MARX
by Tom Milstein
2/7/1997
“On
the afternoon of the 14th of March at a quarter to three, the greatest living
thinker ceased to think.” So Friedrich Engels eulogized his friend and comrade
Karl Marx at his gravesite over a century ago. Another great thinker had died
the previous year, and Engels was moved to compare the two: “As Darwin discovered the law
of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in
human history .... His name will live through the centuries and so also will
his work.”
Engels' comparison of Marx to Darwin, and the analogy he drew between their theories, has not stood the test of time. Darwin's theory remains viable. Marx's does not.
Engels' comparison of Marx to Darwin, and the analogy he drew between their theories, has not stood the test of time. Darwin's theory remains viable. Marx's does not.
And yet Marxism was not defeated by some greater thinker or mightier theory. His system, never lacking for opponents, worthy and otherwise, remains remarkably intact — as a theoretical system. That is why he is so disturbing a presence in our time, in a way that Darwin, the more successful of the two theorists, is not. Events, not ideas, have confounded Marx's theory. His theory has been shattered by history, but never overthrown by any successor theory of comparable scope and depth. The best that contemporary thought has been able to generate by way of a theoretical refutation of Marx's system is embodied in the passionate conviction that all universal theoretical systems are inherently false. This view, virtually an article of faith in social science now, is the true homage which the 20th century pays to Marx, the last of the great system-builders. It testifies to the general resentment at having to remain camped on the outskirts of Marx's deserted and ruined but strangely uncircumventable city.
The French Revolution was Marx's intellectual springboard. He regarded it as the decisive event of the l9th century, a cataclysm which shaped all aspects of life in Europe. He thought that if its secrets could be plumbed, the Revolution would become a mighty paradigm for analyzing history, politics and society. In this sense all of Marx's economic and historical investigations, as well as his arduous ascent from speculative philosophy to social science, amount to an extended commentary on his concept of the origins and consequences of the French Revolution.
The Russian Revolution is for our time what the French Revolution was for Marx's. The critical evaluation of Marx's theory of history, therefore, really depends on juxtaposing the theory to the reality of the Russian Revolution. How well does the theory explain the reality? The question is not academic. Nor is it unfair to Marx. The Russian Revolution was in fact mastered by “professors” of theoretical and applied Marxism who called themselves Bolsheviks.
If we focus the Marxian searchlight on the Russian Revolution, two very dark shadows immediately stand out: Why, given the pre-capitalist character of Russian society, did the revolution assume a socialist, a post-capitalist, form? And why did this socialist revolution produce a totalitarian society?
The socialist form assumed by the Russian Revolution is problematical because Marx envisioned socialism maturing out of the contradictions of capitalism at its ripest — that is, in the advanced industrial nations of Western Europe — and not in a backward country like Russia, where capitalism was just emerging. And the totalitarian outcome of the Russian Revolution is truly mysterious, inasmuch as it introduced a strange society into the world for which Marx made no provision and whose impact on the 20th century was such as to defeat his entire historical prognosis.
What the Russian Revolution gives us, then, is a socialism where it ought not to have been, and a totalitarianism that ought not to have been at all. Between these two conundrums Marxism cannot be stretched. But where precisely is the theory's breaking point?
The Bolsheviks, who made the Russian declaration of socialism, justified themselves in Marxian terms. Their Menshevik opponents, who renounced all thought of a socialist revolution in Russia as “adventurism,” were denounced by the Bolsheviks as cowardly renegades from Marxism. Lenin and Trotsky argued that their socialist revolution confirmed Marx because it corresponded to the new form of class struggle and revolution in the new era of capitalist development — the era of Imperialism. Imperialism transcended the limitations of the nation-state through the global reach of financial capital. Russia might be generally backward and pre-capitalist, but finance capitalism — unlike its national counterpart — could still seed numerous pockets of industrial development. The Bolsheviks regarded these pockets as advanced outposts of European capitalism, and therefore altogether appropriate places for the socialist world revolution to commence.
This argument obviously stretches Marx's theory. Does it strain the theory past its breaking point? Lenin and Trotsky never claimed that their socialist revolution would actually produce “socialism in one country”; they predicted that it would spread from Russia to the more advanced countries of Europe, whose great wealth could then be tapped for the purpose of modernizing the Russian economy. Such modernization would stave off the counterrevolutionary menace which lurked in Russia's overall backwardness. They never denied that if the revolution failed to spread, socialism in Russia would certainly be overthrown.
Marxism would need some stretching if it was to survive its World War I debacle, when a paralyzed Socialist International watched helplessly while its member parties endorsed the war aims of their respective national governments, thus freeing the European working class to slaughter itself in blithe disregard of the pieties of “proletarian internationalism.” The rescue of Marxism demanded heroic measures. The Bolsheviks offered not only daring theoretical innovations, but a vivid demonstration of their practicability — a victorious revolution.
The alternative to granting the Bolsheviks their Marxist credentials, notwithstanding their revisions, is not some pristine form of Marxism, untainted by Bolshevism's subsequent crimes. It is rather to acknowledge that Marxism collapsed when the guns of August began to roar. So let Marxism be allowed new life in the Bolshevik revolution, and the Bolsheviks their claim to the Marxian heritage, albeit in a creatively extended form. The breaking point arrives soon enough.
The Bolsheviks saw the Russian Revolution as a great drama in three acts. The first stage began in February 1917 when the Czar's “feudal” regime was overthrown by a democratic revolution of the entire people and a “bourgeois-democratic” government installed. This first, “capitalist,” phase ended in October when the Bolshevik party, utilizing its power in the workers' and peasants' soviets, overthrew the “capitalist” regime and inaugurated the second, “socialist,” stage. The third stage would arrive when the Russian Revolution extended itself to Western Europe and triggered the world revolution. It followed from this scenario that if anything went wrong in the third act, if the revolution failed to spread through Western Europe but was instead isolated and confined to Russia, the socialist achievements of the second stage would be rolled back by a counterrevolutionary alliance of reactionary forces from inside and outside of the country. Its pockets of advanced capitalist industry notwithstanding, Russian society overall was just too backward to sustain an insular socialism. Only the political achievement of the first stage — bourgeois democracy and its capitalist social order — would remain.
The fundamental assumption underlying this scenario was that Russia was a Western country whose “laws of development” would replicate the sequence of historical stages into which Marx had organized the history of Europe. The Bolsheviks did not propose to annul or skip over the capitalist stage in Russia's development; they would merely drastically foreshorten or “telescope” it into the eight months between February and October. If Bolshevism were overthrown, Russia would return to this stage of development, which would then re-extend itself for the full period of time necessary for capitalistic accumulation to modernize the country. An unpleasant prospect for socialists, to be sure, but one which would leave Russia no worse off than she was before the Bolshevik October — better off, in fact, for the intervening socialist episode would at least sweep away the deadweight of Russia's remaining feudal vestiges far more thoroughly than the bourgeoisie would ever dare.
But of course Russia was not a Western country. The terms “Oriental,” “Asiatic,” and “semi-Asiatic” do crop up in Lenin and Trotsky's descriptions of Russia, but they used these terms only to connote Russia's extreme backwardness as compared to “the rest of Europe.” For Marx, however, these terms were not merely descriptive. He used them very carefully in a powerful category of social analysis, equal in weight to “feudalism,” “capitalism,” and the other categories of his theory. The “Asiatic mode of production” was for Marx the social system of “Oriental despotism,” the predominant form of society in the non-Western world. The distinctive feature of this social system was its overgrown (by Western standards) state bureaucracy, which combined the functions of coercive domination and economic exploitation of the population, functions which were sharply differentiated in Western history. In the Orient, in other words, the government was also the ruling class. Marx consistently defined Russia as an Oriental despotism, “feudal” only in the social nomenclature which it borrowed from its European neighbors.
Was Marx wrong to regard Russia as a quasi-feudal Oriental despotism? Numerous upholders of Russia's “fundamentally Western” heritage, Marxist and otherwise, have defined Czarist Russia as a semi-Asiatic feudalism. Questions such as this have been known to produce scholarly quarrels lasting centuries. Fortunately, the question has long since been definitively answered — not speculatively, but “experimentally,” i.e. by the actual outcome of the Russian Revolution.
There was no private ownership of the means of production in the U.S.S.R. The revolution was isolated, and yet no capitalist restoration occurred! This incontrovertible fact left open only two possible interpretations. The absence of private ownership might truly testify to the survival of socialism in Russia. In other words, notwithstanding the failure of the revolution to spread into the advanced industrial countries of Europe, no counterrevolution occurred in Russia. In this case, Marx was dead wrong to insist that the prerequisite for socialism was an advanced industrial economy. Of course, if he was wrong about this, he was wrong about everything, for Marx did not postulate socialism's dependence on a pre-established industrial base, he concluded it at the end of a tight chain of reasoned analysis of history and society.
On the other hand, if a counterrevolution did occur, then Russia cannot be a “fundamentally Western” country, for the counterrevolution, in overthrowing Russian socialism, manifestly did not restore capitalism. In this case, it is not Marx, but the Bolsheviks, who were wrong about everything. Whichever of these two interpretations is correct, the connection Marxism and Bolshevism is here sundered, precisely by absence of any capitalist restoration after the revolution was effectively quarantined from Europe. Here is the point at which the Bolsheviks' “stretched” Marxism snaps — and recoils back upon them with all the stunning fury of the Stalinist blood bath.
But which interpretation is correct? Was Russia still socialist, or did a counterrevolution occur? It would be illogical to throw out Marxism in order to salvage the socialist reputation of the Soviet Union, in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks based the legitimacy of their entire enterprise on Marxism. Apart from logic, however, there is the overwhelming evidence of continuity between Marx's definition of Russia as an Oriental despotism and Stalin's transformation of Russia into a totalitarian autocracy. If we begin our analysis of the Russian Revolution with Marx's definition of the Czarist autocracy as an Oriental despotism, then the characterization of Stalin's regime as “totalitarian” becomes not just a static descriptive category but a genuine historical process with its roots deep in Russia's institutional heritage. It is no longer necessary to derive Soviet totalitarianism from such ahistorical sources as Lenin's organizational genius or Stalin's wicked soul. The absent capitalist restoration becomes the invisible “Asiatic restoration” — invisible to the Bolsheviks, who were expecting a resurgent capitalism, against which they adopted measures that actually nurtured Russia's recrudescent Oriental despotism. The nationalized economy, and the coercive ramparts which the Bolsheviks threw up to protect it, were the very counterrevolution incarnate. Socialism's “dictatorship of the proletariat” became Oriental despotism's “overgrown state bureaucracy.”
Marx's definition of Russia as an Oriental despotic rather than a European feudal society is the only characterization which renders intelligible the totalitarian rather than capitalist outcome of the Russian Revolution. Bolshevism's derivation of the revolutionary process in Russia from the history of Europe — from feudalism to capitalism to socialism — was a Procrustean imposition. Eurocentrism blinded the Bolsheviks to the real form of any authentic Russian counterrevolution: not a restoration of capitalism, but the return of Russia's Oriental despotic heritage, of the Asiatic pattern of monolithic state coercion and exploitation of society by a bureaucratic class of powerholders. The Bolsheviks sowed socialism in Oriental despotic soil — and reaped totalitarianism. The Bolshevik October launched Russia's movement from “the freest country in the world” (Lenin's description of Russia after the February revolution) to the reign of “Ghengiz Khan with a telegraph” (Bukharin's characterization of Stalin). The Bolsheviks were the real (if unwitting) counterrevolutionaries of the Russian Revolution.
So Marx is vindicated! He cannot be held responsible for Bolshevism's misappropriation of a theory whose applicability he specifically restricted to Western Europe. He cannot be held responsible for Bolshevism's willful disregard of his clear definition of Russia as an Oriental despotic rather than feudal society, his emphatic exclusion of Russia from Western civilization. So he certainly cannot be held responsible for the monstrous consequence of all this Bolshevik “revisionism” — Stalinist totalitarianism.
Or can he? Set against all the evidence that Marx, had he lived to see Bolshevism, would have disavowed it as a gigantic falsification of his views on socialism and Russia — evidence which, although inferential, since Marx is not alive to give it, is quite compelling — is evidence of a different kind, tending to a different conclusion. It is a fact that the Bolsheviks, no matter how misguidedly, were sincerely animated by Marx's theory and vision. It is a fact that almost none of the Marxist opponents of the Bolsheviks challenged their most fateful assumption — that Russia was “fundamentally Western” (because they all shared it). It is a fact that the Soviet regime invoked Marx for legitimacy. It is a fact that the political vehicle in and through which totalitarianism entered the modern world was Marxism.
There is no question here of crude amalgamations of Marxism and totalitarianism. The mere fact that Marx's concept of the Asiatic mode of production offers such powerful insights into the origins of Russian totalitarianism absolves him from such tendentious judgments. Marxism and totalitarianism are not the same thing; the question is rather one of Marxism's vulnerability to totalitarian exploitation and manipulation. This vulnerability has yet to be explained, or even faced, by those who would invoke “true Marxism” against Communist realities. So prescient in other ways, why did Marx not anticipate totalitarianism, the most potent phenomenon of the 20th century — especially when he analyzed so acutely its predecessor, Oriental despotism? And since he loathed this Oriental despotism, viewing it has the moral and historical antithesis of Western civilization, which he cherished, how was it possible for his form of socialism to be hijacked by the totalitarian movement of our time?
Let us retrace our steps. The solution to the problem of the “missing counterrevolution” lies in Marx's concept of the Asiatic mode of production. Marx explicitly placed Russia under the rubric of this mode of production, whose outstanding trait was its unified exercise of political domination and economic exploitation through the singular institution of a state bureaucracy which “owned,'' de facto if not de jure, the means of production. The personnel of the state were therefore the ruling class. Stalinism, while in no sense the counterrevolution the Bolsheviks were expecting, certainly does qualify as the counterrevolution they ought to have expected: an “Asiatic” rather than a “bourgeois” counterrevolution.
But this explanation cuts two ways: against Bolshevism, but also against Marx. If the real counterrevolution was Bolshevism's inadvertent triggering of an Asiatic restoration, then after that counterrevolution Russia should have returned to some form of Oriental despotism. In that case, Stalin should not have been able to command the industrial transformation of the country's economy without fatally undermining his own regime. Russia should have remained an agrarian country, for, from the Marxian standpoint, no counterrevolution can carry through a revolutionary transformation of the means of production. Yet that is just what Stalin did. Moreover, Marx held that the despotic aspect of class power in Asiatic society was bound up with its agrarian mode of production. The agrarian economy, resting on its base of inherently dispersed and disorganized peasants, was the necessary social correlate of Oriental despotism's highly organized and centralized state bureaucracy. But Marx identified no corresponding social function in industrial society for a continuation, let alone a gigantic augmentation, of state tyranny. Quite the contrary: according to Marx, the main producers in industrial society, the workers, possess a capacity for self-organization which militates against any such despotic superimpositions. Yet the industrialization of Russia was accompanied by the greatest intensification of despotism in history.
Finally, Stalin's “industrialized Oriental despotism” shatters Marx's historical theory, according to which Oriental despotism is not supposed to have a future, only a past. Marx called this social formation a “mummy” which would disintegrate into dust when exposed to the fresh air of Western imperialism — a disintegration he welcomed as ridding the world of its most stagnant, oppressive and degrading social system. He left unclear the matter of whether it was to be Western capitalism or Western socialism which would lead the peoples of the non-Western world to modernity. But he was very definite that their “Asiatic” heritage had no role to play in this modernization (except to facilitate it by vanishing).
But if Stalinist totalitarianism is a modernized form of Oriental despotism, Marx was wrong about the stationary and vegetative character of Oriental despotism. The totalitarian transformation of Russia reveals latent powers of self-development in the Asiatic mode of production. The result of these powers — totalitarianism — spoils Marx's entire historical prognosis by introducing a third force into the dialectic of class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, into which Marx resolved world politics, and from which he projected his socialist vision of the world's future.
A revolution sponsored by a counterrevolution, an industrialized Oriental despotism, and a dynamic, self-transforming Asiatic mode of production: perfect Marxian paradoxes. We used Marx's ideas to appraise the Russian Revolution, thereby clearing socialism of its Soviet identification and Marx of responsibility for totalitarianism; we must therefore be prepared to accept the consequence of using the Russian revolution to appraise the ideas of Marx: the spontaneous combustion of Marxism.
Marxian theory, born of the French Revolution, was slain by the Russian Revolution. But the paradoxes to which the theory gives rise when confronted by the reality of the revolution carried out in its name become manifest only in retrospect. Prior to the Russian Revolution they were merely latent in Marxism. Of course it was this very latency which made Marxism so ripe for totalitarian appropriation. Did not the socialist movement absorb from Marx the euphoric assumption of the world's irresistible Westernization? By consigning the non-Western world to past limbo and future oblivion, Marx in effect announced the end of the East-West schism in world history, in the form of total victory for the West and the unconditional surrender of the East. It followed from this declaration of a Westernized world that the inner contradictions of the West's social system, capitalism, would become — had become — the governing laws of world politics. From this perception of a bourgeoisified world Marx advanced to his confident prophecy of the immanent necessity of socialist revolution, the former being the guarantee of the latter. Capitalism had to become a universal system in order for Das Kapital to become the world's Bible. Marx's wish-fulfilling assumption made it possible for totalitarianism to don its socialist disguise: if the world is capitalist, and Stalinism is anti-capitalist, then Stalinism had to be... socialism. A warped and distorted socialism perhaps, but still... socialism.
Paradoxes in theory which only become manifest as a result of some subsequent event in the real world cannot truly be said to lie in the theory itself. They lie at the intersection of the theory with the world, and for that reason are not theoretical contradictions per se, which must be intrinsic to the theory. But these theory-world paradoxes do serve as pointers toward the theory's inherent contradictions. In other words, beneath the paradoxes of Marxism which stand out so clearly in the retrospect of the Russian Revolution, there must lie a deeper contradiction in the theory itself, a contradiction which was there even before the Russian Revolution had occurred. We are after what Marx might have called the “ideological element in Marxism,” the contradiction in his thinking that blinded him to what he could have known and should have known about the approach of totalitarianism even before it arose.
These paradoxes which sprout at the intersection of Marxian theory and the Russian Revolution — where then do they point? Like all pointers, in two directions at once: toward the East, which, obviously, Marx gravely misperceived; from Marx's ideology, which generated his skewed view of the East. But to identify this ideology, which is the true theoretical contradiction of his doctrine, we must work our way back to it from a deeper consideration of his misperception of the East, reversing the actual movement of Marx's thought, which proceeded from ideological preconception to Eastern misperception.
To the limited extent that Marx thought about the future of the East, he saw it as little more than modeling clay to be molded by the West in its own image. His nonchalant colonialism toward the non-Western world envisioned no real participation or contribution on the part of the subject: the indigenous institutions, traditions and culture of the East were destined to disappear completely. Marx never dreamed that the clay might come alive, that it would react back upon its Western manipulator with sufficient strength, not just to resist the modeling process, but to remodel the West itself. Westernization and modernization were synonyms to Marx, and conceived by him strictly as a one-way process. The West would replicate itself in the East, and the East would disappear into thin air.
Marx profoundly misconceived the future of the East-West relationship — so profoundly that he could not envision it as a relationship at all, insofar as that term connotes interaction where Marx saw only one-sided manipulation. It is an astonishing error, not only because its visible refutation — the irruption of totalitarianism in our century — has been so dramatic and so absolute, but because Marx committed it with such smug assurance. But the reverberations of this error do not extend only to Marx's posterity, which is to say, us. They echo back into Marx's past, or rather, the past which he construed from his theory of world-history.
Marx assumed that there would be no future relationship between East and West, that the East would simply expire, because there had been no past relationship. He presented the flow of history as hermetically Eurocentric, with the East world-historically inert. He never claimed that the sequence of historical development he attributed to Europe applied also to the East; this was to become the cardinal Stalinist falsification of his theory. He simply held that only Europe had even known progressive historical development in the true sense, whereas the East, locked within static cage of its Oriental despotic social system, “vegetating in the teeth of time,” remained stranded outside the historical process altogether. And since history was a unique property of Europe, Europe alone was responsible for history: Marx presented Europe's development as continuous and self-contained, a movement driven solely by its own inner class struggle dynamic through successive stages of economic organization, free of all significant outside influences.
Marx arranged his theory of history so as to demonstrate this self-sufficiency of European development. His ostensible purpose was to banish all “non-material” factors from the scientific explanation of history, in line with his famous dictum that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Marx's immediate purpose in promulgating this dictum was, of course, to overturn Hegelian idealism. But on a deeper level Marx regarded all idealist philosophy as essentially a continuation of religion's supernatural explanation of history in secular disguise. And Marx saw himself as a kind of diabolic-humanistic Prometheus who, by puncturing the pretensions of religion, would liberate humanity with fire stolen from the gods. His real interest in religion was iconoclastic. Beyond demonstrating to his own satisfaction that religion was the most epiphenomenal of all human phenomena, his interest in the subject was very limited.
Now it so happens that the chief evidence for a powerful Oriental influence on Europe's development lies in the sphere of religion — precisely where a historical materialist would be most insensitive to it.
Why did the West adopt an Eastern religion as its ideology, and remain under its sway for 1500 years? The ideological triumph of Christianity in the West should have triggered loud alarms in Marx's theoretical early warning system. Non-Marxian historians might dismiss the Eastern provenance of Christianity as a mere historical accident, or treat it as an example of the power of great ideas to “float free” of their originating environment and take root in completely foreign soil. But “idealist” explanations of this sort are impermissible to historical materialists. According to the Marxian critique of ideology, the sway of any given idea can only testify to the power of a corresponding social force. The apparent power of the idea is the real power of the social force.
Pagan Europe suffered from no shortage of its own indigenous ideologies, religious and secular. What then could the triumph of Christianity over indigenous Western paganism represent if not a massive Oriental intrusion into Western historical development?
Marx never even considered this problem — an omission which was no doubt conditioned in the first instance by his overall disdain for religion, both as a phenomenon in its own right, and as a field for fruitful scientific inquiry. But suppose Marx had posed the question of the significance of Christianity's Oriental provenance. What could he have possibly made of it? How could he have ever integrated the fact of Christianity's Oriental origin into his theory? Historical materialism constitutionally rejects the very possibility of Eastern influence on the West, no matter how compelling the evidence for it or where that evidence might be located. The theory describes history as the result of interaction between different classes, not different societies. And this “class struggle” analysis of history is binding for Marx: in order for the West to be defined as a self-developing entity, each stage in its development must be shown to “grow out of” the preceding stage exclusively. Classical slavery “grew out of” primitive communism, feudalism “grew out of” classical slavery, capitalism “grew out of” feudalism, just as socialism will “grow out of” capitalism. Each new stage is determined by contradictions in the mode of production of the previous stage; these contradictions manifest themselves in class conflict; class struggle is therefore the motor force of history.
The entire series of historical stages through which Marx depicts Western history as passing serves therefore a double function, each one conditioning the other: Western history is sufficient unto itself, independent of the rest of the world; and historical materialism is established on a “scientific” foundation, since it explains this history without the aid of any deus ex machina, either in the form of divine or metaphysical intervention, or of external influences originating outside the bounds of the social system whose transformations are being explained.
If Christianity testifies to the impact of Oriental civilization on the West, for Marx such testimony could only serve as additional vindication of his preconception that religion's role in the determination of history was trivial. For if Western history is the product of contradictions in its own modes of production, how could historical changes introduced from without, from another mode of production geographically removed from the West, not be trivial? Indeed, Marx often seems to betray an unstated but deep-seated conviction that the real ideology of the West is secular Greek philosophy and its European elaboration — almost as though one-and-a-half millenniums of Christian religious hegemony were just an un-Western aberration, perpetrated, no doubt, through some colossal fraud of the priests. This peculiar bit of Voltairean gnosticism, of course, flies in the face of reality: secular philosophy, until recently, has never been more than the ideology of intellectuals, gaining mass influence only when absorbed into the body of Christian religious doctrine.
Marx failed to appreciate the fact of Eastern influence on the West's development for reasons that can only be described as “ideological,” in precisely Marx's own sense of that term. The defects in his theory of historical materialism — its ingrained bias against evidence drawn from the field of religion, and its exclusive reliance on an intra-societal dynamic, as opposed to intersocietal forces, to account for historical change — are defects which implement this failure rather than explain it. The premier role of Christianity in Western culture, and its plainly Oriental origin, are not obscure clues to an esoteric mystery. They are obvious material facts of Western history. It was not Marx's theory which prevented him from seeing them, but Marx who prevented his theory from seeing them. Only an ideology could have wielded such power over Marx, leading him to stare through the centrality of Christianity in Western culture and thus elide the problem of its Oriental origin. But what ideology? That is the mystery — the mystery of Marx's ideology.
There exists one puissant clue to the solution of this mystery. Marx's view of the past (historical materialism) and his view of the future (socialism) run aground on the phenomena of Christianity and Communism, respectively. And both Christianity and Communism originated in the East. They are Oriental intrusions into Western history. But to speak of Christianity and Communism as “Oriental intrusions” is to refer only to their origins. Apart from their similar origins, is there anything to connect the two phenomena? After all, if Marx's error truly is ideological in nature, there ought to be more than this one correspondence. There ought to be additional similarities between Christianity and Communism — similarities which would point beyond their similar origin, to an actual similarity of function.
We begin our search for additional linkages between the two phenomena by examining that aspect of Christianity which is specifically Oriental — the aspect which Christianity, even as it became a “Western religion,” carried over from its Oriental origins and which represents the East's real contribution to the development of the West. Identifying the “Oriental content” in Christianity would provide us with a “missing ingredient” in Western history suppressed by Marx's theory of historical materialism — an ingredient which, in view of the magnitude of Christianity's role in Western history, may be presumed to have been a major determinant of that history. Furthermore, since Marx's theory did suppress this ingredient from the West's past, it is reasonable to infer a connection between his failure to recognize the function of this ingredient in the West's own history and his failure to anticipate the rise of Communism. In other words: Marx failed to see in the West's past what he failed to foresee in the world's future.
What then is Christianity's Oriental content? It is that which is Jewish in Christianity, for it was out of Judaism that Christianity evolved, and it is in its Judaic component that Christianity most acutely manifests its Oriental content.
Judaism is not just a religion of the East, but in a real sense the paradigmatic religion of the East. It amounts to a religious grasping of the organizational principle of Oriental despotism, its theological conceptualization as it were. With their sublime vision of the single, universal God, the Jews realized in their heads the very thing that geopolitical realities kept robbing them of: the visionary consolidation and perpetuation of their own Oriental despotic empire, surpassing in power, majesty, and durability those worldly empires of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates river valleys by which they were constantly buffeted. But with this difference: God's spiritual autocracy, his omniscience, omnipotence and eternality, worshipped 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 elites of the Oriental despotisms — the principle of a single center of authority, a center to which all thought and action had to be related as so many means to one great End. Denied attainment temporally, in an actual and durable state, the governing institutional principle of Oriental despotism was transmuted by the Jews into monotheistic religion rather than monolithic social organization, which is to say, the guiding principle of the Universe rather than a concrete fact of political life. The means/End calculus became a heuristic salvational device for an entire people just because it was prevented from becoming the elite's private administrative technique. Thus, in Judaism, where the universal spiritual authority of God supersedes the worldly power of any ruler, His law replaces the actual bureaucratic structure of the despotic state, and history becomes His field of activity, His empire.
This inward ideological leap turned the Jewish people into a “nation of priests” and made every Jew into a functionary of God. The terrific psychic dualism which is built into Jewish monotheism, rooted in the gulf between Creator and creation, gave powerful religious sanction to an ascetic model of conduct, for behavior strictly regulated by rational conformity to God's written law, rather than by the usual mixture of terror, tradition and custom. This ascetic spirit of Judaism differs sharply from the mystical, magical, or orgiastic spirit of the other religions of the ancient world. It is based, in Max Weber's language, 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. God, unlike the gods, 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 for the Jewish people consists in making themselves, as nearly as possible, His tool, a task requiring vigilant self-policing according to the dictates of His law.
The West's Christian ideology thus did not merely originate in the East, but in an Eastern religion which peculiarly “captured” Oriental despotism by introjecting its functional principle as a guide to conduct, a religious ethos, while projecting its structural principle into the very fabric of Universal space and time. And while Christianity adulterated Jewish monotheism with diverse pagan themes -e.g., its incarnate man-god savior, its Trinitarian theology, and its sacrament-dispensing priestly bureaucracy — it also retained important elements of it, always upholding the spiritual primacy of asceticism, anticipating the future redemption of the world, and affirming the fundamental oneness of God.
What did Christianity contribute to the history of the West? According to Marx, very little, because Christianity is a religion, and religion is epiphenomenal — i.e., having no power to determine the development of a social system. But we have discovered that there are more things in the Christian religion than were dreamt of in the philosophy of Karl Marx. Christianity the religion was the conduit for an Oriental influence on the West — an influence which Marx rendered his theory incapable of acknowledging. And since Christianity was such a conduit, we are quite justified in attributing to Christianity a shaping influence in Western history, so long as we appreciate that the role we are assigning to Christianity is really the role of that which is specifically Oriental in Christianity, which is to say, its Jewish component, which embodied the influence of the social system of the East in the West.
Christianity sustained civilization in Europe after the destruction of the Roman Empire. Without the advanced organizational and cultural principle which Christianity represented, Europe would have reacted to the collapse of Roman power by reverting to the Neolithic tribalism which was indigenous to it. Christianity prevented such a reversion by allowing a mode of production to emerge in Europe which was settled and agricultural, without being Asiatic (i.e., the “feudal mode of production”); it preserved in significant part the cultural level of the Roman Empire without its stultifying state despotism. Post-Roman Europe did not abandon the Oriental despotism of the Roman Empire, but institutionalized it in the Roman Catholic Church, the material embodiment of Oriental despotism's contribution to European history; and acculturated it in an ideology based on the spiritual ideal of asceticism, of renunciation of the world and self-renunciation. The two taken together — the Church's hierarchical, centralized, rational-bureaucratic institutional structure, and its ascetic ethos — became Europe's only unifying force amid a welter of centrifugal tendencies and decentralized local powers.
Christianity therefore made European feudalism possible. Feudalism therefore cannot be considered the second stage in a unilinear sequence of Western historical development running from Hellenic to modern times, as Marx would have it. It must rather be seen as a hybrid synthesis of Europe's indigenous Neolithic tribalism with the Roman Empire's Oriental despotism — a synthesis made possible by the derivative monotheism of the Christian religion.
Now if the monotheist component of Christianity constitutes its most distinctively “Oriental” element, and if this Oriental element supplies the “missing ingredient” in Western history which Marx's theory suppresses, then it follows that there was something akin to monotheism, in content and function, in Communism — and that Marx suppressed this “something” from his vision of the world's future, just as he suppressed monotheism from his theory of its past. We already know what this “something” is: totalitarianism.
Just as monotheism is a “religious grasping” of the organizational principle of Oriental despotism, totalitarianism is its “political grasping.” Thus Communism became a “secular religion” of the East which used Oriental despotic methods — the terroristic subjugation of all segments of society by a single coercive center — in order to transform its rural, agrarian mode of production into an urban, industrial economy. The quasi-religious character of this movement showed 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 prototype of Communist states, the U.S.S.R., these traits coalesced around a single personality. During this period, the entire population, from the lowliest sweepers of streets to the highest party officials, lived in intimate dread of this one man. But no alien force fastened Stalin's rule onto the Soviet people; they imposed it on themselves. The charisma of his terror, like all other forms of charisma, was in the eyes of its beholders; the measure of his authority, only the totality of their submission.
The totalitarian function of the Communist movement in Russia parallels the function of the monotheist component of Christianity in the West: to mobilize the people against themselves. A squalid contradiction, when viewed from the standpoint of a West which has outgrown its religious roots and can therefore pretend that it never had any. Squalor there is, but also valorous accomplishment: out of nothing, the Soviet people built themselves up into an autonomous power in the world. They did it by transforming themselves from a ruined peasant people into an industrial people. And they used the terroristic methods of organized self-renunciation to do it: that scourge of the people, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, practiced its most horrific violence on itself.
The Russian people inflicted Communist totalitarianism on themselves. They built it up from within, from what they had to work with, from their Oriental despotic heritage — from what they were. They refined the coercive side of Oriental despotism, its state bureaucracy, into a mass totalitarian party, in order to transform the traditional, agrarian-peasant side into modern industry. So out of the terror came something besides terror: the capacity to survive in the modern world through the power of self-control. It is the same dualism that inheres in all asceticism, the same terror-inspired rationality that lies behind the West's experience of monotheism. There is no rational connection between the arbitrary terror of Stalinism and the modernization of the Soviet Union. It is because the connection is religious ¾ i.e. totalitarian ¾ that it was effective, effective in the same way that Calvin's predestinarian God stimulated Protestants, 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 enterprise.
All direct comparisons of Western and Communist modernization fail because the totalitarian core of the Communist modernization experience has no obvious correlate in Western history. No obvious correlate, because Western historians are insensate to any but the gross physical manifestations of modernization. They try to compare the industrialization experiences of the two societies, oblivious to the fact that the industrial revolution in the West was the culmination, not the beginning, of its modernization. And because Western industrialization was not accompanied by totalitarian developments in the political sphere — indeed, just the opposite, for this was the period in Western history when laissez-faire and representative democracy emerged as guiding political norms — they conclude that there is no analog to totalitarianism in the modernization of the West. From this conclusion emerges the picture of the modern world as torn between two opposing “models” of modernization: the Western and the totalitarian.
But the modernization of the West did not begin with the industrial revolution. It began with the Protestant Reformation, a religious revolution which subjected Europe to the most brutal dislocations and bloody upheavals. If we compare the Communist modernization of the Soviet Union to the real period of the West's modernization — the period commencing with the Reformation and culminating in the industrial revolution — we discover some truly interesting parallels. We find, for example, that the political dimension of modernization in the West was far from the benign triumph of Enlightenment it is usually depicted to be by Western historians whose grasp of the modernization process is limited to the industrial revolution. Calvin's Geneva, Munzer's millennialist communities, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Puritan New England are but three instances of “modernizing” regimes whose totalitarian intensity was inferior to the Communist example only in respect to the technological means available to them.
An even more provocative analogy is to be found in the realm of ideology. Earlier we noted that “The Russian people inflicted Communist totalitarianism on themselves. They built it up from within, from what they had to work with, from their Oriental despotic heritage: from what they were. They refined the coercive side of Oriental despotism, the state bureaucracy, into a mass totalitarian party, in order to transform the traditional, agrarian-peasant side into modern industry.” Is this not what the European peoples did to themselves during the Reformation, working with similar materials, and yielding a similar result? Only instead of tapping their political tradition, which was feudal rather than Asiatic, they drew on their religious tradition, or rather its “despotic” monotheist kernel, ruthlessly stripped of its original and acquired pagan accretions until nothing was left but the empty ghost of a Savior and a terrifyingly real divine Sovereign, as arbitrary, imperious and maddeningly opaque to human reason as any modern totalitarian ruler. Nobody has stated the result more succinctly than Max Weber:
...the significance of the Reformation [lies] in the fact that now every Christian had to be a monk all his life. The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations....
Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.
The ideology of Western civilization was derived from the East, but moreover from an Eastern religion which uniquely “captured” the active principle of the prevailing social system of the East, Oriental despotism — supposedly the antithesis of Western civilization!
The Russian Revolution was inspired by Western ideas of democracy and socialism, by the Western dream of Communism, yet it culminated in totalitarianism — again, supposedly the antithesis of Western civilization!
The connection between these two apparent paradoxes is a failed theory — the failed theory of Karl Marx. It is this theory which turns facts into paradoxes, simply by interposing itself between them, so that neither can be used to understand the other. Yet it is only in conjunction with each other that these two facts cease to be paradoxical.
Marx's theory operates like a stationary telescope set between past and future. Viewed through one end, it reduces the role of the East in the determination of Western history to the infinitesimal. Viewed through the other, it magnifies the phenomenon of Soviet totalitarianism to the proportions the alien supernatural. The theory is the problem. It is not a theory at all — not a theory of historical materialism, not even a theory of socialism. Marx's telescopic theory is an ideology which, by turning Western history into History per se, turned socialism into totalitarianism. Thus it was not Marx's commitment to socialism which “biased” his attempt at a scientific theory of history; nor his materialistic philosophy of history which “corrupted” his version of socialism. Both aspects of his system were warped ab ovo by an underlying ideology which Marx was not even conscious of upholding — the ideology of Westism.
Westism is the ideology of Western civilization. Like all active ideologies, it is a living, growing thing, and appears now in a much more elaborate form than it did in Marx's day. Additionally, Marx was far from being its sole begetter or even its best propagandist. Marx's socialist-historical materialist version of Westism, however, had a tremendous impact on the modern expression of the ideology.
Marx's Westism consisted of two interrelated components. The first was his belief in the autogenesis of Europe, the belief which blinded him to the roots of Western civilization, which he exalted, in Oriental despotism, which he abominated. By viewing the West as a self-developing entity, governed solely by its own internal laws of class struggle, he allowed himself to ignore the plain evidence of decisive Eastern influence at critical junctures in Europe's development. He constructed his whole theory of historical materialism around this lacuna, requiring his intra-societal, class struggle analysis to serve as an explanation of all history, including those aspects clearly due to inter-societal influences.
But the more elaborate the theory became, the more loudly did the gaps at its periphery testify to the existence of the hole at its center. If Europe developed autogenically, how, for example, did feudalism “grow out of” classical slavery? More to the point, in what economic sense is the “feudal mode of production” an advance over that of the Roman Empire? Also, how on historical materialist grounds can capitalism be shown to have originated in — that is, developed out of the contradictions of — feudalism? Marx was more or less silent on these questions. But he must have felt their burden, because he compensated for the vacuum at the center of his theory by carrying his exaltation of Europe and denigration of the East to metaphysical proportions, treating history itself as a European characteristic, and writing the Orient out of history altogether: “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.”
Marx's Westism led him to mystify the uniqueness of the West into a self-developing essence. By confining the very category of history to the West, he in effect included the very thing he ought to have explained — the unique development of Europe — in the definition of his subject, thereby saving himself the trouble of explaining it. To preserve the egotism of Europe, Marx simply disregarded the fact that according to his own sociology of the East, the Asiatic mode of production, unchanged in essence, had stood beside the West throughout the lather's manifold development. Had they never influenced one another? Never, asserts Marx: history is the result of interactions between different classes within a society, but not interactions between different societies.
There existed, however, one fixture of European history which extended down to Marx's own time and which was not so easy to conjure away. Unlike Christianity, this fixture could not be theoretically dismissed, because it was not simply a religious “ideology.” This problem presented itself to Marx in the shape of a people of flesh and blood, with a coherent religious “ideology” and a continuous history antedating Europe's and so, unlike the problems of feudalism's “progressiveness” and capitalism's origin, could not be dealt with by means of strategic silence. The role played by this people and their “ideology” in European history cannot be reconciled with Marx's theory. Indeed, their stubborn survival as a people was an ongoing reproach to Europe's pretensions — and to Marx's.
Anti-Semitism thus had to become the other main ingredient of the Westist ideology. The Jews, symbols and bearers of monotheism, served as a constant reminder to the ideologues of Westism that Europe's history was not autogenic. Their mere existence spoiled Europe's pedigree, at a time when European imperialism desperately needed a purebred sense of self-assurance and manifest destiny to justify its pillage and conquest of the ancient civilizations of the non-Western world. What noble lineage, what legitimate right to rule the world, could Europe claim as the mongrel offspring of Oriental despotism and nomadic tribalism — the very types of society over which it now sought hegemony? The European conquest of the non-Western world would become a matter of naked conquest, devoid of any higher authorization.
The Jews bastardized European history — and the ideologues of Westism responded by bastardizing the Jews. Notwithstanding the brutal consequences of Christian anti-Semitism, Christianity had never denied the historical importance of the Jews — indeed, how could it, given Christianity's claim to represent the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy? — and thus always acknowledged the Jewish people's right to exist, if only as a pariah people testifying through their perpetual exile to the truth of the gospels. But Westism detached the tradition of European anti-Semitism from its religious context and moved it into the realm of secular ideology. The Jews retained all of the negative traits imputed to them by Christianity, but lost the right to exist which hitherto Christianity had grudgingly conceded. The Jews remained a pariah people in the Westist mentality, but their pariah status lost its raison d'être. Thus Westism, by celebrating the West as an autogenic miracle, 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.” The Westist ideology carried the delegitimation of the Jews beyond the bounds of Christian anti-Semitism, into a realm in which, eventually, final solutions would devolve into a matter of civil hygiene.
But Marx had personal as well as theoretical reasons for incorporating anti-Semitism into his Westist ideology. Just as the Jews intruded into European history in a way most embarrassing for the celebrants of Europe's self-origination and self-development, they also made their discomfiting presence felt in Marx's family tree, implicitly mocking his pretension to be the Prophet of Europe.
The seeming incongruity of Marx's anti-Semitism, not to mention its morbid odor, has led many students of Marx to the selbsthass thesis, according to which 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 his father's less-than-wholehearted conversion to Christianity, tend to support this thesis. The stresses of marginality to which European Jews were exposed in the l9th century, stresses which were only partially relieved — in certain ways, actually aggravated — by conversion to Christianity, are well known.
The self-hatred thesis has been strenuously resisted by most socialists, despite overwhelming evidence that more was involved in Marx's anti-Semitism than casual or typical prejudice. It is difficult for Marxists to reconcile the image of their hero as a titan in the modern struggle for human liberation, with the rather sordid evidence of a neurotic twist in his character. The main form which this resistance has taken has been to Bowdlerize Marx’s anti-Semitism, a tactic which has been so effective that most people are not even aware of its existence (see the Appendix to this article for a compilation of Marx's comments on Jews and their religion). Of course, Bowdlerization does not solve the problem, it only suppresses it. Unpleasant though it may be to contemplate, Marx loathed the Jews, and the self-hatred thesis stands as the most reasonable explanation of this major warp in his thinking, which it locates in an appropriately irrational source: Marx's inner shame at being something other, and less, than a real German.
The trouble with the selbsthass thesis 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 relationship, whether causal or symptomatic, between his anti-Semitism and his theory. Certainly acceptance of the self-hatred explanation does not warrant this reticence, for self-hatred deals with the motivation for Marx's anti-Semitism, and does not even address the matter of its implications for the rest of his thought.
To treat with Marx's anti-Semitism solely on psychological grounds is to destroy its significance as a clue, an outcropping of hitherto unsuspected strata of meaning. Marx's anti-Semitism was his violent emotional and intellectual reaction to the Judaism in his assimilated self and to the Oriental despotic roots of his beloved Europe, symbolized by and embodied in the Jewish people. Just as he mutilated the history of Europe with his theory of historical materialism by disregarding the plain evidence of decisive Eastern influence at critical moments in Europe's development, so he did violence to himself in almost every remark he made on “the Jewish question.” His anti-Semitism was 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. Together, they constitute Marx's contribution to the ideology of Westism. By constructing a world-view which excluded the Jews, Marx tried to exorcise a personal demon. By adopting this world-view Europe sought to exorcise its age-old demon, the Jews. Having thus been culturally extruded from the now-healthy body of Europe, the demon could at last be disposed of in the manner appropriate to demons. The attempt to carry out this “final disposition” came very close to success, but it failed — and its failure marked the failure of the first, European form of the Westist ideology. In its place has come the modernized —“Americanized” — version of Westism which prevails today.
Eurocentrism became obsolete with the defeat of European imperialism. But the ideology of Westism did not die; it rose to the challenge posed by a new world order and became modern Westism. Modern Westism is Westism adapted to the new fact of 20th century politics: the displacement of Europe by America as the hegemonic center of the West.
The original purpose of the myth of autogenesis in the ideology of Westism was to radically delegitimate the East in order to justify Europe's imperialist conquest of the world. Now the myth serves another purpose: to provide the pseudo-historical background for the mystique of totalitarianism.
Just as the myth of the West's autogenesis provides Westism with its historical rationale, the mystique of totalitarianism supplies its political “theory.” The myth denies the Oriental despotic component in Western history; the mystique converts that which has been denied into the moral opposite of Western civilization — “modern totalitarianism” — and invests this opposite with all of the fear and disgust felt by the West toward its own repressed Oriental despotic past.
The mystique of totalitarianism is built up by means of the method of reification. The differences between two societies — East and West — are presented as the essence of one of them. Any juxtaposing of Soviet and Western society yields dramatic contrasts; the mystical idea of totalitarianism reifies these contrasts, endowing them with a life of their own, a kind of élan vital of pure evil. Totalitarianism then becomes absolutely different from and absolutely unprecedented in the Western experience by definition. Actually, this image of Soviet society fills the place left vacant in Western culture by the disappearance of Satan. The Soviet Union becomes the Manichean opposite of Western civilization: utterly alien, exotic, and anti-human, reminding the West of nothing about itself and its past except its own comparative virtue.
The mystique defines totalitarianism as an archetypal system of oppression based exclusively on fear, ruling through a monolithic party-state apparat which infiltrates and atomizes all real or potential centers of opposition to its power. Its sole historical function is to aggrandize its own power so it is bereft of legitimacy, a gangster state whose population has no influence on it, is helpless against it, and exists only to be victimized by it.
The reason this totalitarian archetype is mystical is because it forces a descriptive concept to serve in place of a real theory. In the absence of a theory of totalitarianism, the abstraction “totalitarian system” must be brought to life, reified into an active subject. The resulting intellectual apparition supplants the real people who constitute totalitarianism — the real people who preceded it, engendered it, nourish it, and survive it, but who are reduced by the mystique to the role of passive objects, “innocent victims” of the totalitarian machine. Masquerading as compassion, the mystique paints what is in fact a sentimental and condescending picture of the people who comprise totalitarian systems. The crushing weight of oppression is always being lowered onto them from above, or foisted onto them from without. The mystique never allows them to take responsibility for it. The people are not held accountable for their government.
Now if the people over whom the totalitarian regime reigns are not responsible for that regime, who is? Answers are numerous, but most of them fall into two broad categories, one of which might be termed the intellectual-academic and the other the conspiratorial. The former category includes all those explanations which invoke impersonal forces in whose steely grip humanity supposedly writhes. Thus, to the question “Who is responsible?” the intellectual-academic explanation answers “No one,” and goes on to place responsibility on abstractions: “social forces,” “historical trends,” “the weight of a despotic tradition,” and the like.
The problem with these abstractions is not necessarily that they are wrong, but that they are, after all, abstractions. They have no existence apart from the living people whose behavior they help us to understand. They are not absolutions from responsibility for totalitarianism, but measurements of that responsibility. As Marx insisted on more than one occasion, the fact that man does not make history “according to circumstances of his own choosing” must not be twisted into the belief that someone or something other than man makes history. “Social forces,” “historical trends,” and the like are not powers over a people but traits of a people. When we delineate these forces and trends, using the tools of social science, we are not describing a meta-human realm that is somehow more real than the merely human, we are simply describing the characteristic features of a specific people — in the case in point, the Russian people.
As against the intellectual-academic explanation's sidestepping of the question of responsibility for totalitarianism, and partially arising out of frustration with its obscurantism, there is the conspiratorial explanation. Conspiratorial accounts assign responsibility to every conceivable human agency but the responsible one. They do not seek refuge in the abstract realm of impersonal “forces,” but in the Christian-populist myth of a good-hearted and trusting people who are forever being swindled, manipulated, or betrayed into totalitarianism by the hidden hand of a shadowy elite. This elite is never of the people — i.e., the German general staff, or the financiers of Wall Street — even though it may be among them — i.e., the Jews. The one consistent theme of all conspiratorial explanations, and the feature which it shares with the intellectual-academic explanations, is that totalitarianism never arises because the people want it, support it, and make it work. It always comes about against their will.
But no abstract social force or “hidden hand” imposed totalitarianism on the Russian people. They imposed it on themselves. This self-oppression is infinitely mysterious to the ideologues of Westism because they can find no analogy to it in their own mythologized version of the history of the West. The analogy is there, in the West's monotheist religious heritage, but it tells the West more than it wishes to know. To recognize it would be to acknowledge Europe as a peninsula of Asia in more than just the geographical sense, isolated from but also connected to the Orient in just the right degree. To recognize it would be to recognize in the totalitarian phenomenon the very process of “Westernization” to which the West is presumably committed. Above all, to recognize this analogy would legitimate Judaism as the -creative source of the social formula by means of which the delicate balance between fear and rationality was grasped in theory and realized in practice — in other words, as the seminal source of Western civilization. But Westism will never extend legitimacy to Judaism, for Westism, in the final analysis, is anti-Semitism.
Western uniqueness and Soviet totalitarianism are real. They are not figments of the West's vain imagination. But Marx's conceptual telescope turns these realities into something both more and less than reality: into a myth of Western autogenesis and a mystique of totalitarianism which together amount to the doctrinalized egotism of the West; into the ideology of Westism; into the prologue to another world war and another genocide.
APPENDIX
Marx On the Jews and Judaism
Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of religion in the actual Jew.
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Commercialism.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.
Very well! Emancipation from haggling and money, and thus from practical and real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our age.
An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions of commercialism would render the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like stale smoke in the actual life-giving air of society....
Thus we perceive in Judaism a general contemporary antisocial element, which has been carried to its present apex by a historical development to which the Jews have zealously contributed — an apex at which it must necessarily dissolve itself.
The emancipation of the Jews, in the final analysis, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.
.... The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish way not only by acquiring financial power but also because, with and without him, money has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.
Yes, the materialistic domination of Judaism over the Christian world in North America has achieved such clear and common expression that the very preaching of the Gospel, the Christian ministry, has become an article of commerce...
Out of its own entrails, civil society constantly produces the Jew. What, actually, was the foundation, in and of itself, of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.
Hence the Jew's monotheism is in reality the polytheism of many needs, a polytheism that makes even the toilet an object of divine law.... Money is the universal, self-sufficient value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper worth. Money is the alienated essence of man's labor and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it. The god of practical need and self-interest is Money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist....
The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the actual god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The view of nature achieved under the rule of private property and money is an actual contempt for and practical degradation of nature, which, to be sure, does exist in the Jewish religion but only in imagination.
What is contained abstractly in the Jewish religion ¾ contempt for theory, for art, for history, for man as an end in himself — is the actual conscious standpoint and virtue of the money-man. The species relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce! The woman is haggled away.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the money-man in general.
Christianity overcame Judaism only in appearance. It was too noble, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the heavens.
Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity; but this application could become universal only after Christianity as the completed religion had theoretically completed the alienation of man from himself and from nature.
Only then could Judaism attain universal dominion and convert divested man and divested nature into alienable and saleable objects subservient to egoistic need, dependent on haggling.
The Christian salvation-egoism in its practical fulfillment necessarily becomes the materialistic egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is converted into worldly need, subjectivism into selfishness....
-- Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844
.... Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.
... the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities, and the changing of money and negotiating of bills in a great measure arising therefrom. Take Amsterdam, for instance, a city harboring many of the worst descendants of the Jews whom Ferdinand and Isabella drove out of Spain, and who, after lingering awhile in Portugal, were driven thence also, and eventually found a safe place of retreat in Holland. In Amsterdam alone they number not less than 35,000, many of whom are engaged in this gambling and jobbing of securities.... The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveler's valise or pocket than those Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader.
... the big Jewish houses, such as that of Hollander and Lehren... are of the Portuguese sect of Jews, and practice a great ostensible devotion to the religion of their race. Lehren, like the great London Jew, Sir Moses Montefiore, has made many sacrifices for those that still linger in Jerusalem. His office, near the Amstel, in Amsterdam, is one of the most picturesque imaginable. Crowds of these Jewish agents assemble there every day, together with numerous Jewish theologians, and around its doors are congregated all sorts and manners of Armenian, Jerusalem, Barbaresque, and Polish beggars, in long robes and Oriental turbans. The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind.
.... Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loanmongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners....
.... Meantime the Czar will get his fifty millions and... if he wants five fifties more, the Jews will dig them up. Let us not be thought too severe upon these loanmongering gentry. The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loanmongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.
-- Karl Marx, “The Russian Loan,” New-York Daily Tribune, January 4, 1856
.... But of what use is it for Levy to attack Mr. Disraeli... so long as Mother Nature has inscribed, with the wildest black letters, his family tree in the middle of his face? The nose of the mysterious stranger of Slawkenbergius (see Tristam Shandy), who fetched himself the finest nose from the promontory of noses, was merely a week's talk in Strasbourg, whereas Levy's nose constitutes a year's talk in the City of London....
-- Karl Marx, Herr Vogt, 1860
After the two Bambergers, father and son, procrastinated from week to week — first from month to month — with promises to discount a promissory note for me, and after I went to that Jew den with an appointment for that purpose, bringing with me stamped paper, the young one informed me that the old one, who was also present, could not, etc., etc.
That I did not box the ears of these two Jews for this infamous procrastination, waste of time, and placing me in a false position, was most regrettable....
-- Karl Marx, letter to Engels, July 31, 1851
.... The Jewish nigger Lasalle, who fortunately departs at the end of this week, has luckily again lost 5000 Taler in a fraudulent speculation. The fellow would rather throw his money into the muck than lend it to a “friend,” even if the interest and capital were guaranteed. In addition he acts on the notion that he must live like a Jewish baron or baronized (probably by the Countess) Jew....
It is now completely clear to me that he, as is shown by his cranial structure and curly hair — descends from Negroes who joined Moses' exodus-out of Egypt (assuming that his mother or grandmother on his father's side did not interbreed with a nigger). Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic negroid substance must produce a peculiar product. The impertinence of the fellow is also niggerlike....
-- Karl Marx, letter to Engels, July 30, 1862
