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    Marxism-Leninism, Incisively Debunked

    by

    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.

    How Not to Edit a Collection of Essays

    by

    John K. Roth and Robert C. Whittemore, eds.: Ideology and the American Experience: Essays on Theory and Practice in the United States. Washington: Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, 1988.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 27, 1988.

     

    Easy to compile but hard to design, anthologies and collections usually don’t work. This one is no exception. Exhibiting several of the ‘collection’ genre’s characteristic weaknesses, it amounts to a sort of ‘how-not-to’ manual for any future editor. The editors commit two basic errors, out of which others flow.

    Lack of focus is the first one. The topic “ideology and American experience” invites platitudinous meandering on whatever may interest the contributors at the moment of writing. The blah-blah-blah syndrome affects several of the writers here, notably Morton A. Kaplan and co-editor John K. Roth, whose articles unfortunately come last in the volume, causing it to stop instead of concluding. Kaplan runs on about a few issues-of-the-day, to no avail. Roth more spectacularly calls for a “public philosophy” consisting of pieces from Whitman, Santayana, Niebuhr, and Dewey—an artifact that supposedly would animate the “cooperative independence of pluralistic selves.” Don’t be alarmed; it didn’t make sense to me, either.

    The key term, “ideology,” receives no consistent treatment. Several contributors invoke the shade of the eighteenth-century French intellectual, Destutt de Tracy, who coined the word and meant it literally: “ideology” meant the science of ideas, in just the same way as biology is the science of life. An empiricist, Destutt de Tracy believed ideas could be studied with near-mathematical rigor, and he did not much think about the epistemological problem: How one can study ideas without generating ideas-about-ideas in infinite regress. This weakness led to subjectivism (most immediately Romanticism) on one extreme, historicism (particularly Marxism) on the other.

    Other contributors use the definition current today, ideology as a structure of ideas which may or may not correspond to some reality. This inconsistency makes comparison of one essay to another, one argument to another, almost impossible. The collection becomes a concatenation of monologues, not a dialogue. It’s up to the editors to define terms and make contributors either stick to those definitions or directly challenge them. These editors didn’t do that.

    Their second error derives from departing too readily from editing and descending into writing. Unless firmly convinced that they have an indispensable contribution to make, editors of collections of essays should restrain themselves when tempted to throw their own articles into the hopper. Professor Roth’s effort has been noted. Professor Whittemore leads off the volume with a Quixotic attempt to revive interest in the deservedly forgotten writings of Frank Lester Ward, author of “the most important philosophical synthesis yet produced by an American”—faint praise indeed, but alas not intentionally so. Ward’s ‘evolutionary’ democratic socialism, aiming at a regime he called “sociocracy”) amounts to little more than a variant of the materialist progressivism fashionable during the 1870s, when Ward was active. Bizarrely, Whittemore calls Marxism “an outworn and simplistic materialism allied to a naïve epistemological realism.” True enough, but where does that leave the likes of Ward?

    The best article here is Douglas R. Rasmussen’s “Ideology, Objectivity, and Political Theory.” “Belief in an objective moral order does not pervade today’s intellectual scene,” Professor Rasmussen politely notes, “and any attempt to treat the claims of the Declaration of Independence as normative truths would almost certainly regarded by many as naïve.” Modern philosophy cannot provide a firm basis for these truths, but Aristotle does, because he does not assume that the way human beings know determines what they know (subjectivism) or that knowledge is mere sense-perception (materialism). Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” need Aristotelian epistemology for their discovery.

    There is also a good discussion of Adam Smith by Douglas J. Den Uyl, challenging the popular caricature of Smith as an apostle of greed. Den Uyl does criticize Smith for adopting David Hume’s dualism, the radical distinction between what is (a matter of science) and what ought to be (a matter of sentiment). Den Uyl does not consider that Smith’s exceptionally strong emphasis on economic liberty from political authority may depend upon this dualism.

    Another worthwhile contribution comes from Tibor R. Machan, one of the few undoctrinaire libertarians, who offers some commonsense remarks about responsibility as the concomitant of liberty. Gordon C. Bjork argues convincingly that ideas determine economic systems, not vice-versa—and he is an economist, of all things.

    These patches of intelligence don’t add up to a rich harvest. Although the papers resulted from a two-year series of conferences sponsored by the publisher, the book betrays insufficient sustained effort by the editors to make the authors speak to one another. The articles themselves are of too-uneven quality. A good collection of essays on ideology in American might be produced. This isn’t it.

    Peace-Seeking in the Western Tradition

    by

    James Turner Johnson: The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 14, 1988.

     

    A tradition cannot validate itself. When confronted with another, contradictory tradition, it can either retreat into cultural solipsism or appeal to something beyond itself: revelation, nature—some authoritative source of principles. Historicists deny that any trans-traditional framework exists, except for ‘History’ itself, which simply moves onward and cannot in principle offer guidance. Some historicists—Hegel and Marx most prominently—posit an ‘end of History’ wherein all contradictions must cease. The evidence they offer for this promise seldom convinces any but the most wishful thinkers.

    Many historians today are also historicists. James Turner Johnson does not consistently think through his historicist assumptions, but he surely does have them. They mar an otherwise informative, well-ordered account of Christian and modern Western civilization’s not entirely successful “quest for peace.”

    Johnson identifies three “traditions” of peace-seeking: that animated by ‘just war’ doctrines; that of sectarian pacifism; and that of political peacemaking. He proceeds, however, not by isolating and discussing them thematically, but by describing their historical unfolding.

    Challenging pacifist historians, he denies that the early (pre-Constantinian) Christian Church adhered to absolute non-resistance. Jesus and His disciples rejected violence because they expected the Second Coming within the first Christian generation; they felt no need to elaborate a political modus vivendi that included warfare. As the Church gradually adapted to the historical long run, Christians generated several views concerning warfare. Pacifism was only one of them.

    Johnson’s claim rests on two unsteady pillars. First, he questions the pacifism of the major early Church fathers: Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen. He does not always summarize their arguments accurately—failing to quote (for example) Tertullian’s explicitly condemnation of military service based upon Jesus’ rebuke of Peter’s swordplay at Gethsemane. Second, he defines the Church not by the authoritative teachings of the fathers, but by the actual practices of all the baptized, many of whom did serve in the Roman legions. Thus may some historian two millennia from now argue that the Roman Catholic Church endorses artificial contraception, because so many Catholics use it. It may be that Johnson, in both these instances, displays something of the historicist tendency to deny the cognitive status of ideas, preferring to look at ‘concrete’ historical practice.

    Johnston stands more firmly when discussing the just war tradition, on which he is an authority. He observes that Ambrose and Augustine formulated the first just-war theories, marrying Christianity to Ciceronian political philosophy. Christian love in the political realm aims at justice; warriors moved by the desire for a just peace partake in Christian love. This brilliant and perhaps somewhat unstable synthesis appalls pacifists, who often describe it as the Church’s fall from Christianity, back to a new form of paganism.

    For centuries, such post-Augustinian pacifists tended to withdraw from this world many of them surviving not in cities but in the apolitical countryside. Those sects such as the Waldensians, who did try to live non-violently among their fellow-men, were soon driven away by just-war Christians scandalized by pacifism.

    Johnson identifies the first stirrings of political or secular peacemaking in the writings of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Both undercut “the temporal supremacy of the Church and its clergy,” arguing that the disorder “resulting from [the clergy’s] unwarranted pretensions impedes justice and the other supreme value in medieval political thought, peace.” Stressing the importance of good institutions as a substitute for rulers’ goodness, they anticipated such modern writers and Rousseau and Kant.

    Johnson sees that sectarian pacifists in the last two centuries adapt many of the plans of secular peacemakers. Gandhian “nonviolent defense” represents one attempt to reconcile radical idealism with realism. Thus have sectarians become more worldly, more politically ambitious, without necessarily becoming very realistic. Gandhi especially (it might be added) inflamed the political ambitions of Christian pacifists by making it seem that the spiritual warfare of Christianity might be transferred to the realm of social action in some decisively effective way. The results have been mixed.

    Purely secular peacemaking offers scarcely more realism than does sectarian pacifism. The champions of internationalism almost invariably require a prior commitment to peace among the nations—who, Johnson notes, if they were committed to peace, would already be internationalist. Johnson’s criticism here is too narrowly voluntaristic. It would be more just to say that secular peacemakers seek moments favorable to peaceful sentiments in order to establish or strengthen institutions that re-channel warlike sentiments when, inevitably, those sentiments reappear. This can work; General Douglas MacArthur transformed Japan into a commercial republic whose worst wars now are only trade wars. Whether such peaceful republics can ever come into existence worldwide, and maintain themselves, remains an open question.

    Johnson hopes his historical work can help others committed to the quest for peace. It can, but only if peacemakers combine Johnsonian realism with an in-Johnsonian rejection of historical relativism.