The Stalinist delusion

I can’t agree with you entirely John. The Webbs, in particular don’t seem to me to be a good example of people who backed the Soviet Union because they thought it was more just and democratic. Rather, they seem (along with others like GBS) to have been captivated by the idea of a rationally managed society. Tidiness and orderliness were the reasons for a certain type of intellectual being attracted to Stalinism.

An entirely different type of person was attracted to communism (in its various forms rather than Stalinism) by their perception of the injustice of capitalism, the experience of mass slaughter in WW1 and by the feeble response of the Western democracies to the rise of fascism. Unlike what motivate the Webbs of this world, those are laudable aspirations.

The twist comes when you add a dose of “realism” to the mixture. Once you’ve identified some agency as the best means of fighting injustice, war and fascism, it is all too easy to convince yourself of something like Sherman’s “war is hell” doctrine and to shield yourself from a proper appreciation of what your side is really becoming. If you want a recent parallel for this psychological process, look at the way that people who believe the values of the West need to be defended by any means necessary and take solace in the writings of Victor Davis Hanson and the like.

And the fact is that there _is_ something (but exactly how much?) to the idea that one shouldn’t be too squeamish in fighting for a just cause when the other side will use any means at its disposal. Differing views on _that_ question and on whether the Soviet Union remained an effective means for prosecuting justice etc or had turned into part of the problem, explain many of the fractures in the communist movement from 1917 on.

Chris is near the mark in his take on what motivated Communists in Britain, I think. A feeling on their part of a just cause, backed by the apparent intellectual rigor of Marxism, was surely part of the appeal for those with authoritarian inclinations. Another aspect was an essential personal capacity for selective amnesia to shut out, or explain away, accounts of the Moscow show trials in the late 1930s and the gulags.

I know of dedicated Communists who went through deep personal traumas as the result of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Some left the Party as a result. Perhaps the bigger puzzle is the motivation of those who wittingly joined the Party in the west after then while knowing of Khrushchev’s denunciation and the horrors of the gulags.

It is perhaps reassuring in its way, that in Britain at least, there was little evidence of “intellectual” motivation in support for the Nazis. Mosley and the British Union of Fascists regularly attracted little support at elections in the 1930s. However, in mainland Europe, there was, I believe, some “intellectual” rationalisation on behalf of National Socialism that had little to do with a “blood and guts” appeal of fascism, the personal charisma of the Fuhrer or even with a justification of the Nazis as a necessary bulwark against Bolshevism. Hitler was opposed to Bolshevism, not to “socialism”.

The Nazis in Germany could and did point to the rapid reduction in unemployment under the Nazi regime. There is little doubt that living standards for many in Germany did improve. For some, the racist elements of Nazi ideology were of a secondary order of importance, an optional extra, possibly intended to widen the popular appeal of the Party. It is said that many Nazi members purchased copies of Mein Kampf for prominent display rather than to read. The racism of the Nazis was not initially part of fascism in Italy and only became so under pressure from Germany in the late 1930s. For them, an authoritarian new order was necessary to address the failings of market capitalism. Von Stackleberg, an economist who later became well-known for his contributions to the theory of oligopoly, evidently believed authoritarian government was a necessary corrective for the otherwise inescapable instability of competitive outcomes in markets dominated by only a few rival suppliers.

I read a bunch of Sartre’s essays a few years ago. Don’t remember much, but most of them were exactly about “the appeal of Stalinism to intellectuals”. Mostly about him losing his closest friends as they were becoming disillusioned with Stalinism — around early ’50s, if I remember correctly. More than enough in this book (don’t remember the title, unfortunately) to answer Mr. Cowen’s question. Well, those were French intellectuals, of course, but I don’t think other intellectuals were much different.

“many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other”

Lyndon LaRouche is a good example of this type in current US politics.

I remember that in Claud Cockburn’s autobiography, he wrote that he left the British CP after the Hungarian revolt was crushed in 1956. Not because it was crushed but because of the fact that it took place on such a large scale in the first place within a communist country meant that the game was up, essentially. So realism can lead both ways.

John Quiggin wrote:

After writing this, I recalled something Orwell had to say in response to an early Cold War description of the typical Communist as a fanatical ideologue, subordinating all personal values to the global struggle against capitalism and democracy. As he said (I’m paraphrasing from memory here), “this all sounds convincing, until you try to apply it the Communists you actually know. With the exception of a couple of hundred hardcore members, they are nothing like this. Most drift in, become disillusioned after a while, and drift out again”.

From my recollection, that’s not the end of the sentence. It finishes with a clause which goes

“…retaining nothing but a contempt for democracy and democratic methods.”

Which of course brings us to the fascinating subject of the psychology of ex-communists, neocons included.

I’d say Chris’ analysis is much more on top than Lilla’s, which isn’t analysis at all, but denunciation. I love things like this: ” First, there are those for whom the central appeal was the cartharsis of a revolutionary smashing of the existing order. This was essentially the same appeal offered by the Nazis, and many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other.”

Really? As I recall, in the West Germany of the 50s, as many of “this type” changed sides to support the Christian Democrats — in fact, Hannah Arendt, in Eichman in Jerusalem, makes a long survey of how many former Nazis had assumed posts in the Adenauer government and the judiciary. Proving that Christian Democracy is a variant of Naziism? No, proving that the bureaucratic mentality develops ways of surviving radical adjustments of regimes.

As for the nihilism that supposedly binds together Naziism and Communism, that exists entirely in Lilla’s head. The Nazi desire to smash the order of society in Weimar Germany in 1933 was located almost entirely among the petit bourgeois and the middle class — the working class, which sided with the Commies or the Socialists, was specifically targeted by the Nazis.

Stalinism — or support for communism — was dependent much more on different circumstances than on intellectual themes. For instance, an African-American intellectual like Dubois might, pace Lilla, find very good reasons for thinking that the social order should be smashed.

‘It is perhaps reassuring in its way, that in Britain at least, there was little evidence of “intellectual” motivation in support for the Nazis. Mosley and the British Union of Fascists regularly attracted little support at elections in the 1930s. However, in mainland Europe, there was, I believe, some “intellectual” rationalisation on behalf of National Socialism that had little to do with a “blood and guts” appeal of fascism, the personal charisma of the Fuhrer or even with a justification of the Nazis as a necessary bulwark against Bolshevism.‘

The best explanation for the varying appeal of fascist parties throughout the continent and Britain in the interwar that I’ve seen is demographic: if you had some place to ship your demobbed malcontents, as Britain and (to a lesser extent) France did, you escaped mass fascist appeal. The guys who became Germany’s Stallhelm became Britain’s Colonial Police. Inspiring a gratitude on the part of the colonists that became obvious BTW.

One of the terrible, hidden truths of World War I is that an awful lot of soldiers liked it. They came back wanting to turn their countries into one big barracks. We mislead ourselves by taking the literary output of a handful of sensitives for the common experience. Feels good, but leaves us very confused.

An additional motivation that I’ve read about (In Furet’s _History of an Illusion_ and in an essay by Isaiah Berlin) was the mutual reinforcing nature or communism and fascism.

As the continental politics became more radicalized, each side justified the other–“the only way to fight fascism is to go with the communists,” and vice-versa. There was widespread doubt that there was a viable middle course. And of course the real need to fight the brutalities of the other side served as a justification for the brutality of your own side. Fight fire with fire.

Berlin wrote a nice essay about FDR which empahsized his importance to europeans precisely because he demonstrated with the New Deal that such a middle course was possible. You could make it through the 30’s with a democratic more or less capitalistic state.

It’s simply not true that few intellectuals supported ultra-right politics.

In continental Europe, there were always a very large percentage of prominent intellectuals who were on the right, at least before 1939 or so. Heidegger, probably the greatest of all twentieth-century philosophers, is but the best-known of cases (Lilla is fully aware of Heidegger, so this isn’t necessarily a criticism of him). Before 1918, ultra-right intellectuals were arguably more important: Baudelaire, the most influential poet of the nineteenth century; Flaubert, the most influential post-Romantic novelist; Celine, Yeats / Eliot/ Pound and many others.

It’s that intellectuals have been attracted to radical politics on both sides. It’s interesting that Cowen wants to ignore half of the equation.

“Red Shirt” comes from Garibaldi and 1848, no? [checks Google] 1843.

I’d fear to assign anything like the modern uses of ‘left’ or ‘right’ when referring to that era. I am pretty sure we’d all want Metternich out. Well, except for Tic.

Some of this discussion is rather ahistorical. The 30’s were a bad time for everyone, and, although the good guys eventually won, the 40’s were horrific. Even with hindsight, I can’t think of a consistent ‘theoretical’ view that would have yielded answers that left no regrets.

Yes, TS Eliot was extremely conservative. Admittedly, he was more of a retro-ultra High Church conservative than the new-style right which seduced Celine, Heidegger and many others. He called himself a royalist in 1928 (a completely and self-consciously anachronistic position), as well as being an open, and fairly extreme, anti-Semite.

He certainly wasn’t anywhere near Pound’s lunacy, but he was a man of the far Right, at least before WWII.

Justin: “Fascism indeed involve state direction and leadership, but it’s intervention was on behalf of capital rather than labor, something significantly more similar to Bush Republicanism than to Schroder Socialism.”

It is certainly true that the Nazis attracted financial support from big business corporations in Germany, which viewed with increasing alarm the growing support for the Communist Party during the deep depression of the early 1930s. It is also true that once in power, the Nazis destroyed the trade unions in Germany. However, it seems to me simplistic to claim the Nazis were opposed to labour. The fact is that unemployment was significantly reduced within a few years under the Nazis and living standards improved.

If the Nazis were supposed to be opposed to labour interests, I doubt this was evident to many German workers at the time unless they were active trade unionists or members of the banned Communist and Social Democrat Parties. Robert Conquest, in his study of Stalin, writes of a report-back in 1936 by the British ambassador to Germany where he remarks that in a march past of the Nazi SA [the Brownshirts] in Berlin, the contingent of ex-Communists were the best turned out. Stalin had no insuperable ideological objections to the Soviet Union contracting a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany in late September 1939, when Britain and France were already at war. In France during WW2, the Communist Party became the mainstay of the resistance movement but only after the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941. Before then, the Party line had been that the war was a capitalist war and therefore no concern of the Communist Party.

By the 1930s, long standing traditions of state intervention in business and market regulation (“dirigisme”) were deeply embedded in much of mainland Europe although not in Britain, where a tradition of laissez-faire tended to prevail, the official Treasury line being that nothing could be done about mass unemployment through an activist fiscal policy because of crowding out. My impression is that the somewhat ad hoc economic interventions of the Nazis, as well as the Fascists in Italy, went with, rather than against, the grain of populist political traditions in mainland Europe, which may help to explain the extent of ready compliance in some countries with German occupation early on in the war. Fascist economics is not alien to European traditions, the main opposition to it coming from the Neo-Liberalism of the Austrian school of economics, which is probably why leading exponents of that critical tradition, such as Von Mises, Schumpeter, Machlup and Hayek, came to settle in America.

bob, it seems the theory you’re working on is that “hitler was a socialist because workers did better without socialism”….if Nazi Germany was socialist simply because unemployment fell, I think that kind of reasoning would have a ton of people on the right up in absolute arms.

You then revert to a populism vs elitism argument. I also find this irrelevant…it’s based on the assumption that supporting the corporate state can’t be pitched as a pro-people argument, something the Republican party of the 20th century (death tax, anyone?) has surely refuted.

Anyone who thinks they have True Knowledge is at high risk for self-deception. In retrospect, it seems amazing that these smart people would continue to support Stalin.

Self-deception isn’t pure wishful thinking. Simply wanting X to be true isn’t usually sufficient to sustain massive self-deception. The self-deceiver must also engage in an active process of rationalization in which she explains away inconvenient observations in terms of her background theory. We call people self-deceived when they are unwilling to reexamine their background theories in light of the evidence, especially if wishful thinking fuels that reluctance.

When Stalinist intellectuals were confronted with evidence of Stalinist crimes against humanity they persuaded themselves that these were i) Lies and distortions perpetrated by an unreliable capitalist media, or, ii) Historical inevitabilities on the way to an equally inevitable utopia, and/or, iii) Snags that were only to be expected in the greatest experiment in human history.

Justin, I don’t even pretend to know whether Hitler can be properly assigned to any one of the 57 varieties of Socialism. What I do know is after the racist elements in the fundamental programme of the Nazis, launched in February 1920 and never amended, the programme included many items commonly found in manifestoes of European socialist parties, such as the abolition of incomes unearned by work, nationalization of trusts, expropriation of land for communal use without compensation etc – I have by me the translation published by the University of Exeter Press (1983).

I also saw that in a speech made by Hermann Goering in 1936, he said: “We must not reckon profit and loss according to the book, but only according to political needs. There must be no calculation of cost. . .” [J Hiden: Republican and Fascist Germany (1996) p.128]

That seemed remarkably similar to the slogan I have often heard from self-proclaimed leftists: “Production for use, not profit.”

I then came across: “The tax department chief of the Association of Industrialists emphasized that it was useless to attempt a precise comparison between old and new tax regulations because the important issue was ‘the new spirit of the reform, the spirit of National Socialism. The principle of of the common good precedes the good of the individual’ stands above everything else. In the interest of of the whole nation, everyone has to pay the taxes he owes according to the tax law.” [Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics (1990) p.185]

With the implicit reference to stealth taxes, that seemed to have almost a New Labour resonance.

As for commentary by distinguished, independent scholars:

“‘In the long run, the Nazis aimed essentially at an economic system which would be an alternative to capitalism and communism, supporting neither a laissez-faire attitude nor total planning.’ [citation to Hardach: The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century; University of California Press (1980) p.66] They introduced administrative controls over investment through licensing and direct allocation of raw materials. But their brand of socialism emphasised central control over economic activity rather than public ownership of firms. Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could make choices by currency controls, taxes on profits and direct allocation measures of the state.” [Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression; MIT Press (1989), p.117]

“The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realise that pure racial anti-semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-semitic, and ultranationalist groups that abounded in post-1918 Germany. Instead, I would suggest, the Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party’s programs, which in an uncanny fashion integrated elements of 18th and 19th century nationalist-etatist philosophy with Keynesian economics. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life including the economy.” [W Brustein: The Logic of Evil – The Social Origins of the Nazi Party 1925-33; Yale UP (1996) p.51]

In response to Jim Harrison,

And we should note that many of the intellectuals who sympathesized with the Fascists (or worse, eventually joined the various Fascist movements) never gave up those beliefs even after WWII. Heidegger and Celine, for example, were still somewhat attracted to Fascism long after the war (though they both were clearly disappointed with their real-life experiences with it). Now, if you witness the Nazi Reich first hand for years, and that still doesn’t convince you…………well, let’s say that Stalinism wasn’t the only thing that got people hooked.

A better parallel to the intellectuals who inexplicably adopted the Stalinist program is: ministers of the gospel who inexplicably adopt some form of nationalist militarism.

In each case it seems incongruous because of the violation of central values belonging to the group. Intellectuals by definition value free inquiry and an open society. Ministers of the gospel by definition value love and peace. But sometimes people can become so obsessed with a vision of an end-state that they disregard contradictions in the methods they are willing to apply to reach that end-state.

The Stalinist-intellectual phenomenon only seems mysterious (while the politicized minister phenomenon does not) because of the prevailing prejudice that “intellectuals” are also wiser than other people.

It should be no more unobjectionable to point out that Jews were disproportionately involved in distasteful politics on the left than it is that they are today disproportionately involved in distasteful politics on the right.

??

Perle, Wolfowitz. Feith, Wurmser, Abrams…

Yr. essay cd. have been published in Encounter (CIA, for those who don’t remember). You are totally ahistorical: There was the Great Slump, which led many people to wonder whether capitalism was the best of all possible worlds.

Yr. essay cd. have been published in Encounter (CIA, for those who don’t remember). You are totally ahistorical: There was the Great Slump, which led many people to wonder whether capitalism was the best of all possible worlds.

This may help to understand metamorphosis of the neocons: Norman Podhoretz Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

…If I had my way, this movement — it wasn’t really a movement, it was more like a tendency — would have been called neo-nationalism because what it really represented was a rediscovery of the values and virtues of American society. And I was and am an American nationalist, an American patriot, whichever word you like to use, and so were all the other neo-conservatives.

This rediscovery of the virtues happened in the late ’60s. Way too late for this rediscovery to be an outcome of disillusionment with Stalinism/USSR; about 15 years late.

In another part of the interview he says:

…I was deeply involved intellectually in the Jewish heritage. It shaped me to the extent that it created in me a high regard for this heritage, unlike many of my friends at Columbia who thought there was nothing there and who thought I was crazy for wasting my time on it. Although I was never a passionate Zionist when I was young, later it turned me into a passionate defender of Israel when Israel came under assault, especially from the left, after 1967.

Hmm good Catholics supporting Franco…

Should we really be so surprised? The Vatican and the Papacy have a record of creating misery that is much longer than that of Stalin, Communism or Fascism.

The current pope has appologised for the Inquisition but has reaffirmed the dogma of absolute Papal authority including papal infalibility. So the symptoms of totalitarianism are disowned but the cause is reaffirmed.

Of course criticizing the Pope can be called predjudice against Catholics, just as criticizing Israel is routinely called anti-Semitism and describing George W. Bush as incompetent is attacked as anti-American.

If we are asking why Communists can’t see through the lies to see the reality why not ask the same of religions? And here the bigottry of Jerry Falwell is as odious as the sanctimonous prating of a pedophile coddling Pope.

There are, indeed, many remarkable historic parallels.

During the reign of Mary Tudor, Queen of England 1553-58, a minimum of 287 protestant heretics were burned alive at various public sites across England in accordance with her policy to restore catholicism as the established faith of her realm. An armada from Spain, with a Papal commission to restore the faith, attempted an invasion of England in 1588. Guy Fawkes and fellow conspirators tried to blow up Parliament at the state opening in 1605 – we still celebrate with fireworks displays our deliverance from that intended atrocity on 5 November each year.

There is absolutely nothing new about a war against terrorism.

The St Batholomew Day massacre of the protestant Huguenots in France on 24 August 1572 makes 9-11 look like a minor incident: http://www.reformation.org/bart.html

The anti-Catholic strain is a little odd, here. There was a leftist type — exemplified by Grahame Greene — who felt that the historic pattern went all the other way — that the persecution of the Catholics by the reigning English protestant establishment, the seizure of the monasteries and nunneries, the capture of Jesuits from overseas and their burning, the system of secret ceremonies and hidey holes that kept the Catholic English going — that it was all rather like working against another reigning Protestant establishment — the Yanks — and for another overseas power — the Soviets. At least, this is a constant theme in the latter G.G.

In addition, I want to comment on the equivalence between the liquidation of the khulaks and the Nazi extermination of the Jews by Bob above. Whereas I certainly don’t want to justify or rationalize either in any way, I think it is legitimate to distinguish an historical event-structure from the intentionality of ideas, rather than just reducing the former to the latter. The “eliminating of the khulaks as a class” per se could amount to an economic policy, (an immensely stupid one, to be sure), an alteration in the arrangements of production and distribution. It was, in fact, part and parcel of the policy of forced collectivization of agriculture. The fact that in its execution it was entirely brutal and resulted in mass starvation does not mean that it amounted to the production of murders for their own sake, as did the Nazi extermination. There is an ideological tendency to tote up all the deaths attributable in any way to Stalinism/Maoism over the course of their history, assigning speculatively some statistical figure, possibly inflated, and directly compare them to the deliberate and aggressive murder of millions by the Nazis over 6 years, to the perverse benefit of the latter. There is no doubt that Stalinist policies were brutally violent, exercised on behalf of a despotic and terroristic state, and are a source of moral horror and outrage to anyone with some trace of neurons in their body. But what is noteworthy about them, in terms of the intentionality of their ideas, which distinguishes them from that of the Nazis, is how self-contradictory, self-defeating, absurd, they were. Imprisoning trained engineers in the Gulag as “saboteurs” does not amount to a policy to build up the material economic infrastructure for the sake of progress in the well-being of the people. The fact that some “intellectuals” could not see that perhaps bespeaks their faith in ideas shorn of context, which is paradoxically idealism. But then Hegel did warn us that history is not the theater of happiness…

Coming in late — I think that iys a bit misleading to say that Nietzsche was “clear about what he wanted” except in the basic fact that he was anti-egalitarian and believed in heierarchy. He didn’t seem to be able to get through a paragraph without deliberately undercutting or qualifying his own argument.

I think that Chris B. got most of it. One factor not mentioned much except perhaps by Scott M. is the “wave of history” idea, expressed in pseudo-scientific form, which to me functionally resembles the kinds of occultist doctrines based on numerology, astrology, kabbalist readings of sacred texts, etc., which traditional Chinese revolutionaries used to ground their innovative ventures in “truth”.

Burrito Boy,

TS Eliot was hardly “openly” anti-semetic, having denied it the few times his was personally confronted with the charge. Neither is “exremely” an apt adjective. Indeed, the most controversial statement (A sentence in “After Strange Gods” where he speaks of the undesirability in an otherwise homogenous society of “free-thinking jews”), he disowned later as the work of a “sick man.” There have been a few convincing articles as of late defending Eliot of this charge.
Also, to compare Eliot and Pound as rightists who only differ in their degree of “rightism” is incredibly disingenuous. The two saw themselves to have nearly opposite political sensibilities. To compare Eliot’s traditionalism with Pound’s fascism is dishonest.