Thomas G. West and Sanderson Schaub: Marx and the Gulag. Montclair: The Claremont Institute, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 28, 1988.
Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev calls for the “opening” and “restructuring” of the Soviet Union. His wife, a professor of Marxism-Leninism, gives every evidence of endorsing such plans, accompanied as they are by a military buildup largely uninterrupted by the planned dismantling of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.
These seemingly contradictory doings raise the questions, ‘What is Marxism-Leninism?’ ‘Can it animate Stalin and Gorbachev, violent purges and small-potatoes reform?’ ‘If so, how so?’ This brief and closely-reasoned pair of essays shows how the Soviet ideology can bend so easily while enduring so tenaciously.
Professor Thomas G. West demonstrates the continuity—denied by superficial writers—between the teachings of Karl Marx and the practice of V. I. Lenin. Following and deepening the insight of Alfred G. Meyer, whose book Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice appeared almost thirty years ago, West observes that Marx calls for and predicts the material embodiment of rational thought by means of revolution. A small cadre of revolutionary, that is, acting intellectuals will lead a passive working class to overthrow the bourgeois order, establishing a ‘proletarian’ dictatorship (as defined by party leaders) which will reshape human and all other forms of nature and lead to the stateless utopia of pure communism.
Party dictators will use terror in the early stages of this series of revolutions—hence the purges of Lenin and Stalin, repeated by every other major Leninist revolutionary who has seized power. Marx explicitly mentioned “France in 1793,” with its Reign of Terror, as the precursor of the specifically communist reign of terror he did not live to see.
By 1881, two years before his death, Marx no longer assumed that a country—and he was thinking of Russia—needed to undergo a phase of capitalism before the socialist revolution. He regarded capitalism as historically necessary in much of western Europe, but not in the East. Although European and North American scholars often overlook this teaching, Russians from Lenin to the Gorbachevs have not. Even many Soviet scholars, who emphasize what they are pleased to call the scientific character of Marxism–its discussion of class ‘contradictions’ yielding a predictable pattern of historical events culminating in revolution–usually fail to understand this deep slash into the socio-economic Gordian Knot. Professor West, however, sees clearly: “For Marx, the core was always the revolution. Everything else in his theory was subject to revision.”
Lenin took this late development of Marx’s thought and used it to destroy czarism, seize power, and consolidate the first communist regime. In the face of conservative (‘reactionary’) working classes, Lenin and Stalin attacked: “The ‘proletarian vanguard,’ Lenin admits, is not even the party, but only the Politburo of the party, consisting of Lenin and a handful of close colleagues…. The stronger the bourgeois ‘force of habit,’ the smaller and more despotic must be the governing organization of revolutionaries.”
This is why “the despotism and wholesale violence of Marxism in practice arise not in spite of but because of the high ideals of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” Men who demand the embodiment of the ideal in human society, not by divine grace but by human will and action, men who moreover treat nature as mere matter to be conquered not respected, will inevitably turn to violence, because they hate stubborn, ‘reactionary’ human nature and the very concept of God.
The hatred of Marxist-Leninists the world over for the regime dedicated, in its Declaration of Independence, to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, follows from their ideology. Tactical compromises? Of course. True accommodation? Never: not without the abandonment of the ideology itself, and of the patterns of mind it causes.
Hatred of the concept of God must yield anti-Judaism. Marx himself was the son of a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Almost predictably, one of the first major essays Marx wrote, “On the Jewish Question,” amounts to “a sustained and scathing attack on Jews and Judaism,” as Sanderson Schaub rightly sees. “One may even sum up the purpose of Marxist revolution in a word as the ’emancipation’ or reconstruction of the Jew.”
If this begins to sound like proto-Hitlerism, it is no accident. As Schaub sees, the attack on the kind of emancipation of Jews seen in commercial republicanism, and the substitution of a new ’emancipation’ consisting of the forceful abolition of Judaism itself, involves communists and Nazis alike in acts of repression, sometimes genocide. Fundamentally, both of these ideological parties seek to replace the Creator-God of Judaism and Christianity with “god-like creation ex nihilo by men, as guided and radically reshaped by revolutionary ‘vanguards.'”
Both ideologies equate ‘bourgeois’ with ‘Jew.’ “What Marx elsewhere calls capitalism, to be overthrown by violent revolution, Marx in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ calls Judaism.” The attack on commercial republicanism, Marxist or Hitlerite, begins to look increasingly like a return to a worse form of anti-Judaic, anti-‘capitalist’ European feudalism—a return to medievalism without the grace of God or the intelligence of scholasticism. The historical result of Marxism-Leninism, after the terror exhausted itself, turned out to be an all-consuming bureaucracy combining the worst of the medieval Church and State. “The Soviet Gulag is the agonizing hell of Marx’s utopian ecstasy.”
“What Marx calls the Jew in man… is ultimately his mind or spirit”—human nature and divine grace. These must be obliterated, Marxists insist, ‘overcome’ by the fusion of theory and practice that produces re-created ‘Communist Man.’ Tactical concessions, such as Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” in the 1920s and Gorbachev’s program today, in no way alter this ambition. Along with a substantial selection of writings by Marx and Lenin themselves, this short book deserves inclusion in every college course on socialism or on comparative regimes in the twentieth century.
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