May, 1979
MARX, THE ANTI-SEMITE
By TOM MILSTEIN
Despite generations of socialist
cover-up, obscurantism and bowdlerization, the fact that Karl Marx was an
anti-Semite, that he reviled Judaism as a religion and Jews as people, is so
well established by his own writings as to be beyond reasonable dispute. What
remains unclear is the meaning of this anti-Semitism. A number of explanations
have been offered, none very satisfactory.
For most Marxists, the subject is an
embarrassing one. Some deny that he was
anti-Semitic “in the modern sense,” arguing that his hostility to Judaism was
cut from the same cloth is his hostility to Christianity and to religion in
general. This view will not withstand a serious reading of what Marx actually
had to say about Jews and Judaism. His statements have a very “modern’’—not to
say Hitlerian—ring to them, and moreover reveal a special loathing for the Jews
which transcend his critique of Christianity or for that matter religion as
such. Marx’s attitude toward Christianity at its most negative, was merely
sarcastic and iconoclastic, and he never lost a certain maudlin empathy, toward
it—Marx’s daughter Eleanor reports that “Again and again I heard him say:
‘Despite everything, we can forgive Christianity much, for it has taught to
love children’.” Toward religion in
general he could show real poetic feeling, even when attacking it, as in the
lines which precede his famous “opium of the people” dictum: “Religious
suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest
against real suffering. Religion is the
sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions.” There is
no such compassionate sensitivity to be found in his attitude toward Judaism.
Other Marxists acknowledge the
anti-Semitism, but brush it off as merely a reigning prejudice of the age.
Aside from the fact that Marx is not notable for succumbing to the reigning
prejudices of his age—why should he have acquiesced in this one? -- this
explanation does no justice to the
obsessiveness of Marx’s anti-Semitism. It appears in every field of his
literary activity, his polemics, his journalism, his treatises on philosophy
and politics, his correspondence above all and most vulgarly, his
correspondence. And it appears in the form of a passion, not the grand passion of his life, to be sure, but still a
nagging theme to which he would recur in the most irrelevant contexts—his
rivalry with Lasalle, for example—and in the most defamatory and emotion-laden
terms. We are dealing with more than a mere quirk, either of Marx or his times.
Socialist anti-capitalism has been invoked
as another explanation. There is a long tradition of socialist willingness to
exploit the stereotypical identification of Jews with the commercial spirit, to
make the Jews personifications of capitalist evil, which certainly antedates
Marx. Marx is represented as merely inheriting and thoughtlessly continuing
this demagogic tradition in the propaganda of anti-capitalism. But Marx
rejected the simplistic anti-capitalism of the radical tradition. One of the
touchstones by which he distinguished his theory of socialism from its
“utopian” predecessors was its subtly inflected critique of capitalism, which
stressed capitalism’s historically progressive mission as the solvent of
tradition and custom’s bonds and the organizer of colossal productive
forces—both of which functions he regarded as the sine qua non of socialism.
As is well known, Marx was quite capable of praising capitalism to the
skies, especially when defending it against the primitive and—to his way of
thinking—reactionary attacks of “unscientific” socialism.
Marx’s anti-capitalism is therefore no
explanation of his anti-Semitism, even if he did partake in socialism’s
traditional identification of Judaism with the spirit of capitalism. Such an
identification would, logically, have led Marx to all evaluation of Judaism at
least as nuanced and dialectical as his critique of capitalism itself. Instead,
we find a striking disparity between Marx’s unmodulated hatred toward the Jews
and thing for which he is alleged to have hated them, their capitalistic
spirit. It is the same disparity which we earlier noted between his attitudes
toward Christianity and Judaism.
The incongruity of Marx’s anti-Semitism,
its glaring inconsistency with the general tenor of his thought, not to mention
its morbid odor, has led many students of Marx to the selbsthass thesis. Marx’s anti-Semitism is to be understood
primarily in terms of the psychology of the self-hating Jew. The biographical facts of Marx’s life,
particularly those connected with the less than wholehearted conversion of his
father to Christianity, tend to support this thesis. Additional circumstantial
evidence is provided by familiarity with the stresses of marginality to which
European Jews were exposed in the 19th century, stresses which were
only partially relieved—in certain ways, actually sharpened—by exercising the
conversion option.
The self-hatred thesis has been
strenuously resisted by many socialists, despite overwhelming evidence that
more was involved in Marx’s anti-Semitism than casual or typical prejudice,
doubtless because of the difficulty of reconciling the image of Marx as a titan
in the modern struggle for human liberation, with the rather sordid evidence of
a neurotically twisted character. The only alternative, however, would be to
swallow the Great Man’s bigotry; and that alternative is simply not available
to a civilized person in the 20th century, socialist, Marxist, or
whatever. So, unpleasant though it may be, the self-hatred thesis stands as the
most reasonable explanation of Marx’s anti-Semitism. It locates the source of a
major warp in his thinking, obsessively clung to, in an appropriately
irrational source—inner shame at being something other, something less, than a
real German.
As an explanation, self-hatred seems
right. The trouble is that it has been made to serve as more than an
explanation. It has become a way of encysting the problem, as though Marx’s
anti-Semitism were a characterological carbuncle, diseased in itself, but
fortunately walled off from the healthy surrounding tissues of his thought. No
attention whatever has been paid to the possible relationship, whether causal
or symptomatic, between his anti-Semitism and his other ideas. Certainly
acceptance of the self-hatred explanation does not warrant this reticence, for
self-hatred deals with the motivation of Marx’s anti-Semitism, and does not
even address the matter of its implications for the rest of his thought.
One can already hear the cries of the
Marxists: “Marx’s anti-Semitism had no such implications! It may have been a
serious character flaw, but that is all it was.” But if it was a serious flaw (i.e., serious enough to be
rooted in something as perverse as self-hatred), how could it fail to be
reflected in the rest of his thought? More to the point, is this effort to
pigeonhole an inconvenient and distasteful biographical and intellectual fact
at all consistent with the method Marx would have pursued? To treat Marx’s
anti-Semitism as an embarrassment is to destroy its significance as a clue, an
outcropping of hitherto unsuspected strata of meanings. It was his method to
follow such cryptic manifestations wherever they led, no matter whose lovely
intellectual castles were undermined in the pursuit. Perhaps for Marxists this
method loses its charm when their own ideological ramparts risk being
breached—and perhaps this would be another occasion on which Marx would have to
deny being a “Marxist.”
Anti-Semitism stands for Marx’s blindness
to the roots of Western civilization, which he exalted, in “Oriental
despotism,” which he abominated. This blindness, which pervades his theory of
history and therefore his strategy for socialism, represents the submerged
eight-ninths of an iceberg of which anti-Semitism was merely the visible
protrusion. It is the blindness which led him to view the West as a
self-developing entity, governed solely by its own internal laws of class
struggle, and to disregard the plain evidence of decisive Eastern influence at
critical junctures in the West’s development. One of these influences, an
influence without which the unique development of the West would have been
impossible, is expressed in the role of monotheism in Western history, and it
is the Jews, symbols and bearers of monotheism, whom Marx traduces.
For Marx, there could be no such
influence. The relationship between East and West was strictly one of contrasts
and polar opposites. Oriental despotism he portrayed as a “generalized system
of state slavery,” presided over by a supreme autocrat and his bureaucracy
which concentrated both economic and political power in one gargantuan
administration, and which preyed upon a mass of dispersed agrarian villages,
each one related to the next only by the unifying force of centralized state
coercion and exploitation. This system he denoted the “Asiatic mode of
production,” and emphasized that it did not undergo historical development
(i.e., institutional change through time) but only expanded until it reached
its natural geographical limits (i.e., development across space), after which
it assumed the aspect of a static, unchanging cosmos “always [showing] an
unchanging social infrastructure coupled with unceasing change in the persons
and tribes who manage to ascribe to themselves the political
superstructure.” In other words,
Oriental society lacked all capacity for self-development.
The West, on the other hand, was the
self-developing civilization around which Marx built his whole theory of
history. According to this theory, history was a series of stages in the
development of the means of production, each one constituting a mode of
production with its own characteristic division of labor, out of which grew its
particular class relationships, political struggles, and cultural products.
While Marx was a good deal more flexible in his portrayal of the relationship
between the economic base and its corresponding superstructure than most of his
“Marxist” followers, the fact is that he presented the history of the West as a
unilinear process of development driven by forces originating in the economic
base. Each mode of production expanded to its maximum potential, after which
its inherent but formerly muted contradictions burst to the surface. The social
and political upheavals expressing these contradictions culminated in a social
revolution which overthrew the old mode of production (and all the social relations
based on it) and replaced it with a new and more advanced mode. From this
conception stemmed Marx’s famous schema of the historical process: primitive
communism, classical slavery, feudalism, capitalism and finally, socialism.
Now Marx specifically warned against
“[metamorphosing] my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western
Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of the general path every people
is fated to tread...” in a letter discussing the misapplication of his ideas to
developments in Russia.
From this and other evidence (e.g. his use of a geographic term to distinguish
the Asiatic mode of production as
opposed to the historical and analytical terms he used to describe the other
modes) it is clear that he did not intend his unilinear theory of Western
history—ancient, feudal, bourgeois—to be generalized into a unilinear theory of
world history. But his becomingly modest posture Marx belied on the numerous
occasions when he insisted that history
itself was a characteristic of the West, because Oriental despotism lacked
the inner dynamic of forces necessary to evolve: “Indian society has no history
at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the.
history of successive invaders who founded their empires on the passive basis
of that unresisting and unchanging society.”
In other words, Marx’s theory of history
applies only to the West, and not to the world as a whole. But the Oriental
despotic world outside of the West, the world of the Asiatic mode of
production, has no history.
Therefore, insofar as there is such a thing as human history, Marx’s theory is its universal key, his modest
disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding. Marx’s qualifications do not yield
the image of a world made up of two separate streams, but rather of one stream
and one stagnant pond.
Since he identified history exclusively
with the West, Marx felt obliged to explain that history solely in terms of
forces originating in the West. That is the meaning of his theory of history:
the self-development of the West, as
against the stagnation and fossilization of Oriental despotism. The theory’s
actual content—“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles”—represents Marx’s effort to identify the mechanism by which
this self-development took place, the common thread linking together and
mediating between the different forms of social organization which, each in its
turn, make up the history of the West. According to the theory, the classical slavery
of Greek and Roman antiquity grows out of primitive communism, feudalism out of
classical slavery, and capitalism out of feudalism. Each system develops
embryonically from within the system it is destined to replace; it replaces it
because of a superior organization of the productive forces. Class struggle is
the replacement process and therefore the motor of history.
History—the development of one social
system out of another—is composed of the interaction of classes. What then is made when whole social systems
interact? The significance of this question emerges when it is recalled
that the concept of class struggle is central to Marx’s unilinear theory of history. In order for him to present the
history of the West at all, in contradistinction to the stagnation of the East,
he had to portray is as a self-developing entity. Classes struggled; one social
system changed into another. Only classes
interacted, therefore: social systems, societies modes of production were the product of that interaction and did not
themselves interact, being temporally separated (“stages”) in the historical
process. Marx’s theory of history therefore cannot allow the possibility of
significant interaction between different social systems.*
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• Obviously, Marx dealt with the phenomenon of revolutionary
war between nations possessing different social systems—indeed, it was the only
kind of relation he could imagine between them—but he treated such events as a
special case of class struggle in its revolutionary climax. Since such
conflicts always took place between nations embodying the ancien regime and a nation or nations embodying its revolutionary
replacement, the narrative sequence of his unilinear theory was not upset by
them. Also, while Marx’s theory could not acknowledge interaction between
differing social systems, Marx himself could, as his observations concerning Russia’s relationship to Europe
show. But he never integrated these observations into his theory of history.
Indeed, they cannot be so integrated.
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But all of the social systems which Marx defines as
“stages” in the historical progress of the West interacted with, and were
profoundly influenced by, Oriental despotism, the system which he excluded from
history. When Hellenic Greece became the Hellenistic Empire, it was manifesting
such influence, as was Republican Rome when it became Imperial Rome. In both
cases the result of extensive conquests of Oriental despotic societies was a
partial “orientalization” of the conqueror. Feudalism did not grow
“organically” out of the contradictions of classical slavery; it was rather a
synthesis of the Oriental despotism of the late Roman
Empire and the tribalism of the invading barbarians who overthrew
it. Capitalism may have sheltered in the “interstices” of feudalism, but that
is not the same thing at all as developing out of its “contradictions”; in
point of fact the commercial technique indispensable to Western capitalist
development was unlikely to have arisen spontaneously out of feudal agriculture
and was in any case imported from the East, where it did arise, thousands of
years before European feudalism even existed. Socialism too was supposed to
develop out of the contradictions of capitalism; instead it has become Oriental
despotism’s ideology of liberation from Western imperialism and of
modernization.
From the standpoint of Marx’s theory of
history, of history conceived as the record of the West’s self-development,
these Eastern influences on the West’s history are inadmissible. Had Marx
acknowledged them, he would have had to explain them. To have explained them,
he would have had to abandon his whole unilinear scheme, according to which the
West advances, from antiquity to modern times, through a fixed sequence of
stages, by means of its own inherent dynamism. In place of the unilinear
scheme, he would have had to advance a model of Western development which
viewed it as the outcome of a process of hybridization,
of internal class struggle plus the persisting external influence of Oriental
despotism. In the latter framework, Western uniqueness becomes a hybridized
development of Oriental despotism rather than the product of unilinear
autogeneous development out of the Greek city-state.
Marx’s
theory of history is an ideology—the ideology of Westism. Westism mystifies
the uniqueness of the West into a self-developing essence. Westism accounts for
the curious lacuna in Marx’s thought, whereby he can recognize interactions
between different classes within a society, but not interactions between
different societies—even though, according to his own sociology of the East,
its characteristic mode of production, unchanged in essence, has stood beside
the West throughout the latter’s manifold development. Westism is therefore the
proper name for the unidentified ingredient in Marx’s thought, for that
“blindness” referred to earlier as the submerged eight-ninths of an
intellectual iceberg whose overt expression was anti-Semitism. Marx’s hatred of
the Jews and Judaism, no matter how motivated in the personal or biographical
sense, reverberated through the rest of his thought in this Westism, an
ideology which, because it treats the history of the West as an autogenic
process, requires every instance of Eastern influence in and on the West to be
viewed as exotic, extraneous, or subversive—which is to say, not truly
influential at all, except in the destructive or regressive sense.
For there is this tremendous paradox: the
supposedly self-developing West found it necessary to adopt the ideology of
monotheism, an Eastern religion,
during its transition from “classical slavery” to feudalism. This appropriation is extremely peculiar, to
say the least, from the standpoint of Marx’s theory of history. If the history
of the West truly is the result of self-development,
why did it occur under the rubric of an Eastern religious ideology?
The problem is made all the more poignant
by the actual content of the Eastern religion involved. Monotheism is not just
a religion of the East, but in a certain sense the quintessential religious
expression of Oriental despotism. It contains a religious grasping of the essential principle of Oriental
despotism, its theological conceptualization. With the gradual emergence of
their religion based on the single, universal God, the Jews were realizing in
their heads what geopolitical circumstance kept depriving them of in practice:
the imaginary consolidation and perpetuation of their own Oriental despotic
empire, comparable in glory and durability to those very real empires in Egypt
and Babylon which continually buffeted them. But with this difference: "Yahweh’s"
spiritual autocracy, his omniscience, omnipotence and eternality, worshiped
not in a private cult of the elite but as the common faith of an entire people,
signified the appropriation and internalization by that people of what hitherto
had been an exclusive property of the ruling class of Oriental despotism, as
well as its governing institutional principle: the principle of a single center
of authority, a center to which all action had to be related as so many means
to one great end. Denied attainment in an actual despotic state, this principle
emerged as monotheistic religious ideology rather than monolithic social
organization, which is to say, as the guiding principle of the universe rather
than a concrete fact of social life. The means/end calculus became, so to
speak, a heuristic salvational device for an entire people just because it was
prevented from becoming the elite’s practical administrative device.
Thus, in Judaic monotheism, where the
universal spiritual authority of "Yahweh" replaces the incarnate power of the
deified despot, the law replaces the
actual bureaucratic structure of his despotic state, and history becomes his
field of activity, his empire. This inward ideological leap permitted the Jews
to survive the periodic destruction of their state, the discrediting of their
temple-cult, the occupation and governing of their land by unclean foreigners,
the dislocations of the Diaspora, and the subversive temptations of rival
ideologies and ways of life. It allowed these disasters to be reinterpreted as
instances of "Yahweh’s" just punishment of his erring people, rather than proofs
of "Yahweh’s" weakness against superior alien gods.
But most important, it made every Jew into
a functionary of God. The tremendous psychic dualism which is built into
monotheism, based on the gulf between deity and self, provided powerful
religious sanction for an ascetic model of conduct, for behavior strictly
regulated by rational conformity to God’s written law, rather than by tradition
and custom. This ascetic spirit of Judaism differs sharply from the mystical,
magical or orgiastic spirit of other popular religions of Oriental despotism.
It is based, in Weber’s terminology, on world-rejection rather than
world-flight, and stems directly from monotheism’s radical devaluation of the
world in favor of the transmundane God in whom alone value subsists. "Yahweh,"
unlike the gods of mythic religion, cannot be manipulated through appropriate
ritual observance and sacrifice as a means of controlling events in this world;
he alone is the Great Manipulator, and salvation consists in making oneself, as
nearly as possible, his tool, a task requiring vigilant self-policing according
to the dictates of his law.
The ascetic spirit of conduct and rational
form of consciousness which this religion engendered had the unintended but
vital consequence of predisposing the Jews toward a commercial rather than
agricultural way of life—an adaptation without which they never would have
survived the impractical geopolitical situation of their state at the
crossroads of two great rival empires. The religion never sanctioned rational
economic activity per se—this was to be a Protestant and specifically Calvinist
innovation—but it encouraged a way of life and habits of thought which made it
extremely difficult for a devout Jew to be a farmer, but which lent themselves
quite readily to commercial activity. Thus the monotheist ideology not only
helped insure the survival of the Jews as a religious-cultural entity, it also
indirectly entered into their means of production as a crucial factor in their
economic survival as an urban commercial people.
What monotheism did for the Jews as a
people, it did for the West as a civilization. Ascendancy by the Christian sect
of Judaism helped Europe to withstand the destruction of the Imperial Roman
state without regressing to the tribal barbarism which was indigenous to Europe. It allowed a mode of production to emerge in Europe which was settled and agricultural, without being
Asiatic; it preserved in significant part the cultural level of Roman
civilization without its stultifying state despotism. It did this not by
abandoning the Oriental despotic principle, but by internalizing it, as an
ideology rather than a mode of statecraft. This ideology established the
spiritual ideal of asceticism, of renunciation of the world and
self-renunciation; and this ideal, self-dominion rather than dominion over
others, became the unifying cultural principle amid a welter of decentralized
local powers. Christian monotheism, in short, made feudalism possible.
Feudalism is therefore not the second “stage” in a unilinear sequence of
Western development running from antiquity to modern times, but a hybrid
synthesis of tribal barbarism’s freedom from centralized state coercion with
Oriental despotism’s agrarian mode of production and elevated cultural level.
It would of course be presumptuous to
contend that Christianity’s authority in feudal Europe
testifies to the intrinsic power of the monotheistic idea. It is the idea as
socially expressed, monotheism in its institutional embodiment, which is
historically significant. God’s authority in medieval Europe
was wielded by the Vicar of Christ and his priestly bureaucracy, by the Roman
Catholic Church. This centralized organization, the material expression of
Roman Oriental despotism’s contribution to feudalism, compensated for its lack
of total secular power by asserting a claim to total spiritual authority, and
it embodied this claim in a bureaucratic type of organization which was
qualitatively different from that of feudalism’s other ruling power, the
hereditary aristocracy. The very asceticism which made this bureaucratic
organization possible, also made it dependent on the aristocracy which
controlled the peasantry’s surplus product, for the Church was incapable of
self-reproduction while still remaining bureaucratic (a fact enshrined in its
rule of priestly celibacy). But the aristocracy in turn was dependent on the
Church for the legitimation of its rule to the producing peasantry. And the
prestige of the Church, the “charisma” which permitted it to confer this
legitimation on secular power, derived from the reverent awe in which the
population held it—the awe in which simple worldly people hold any sustained
and systematic ascetic rejection of the world.
It would also be wrong to suppose that
monotheism, with or without its institutional embodiment, was bound to play the
same role everywhere it gained hegemony that it played in feudal Europe. Byzantine Christianity and Islam are both
examples of what could happen to monotheistic religion in social contexts where
Oriental despotism is deeply ingrained in the social structure and culture, and
in economic contexts incapable of supporting extensive agriculture on the basis
of rainfall alone—which require, that is, state-sponsored irrigation and
water-control projects in order to become agriculturally productive. In such
cases the “power of the ideal” shows itself to be conditional in the extreme,
for the monotheist ideology ceases to be a means of transcending Oriental
despotism through the ascetic internalization of its dynamic principle, but
instead reverts to merely another religious sanctification of Oriental
despotism.
Marx’s reification of the West need not be
replaced with another reification—of monotheism itself. It is possible to
respect "Yahweh" without believing in him. The unique development of the West
depends to a considerable degree on the influence of its monotheist religious
ideology, a religion which is Eastern in origin and Eastern in content, and an
influence which conveys the West’s Oriental despotic heritage. Monotheism is an
important influence but it is not all-important. It is not monotheism, but Marx’s failure to accord it any recognition
at all, which is all-important. It
is this failure which turned his theory of Western history into the ideology of
Westism. No man whose loathing of the Jews extended even to himself was about
to show any respect for their religious creation or their role in history.
Quite the contrary; he was bound to construct a world-view which by excluding
them exercised his personal demon. His anti-Semitism was thus part and parcel
of his inability to acknowledge the West’s debt to the East. His theory of
history and his anti-Semitism are intertwined. The theory is not secular, as he
thought, but merely pagan; not iconoclastic, but philistine; not scientific,
but idolatrous. It is not a theory at all, but an ideology, the ideology of
Westism. And this Westism (to which there were many other contributors besides
Marx), by celebrating the West as an autogenic miracle and excommunicating the
Jews as a pariah people, helped mightily to prepare European acceptance of “a
world without Jews,” by insisting on a history in which Jews had no positive
part, a sociology which defined them as exotic parasites, and a future in which
they would “disappear.” Westism carried the illegitimation of Judaism beyond
the bounds of Christian anti-Semitism, into a realm in which final solutions
could one day seem both reasonable and humane.
Marx’s parricidal interpretation of the
West’s history took revenge upon him in the East. There he became the very God
whose significance for the West he abjured. And the religion founded in his
name, Communism, is under severe attack by Westism, just as he personally would
have been annihilated had he lived to face the European consequences of
Westism. Since the essence of its historical interpretation is the denial of
any Western debt to the East, the essence of Westism’s political program is a
sanctimonious refusal to make any payments on this non-existent debt—coupled
with hypocritical indignation when the consequences of this refusal appear in
the form of totalitarianism.
Communism is a secular religion of the
East which uses Oriental despotic methods—the terroristic subjugation of all
segments of society by a single coercive center—in order to instill an ascetic
ethos in its population and transform its rural, agrarian economy into an
urban, industrial one. The religious character of this movement shows up in the
ascription by the people of traits to their rulers which are essentially
divine—traits of omniscience, benevolence and terrible power. In the prototypal
Communist state, the U.S.S.R., during the most frenzied and formative period of
its history, these traits coalesced around a single personality. In this period
the entire population of the Soviet Union,
from the lowliest sweeper of streets to the highest party official, lived in
intimate dread of this one man. No foreign or supernatural force imposed his
rule on the Soviet people; they imposed it on themselves. The charisma of his
terror, like all other forms of charisma, was in the eyes of his beholders; the
measure of his authority, only the totality of their obedience.
The function of this religious movement is
the same as the functions of Judaism and Christianity in the West: to mobilize
the people against themselves. Communism rules in the name of the people but
against their interests. A squalid contradiction, especially viewed from a West
which has outgrown its religious roots and can therefore afford to pretend that
it never had any—a pretense lying at the heart of Westism. But this
contradiction also has its heroic aspect. Out of very little, the Soviets built
themselves up into an autonomous power in the world. They did it by
transforming themselves from a peasant people into an industrial people. And
they used the methods of self-renunciation to do it. That scourge of the
people, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
reserved its greatest violence for itself. The Communist religion does not
differ in squalor or heroism from Western religion. Only the intensity and
duration of the Soviet religious experience differs from that of the West: what
occurred over fifteen centuries of time in Europe, was condensed into a few
decades in Russia.
All the horrors of Stalinism have the same
schizoid character: the victims cannot ultimately be distinguished from the
perpetrators. Nobody imposed Stalinism on the Soviet people. They built it up
from within, from what they had to work with, from their Oriental despotic
heritage, from what they were. They reified the coercive side of Oriental
despotism, the state autocracy, into a mass totalitarian party, in order to
transform tile agrarian-peasant-traditional side into modern industry. It is
the same dualism that is built into all asceticism, the same terror-inspired
rationality that lies behind the West’s experience of monotheism. There is no
rational connection between the arbitrary brutality of Stalinism and the
modernization of the Soviet Union. It is
because the connection is religious that it was effective, effective in the
same way that Calvin’s predestinarian God stimulated Calvinists, as a matter of
anxiety-reduction (although not of logic—the logical response would have been
fatalistic resignation), to unheard-of feats of rational economic activity.
Lacking capital with which to finance
modernization, primitive accumulation is the only way to modernize. A regime of
primitive accumulation means that almost the entire surplus increment of
production resulting from more rational economic activity by the people must be
withheld from consumption for reinvestment in expanding the means of
production. When the people cannot consume the benefits of their intensified
economic activity, the greater discipline and self-control—the rational self-
consciousness—which is a prerequisite to such activity assumes the form of a
regime of externally forced asceticism. Even in communities thoroughly
conditioned by ascetic religious values this process took on a theocratic,
quasi-totalitarian form (e.g., Puritan New England). But Oriental despotic
societies lack such conditioning and must rely almost completely on externally
imposed asceticism. Primitive accumulation in such societies can only be
enforced by totalitarian methods, rationality can only be sanctioned by terror.
Self-control and self-discipline acquire a coercive significance, requiring
coercion to be inculcated and coercion to be sustained, when the fruits of the
enhanced productivity which such conduct makes possible are expropriated from
their producers.
Even though this expropriation represents
in some sense a social appropriation (the surplus is not consumed by a “La
Dolce Vita” elite but is reinvested, however inefficiently, in future growth),
it is still felt by the individual producers as an exploitative and
demoralizing expropriation. The producers may even identify with and take pride
in the national economic progress which results from their heroic sacrifices;
but since they cannot benefit directly and personally from this progress through
higher individual consumption, they require the services of, and may even be
said to invent, an external coercive agency, the totalitarian party-state, to
stand between them and the product of their labor, the direct consumption of
which would undercut modernization. The Stalinist state, which the people
execrate but also create, out of their own Oriental despotic heritage, is their
alienated symbol of self-restraint. In its inscrutable sovereign arbitrariness,
the state is the irrational foundation of their rationality.
Of course, there is a “variable” in the
totalitarian equation. It is not Oriental despotism, which was a fact of
Russian history as it is of most of the Third World
today. Nor is it the compulsion to modernize, which presented itself to Russia as it
presents itself now to all peoples—as a life or death challenge, beyond their
free choice. The variable is the primitive accumulation factor. Primitive
accumulation is not a historical “given” because the capital necessary to
finance the modernization of Russia
did exist—in the West, however, not in Russia. It was available, only it
was not made available. It remained locked within the property relations of a
system which only extrudes it in expectation of a profit. The only profit which
would have accrued from an investment in Communist modernization would have
been the preclusion of totalitarianism. Much cheaper, really, to propound the
ideology of Westism, which tells the East, “We modernized ourselves with
capitalist economics and liberal politics. Nobody aided us, but we’ll aid you.
Take our political economic doctrines gratis
and make something of yourselves.” When the result is Stalinism, its
countenance waxes wroth while its eyes well up with crocodile tears for the
victims. “See how right we were not to give them one red cent?” The message
changes to sanctimonious anti-Communism, which is now telling the West what
Westism wants it to hear: that force alone is prophylactic, and that the West’s
only complicity in the rise of Stalinism lies in its cowardly unwillingness to
apply sufficient force against it.
The Russian people created Stalinism, but
they did not create it according to circumstances of their own choosing. They
fashioned it out of their own Oriental despotic heritage, according to the
circumstances of primitive accumulation. Russians are responsible for the
creation, but Westism is responsible for the circumstances, for it is Westism
which guards the illusions of the West about itself. The God whom Westism
denies haunts not only the Russian people, but the whole world; his rule is the
price the whole world pays for the maintenance of Westist conceit. When we can
respect this God, neither denying him nor believing in him, we shall rule
ourselves.
