Communism from the Enlightenment to Totalitarianism
How did an Enlightenment philosophy degenerate into totalitarian rule?
The historian Eric Hobsbawm once said about Liberalism and Communism that they both belonged to the same intellectual family. “They were both children of the Enlightenment and spoke the same language”. Hobsbawm is right, for Liberalism and Communism both aimed for nothing less than the liberation of humanity from its pre-modern shackles — albeit by different means. Liberalism — especially in England — appeared in synchrony with Enlightenment thought in the 17th and 18th century. Marxism follows only in the 19th century in reaction to the bourgeois revolution (but very much moving in the same enlightened paradigm). Karl Marx’s favourite Greek hero was Prometheus, and he probably saw himself as a kind of modern incarnation, descending from the bourgeois Olymp, armed with the light of reason, to liberate the proletariat from the dark steam mills and mystified oppression.
If Communism is thus an Enlightenment philosophy, how is it that in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, it degenerated into Stalinism, one of the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century? Surely, totalitarian slave societies are the diametral opposite of any emancipatory liberation project.
Of these two totalitarianisms, the trajectory of Communism certainly poses the bigger puzzle. National Socialism clearly sees humanity as essentially divided into the high and the low, the master race and the human vermin. For Communists, though, any hierarchies in human societies can only be artificial and ultimately have to be abolished. Yet, the Nazis too were at least reacting to some elements of Enlightenment thought — if only to utterly pervert them: They saw the ambition of biologists to meticulously classify the kingdom of animals and plants, which inspired them to dream up an (unscientific) hierarchy of human races. In the sense that Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg co-opted the language of the scientific Enlightenment, they were feeding off its radiant energy like a dark, parasitic force. But Communists — at least in rhetoric — could never drop their emancipatory ideals of equality and liberty.
There were several historical circumstances in 20th century Russia which facilitated the rise of a Stalinist cult of leader worship in the Soviet Union. Compared to the rest of Europe, the remants of the Russian Empire were in general more backward — that is to say less urban, more agrarian and also less literate. Feudal structures, such as official serfdom, had only recently been abolished. Under Lenin, the Bolsheviks had already established an extremely centralized apparatus of power, which Stalin was able to take over. And what is more, the Russian subjects, prior to 1917, had been indoctrinated to revere the czar not only as their monarch, but also as the head of the Orthodox Church — a religious tradition that Stalin evidently thought he could build on with his heresy hunts and miracle harvests.
Apart from these relevant historical factors, I want to consider what one might call a more essentialist argument for the degeneration of Communism as an Enlightenment philosophy into totalitarianism. In their classic The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put forth the case that the Enlightenment, with its propagation of reason, contained from the very beginning a destructive potential, which could possibly sweep away the fruits of civilization it itself had helped to grow — a potential that Horkheimer and Adorno saw actualized in the contemporary totalitarian slave states, but which also remained dormant in the mass societies of the capitalist West.
As Enlightenment thought historically surpassed its role of criticizing feudal tyranny and acceded to power itself, reason could suddenly be applied — not to demystify and criticize the powerful — but to rule over people and nature more effectively. Drunk on its own power, reason could be tempted to fall in love with its own creations and proclaim them the new dogmas, which would thus be beyond reproach. Adorno and Horkheimer saw “instrumental reason”, which rejects critical thinking and refuses to question its own ends, as the means by which the bureaucratized totalitarian state functioned. Rather than the emancipatory Promethean ideal, this is Hephaistos forging the iron chains that bind humanity ever more rationally and effectively. The two éminences grises of the Frankfurt School also observed how easily the modern masses could be gripped again by mythological thinking — a mindset that the Enlightenment thought it had vanquished.
In the Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky ruled with a whip too, but they justified their repressive and violent measures with the future society they were setting out to create (from the most unlikely conditions at that). Their repression may at times have gone beyond the realm of the necessary, as with Lenin’s curtailment of free speech or when Trotsky brutally put down the Kronstadt rebellion. But there is no doubt that for Lenin and Trotsky, the ideal of a free and egalitarian future was a very real and sincere one.
Under Stalin, however, this future ideal degenerated into a hollow shell used solely for propaganda purposes. Stalin completely shed the emancipatory goals that had historically moved Socialists and Communists as “children of the Enlightenment”. Instead, he retained only instrumental reason to cling to power and enslave the population more effectively. Stalin perverted Marx’ and Engels’ idea of “scientific socialism” as he took the projections of historical materialism (or what he sold as such) and raised them to the status of indisputable truths. Any divergence between aspiration and Soviet reality could then only be explained by the evil plots of traitors and class enemies, who — like Arthur Koestler’s Rubachov — were made to confess, and duly shot or driven off to the Gulag.
Predating Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s contradictory, dialectical analysis of the Enlightenment is the Christian critique of reason — a critique that is much more sinister and more resolutely anti-modern. In Christian iconography, the parallel figure to Prometheus is Lucifer (literally “bringer of light”), whom the ancient Romans had associated with Venus, the morning star. The Christians instead thought of Lucifer as a fallen angel: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18). By giving the Promethean myth an Icarian twist and thereby linking the spirit of emancipation with the Devil himself, Christianity proclaimed that hubris, the alleged wish for apotheosis, is the cardinal sin. To strive for Enlightenment becomes an affront against God. If you view the trajectory of Socialism (or any other strain of Enlightenment thought) through this lens, you are not dealing with a tragic degeneration, but with an idea that was sinful and doomed for failure from the very outset.
Whatever charge you want to make against Adorno and Horkheimer, they cannot be convicted of such vile misanthropy as guides the Christian doctrine. They ultimately remained committed to the Enlightenment paradigm, since they aimed at stopping enlightened modernity — which had historically cast off the yoke of absolutism — from devolving into its own, even more ruthless form of absolute rule. Totalitarianism, with the heightened technological potential of modern society, was endowed with hitherto unknown tools of repression and domination. Adorno and Horkheimer wanted to revive the radically critical spirit that they thought was equally intrinsic to the Enlightenment, to get modern societies to question again the ends to which they devoted their powerful means.
Totalitarianism, then, is what you get when pre-modern myth and dogma return to contemporary mass societies under the false guise of Enlightenment and reason. When Rosa Luxemburg reproached Lenin for his excessive censorship and stressed that “freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”, she was insisting on that fundamental right to criticize and question — ends as well as means. Luxemburg thus took recourse to Liberalism’s achievements, which, as she saw quite rightly, socialists should strive to expand rather than limit. These formal freedoms remain a sharp weapon against tyranny — even if the larger society that agrees to grant them is not wholly free.
