere complete, vol. 1, p. 717). 138. After a detailed analysis of the Jewish question using the hermeneutic method of psychoanalysis, Robert Misrhai has reached the conclusion that “Marx turns his deaf and latent guilt, that is to say his self hatred and his desire for self destruction, into hatred of others, that is of Jews, and the will to destroy Hebrewism” (Marx et la question juive [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], p. 237). It is hardly necessary to say that, in subsequent works, the enemy to be destroyed became the bourgeoisie whom Marx considered the modern incarnation of the Jewish spirit. 139. This is conﬁrmed, among others, by the dynamic of the Karaite sect that “in its social practice—mass religious migration—expressed a will of subversion, that reached the extreme with desire for death, for collective suicide” (Pierre Clastres, Archeologia della violenza [Milan: La Salamandra, 1982], p. 92). 140. This theory was formulated very clearly in the famous memorandum of the CCP of May 16, 1966: “Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation, it means revolution. . . . Put destruction ﬁrst, and in the process you have construction. Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought, was founded and has constantly developed in the course of the struggle to destroy bourgeois ideology.” (Quoted from Joan Robinson, The Cultural Revolution in China [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], p. 75f.) 141. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Opere complete, vol. 11, p. 107. 142. Ibid., p. 107. 143. In the poem “Dio e il mondo,” Goethe expresses the desire that animates the ideal of One-All: “Be lost the single, with daring heart to rediscover the Inﬁnite, where all tedium is dissolved. No more desires, effort, will, heavy want, bitter duty: to abandon oneself is voluptuousness” (Opere [Florence: Sansoni, 1993], p. 1349). 144. If a typical symptom of the necrophile personality is desire for annihilation, then Orwell was right when he deﬁned the communist ideology in power as the “cult of death.” 145. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity,” in Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire, eds., The Socialist Idea (London: Weidenfeld and Nich-

284

Revolutionary Apocalypse

olson, 1974), p. 43. The “Kirillov solution” is the other alternative to the inevitable checkmate that awaits the gnostic revolutionary. The Kirillov solution is suicide as a metaphysical protest against the human condition. It is a far less literary solution than is generally imagined: in fact, in 1978 the followers of Jim Jones, the founder of the Marxist sect, People’s Temple, justiﬁed their decision to put an end to their existence thus: “We have committed a revolutionary act of suicide to protest the contradictions of an inhuman world (quoted from Mario Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo [Milan: SugarCo, 1993], p. 67). After vainly seeking a “new start” ( J. Jones) that could modify the ontological status of reality, they reached the desperate conclusion that the only way to escape the evils of the world was a self-annihilation (see Enrico Pozzi, Il carisma malato [Naples: Liguori, 1992]).

A Conclusion?

Toward the end of the First World War, when Anatole France was already an old man, he expressed his skepticism about a future of peace. “I am sure [he said prophetically] that the age of violence will not end with the conclusion of this war, which carries within it three or four equally awful wars.” To a charming lady, who happened to be visiting at the time and had remarked that he was pessimistic about humankind, he answered: “Don’t you see that the cruellest actions, the worst massacres, have been inspired by the idea that man is a virtuous being? Those good for nothing demagogues, whose job it was to look after France and who, instead, were responsible for mass murder and drowning their country in blood, wished to restore primitive goodness, the virtue that allegedly is only to be had in Eden. They lacked that benevolence and tolerance that can only come from a knowledge of human weakness. Those ambiguous visionaries wanted justice for all, they wanted truth to govern the world. They exterminated masses of people to guarantee heaven on earth to the few who survived. As for me, I have a poor opinion of men, but I love them and, since I love them, I am sympathetic toward them.”1 These words simply reiterated the message Anatole France had already expressed in his novels Gli Dei hanno sete and La rivolta degli angeli, describing the ﬂood of destructive and self-destroying consequences provoked by the revolutionary project to make men angels. Yet, this man who had spent his whole life warning himself, and others, against the “hubristic”2 temptation succumbed to the appeal of the October Revolution. In 1922 in an enthusiastic “salute to the Soviets” published in L’Humanite´, he praised the Bolshevik experiment lavishly and completely denied what he had written in Il Giardino di Epicuro: “The folly of the revolution

286

A Conclusion?

lay in its desire to establish a government of virtue on earth. When one desires to make humanity good and wise, free and noble, one inevitably ends up wanting to kill every man. Robespierre, believed in virtue yet, in the end, he introduced a government of terror. Marat, who also believed in virtue, ordered two hundred thousand heads to be chopped off.” The moral of Anatole France’s sudden conversion is that we should never forget that man is a “metaphysical climber” who aspires to “act on all, to create and transform at pleasure, without intermediaries.”3 The desire to transcend the condition of being ﬁnite drives him to follow the example of Icarus,4 who refused the principle of reality and threw himself body and soul into the “crazy” enterprise of destroying the limits imposed by the ontological structure of the world.5 The historical parable of Marxist-Leninist communism has come to a close. The collectivistic utopia disintegrated in the face of the “harsh response of history,” inﬂicting a fatal blow on the idea that revolutions solve alienation. Yet, caution is necessary: the need for the absolute is still with us. In a civilization that has been deserted by the gods but continues to be shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition, where the civitas diaboli and the civitas Dei6 are in constant state of conﬂict, in a civilization that is permeated by the “Gnostic temptation of absolute, total knowledge, that will liberate [humankind] from the anguish of partial, conﬂictual knowledge,”7 who can be sure that in some more or less distant future the revolutionary spirit will not resurface under some new guise?8

NOTES 1. Quoted from T. Reik, Mito e colpa (Milan: SugarCo, 1969), p. 422. 2. In La pierre blanche—an unusual dystopian novel—Anatole France had also described the inevitable bureaucratic and liberticide consequences of the socialist revolution. 3. G. Papini, Un uomo ﬁnito (Florence: Vallecchi, 1974), p. 144. In this work Papini stated, “We must act on reality as a whole, on absolutely everything without exception . . . And if we are victorious, the whole world will be ours, a plastic and manageable matter that we will shape as we wish and the Garden [of Eden] will come true: You will be similar to Gods! To be God! All men, Gods! That is the great dream, the impossible undertaking, the superb end we are seeking! And I will be like a plan—for myself and for others. In Imitation of God: All knowing, all powerful . . . On this claim that is mine and of the Man God, I thought to found a religion.” 4. In fact, Etienne Cabet called his imaginary, harmonious, perfect society Icaria, after the character of Greek mythology who had wanted to make a dream come true. 5. On the “Icarus principle,” see the beautiful pages written by C. Dumitresco, La Cite´ totale, p. 11 et seq. 6. See Alberto Asor Rosa, Fuori dell’Occidente ovvero ragionamento sull’Apocalissi (Turin: Einaudi, 1992).

A Conclusion?

287

7. Giovanni Filoramo, Il risveglio della Gnosi ovvero diventare Dio (Bari: Laterza, 1990), p. 15. 8. Maybe the revolutionary spirit has already reemerged. In Vittorio Mathieu’s preface to the reprint of Speranza nella rivoluzione, it is suggested that revolutionary spirit has identiﬁed ecology as its new area of action, an area already indicated 20 years ago by Andre´ Gorz to the gnostic left: “The ecological struggle is not an end to itself, it is a transition step. It is capable of creating problems for capitalism and forcing it to change” (Ecologia e politica [Cappelli: Bologna, 1978], p. 17). More recently Gorz argued for “The dialectical materialist faith in the goodness of Nature, and of a natural order which is to be re-established” (Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology [London, New York: Verso, 1994], p. 7).

Index

Abnegation of self in Great Collective Soul, 206 Absolute Enemy, need for, 232–33 Acculturation, 251; forced, 252; of intellectuals, 123–25, 126, 252–53; selective, 122 Adler, Alfred, 272 Aggression, cultural, 250–51 Agli uﬁciali dell’esercito (Bakunin), 132–33 Agursky, Mikhail, 248 Albitte, 46 Alexander II, 137 Alienation: gnosis of Mani and therapy for, 15–16; gnostic syndrome and, 151; of intellectuals, 4–7, 123–25, 209; Marxism and, 154–57 Alla giovane generazione (Mikhailov), 137–38 Althusser, Louis, 156 Anabaptist movement, 19 Anarchists, 85–86; Lenin as, 172–73 Ancien re´gime, legitimation of, 35. See also French Revolution Animism, 149–50; Hegel’s revival of, 154 Answers, social mobilization and, 64

Anti-Duhring (Engels), 86 Anti-institutionalism of Marxian philosophy, 156 Apocalypse fanatics, 11–28. See also Millenarian movements of Low Middle Ages Apologia, 202 Aragon, Louis, 211 Arendt, Hannah, 208, 228 Aristocracy, 69; gnostic, 213–14 Aristocratic proletariat, 13 Aron, Raymond, 6 Asian despotism, 35 Atheism, 61–62 Athens, querelle on Sparta and, 39 Augustine, Saint, 14 Autonomous subsystems, modernization and, 244 Autonomy of civil society from State, modernization and, 244–45 Babeuf, E.N., 40 Bakunin, Mikhail, 6, 85, 117, 126, 132–34, 173, 223, 273 Ball, John, 16 Baxter, Richard, 23 Becker, Howard, 60

290 Index Berdiaev, Nikolai, 117, 126 Bernstein, Eduard, 90–93; challenge to Marxism, 90–93, 99 Besanc¸on, Alain, 202, 264–65 Blanquisme, 135; Marxism as updated form of, 91 Bloch, Ernst, 18, 159, 211 Bloch, I.S., 171, 172 Bockelson, Jan, 19 Bolshevik Party, 172–73; as “conscious avant-garde,” 175, 200, 213–14; terrorist strategy of, 174–76 Bolshevism/Bolshevik revolution, 117, 285–86; cultural war vs. Western Modernity, 245–49; destruction of civil society by, 177–78, 264; economic organization policy, 180–84; famine following, 181–82, 185; Great War impact and, 177; inﬂuence on proletarian masses of Europe, 196–97; Jacobins as spiritual fathers of, 41, 42, 108–9, 116, 176, 221–23; nationalization policy, 177, 178; peasants and, 179–84; as political-ideological force of continental dimensions, 196; Russian economy and, 241–42; steps toward, 129–31; universal charismatic bureaucracy created by, 178–79; utopian message of, 176–77; war communism experiment, disaster of, 184–86; Zaichnevsky as spiritual father of, 224. See also Communism/ communist revolution; Lenin, Nikolai; New World, building Bonch-Bruevich, V.D., 173, 223 Bossuet, 35 Bourgeoisie, 2–3; cultural, 3; fear of internal proletariat and communism, 70; ﬂight from Russia under Bolsheviks, 177, 178; intellectuals opposition to capitalist-bourgeois order, 5–6; Jacobin revolution’s consequences to, 46–49; passionate hatred of, 270–71; “silent revolution” of entrepreneurial, 270; working class and, 68–70

Bourgeois revolution, 40; French Revolution as, 36 Bourgeois spontaneity, 184, 185, 262–63, 264, 266 Brainwashing, use of, 229–33 Brinton, Crane, 43, 47 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 31 British labor movement, 100 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 184, 232, 262 Buio a mezzogiorno (Darkness at Noon) (Koestler), 206 Bukharin, Nikolai, 180, 184–85, 224 Bund (order), 107 Bureaucracy: Jacobin, 47–48; universal charismatic, 178–79, 186 Byzantine world, 117–18 Calvin, John, 20, 21 Cambodian Revolution, 266–67 Cannibalism, 181 Capital, Marx on alienation and, 155–56 Capital (Marx), 81–82, 84–85, 139–40: function of, 81–82 Capitalism: antagonism between the feudal system and, 17, 21; autonomy of civil society from State and, 245; bipolar class thesis and, 83–84; categorical imperative to ﬁght, 161–64; cultural catastrophes and, 12; effect of modernization on traditional societies, 251–53; enigma of, 84; factory system, 64, 65, 67–70; inevitable catastrophic collapse of, Marx on, 81–82, 84–85; intellectual opposition to capitalist-bourgeois order, 5–6; intolerable contradiction permeating, 162; Leninist destruction of, without plan for alternative, 263; origin of modern intellectual class and, 4; revolutionary movements and introduction of, 11–12; Rousseau’s vision of history and, 37–38; Russian revolutionaries’ fear of bourgeois West and, 136–40; self government of economy and, 66–67; tsarist “controlled modernization” policy

Index 291 and development of, 135–36; working class and, 67–71 Capitalist ratio, 244 Carlyle, T., 43 Cassirer, E., 36 Catastrophic-palingenetic concept of revolution, 42–43 Catechism of the Revolutionary (Nechaev), 130–31 Categorical imperative, revolution as, 100, 106, 161–64 Cavalli, Luciano, 104 Censorship, 203, 232; See also Brainwashing, use of Centralization, Marx and Engels on, 80–81 Centralism, democratic, 214; of Lenin, 105–6 Change, modernization and willingness to, 243 Charisma-bearing group, Lenin’s revolutionary party as, 103–5 Chartism, 78–79 Che fare? (Chernyshevsky), 106, 115; “new man” of, 128–29, 130 CHEKA, 174, 224 Chernyshevsky, N.G., 127, 128, 130 Chiliasm, gnosticism and, 16 Chinese Communist Party, 268 Christianity: anti-institutional radicalism in early, 13–16; transformation from religion of protest to religion of legitimation, 14–15 Citizenship, modernization and, 243 Civil society: autonomy from State, modernization and, 244–45; total destruction of, 177–78, 264 Class battles, modern society and, 243 Class consciousness, Lukacs on, 199–200 Class war: millenarianism and, 16–17; Puritanism and, 23 Clemenceau, G., 29, 196 Closed society, transition to open society from, 60 Cobban, Alfred, 39–40

Collective dictatorship of secret organizations, 133–34 Collective Thought, 204–5 Comintern (Communist International): as avatar of Manichean church, 202; declared objective of, 195–96; establishment of, 195; as global organization of revolutionary proletariat, 198; as sole and exclusive holder of truth of history, 199; source of charismatic fascination with, 209–11; spiritual vacuum ﬁlled by, 206–9 Committee of Public Safety (France), 32–33, 46, 47 Commune, 80–81 Communism/communist revolution, 18, 40, 99–103: consumer communism, 197; dual truth, system of, 266; Engels’ formulation of “moral” principles of, 222; expectations of, 261, 269; famines under, 181–82, 185, 265, 267; ﬂuctuation between NEP model and war model of, 264–66; fundamental principles of, 81; initial goal of, 261; market and, principle of incompatibility between, 184–85; market communism, 182; Marx and Engels’ future society under, 162–64; Marx’s deﬁnition of, 263; as negation, 263–64, 267–69; Nirvana as ultimate goal of, 274; objectives of, 221; planetary dimensions of, 265; Rousseau and, 37–38; as solution to conﬂict between existence and essence, 157–61; sudden demise of, 261; totalitarian nature of, 228; total sterility of, 262, 266–70; tragedy of, 273; war communism, disaster of, 184–86; See also Lenin, Nikolai; New World, building Communistes, Les (Aragon), 211 Communist Party: as a sacral institution, 198, 200–206; terrorist strategy of, 174–76

292 Index Concentration camps (gulags), Russian, 176, 185, 228–29 Confessions, obsession with, 231 Conscious avant-garde, 175, 200; historical role of, 213–14 Constant, B., 29, 39 “Consumer communism,” 197 Conversions, brainwashing to provoke, 230–31 Couliano, Ioan, 151 Council of People’s Commissars, 173 Cox, Harvey, 61 Croce, Benedetto, 249 Cromwell, Oliver, 23 Cultural aggression, Toynbee’s theory of, 250–51 Cultural bourgeoisie, 3 Cultural catastrophes, 12 Cultural isolation, 233; Lenin’s centralism and, 106 Cultural secularization, modernization and, 243–44 Cultural war between West and East, 241–60; Bolshevik revolution and Western Modernity, 245–49; cultural aggression, Toynbee’s theory of, 250–51; effect on traditional societies, 251–53; elements constituting core of Modernity and, 242–44; intelligentsia and, 252–55 Danton, Georges Jacques, 31, 32 David, Eduard, 91 Death: Comintern and solution to enigma of, 210–11; as dialectically necessary moment in “inﬁnite youth of humanity,” 211; thanatos as driving force of revolution, 274 Decentralization, Communards’ model of, 80 Declaration of the Parisian Population, 80 Decour, Jacques, 211 Defence from existential anguish, 210 De Jouvenel, B., 38–39 De Maistre, 273 Democracy: Jacobins as spiritual fathers of, 41; Rousseau and, 38–39

Democratic centralism, 214; as Lenin’s model of organization, 105–6 Denis, Henri, 150 Deux Re´volutions Francaises, Les (Ferrero), 29 Dialectical enlightenment, 160–61 Dictatorship. See Bolshevism/Bolshevik revolution; Communism/communist revolution; Jacobin experiment Dislocation, social mobilization and, 64–65 Disraeli, Isaac, 64 Division of labor, Marx and Engels on, 163 Dmitrievsky, 246 Domela-Nieuwehuis, Ferdinand, 82 Donatism, 13 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 127, 131–32, 246–47 Dualism dominating Western civilization, 40–41 Dual truth, system of, 266 Duplicitous thought, need for, 233–35 Durkheim, E., 71, 211 Dutard, 39 Dzerzhinsky, F.E., 228 Economic exploitation, 68 Economic maturity, principle of, 81–82 Economic organization: under Bolshevik Party, 180–84; Jacobin, 46–49; planned economy, 262–63 Eisenstadt, Samuel, 254 Elective action, modernization and, 242–43 Eluard, Paul, 210 Enemy (class of user), 202 Engels, Friedrich, 19, 67, 77, 78, 87, 106, 149, 157, 159–60, 203, 269; on division of labor, 163; on revolutionary terror, 222–23, 225–26; scholastic arrangement of basic socialist dogmas by, 86 England: crisis of Chartism in, 78–79; Great Rebellion in, 19–23; Restoration in, 23 Enlightenment, 150; French Revolution as outcome of, 34–36;

Index 293 mechanistic concept of world in, 61–62; origins of the spirit of, 41; romantic reaction against, 153 Ephesus, Council of, 14 Equality, revolution of growing expectations and spread of idea of, 69 Essence, Hegel’s theory of, 83–84 European absolutism, 35 European society: impact on Russian civilization, 116, 117–27; modernization and secularization of, 118, 120 Existential anguish, defence from, 210 Expectations: imbalance between intellectuals’ status and legitimate, 7; revolution of growing, 69 Exploitation, economic, 68 External proletariat, 251 Factory system, 64, 65; factory ownerworker relationship, 67–70 Fall, the, 152; rupture of original unity following, 156–57, 160 “False consciousness” theory, 203, 204, 234 Famine: failure of Communist principles and, 265, 267; following Bolshevik revolution, 181–82, 185 Fear: bourgeois, of internal proletariat and communism, 70; French Revolution and, 29, 30, 31, 32–33. See also Terror, terrorism Ferrero, Guglielmo, 29, 30, 33, 36, 88, 92 Fetscher, Irving, 198 Feudalism, capitalism and, 17, 21 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 271 Fouquier-Tinville, A.Q., 42 France, Anatole, 285–86 Frank, Ludwig, 91 Frankenhausen, Battle of, 19 Free market, 66 Freischwebende Intelligenz, 1, 2 French Revolution, 29–57, 124; as antibourgeois, 39–40; Constitutive Assembly, 30–31; as dual revolution, 40–41; “Great Fear,” 30; Marxist

view of, 39–40; philosophical foundations of, 34–36; revolution within, 32–33, 34, 39; Rousseau and, 36–39; unexpected results of principles of, 29, 31–32 Freud, S., 274 Friedrich, Carl J., 232 Furet, Francois, 48 Gasset, 5, 159 Gemeinschaft (community), 66, 89, 90, 92, 107, 137, 255; desperation for surrogate of, 208 Genocide, 222–23; of Khmer Rouge, 266–67; revolution and, 227–28. See also Terror, terrorism German democratic socialism, 86; selfimposed cultural isolation of, 88 Germani, Gino, 64, 255 Gesellschaft (society), 66, 89, 90, 107, 137, 255 Girondist party, 31–32 Gnostic aristocracy, 213–14 Gnosticism, revolutionary, 11, 149–70, 200; characteristics of “gnostic syndrome,” 151–53; chiliasm and, 16; collective salvation, belief in, 232; Communism as therapy for alienation, 157–61; Communist Party and, 200–206; deﬁned, 152; diagnosis of alienation, 154–57; distinction between pistis and, 203; existential need answered by, 270–72; Hegel’s philosophy of history and, 153–54; Nirvana offered by, 273–74; powerful drive toward destruction and self-destruction, 267; purpose of, 261; revolution as categorical imperative against capitalism, 161–64; self-divination and, desire for, 271–75; vision of history, 200–201 Gnostic Manichean tradition, 15–16; movements reviving, 16–19 Godwin, William, 29 Goldenberg, Josif, 172–73 Gorky, Maxim, 171, 233, 247 Gouldner, Alvin, 3

294 Index Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 197, 202, 207, 213, 245 Great Rebellion in England, 19–23 Great War, 197; Bolshevik revolution and impact of, 177; enthusiasm for communist promise after, 207–8 Gue´non, Rene´, 60, 270 Gue´rin, Daniel, 47 Guilt, brainwashing to provoke sense of, 229–31 Guitton, Jean, 14 Gulags (concentration camps), 176, 185, 228–29 Gutermann, 164 Hatred, unity and mobilization through, 232–33 Hayek, Friedrich, 2, 35–36, 88 Hegel, G.W.F., 2, 60, 153–54, 268–70; historicism of, 62; Marxian version of Hegelism, 154; theodicy of, 62–63; theory of essence, 83–84 Heidegger, Martin, 210 Hell (secret society), 130 Herling, Gustav, 229 Herzen, Aleksandr, 126, 127, 137, 139 Higher education, frustration of intellectuals following extension of, 6–7 Historical materialism, 2 Historicism, 62 History, gnosticism and periods or aeons of, 152 History and Class Consciousness, 200–201 Hobsbawm, Eric, 255 Hoelderlin, 61 Holbach, P.H.D. d’, 36 Holy war, 213, 221 Homo naturalis, doctrine of, 226; communist reaction to, 226–28 Hope in the self-redemption of humanity, 271 Hovat, Branko, 263 Hubris, 271–72, 285 Hume’s laws, 149, 150 Hus, John, 16 Ideas: power of, 5; process of becoming beliefs, 5

I demoni (Dostoevsky), 131–32 Ideologia tedesca, 78, 81 Ideological terrorism, 203 Il Giardino di Epicuro (France), 285–86 Indirizzo del 1850 (Marx and Engels), 172 Individualistic culture, 243 Indulgences, 17 Industrialization: in czarist Russia, 241; modernization vs., 242 Industrial Revolution, 7, 242; phenomenon of the “two nations” as consequence of, 64; social mobilization and, 64–65 Institutionalized schizophrenia, revolutionism as, 233–34 Integration, social mobilization and, 64 Intellectual proletariat, concept of, 123–24 Intellectuals: alienated, role in constructing proletarian church, 209; alliance with workers, 70–71; dictatorship of Marxist, 214; in Jacobin party, 47; plethora of proletarized, in Russian society, 116–17; Puritanism and, 21–22; revolutionary theory as exclusive domain of, 100–101. See also Intelligentsia, Russian Intellectuals as a class, 1–9; alienation and impotence experienced by, 4–7, 123–25, 209; de´classe´s, 6–7; imbalance between status and legitimate expectations, 7; impact on society reality, 5; opposition to capitalistbourgeois order, 5–6; origins of modern, 4; revolutionary secession of, 7; social functions, 3 Intelligentsia, Russian, 115–47; acculturation of, 123–25, 126, 252–53; alienation of, 123–25, 209; Bakunin’s revolutionary policy and, 132–34; deﬁnition of, 252–53; features typical of ethos of, 126–27; impact of European civilization on, 116, 117–27; modernization and, 252–55; Nechaev’s revolutionary policy and, 130–31, 132, 133;

Index 295 nihilism of, 126, 127–29; palingenetic overturning of society desired by, 126–27; paradoxical nature of role played by, 136; Populists, 134–40; Slavophiles, 137, 138–39; steps toward Bolshevism, 129–31; Tkachev, 134–36, 224 Internal proletariat, 63–64, 70, 71, 252 I presupposti del socialismo e i compiti della social democrazia (Bernstein), 90 Iron curtain, 245 Ishutin, Nikolai, 129–30 Islam, Communist movement as twentieth-century, 212 Ivan the Great, 119 Ivan the Terrible, 119 Jacobin experiment, 29–57; as anticapitalist and anti-bourgeois, 41–42; Bolshevism and, 41, 42, 108–9, 116, 176, 221–23; catastrophicpalingenetic concept of revolution, 42–43; consequences to bourgeoisie, 46–49; dictatorship dominated by fear, 32–33; network of clubs, organization through, 47–48; philosophical foundations of, 34–36; as political Messianism, 43; redemption of humanity as goal of Terror, 43–45; Rousseau’s democracy and, 39; suppression of Girondist party, 31–32; Thermidor reaction to, 40, 48, 185 Janke´le´vitch, Vladimir, 209 Jaure´s, Jean, 39 Jesuits of revolution, 99–113; Lenin and, 99–103 Jevons, Stanley, 262 Kant, I., 249 Kaplan, Abraham, 102 Kautsky, Karl, 86–89, 90 Kelsen, Hans, 150 Khmer Rouge, 266–67 Kisselev, 235 Knox, John, 20, 21 Koestler, Arthur, 206, 231 Konrad, Gyorgy, 3

Krizhanich, Iury, 121 Krylenko, N.V., 175 Kursky, 178, 227 Langevin, 211 Language, political, 233–35 Lanot, 43 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 77, 198 Lasswell, Harold D., 102 Latsis, 224 Lavrov, P.L., 129 Le Bon, Gustave, 6–7 Le Chapelier law, 41 Lefebvre, 164 Lenin, Nikolai, 41, 99–103, 171–72, 178, 179–80, 234; as anarchist, 172–73; attitude toward workers, 101; concept of politics, 100; criticisms of, 115–16; democratic centralism as model of organization, 105–6; elements in Leninism in common with new religions, 197–98; elimination of free press, 173; as e´litist, 101–3, 104, 107–9; extermination of opposition, 173–74; on historical mission of Russia, 248; lack of plan for post-capitalist economy, 263; on petit-bourgeois spontaneity as main enemy, 184; reasoning behind NEP, 183–84; revolutionary party of, 102–9; revolution as categorical imperative to, 100; terrorist strategy of, 174–76, 223, 224, 225, 226–27, 264 Lessons on the Philosophy of History (Hegel), 153–54 Lettere dalla francia e dall’italia (Herzen), 137 Liberalism, socialism as historical heir of, 91 Lilburne, John, 23 Lipan, Battle of (1434), 17 Lobotomy, spiritual, 231 Lollard movement, 16–17 Louis, Pierre, 80 Louis XVI, 31 Loyola, Ignatius, 201–2 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 198–200

296 Index Luther, Martin, 17–18 Luxemburg, Rosa, 106, 179 Lying, conquest of power and, 234 Mably, G.B. de, 39 Machajski, Jan Waclaw, 6, 101 Machiavellianism, 234 Malia, Martin, 125, 138 Man, Henri de, 65 Manicheism/Manichean church: gnostic tradition, 15–19; principles of, 153; similarity of proletariat church to, 200–206 Mannheim, Karl, 1, 2 Manuals, 202 Manuscripts of 1844, The (Marx), 155 Mao Tse Tung, 247 Marcuse, Herbert, 158, 210 Market: free, 66; as main agent of modernization and of secularization, 244–45 Market communism, 182 Market economy, planned economy vs., 262–63. See also Capitalism Market society, Marx on, 156 Martov, Iury, 115, 197 Marx, Karl, 2, 6, 63, 67, 77, 120, 149, 203, 242, 269; belief in planned economy, 262–63; desire for selfdivinization in poems by, 272–75; on division of labor, 163; hatred of bourgeoisie in, 270; military vision of class struggle, 6, 78–80; problem of alienation at heart of theory of, 154–57; on revolutionary terror, 222; scientiﬁc socialism of, 150–51; strategy of controversial expectancy of “hour x,” 78; violent desire for destruction and self-destruction, 275 Marxism, 77–97; as airtight, rigorously self-referential system, 204; antiinstitutionalism of, 156; “Asianization” of, 140; Bernstein’s challenge to, 90–93, 99; bipolar class thesis, 83–84; as a categorical imperative, 106; immunizing workers from “bourgeois infection,” 81–82, 83;

instilling conﬁdence in proletariat, 83; Kautsky and, 86–89, 90; as political religion, 159, 254–55; revolutionary theology of, 85; Russian Populists and, 139–40; similarity of Catholic Church and, 85–86; social organization, avoiding problem of, 82–83 Massiﬁcation, totalitarian movements as global response to process of, 208–9 Mathie´z, Albert, 41 Mattys, Jan, 19 Mauss, Marcel, 262 Media, image of the world built and conveyed by regime through, 232 Medvedev, Roy, 228–29 Mehring, Franz, 80 Merchants, resentment toward, 4. See also Bourgeoisie Mering, Franz, 99 Merton, Robert, 2 Messianic expectation: of revolutionary palingenesis, 85; of revolutionary parousia, 82 Messianism, Jacobin experiment as political, 43 Me´thivier, Hubert, 30 Michelet, Jules, 68, 69–70 Michels, Robert, 5 Mikhailov, Mikhail, 137–38 Milan, Edict of, 14 Mill, John Stuart, 262 Millenarian movements of Low Middle Ages, 11, 12–23; leadership of, 13; origins of, 13–16; prophetae of, 11, 13, 15, 16; Puritanism, 19–23; revolutions of, 16–19; similarity of anarchists to, 85–86 Mobilization, social, 64–65 Modernization: effect on traditional societies, 251–53; elements constituting core of Modernity, 242–44; industrialization vs., 242; intelligentsia and, 252–55; as permanent process, 242; secularization and, 60–61; structural conditions generating modern civilization, 244–48

Index 297 Money, Marx on essence of, 155, 156 Monnerot, Jules, 108, 210, 212 Mu¨ntzer, Thomas, 18–19 Nationalism: proletarian internationalism as form of, 246–48; of Russian intelligentsia, 138 Nationalization policy, Bolshevik, 177, 178 Nechaev, Sergei, 130–31, 132, 133, 223 Negation, Communism as, 263–64, 267–69 Neo-language, 235 NEP, 182, 183–84; ﬂuctuation between war model of Communism and, 264–66 New World, building, 221–40; brainwashing and, 229–33; concentration camps (gulags) used in, 176, 185, 228–29; desire for selfdivination and, 274–75; political language and need for duplicitous thought in, 233–35; terrorism and, 221–28. See also Communism/ communist revolution Nicholas I, 129 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62, 63, 107 Nihilism, 62–63, 159, 269; of Russian intelligentsia, 126, 127–29 1984 (Orwell), 231 Nisbet, Robert, 67 Nizan, Paul, 210 Nolte, Ernst, 196 Nomad, Max, 6 Nomocracy, modernization and, 243 Nostalgia, gnostic syndrome and, 151 Oaks, 152 Obshchina, peasant, 136, 139 October Revolution. See Bolshevism/ Bolshevik revolution Open society, transition from “closed society” to, 60 Opportunism, 103 Orphans of God, 62–63; emergence of, 62. See also Intellectuals Ortega, Jose´, 5, 159 Orthodoxy, purity as, 103

Orwell, George, 231, 235 Osorgin, Mikhail, 181 Oulanem (Marx), 273 Padri E Figli (Turgenev), 127 Palingenesis, phases of, 86 Paraclete, science of gnostic, 152 Paradox of all revolutions, 29, 32, 33 Parvus, 116 Pasqualini, Jean, 230 Peasant obshchina, 136, 139 Peasants, Bolshevik revolution and, 179–84 Perfection, aeon of, 152 Peter the Great, 121; open-door policy of, 121–23 Petit-bourgeois spontaneity: destruction of, 185, 262–63, 264, 266; Lenin on, 184 Pfeifer, 18 Philosophes, 34–36, 37 Piatakov, Grigory, 201 Pisarev, Dmitry, 127–28 Pistis, 152, 203 Planned economy, 262–63 Platonic cave myth, 203 Plebeian proletariat, 13, 16 Plekhanov, G.V., 115 Pneumatics, 152 Polanyi, Karl, 12, 66 Polemical-hierocratic order, Lenin’s party as, 107–9 Political language, 233–35 Politics: Lenin’s concept of, 100; salvation as political issue in revolutionary, 37; as soteriological practice, Puritanism and, 20–22 Politika (Krizhanich), 121 Pol Pot, 265, 267 Popper, Karl R., 204 Popular sovereignty, 31, 32 Populists, Russian, 134–40 Power, Marx and Engels on strategy for conquest of, 172 Preobrazhensky, Evgeny, 182, 185, 224 Preobrazhensky law, 185 Principles of Political Economy in Light of

298 Index the Science of Logic, The (Ricardo), 150 Professional revolutionaries, 104–9; Bakunin, 6, 85, 117, 126, 132–34, 173, 223, 273; Bolshevik revolution and gnostic, 178, 179; as custodian of orthodoxy, 106; Leninist conception of party of, 134; Nechaev, 130–31, 132, 133, 223; “new men” of Che Fare?, 128–29, 130; psychological preparation for use of mass terror, 227; self-discipline of, 105; Tkachev, 134–36, 224; ultimate goal of revolution for, 134 Proletarian church, 195–220; Communist Party and, 198–206; historical mission, 212; role of alienated intellectuals in constructing, 209; spiritual vacuum ﬁlled by Lenin’s gnosis-party, 206–9; task of, 211; as totalitarian, 211–14 Proletarianization, 65; Bernstein’s critique of, 90 Proletarian science, 205 Proletariat: external, 251; intellectual, 123–24; internal, 63–64, 70, 71, 252; marginalized from community life, 12; plebeian vs. aristocratic, 13, 16; thought, 134–35 Proletarization as cultural deracination, 67, 68–69 Proletarized intelligentsia, 20; revolutionary gnosticism and, 11; transformed by Puritanism into activists, 22 Propaganda, purpose of, 233. See also Brainwashing, use of Propagandist (class of user), 202 Proselyte (class of user), 202 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 46, 108 Psychic, the, 152 Purges for purity, 103. See also Genocide; Terror, terrorism Puriﬁcation: brainwashing and, 231–32; concentration camps used for, 228–29; terror used for, 228–29 Puritanism, 19–23; politics as soteriological practice in, 20–22;

strategy to create mass revolutionary movement, 22–23 Purity, obsession with: of Bolsheviks, 176; Lenin’s democratic centralism and, 105–6; in millenarian sects, 102–3 Radek, K.B., 247 Reaction, social mobilization and, 64 Redemption: brainwashing for, 230–31; as goal of Jacobin Terror, 43–45; hope in self-redemption of humanity, 271 Reform, the, 17–18 Regeneration, 269; as goal of Cambodian Revolution, 267; of human nature, terror as means for, 225–28; spiritual, phases in, 230 Reintegration, social mobilization and, 64 Religion: abandonment of religiousness for revolutionary spirit, 271; existential source of all, 271–72; ideal surrogates of, search for, 210; Marx and Engels on end of age of, 160–61; Marxism as political, 159, 254–55. See also Proletarian church Restoration, aeon of, 152 Restoration, English, 23 Revisionism, 103; Bernstein and, 90–93; generated by gap between Marxist prognosis and effective dynamics of capitalism, 99; opposition of ofﬁcers of “bureaucratic socialism” to, 92–93 Revolution: as art vs. spontaneous mass action, 108–9; catastrophicpalingenetic concept of, 42–43; as categorical imperative, 100, 106, 161–64; folly of, 285–86; genocide and, 227–28; goal of Marxian, 158; of growing expectations, 69; terrorism and, 221–25; will to destroy all in order to reconstruct all, 163 Revolutionaries. See Professional revolutionaries

Index 299 Revolutionary consciousness, working class and, 100 Revolutionary gnosticism, 11 Revolutionary party of Lenin, 102–9; as Bund or religious order, 107; as charisma-bearing group, 103–5; as mechanism of selection, 107; as polemic-hierocratic order, 107–9; as war machine, 102–3 Revolutionism, 270 Revolution of growing expectations, 69 Ricardo, David, 150 Robespierre, Maximilien, 32–33, 40, 41–42, 45, 48, 176; Report to the Committee of Public Safety of February 5, 1794, 222 Roman Empire, Christian antiinstitutional radicalism in, 13–16 Romantic age of revolutions, Lenin and end of, 109 Romantic intellectuals, loss of Christianity experienced by, 61–62 Rooting, need for, 65 Rousseau, J.J., 33, 36–39, 44; revolutionary nature of anthropology of, 37 Ruge, Arnold, 262 Russia: creation of “civil/state society,” 186; destruction of civil society of, 177–78; economic organization under Bolsheviks, 180–84, 241–42; February democratic-bourgeois revolution and tsarist collapse (1917), 172, 177; ﬂight of bourgeoisie from, 177, 178; gulags, 176, 185, 228–29; historical mission of, 246–47; utopia in power, 171–94; war communism, disaster of, 184–86 Russian revolution: intelligentsia and, 115–47; Lenin and, 99–109; nihilistic turning point as fundamental in evolution of, 127–29; See also Bolshevism/Bolshevik revolution; Communism/communist revolution Russian society: impact of Western civilization on, 116, 117–27;

permanent cultural war in, 117, 122, 124, 125; social structure, 125; total symbiosis between State and Church in, 119–20; tsarism and, 119–25, 135–36, 172, 177; university institution generating acculturated intelligentsia, 123–25, 126 Sacred, the: in modern society, 61; restoration of kingdom of, 274; in traditional closed society, 60 Saint-Etienne, 268 Saint-Just, L.A.L. de, 33, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48 Sartori, Giovanni, 7 Sartre, J.P., 271 Schism, social mobilization and, 64 Schlegel, Friedrich, 59–60 Schmalenbach, Herman, 107 Schuitt, Conrad, 91 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 2, 7, 242 Scientiﬁc socialism, 101–9, 150–51; aristocracy of spirit generated by, 104; Communism deﬁned by, 274; dual claim at heart of, 157–58; grandiose intellectual and moral reform promised by, 213; privileged epistemological status of, 203 Scienza della logica (Hegel), 83 Second Coming, expectation of, 13, 14, 15 Second International, 90, 116 Secret organizations, collective dictatorship of, 133–34 Secularization, 60; cultural, 243–44; modernization and, 60–61 Self: abnegation of, in Great Collective Soul, 206; desire of self-divinization, 271–75 Selznick, Philip, 47 Serrati, Giacinto Menotti, 182 Shafarevich, Igor, 274, 275 Shigalev paradox, 131–32, 134, 233 Simmel, Georg, 262 Slavophiles, 137, 138–39 Slogans, 202 Smirnov, Volodia, 101 Soboul, Albert, 40

300 Index Social classes: class battles, 243; class war, 16–17, 23; intellectuals as class, 1–9; working class, 67–71, 100–101. See also Bourgeoisie Social Contract, 36 Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, The (Cobban), 39–40 Socialism, socialist movement: Bernstein’s challenge to socialist identity, 92; cults, 77–78; as dialectical necessity, 149; division within European, 85–86; ecclesiastical conception of, 85–86; historical heir of liberalism, 91; intellectuals and, 6–7; Kautsky and, 86–89, 90; scholastic arrangement of basic dogmas by Engels, 86; as therapeutic diagnosis of intellectual and moral anarchy, 77; vision of battle for, 213; as voice of great collective resentment, 71. See also Communism/communist revolution; Marxism; Scientiﬁc socialism Socialist Humanism, 233 Socialist State, 3 Social mobilization, 64–65 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 228–29 Sombart, Werner, 71 Sparta: culture of, 243; democracy of, 39 Spd, 86, 87; Bernstein and, 90–91, 92; as bureaucratic device, 88; as party model, 90; revisionism as threat to, 92–93; spiritual extraneity of counter-society of, 89, 92–93 Spiridonova, Maria, 177 Spiritual lobotomy, 231 Spiritual regeneration, phases in, 230 Spontaneity, bourgeois, 184, 185, 262–63, 264, 266 Stalin, Joseph, 198, 246, 247; on “Asianization” of Marxism, 247–48; terror unleashed by, 183, 185–86 Stark, Werner, 2, 3 State serfdom in Russia, 185–86 State terrorism. See Terror, terrorism Strauss, David, 61 Sukhanov, Nikolai, 172, 173

Supreme Being, cult of, 46 Symbolic production, specialists of, 1–3 Szelenyi, Ivan, 3 Taborites, 16–17 Talmon, Jacob L., 38–39, 43, 59 Technocratic age of revolution, Lenin and beginning of, 109 Terror, terrorism, 221–28; destruction of civil society through permanent, 177–78, 264; Engels on revolutionary, 222–23, 225–26; ideological terrorism, 203; Jacobin, 31, 32–33, 43–45; of Lenin and Communist Party, 174–76, 223, 224, 225, 226–27, 264; Marx on, 222; as means for regeneration of human nature, 225–28; revolution and, 221–25; Stalin and, 183, 185–86 Tertullian, 14 Thanatos (death) as driving force of revolution, 274 Theodicy, Hegelian, 62–63 Thermidor reaction, 40, 48, 185 The´ry, E., 241–42 Thiers, L.A., 85 Third World, effect of modernization on, 251–53 Thompson, Edward, 77 Thought proletariat, 134–35. See also Intelligentsia, Russian Tkachev, Petr, 134–36, 224 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 68, 69 Toennies, Ferdinand, 66, 107 Topitsch, Ernst, 204 Totalitarianism: as global response to process of massiﬁcation, 208–9; proletarian church and, 211–14; sacralisation of policy as original element of modern, 212; terror as “real essence” of, 228 Toynbee, Arnold J., 12, 123, 154, 250–51 Trade, Communism and elimination of, 262, 264–66. See also Bourgeoisie Transition ideology, Puritan doctrine as, 22

Index 301 Trench warfare, Marx and Engels on strategy of, 78, 79 Tribal community, communism and return to, 163–64 Trotsky, Leon, 115–16, 172, 180–81, 185, 207, 225, 271 Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 246 Tsarism, 119–25; February democraticbourgeois revolution and collapse of (1917), 172, 177; long-term consequences of “controlled modernization” policy, 135–36 Turgenev, L.S., 127, 128 Tyler, Wat, 16 Unions, 70 Universal charismatic bureaucracy, 178–79, 186 Universities: acculturated intelligentsia and, 123–25, 126; socialization and recruitment of political-ideological members of Populist movement in Russia at, 129 Usurpation, concept of, 29 Valentinov, Nikolay, 223 Varennes, 31 Venturi, Franco, 136

Vollmar, Georg Von, 91 Von Martin, Alfred, 4 Walzer, Michael, 19–20 Weber, Max, 12–13, 60, 103–4, 186, 210 Weil, Simone, 65 Welfare State, 3 Wendland, P., 15 Western civilization: cultural war between East and West, 241–60; as planetary, 250, 252. “radioactivity” of, 250–51. See also European society Willingness to change, modernization and, 243 Winstanley, Gerrard, 23 Wittfogel, Karl, 118, 255 Working class: within the capitalist system, 67–71; revolutionary consciousness and, 100–101 World war: Great War, 177, 197, 207–8; Marx and Engels prediction of, 79 Wyclif, John, 16 Young people, communist indoctrination of, 232 Zaichnevsky, 224 Zamiatin, Evgeny, 204 Zinoviev, G.E., 175, 196, 224, 228, 247

About the Author LUCIANO PELLICANI is professor of political sociology at the Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali of Rome, director of the School of Journalism LUISS of Rome, and editor of Mondoperaio, the review founded by the socialist leader Pietro Nenn. He is also president of the Foundation Gino Germani.