Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History [1st ed.] 9781498557306

Table of contents :
Introduction: The Varieties of the Left Experience

Chapter 1: Religion of Modernity: How an English Textile Baron and a French Aristocrat Jump Started the Socialist Creed

Chapter 2: “Sabbath of History”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Moses Hess Make Socialism “Scientific”

Chapter 3: Great Schism: Social Democracy, Radical Cosmopolitans, and War Socialism (1870s-1920s)

Chapter 4: Prophecy of the World Revolution and Nationalist Temptations, 1917-1930s

Chapter 5: National Bolshevism: Stalin’s Soviet Union (1929-1953)

Chapter 6: True Believers, Fellow Travelers, and Dissenters (1920s-1940s)

Chapter 7: Creating Community: National Socialist Biopolitics in Germany, 1933-1945

Chapter 8: “Regime of Goodness”: Social Democracy and the Swedish Model, 1920s-1990s

Chapter 9: Blood and Soil in the Palestine Desert: Kibbutz Socialism, 1920s-1970s

Chapter 10: The East is Red: Communism in China, North Korea, and Cambodia

Chapter 11: African Socialism: Tanzanian “Village Socialism” and Zimbabwe Ethno-Racial State

Chapter 12: The Western Left: “Third Way” and Neoliberalism, 1970s-2010s

Chapter 13: Retreat of Socialism in the Soviet Union and China (1980s-2008)

Chapter 14: How Marxism Became Cultural: Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and the New Left

Chapter 15: The Cultural Left and the “Curse” of the Western Civilization, 1960s-2010s

Conclusion: From Left Melancholia to New Militancy

Citation preview

Socialism as a Secular Creed

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Socialism as a Secular Creed A Modern Global History

Andrei Znamenski

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Znamenski, Andrei A., 1960– author. Title: Socialism as a secular creed : a modern global history / Andrei Znamenski. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book provides a historical overview of socialism as a modern political religion. Taking a global history approach, the author explores the varieties of the socialist experience, including Marxism, anarchism, Soviet communism, German national socialism, Maoism, Israeli kibbutzim, Tanzanian ujamaa, and the cultural woke left in the West”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045421 (print) | LCCN 2020045422 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498557306 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498557313 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Socialism—History. | Socialism and religion—History. Classification: LCC HX36 .Z63 2021 (print) | LCC HX36 (ebook) | DDC 335.009—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020045421​ LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020045422 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Figures

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Introduction: The Varieties of the Left Experience

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1 Religion of Modernity: How an English Textile Baron and a French Aristocrat Jump Started the Socialist Creed

1

2 “Sabbath of History”: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Moses Hess Make Socialism “Scientific”

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3 Great Schism: Social Democracy, Radical Cosmopolitans, and War Socialism (1870s–1920s)

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4 Prophecy of the World Revolution and Nationalist Temptations, 1917–1930s 87 5 National Bolshevism: Stalin’s Soviet Union (1929–1953)

111

6 True Believers, Fellow Travelers, and Dissenters (1920s–1940s)

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7 Creating Community: National Socialist Biopolitics in Germany, 1933–1945

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8 “Regime of Goodness”: Social Democracy and the Swedish Model, 1920s–1990s

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9 Blood and Soil in the Palestine Desert: Kibbutz Socialism, 1920s–1970s 211 10 The East is Red: Communism in China, North Korea, and Cambodia 233

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11 African Socialism: Tanzanian “Village Socialism” and Zimbabwe Ethno-Racial State

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12 The Western Left: “Third Way” and Neoliberalism, 1970s–2010s 299 13 Retreat of Socialism in the Soviet Union and China (1980s–2008) 317 14 How Marxism Became Cultural: Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and the New Left

339

15 The Cultural Left and the “Curse” of the Western Civilization, 1960s–2010s 359 Conclusion: From Left Melancholia to New Militancy

383

Bibliography 399 Index 431 About the Author

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Robert Owen (1771–1858), One of the Early Spearheads of Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man’s Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1. Figure 1.2 New Harmony, a Socialist Commune Set Up by Robert Owen on the Wabash River in Indiana (1825). Note the missing top of the church building: anti-church rationalists, Owenites purchased the premises from a Lutheran egalitarian community of Harmonists. This watercolor by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1832) caught the settlement in the state of decay. Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique du Nord, exécuté pendant les années 1832, 1833 et 1834 (Paris, A. Bertrand, 1840–1843). Plate 35. Figure 1.3 Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), the Leader of the Saint-Simonian Religion, 1832. Eugéne Fourniére, Histoire Socialiste: le régne de LouisPhilippe (1830–1848) (Paris: J. Rouff, 1908), vol. 8: 189. Figure 2.1 Karl Marx (1818–1883), the Founder of the Most Popular Brand of Radical Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man’s Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1.  Figure 2.2 Proletarians (the Industrial Working Class) Became the “Noble Savages” of Classical Marxism that Elevated Them to the Status of the “Chosen People” Who Were Destined to Liberate the World from Oppression. Der Wahre Jakob, 39 (1922).

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Figure 2.3 Vera Zasulich (1851–1919), a Populist Terrorist Who Later Became One of the First Marxian Socialists in Russia, is Depicted Here in an Act of Shooting at St. Petersburg’s Mayor (1877). Le Monde illustré, March 9 (1878): 172.  Figure 3.1 Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), a Prominent Socialist Organizer in Germany In the 1850s–1860s and One of the First Spearheads of a Welfare State. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man’s Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1. Figure 3.2 Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932); by Revising Marxism and Muting Its Revolutionary Zeal, He Triggered Reformist Movement in Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man’s Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1. Figure 3.3 Anne Besant (1847–1933), a Known Theosophist and Fabian Leader Who Advocated Stealth Socialism. Source: Photograph by H. S. Mendelssohn, London, 1885. Annie Besant, Anne Besant: An Autobiography (London and Leipzig: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1908).  Figure 3.4 Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919). This cosmopolitan firebrand preached a spontaneous international workers revolution and sided with Lenin’s Bolsheviks but did not approve their totalitarian vanguard practices. Source: Provided by the author. Figure 4.1 A Bolshevik Commissar Enlightens Russian Peasants about the 1917 Communist Revolution by Showing Them Trotsky’s Portrait. From a painting by Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov (1922). Source: Courtesy of Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov paintings, 24001.005, Hoover Institution Archives.  Figure 4.2 Marxist-Leninist Young Pioneer Summer Camp in Wisconsin (1929) Sponsored by the Communist International. Source: Courtesy of Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo  Figure 4.3 Hede Massing (1900–1981), a German-Jewish Communist Bohemian, Participant of the Early Frankfurt School, and Agent of the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), 1920s. Source: Courtesy of author’s personal collection. 

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Figure 5.1 Stalin’s National Bolshevism: A Propaganda Poster Depicting the Soviet Multinational Empire Navigated by Stalin and Led by the Russian Core Ethnics, 1934. Source: Courtesy of author’s personal collection.  113 Figure 5.2 A Quixotic Fight of Marxian Internationalists against the Goliath of Stalin’s National Bolshevism: Trotskyites’ Headquarters in Paris (1939). Source: Courtesy INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo. 130 Figure 6.1 Andre Gide (1869–1951) in the USSR, 1936. Criticizing Stalin’s terror, this Soviet fellow traveler blamed his hosts for not being egalitarian enough. Source: Courtesy of Album/Alamy Stock Photo. 156 Figure 7.1 German National Socialists Celebrate the First of May, a Working-Class Holiday (1934). Source: Courtesy of Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo. 174 Figure 7.2 “Struggle Against Marxism and Capitalism”: A 1936 Editorial from National Socialist Newspaper Volksgemeinschaft Beobachter (People’s Community Observer). Source: Courtesy of the author’s personal collection. 182 Figure 8.1 W. H. Beveridge (1879–1963), Influential English Politician Whose Work Was the Foundation for the British Welfare State and Socialism in the Wake of World War II. Source: Courtesy of Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo. 194 Figure 10.1 Blend of Communism with Buddhism: Red flag with Hammer and Sickle Outside a Temple in Luang Prabang, the Former Capital of Laos. Source: © carstenbrandt/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images 234 Figure 10.2 Stalinism with Chinese Characteristics: A 1971 Propaganda Poster Stressing the Link between Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Communism. Courtesy of the author’s personal collection. 241 Figure 10.3 Kim Il Sung (1912–1994) Delivers a Speech (1950). This Soviet middle-level officer, who was planted by Stalin to head the North Korean communist dictatorship, became the founder of “red-brown” Kim dynasty. Source: Courtesy of SPCOLLECTION/Alamy Stock Photo. 247 Figure 11.1 President Julius Nyerere (1922–1999), Who Spearheaded African Socialism, Is Depicted Here During a Celebration Ceremony for His Ruling TANU

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Party, July 7, 1974. Source: Courtesy of Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo. 270 Figure 11.2 A “White Kulak” Farmer Elizabeth McCellen Confronts Mugabe’s Militants Who Came to Seize Her Farm Outside of the Town of Raffingora, 2000. Source: Courtesy of Peter Jordan/Alamy Stock Photo. 278 Figure 13.1 Soviet “Advanced Socialism” in Action (1970s): By Selling Natural Resources Abroad, the Stagnating Soviet Regime Was Struggling to Provide Minimum Welfare and Project Housing to Its Populace. Source: © Iulianna Est /iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images 322 Figure 13.2 Socialism Remains the Political Religion of China: Middle-level Party Bureaucrats during Their Pilgrimage to Xibaipo, October 23, 2012. The area, which accommodated the commanding post of the Chinese Communist party in 1947–1948, is one of the Red sacred sites in China. Source: Courtesy of Lou Linwei/Alamy Stock Photo. 333 Figure 14.1 1956—the Year that Signaled the Eclipse of the Soviet Brand of Socialism. Here a Hungarian man burns the portrait of Lenin during the anti-communist revolution, Budapest, 1956. Source: Courtesy of Mccool/Alamy Stock Photo. 340 Figure 14.2 Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), One of the Deans of the New Left, Speaks at a Mass Rally in Frankfurt, Germany (June 6, 1972), in Defense of His Student Angela Davis, an American Communist Activist Who Was Arrested for Supplying Guns in a Plot to Assist a Prison Escape for One of Her Comrades. Source: Courtesy of Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo. 354 Figure 15.1 Strengthening Bonds between the Western Identitarian Left And the Third World Communism: In the Process of His Conversion to Communism And Relocation to Socialist Ghana, Willian DuBois (1868–1963), a Prominent Pan-African Intellectual from the United States, Meets Chinese Dictator Mao Tse-tung, 1959. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries MS 312, mums312-i0741. 365

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Introduction The Varieties of the Left Experience

On a hot August day of 1992, with a small group of people, I was sitting in a large room that was dimly lightened through glass-stained windows. We were at the Washington Square Methodist Episcopal Church, Greenwich Village, Manhattan—the very heart of New York City. The church, which by now has preached itself out of business, was providing us, a small progressive cell of Marxist Humanists, with facilities for regular meetings. Marxist Humanists were a decentralized group of radical leftists who were preoccupied with promoting socialism in the United States. They also aspired to cleanse Marxism from the stains of Stalinism by returning it to the original humanistic “sacred books” of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. Because of the specifics of its political and ethnic history, New York City is like “Palestine” for the American Left. To the present day, it harbors numerous sects and movements that profess various brands of socialism, which frequently argue with each other about the content of that creed. The Marxist-Humanist movement, one of them, was loosely united around a periodical called “News and Letters”; it actually brings to mind an analogy with ancient Christians who had similarly congregated around “good news” (testaments) delivered by St. Paul to the scattered groups of Mediterranean seekers. Founded by Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987), who acquired part of her charisma by apprenticing with famous Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, Marxism-Humanism was one of the numerous left fellowships that sought to humanize socialism, to read correctly the signs of capitalism’s decline, and to find new ways of salvation of humankind from social evils. Headed by a Jewish-American couple of an Eastern European lineage, an economics instructor and a lawyer, the New York chapter included a few unemployed WASPs, a mentally ill person, a retired lonely lady, and several students of various ethnic and racial “colors” from local universities. xi

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A year prior to this, I left the crumbling Soviet Union, where I quit my job of an associate professor of history in a provincial city of Samara and departed for the United States, the “den of capitalism,” to jump-start anew my career as a historian. I had a fear that, through its creative destruction, advancing capitalism in Russia would wipe out much of regular humanities along with Soviet ideological social scholarship. I was right about the latter and was wrong about the former. In the wake of 1991, many of my former compatriots at first flocked to the “market utopia” but soon, ten years later, when the capitalist “milk and honey paradise” did not materialize, they already felt nostalgia for the Soviet Union with its cradle to grave welfare state. Despite “neoliberalism” that was reigning in the 1990s, when I arrived at the United States on August 21, 1991, I was still convinced that true socialism had been distorted by brutal bureaucratic Soviet practices and that it could be somehow regenerated. At that time, I thought that somewhere in the West there were teachers and wise sages that had answers on how to refurbish the creed to make it more humane and vital. Hence, Marxism-Humanism, the group I stumbled upon by chance while wandering the cold streets of downtown New York in the fall of 1991. Incidentally, prior to my moving to the United States, the same expectation had already led me to Boris Kagarlitsky—a charismatic Marxist sociologist who in 1990 made an abortive attempt to set up a Western-style socialist party in Russia. To be fair, I was welcomed into the New York Marxist-Humanist cell and came to appreciate the friendship and support of those people. Since I had no friends in the United States, to be part of such fellowship was not a small thing for me at that time. They eventually introduced me to informal leaders of the movement. At one point, I even delivered a speech to one of its nationwide gatherings. Moreover, I became involved in translating into Russian one of the major books produced by the “grandmother” of that movement.1 However, my stay with the left humanists was not too long. I mingled with them somewhere until 1995 and then dropped out. Skeptical by nature, I could not fully commit myself to any teaching or school, especially when I detected signs of an orthodoxy. Overall, I never could go “native” by fully sticking to any religious or secular fellowship or a cause. This book is a cultural and intellectual history of socialism that has been written by the person who does not belong to any brand of this creed and has no stake in it. I mostly address this book to regular “lay” readers who want to have a comprehensive and at the same time readable introductory history to this phenomenon that for the past few years entered political debates here in the United States. Despite the multitudes of endnotes, I do not want the potential reader to feel scared of this text, which I made as accessible as possible. Like any social scholar, I have my own biases, which will be clear to those who will finish this book. I also have my own research angle that I want

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to use in this grand history tour of socialism. The anecdote about the “church gathering” of Marxist Humanists that I shared above was to give you a hint about what kind of angle it was going to be. I understand that practitioners of and sympathizers of socialism might frown on me for the approach I used to scrutinize their ideology.2 Incidentally, I used the same “deconstructive” methodology (skeptical but not dismissive) in my earlier books dealing with other topics. In a nutshell, I approach socialism as a form of a political religion—a secular creed that emerged with the rise of the modern world and became its radical manifestation. I also treat socialist states and movements, including those that originally spearheaded transnational and cosmopolitan messages, as projects that eventually mutated into tools of collective mobilization for various nationalist, ethnic, and identitarian causes. SOCIALISM STUDIES AND SOCIALISM AS A MODERN POLITICAL RELIGION There is a multitude of scholarly and popular books on socialism in general and on its various brands. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, the number of such texts along with video materials dramatically increased. The interest in left ideas, which declined with the collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s, have been recently resurging. The United States, where, unlike the rest of the world, socialism had never dominated the mainstream, is not an exception. A greater portion of these texts is partisan, which is understandable, considering ideological battles that people continue to fight over that creed. Left activist writers naturally tend to endorse socialism.3 Humanities and social science scholars (e.g., anthropologists, historians, psychologists, geographers, linguists, literary, and social work scholars), many of whom lean toward the left, too give a sympathetic treatment to that creed.4 In contrast, economists and political scientists are more skeptical about the moral preaching of socialism.5 So are activists and politicians on the right.6 Since the end of the 1950s, with the debacle of Stalinism, one could also see the emergence of the whole genre of the memoirs of leftists and later the New Left people who became disillusioned with socialism and communism.7 Some of these authors, like former Soviet spy writer Whittaker Chambers and prominent U.S. Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, found their spiritual solace in a conversion from socialism to conventional Christianity.8 Others embraced their ethnic nationalism9 and neoconservatism as secular substitutes for their former left convictions. Still others came to share such secular creeds as classical liberalism and libertarianism. Several of these apostates attempted scholarly studies of socialism.10 Moreover, there have been a large group of dissident scholars from former communist countries or, people who,

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like me, were emigres from these countries. Having a firsthand experience of living in societies that claimed socialism,11 these people became skeptical of this creed after witnessing repeated and failed attempts to reform it. They too produced critical studies of the socialist phenomenon.12 The pinnacle of this engaged scholarship is Black Book of Communism,13 which was produced in France, a Western country where social democracy and communism made deep inroads in political culture and economic system. I see socialism as a natural and spontaneous phenomenon that had emerged in the modern age on the heels of Enlightenment with the gradual decline of traditional religions. The latter process led to the “disenchantment” of the world and simultaneously to its “re-enchantment” through the rise of a romantic faith into the power of science and reason. Like the rest of modern ideologists such as (classical) liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism, socialism did come to exercise a tremendous influence of many segments of modern society, complementing or replacing traditional religions. As such, it became a surrogate political faith that catered to the needs of radical groups of intellectuals working-class people, and impoverished peasants who both wanted to reach out to the modern world and simultaneously felt alienated from that world. Although many adherents to the socialist creed passionately denounced traditional religions and referred to themselves as secular people, they in fact constructed a new moral religion that was no less potent than earlier ones. In many respects, socialism grew out of the nineteenth-century belief in the miracles of industrial revolution and science and a simultaneous fear of the industrial order they were unleashing. Hence, obsessive attempts to place power into the hands of benevolent government experts that were expected to know better how to construct from above better material and social life. Out of this science, technology, and state’s worship, there emerged collectivist projects of social and biological engineering. Stalin’s socialism, Hitler’s national socialism, and Chinese Maoism are the most grotesque manifestations of that mindset. In contrast, Fabian socialism in Britain and Swedish social democracy are benign examples of the same ethos. What made socialism special, unlike, for example, contemporary liberalism, was that much of its popular appeal originated from the successful blend of a traditional belief in redemption and a future golden age with the language of science. Accordingly, socialism could appeal not only to intellectuals but also to various groups of people with elementary education, who felt frustrated about mainstream churches. The thesis that socialism came to play the role of a secular religion in the modern world is not a novel argument. As early as 1898, in his The Psychology of Socialism, famous French psychologist Gustave Le Bone (1841–1931), stressed, “Thanks to its promise of regeneration, thanks to

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the hope it flashes before all the disinherited of life, socialism is becoming a belief of a religious character rather than a doctrine.” He also noted that socialism was striving to “substitute itself for the ancient faiths.”14 Another early critical observer was Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), a Russian émigré philosopher. He explored Soviet communism as a surrogate religion, arguing that its iconography and ritual practices replaced or complemented the debased Greek Orthodox Christianity. Although in his earlier 1906 article, Berdyaev did try to explore socialism in general, his overall approach was understandably parochial, being focused on the Soviet Union—the only country to claim socialism in his lifetime.15 In his essay peppered with personal recollections, writer Arthur Koestler, a famous communist apostate and the author of classic Darkness at Noon (1938),16 examined the formation of the secular faith of communism by pointing to similarities between communist and Christian symbolism and iconography.17 Analyzing national socialist and Bolshevik ideologies, political scientist Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) approached them as surrogate secular religions of modernity. For the description of these and similar phenomena, he introduced the concept of a political religion. Among the major current proponents of this concept is Italian historian Emilio Gentile.18 Furthermore, in his Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), political philosopher Raymond Aron (1905–1983) compared the rise and development of both Western and Eastern Marxism with Christianity.19 Economic historian and philosopher Murray Rothbard explored the millenarian message of Marxism, which was one of the most popular intellectual trends in socialism and which drew on secularized traits of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition. Rothbard was unequivocal in his conclusion: “Marxism is a religious creed.”20 Historian Paul Gottfried, who is known for his studies on the therapeutic nature of the modern welfare state, too used the concept of a political religion for the analysis of the post-Marxist Western left. Moreover, he was among the first to examine the emergence of the identitarian left on the current political scene in the West. Gareth Stedman Jones, who is the author of the most comprehensive biography of Karl Marx and who himself had dubbed into the radical culture of the English bohemian left, too compared his former creed to a secular religion. The most recent study of socialism as a form of a secular faith was done by historian Yuri Slezkine. In his The House of Government, a biography of top “preachers” of Bolshevism who were housed in the special residential building assigned to them by Soviet authorities, he examined the millenarian essence of the early Soviet communism.21 In my book, I have drawn on all that scholarship. Incidentally, I share Slezkine’s broad approach to religion, which includes secular ideologies. Drawing on Emile Durkheim’s argument that a religion represents a unified system of beliefs and practices that are considered sacred and that glue people together as a moral community,

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Slezkine has suggested that any comprehensive ideology (including a secular one) could be considered a religion. He has assumed that the sacred is not necessarily related to the otherworldly realm. It might be a ritual, site, event, and object that cannot be touched with impunity. In this case, the role of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities.22 Since the secular religion of socialism was the child of modernity, one needs to address the relations between modernity and the sacred. Earlier scholars drew a sharp line between the premodern “age of religion” and the modern “secular age” that sprang up during the Enlightenment period. Viewed from this angle, rationalism and atheism appear as a complete breakaway from the spiritual and religious. Moreover, those who maintained a soft spot for the premodern tradition frequently approached secular views and creeds as a “parasitic” and artificial phenomenon on the body of “genuine” (ancient) spirituality. Mircea Eliade, one of the pioneers of religious studies, has exemplified this type of scholars. On the one hand, he stressed that modern people could not cut themselves from their religious past and pinpointed its survivals in surrounding contemporary life. Yet, on the other hand, he unwarrantedly dismissed modern secular teachings and movements as “pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies.”23 Voegelin and later Gentile stressed that modernity not only carried on vital elements of traditional spirituality and religion, but it also replicated the traits of old creeds in a new secular garb. Moreover, for the past thirty years, other humanities and social science scholars too have blurred the border between the “age of religion” and the modern “secular age,” stressing that the sacred continued to exist in the modern world in a secular guise. They noted that modern ideological movements—secular creeds—reenacted and customized premodern notions. In the light of this, modern age, which was said to have “disenchanted” our world, appeared to have created movements and regimes that in fact “re-enchanted” the world. In his Earthly Powers, Michael Burleigh described the intellectual and spiritual mechanism of how exactly mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism were gradually giving rise to powerful secular ideologies. Along with nationalism, he singled out socialism as the most potent among modern religions that replaced or complemented God with the human agency.24 Most recently, in his study on the emergence of atheism, intellectual historian John Gray pointed to socialism as a modern secular religion. He has noted that secularism was too often mistakenly viewed as something opposed to the realm of religion and spirituality. Moreover, Gray has insisted that there was no such thing as the secular era and defined what we usually call secular movements as repressed religions: “Partisans of revolution, reform, and counterrevolution think they have left religion behind, when all they have done is renew it in shapes they fail to recognize.”25 Gray also stressed that it

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was Judeo-Christian tradition that triggered the gradual rise of atheism as an organized movement with socialism as its byproduct. Focusing his attention on atheism as a spiritual phenomenon that flourished in modern age, Gray explored teachings, movements, and regimes that relied on the socialist rhetoric such as the “utopian socialism” of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Marxism and such radical modern movements as Soviet communism and national socialism. Gray stressed that much of what made these movements so potent came from ascribing religious attributes to specific brands of pop science. Elevated to the status of an ideology such “scientific knowledge” (e.g., Marxism, Aryan Science, Identity Studies, Environmentalism) have been expected to magically produce better forms of social and political life. For example, both Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Hitler’s National Socialists blindly believed in the redemptive role of their “science”; the only difference was that the Bolsheviks were practicing “sociology” by invoking class cleansing and class affirmative action, whereas the Nazi were applying “biology,” focusing their policies on racial justice that later evolved into racial cleansing.26 Gray also noted that socialism gradually came to fill the spiritual void after Enlightenment writers and thinkers “evicted” God and gradually replaced it with humanity as the “great architect.” In the past, it had been God to whom people had attributed the active role of the creator and to his priests had as his social engineers. In modern times, it was scholar-bureaucrats, revolutionaries, and governmental officials who put on the mantle of creators and social engineers. In other words, like in other modern secular doctrines, in the socialist creed, humanity came to worship itself, setting out to build a paradise on the earth. After the collapse of communism in 1991, when the Cold War with its “us” against “them” approach was removed from the picture, scholars began scrutinizing communist socialism, putting it in the context of world history. The so-called modernity studies scholarship came to the conclusion that what the Soviet Union was in fact an extreme manifestation of social and economic practices that were common in other countries in modern time. It was noted that, although in benign and mild forms, in the first half of the twentieth century, Europe and North America too saw the expansion of similar policies that promoted state welfare, collectivism, worship of science and state, mass mobilization, and social engineering.27 Modernity studies eventually produced an offshoot scholarship that, picking up the popular postmodern approach, became focused on exploring multiple modernities that were peculiar to specific countries and cultures. An additional advantage of the overall modernity approach was that it provided a convenient intellectual exit for left-leaning scholars who did not want to part with the socialist creed but who, at the same time, could not morally endorse such brutal projects as Stalinism and Maoism. From the

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vantage point of modernity, a scholar could safely criticize the excesses of “high modernity” without bringing to light socialism or tarnishing the image of this creed.28 Yet, the same modernity methodology could equally satisfy the ideological sentiments of right-leaning scholars who could suggest that socialism existed not only in the Soviet Union but also in such countries as France and Italy that did not necessarily claim socialism but whose social and political fabrics were heavily embedded with the left culture. In my book, I do not seek to disentangle “genuine” forms of socialism from “non-genuine” ones; such attempts strongly remind me of theological debates between Protestants and Catholics or between Shiites and Sunnites about “correct” and “incorrect” ways of practicing their faiths.29 Putting such theological debates aside, I simply want to explore where, how, and under what circumstances people adopted the socialist rhetoric and practices, what contributed to their demise in the 1970s, and what sustains this rhetoric and practices in our days. One of my arguments is that socialism never manifested itself in a “pure” form. As I stressed above, debating the “purity” of a doctrine is usually a job of theologians and ideological true believers. Instead, as the historian of culture, I prefer to talk about socialist rhetoric, mindset, and governance, which were unevenly present in different historical contexts and areas of the world. In many respects, my approach to socialism is the mirror image of what some social scholars practice under the rubric of neoliberalism studies.30 This scholarship seeks to examine how and why the ideas of free market, individual liberty, and limited government gained popularity since the 1970s. Frequently with pejorative notions, scholars and writes who partake of this scholarship talk about the rise and development of the neoliberal thought collective (rhetoric, sensibilities, organizations, and governance).31 They explore the ways neoliberal “governmentality” affect society and seek to pinpoint its pockets in economic, political, and cultural spheres. Borrowing this methodology, I reversed and applied it to socialism. Thus, in this book I talk about the formation and development of the left thought collective, trying to pinpoint where, how and under what circumstances socialist rhetoric, intellectual culture, organizations, and “governmentality” have influenced specific historical periods, countries, and segments of society. Just like other world religions, socialism manifested itself in many guises and trends. Although its philosophy was heavily influenced by Marxism, socialism cannot be reduced to the teaching pioneered by Marx and Engels. Neither can one narrow its political system to the Soviet model, although, as socialist activists admit, it did dominate their creed from the 1920s to the 1940s.32 My book is focused on varieties of the socialist experience in different countries and cultures; the title I chose for my introduction is a paraphrase of famous The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by William James.33

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At the same time, I approach the various manifestations of the socialist creed as movements and systems that share the same genetic roots. As left sociologist Norman Birnbaum aptly stated, “Socialism in all its forms was itself a religion of redemption.”34 Just like Christianity that had become divided into Western and Eastern churches in 1054 and later in 1517 into Protestants and Catholics, socialism too experienced its great schism. In 1919, the socialist movement split into socials democracy and communism. Both became involved into a prolonged ideological warfare over who held the keys to the “haven on the earth.” The first gave rise to reformed socialism that later assimilated itself into the existing capitalist socioeconomic system. The second, a militant offshoot, aspired to overthrow that system through a revolution and radical social engineering. There are many histories that examine communism35 and social democracy separately.36 Still, comprehensive texts that bring together the variety of social democratic and communist experiments are few. In addition, many of these writings, except Joshua Muravchik’s book, are focused on European events and hardly examine the development of socialism in other parts of the world.37 It also appears that some scholars are still reticent to recognize that both social democracy and communism not only sprang up from the same sources but also shared the same set of notions, or, as Germans would say, gestalt. I encountered such an attitude in 2016 at an academic conference where I met and briefly talked with Archie Brown, a prominent UK historian of communism.38 When I mentioned that I was going to use his excellent book on communism as one of the texts in my history of socialism book project, he was happy to learn about my choice. Yet, he strongly cautioned me that I must emphasize that communism had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever. Not meaning an intellectual insult, such a stance reminded me of an episode from an introductory class in my History of Religions course a year prior to this. When I casually mentioned that, among other world religions, we were going to discuss Christianity and its major factions such as Protestants and Catholics, one of the students “corrected” me by saying, “Catholics ain’t no Christians.” Much of that enduring tradition of viewing social democracy and communism as two drastically distinct ideologies should be attributed to the distorted lenses of the Cold War legacy, when the anti-communist and communist left challenged each other as parts of two military blocs. In the eyes of many, the debacle of the communist bloc exonerated social democracy and its welfare state model that was now viewed as the “end of history.”39 Yet, despite parting their ways in 1919, until the 1950s, two factions did not stop sharing their fundamental ideological goals (egalitarianism) and social base (industrial workers). Both factions also agreed that centralized planning and greater nationalization should navigate economic development. They did disagree

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about the degree of centralization and nationalization but not about its essence and the destination. Both factions also shared the faith in the primacy of collectivism over individualism. As early as 1843, Moses Hess, one of the spearheads of what later became known Marxism, had already stressed that, although socialism had been more concerned about the organization of labor and communism had aimed at the complete abolition of private property, “the basic principle of both is identical.”40 In fact, the common genetic roots of both factions often paralyzed social democratic opposition to communism.41 Another narrative that is popular among the proponents of socialism is the argument about the distortion of the creed by various “bad apples” such as Stalin and Mao, who are now viewed as “inauthentic” socialist by the mainstream left. I ran across the most exotic attempt of this kind in a book about socialism in Tanzania. Its author sought to distinguish between Tanzanian “African Socialism,” which she has tended to view in a positive light, from “scientific socialism” or Marxism-Leninism that was assimilated by proSoviet regimes in Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. The author specified that she referred to the Tanzanian socialism with a capital “S” to emphasize its indigenous, non-Western, and authentic nature. In contrast, speaking about the Marxist-Leninist brands of the creed, she used a small “s” to stress its non-genuine character.42 My attitude to such things is different. If specific movements and regimes have called themselves socialist and used a socialist rhetoric, I take these claims seriously. Ideologically loaded words and rhetoric are meaningful. When the communist party of the Soviet Union argued in the 1970s that it was building “advanced socialism,” when Hitlerites called their movement National Socialism, when most of the Israeli agricultural settlements (Kibbutzim) billed themselves as socialist, or when African nationalist Julius Nyerere from Tanzania announced that he was building African socialism, I take all that rhetoric for granted. Instead of arguing about the validity of their claims, I am more interested in showing what prompted revolutionary leaders and activists to resort to that usage, what they meant by it, and what drew people to their projects. My survey of socialism treats its various brands historically, showing what attracted masses of people to that ideology during specific time periods. I also explore cultural settings which made some countries and segments of population susceptible to socialism, while keeping others aloof or less enthusiastic about it. Furthermore, in contrast to available surveys of socialism that are focused more on European experiences, I took a world or global history approach, exploring how socialism was introduced, assimilated, and practiced in various European, Asian, North American, and African contexts. My only regret is that, for the lack of space, I had to exclude from my set of essays such important area as Latin America. Without Castro’s communism

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in Cuba, Bolivarian Socialism in Venezuela, and Liberation theology, which represented an ideological blend of Marxian socialism with indigenous Catholicism, the picture of socialism history will not be complete. I hope a future student of religion and ideology will address those topics along with such fascinating characters as the current left dictator of Venezuela, who claimed to communicate with the ghost of the late Hugo Chavez, and the Argentinian revolutionary martyr Che Guevara who became a secular saint for the radical left (“Jesus Christ with a machine gun”). UTOPIANS, MARXISTS, ANARCHISTS, AND ETHNO-NATIONALISM In their search for the roots of socialism, several authors traced them to millenarian sects of the early modern Europe such as the Taborites from Bohemia (1420s–1450s), Thomas Muntzer (1489–1525) town commune in Germany, and the Anabaptist fellowship set up by the prophet John of Leyden (1509– 1536) in Holland. Moreover, one writer claimed that the Inca redistributive empire had been too a socialist state.43 These writings have used radical equality and wealth redistribution as the major criteria to relegate them to the realm of socialism. Such an approach is problematic because the early modern age European egalitarian groups were in fact Christian sects that had operated exclusively within the existing Christian ideology. Although these sects did carry the sparks of the would-be political religion, they never moved beyond the existing Christian narrative.44 As for the redistributive Inka Empire, although it did exercise the total governmental control over economy and peasant communes, it was first and foremost a clan-based theocratic monarchy that certainly did not claim any scientific and democratic origin—the essential features of modern left regimes and movements. It will be more correct to refer to the abovementioned egalitarian European sects as important intellectual forerunners of socialism. Regarding the Inka Empire, whose economy had been based on the collective labor of peasant communes, it created a fertile cultural ground for the later assimilation of socialism into those societies in modern times. One can say the same thing about Manchu and Russian empires. James H. Billington, Martin Malia, Frank Paul Bowman, Jones, Julian Strube, Gray, and Slezkine45 demonstrated that socialism was the product of a gradual secularization of various dissident Christian reformist sects; the activities of these sects opened a door for the “re-enchantment” of northwestern Europe with the secular ideas of Enlightenment. As the radical offshoot of the latter, socialism later expanded over Europe and further to other areas and cultures. In the wake of the Reformation, the decentralized Protestant movement, which was centered

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on the Bible readings, individual interpretation of the Bible, and the constant debates about Christianity, had effectively ended the spiritual hegemony of Roman Popes and, through various dissident sects, led to the Enlightenment. The latter further debased the power of Christianity, shaping intellectual and spiritual prerequisites for socialism. The first full-fledged secular movement with visible traits of socialism was French Jacobins. During the radical stage of the French Revolution (1792–1794), some of the Jacobins attempted to promote secular egalitarianism and replace God with the so-called religion of reason.46 It was not accidental that in the twentieth century many radical socialists considered themselves the heirs of the Jacobin tradition. Despite the powerful secular drive, in its early years (1820s–1830s), socialism was still heavily informed by conventional Christianity and by occult alternative spirituality. In fact, at that time, socialist sects were part of the emerging new religions movements (e.g., Mormons, Methodists, Shakers) that flourished outside the traditional church.47 A large role in this unchurched “Great Awakening,” which produced secular offshoots among others, belonged to Freemasonry.48 Freemason clubs preached the ecumenical idea of God that acted as the great architect for people of all creeds, nations, and countries. These clubs not only provided an organizational niche for first socialists but they also became a powerful jumping ground for the future socialist universalism. In their format and ritual activities, early socialist movements acted as religious-like sects in a new secular garb. Scholars, especially those who have been part of the left thought collective, frequently set apart early “utopian socialists” (Robert Owen (1771–1858), Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871), and the like) and the “scientific” doctrine of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.49 As intellectual historian Michael Burleigh aptly noted, such notions ignored the fact that Marxism itself was a religiously inspired mythopoetic drama dressed into a scientific-sounding garb.50 The profoundly theological attempt to separate “utopian” from “scientific” socialism had been in fact promoted by Marx and Engels themselves. Acting as millenarian prophets, the founding fathers of Marxism implied that all earlier brands of socialism had not been genuine and complete, and that they were the ones to give humanity the complete and true teaching of liberation.51 To be specific, this view owes much to Engels, who popularized Marxism for wider audiences. In his 1892 canonical essay “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” which served as the catechism to several generations of Marxists, he set apart the “true” Marxian socialism from its earlier “false” versions.52 In fact, one can still see this narrative in history books that refer to socialism. From the turn of the twentieth century to the end of the 1950s, Marxism dominated the socialist mainstream, marginalizing other schools of the left.53 The most appealing feature of Marxism was its passionate prophecy about

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the radiant egalitarian future that passed for a hard science. At the age of advancing science and industrial revolution, this powerful “rational” message canceled many of Marx’s opponents who were never able so skillfully blend “science” and “religion.”54 Marx’s “science” differed very much from the preaching of earlier “utopian socialists.” In contrast to the “utopians,” who in fact too embraced science and wanted to use it to foment an egalitarian society, Marx came up with something radically different. It was a millenarian “scientific” prophecy about inevitable iron laws of history (an equivalent of natural laws) that were to move society toward the “last judgment” of a revolution against the world of oppression and usher in the “paradise on the earth.” The job of revolutionaries was to correctly read the “signs of time” and be ready to use a situation to raise masses for a revolution. Moreover, the revolution itself was to be performed by the so-called proletariat (industrial workers)—the class of people who were “chosen” by history to overthrow capitalism and push society toward communism. As an organized movement, socialism emerged within journalistic circles in French and British cities amid the advancing industrial revolution in the 1820s and the 1830s. With little support from working-class people, this was at first an intellectual movement of educated people and their associates among artisans who were concerned about the social and economic dislocations caused by the rapidly expanding modernization that ruined the established traditional order.55 To be specific, socialism grew out of the fascination with and simultaneously the fear of modern industry and changes it unleashed. While attacking traditional religions and lifestyles, socialism came to replace them, offering prophecies that married a nostalgia for the pre-industrial order to an egalitarian utopia that aimed to harness the energy of the modern world. Unlike current traditionalist and leftist critics of modernity, nineteenthcentury and much of the twentieth-century socialism never practiced literal “looking backward” escapism. Neither did it preach animosity toward an industrial growth. At that time, the left embraced the modern along with its machine civilization that they were eager to use to build a socialist utopia. This mindset manifested itself well in the Marxist theory of socioeconomic formations that preached the return of humans into their original communistic “tribal” state only on a new technologically advanced level. While contemporary conservative critics of the emerging modern society were busy attacking city life with its “satanic mills” and breaking their heads about how to return society to its primal “healthy” state, Marx’s followers celebrated capitalism as an unavoidable and usable evil that was expected to prepare a material base for a leap into the glorious communist future. Although dominant in the left mainstream of continental Europe, Marxism coexisted with other versions of socialism. In the second half of the nineteenth

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century, its major challenge came from Anarchism. Le Bon, the author of the first large study of socialism, stressed that Marxism and Anarchism were the only two popular “sects” that defined the face of contemporary socialism.56 Both agreed that the private property was evil. Yet, they passionately debated each other about better ways to overcome this “sinister” phenomenon and reach the golden communist future. Marxists insisted that society would be renewed through a revolution and the state power of a proletarian dictatorship that was to purge capitalists. Their opponents argued that it was not capitalists but this very state power that generated oppression. Anarchists stressed that local collectivist self-governing communities would gradually spearhead communism by the sheer power of their example.57 To be fair, there were anarchists who advocated an immediate revolution against the state. In this historical debate, the Marxian statist way eventually overpowered the anarchistic trend and squashed it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the socialist mainstream came to believe that it was a benevolent omnipotent state that was to eliminate private property, nationalize economy, and fairly distribute wealth. The final nail in the coffin of the libertarian socialism was hammered by the Stalin secret police that drowned in blood an anarchist revolt in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.58 From then on, the major debate continued between Western reformed socialism (social democracy) (UK, France, Scandinavia, Germany) and radical Eastern communism (the Soviet Union and China). Those among the current left, who has been seeking to reform their creed and exorcise the martial tradition from their movement, refer to that latter trend as state socialism and insist that it has nothing to do with “true” socialism. Yet, throughout the first half of the past century, it was precisely this top-down statist approach, with its local variations, that defined the entire face of the left. Metaphorically speaking, much of the socialist creed at that time was revolving around the “house of government.” It was true both for social democrats and communists, who disagreed about the degree of centralized state control but not about its content. In the early twentieth century, when asked to define the essence of socialism, the famous American progressive politician William Jennings Bryan spelled out the then-popular opinion: “Socialism is the collective ownership, through the state, of all the means of production and distribution.”59 This vision of socialism became embedded into standards reference editions. Thus, the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines socialism as a “theory or system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society.”60 To be exact, the view of socialism as benevolent omnipotent statism had emerged as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. It can be traced

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back to the faith in aggressive social engineering based on the abovementioned “science worship”—a situation when educated guesses or hypotheses of scientists were amplified, distorted, and turned into pop science to be used to reshape the entire life of society. As traditional religions were waning out or being marginalized, the faith in scientific prophecies was expanding. In the twentieth century, appeals to the authority of science and natural laws became for various ideologists a standard practice they used to justify various grand projects of social engineering, mass mobilization, deportations, and social welfare schemes they advertised as progressive and benevolent. World War I became a pivotal event in shaping the identity of the modern left. Warfare further amplified and legitimized the existing social engineering approach, turning various statist schemes and centralized planning into an article of faith. Military propaganda, mass conscriptions, massive intervention in economic, social, and political life equally affected all societies and their institutions. Although all political forces were influenced by that martial mobilization spirit, the left embraced it wholeheartedly. As a result, in addition to such popular memes of socialism as “proletariat,” “dictatorship of proletariat,” “basis,” “superstructure,” and the like, many on the left embraced the concept of a governmental “plan.” Those who take time to leaf through the 1920s and the 1930s’ print media, will quickly notice that the mainstream left viewed centralized planning not only as a politico-economic category but also as an ideological fetish. Overall, in the eyes of the contemporary public, socialism came to mean nationalization of economy and increased state power. The faith in centralized planning and nationalization became so widespread on the left that even the most brutal communist states (the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and Ethiopia) had been considered socialist because they had nationalized economies, practiced centralized planning, and attacked Western civilization. Besides viewing socialism as a modern surrogate religion, the second major theme of my book is an intimate link between ethno-nationalism and socialism. I want to purposely emphasize this because, at least in theory, socialism has been frequently posing as an internationalist and cosmopolitan doctrine. Yet, once grounded in specific cultural settings, it sooner or later mutates into local versions of ethno-nationalism and identity politics. Historian Malia aptly stressed that socialist internationalism was visibly present a year or two when a revolutionary zeal was potent and militant. As soon as dust settled down and the millenarian zeal evaporated, good old nationalism always kicked in, eventually supplementing or overriding internationalism.61 In his popular utopian novel, Looking Backward (1887), which advocated public ownership of property and set the year 2000 for a socialist paradise to win over America, writer Edward Bellamy sought to make socialism understandable for the masses of Americans. For this purpose, this prominent

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author and social critic discarded the word “socialism” and replaced it with “nationalism” and “nationalization.” Although both were effective forms of collective mobilization, Bellamy correctly assumed that the latter was more potent.62 Little did Bellamy know how prophetic his message would sound in the twentieth century, when various national liberation movements (from Hitler’s German revolution of 1933 to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Pol Pot’s Cambodia) claimed socialism to channel their nationalistic aspirations. The reason why ethnicity and nationalism so easily blended with socialism is very simple. The cultivation of class warfare and class identity can easily shape-shift into the promotion of ethnonational and racial warfare and justice and vice versa. The ideological border between “class justice” and “racial justice” is very slim just as the border between capitalist “world financiers” and Jewish “world financiers.” For example, despite drastically different cultural and political settings, such mono-ethnic regimes and movements as Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Cambodian Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China, Jewish kibbutz socialism, and French communist party shared one important trait. They merged socialist rhetoric (attempts to construct egalitarian societies for their countries) with potent ethno-nationalism (fights against Yankee imperialism, Vietnamese invaders, Russian hegemony, hostile Arabs, and American cultural imperialism). Unlike their mono-ethnic counterparts, such socialist countries as Yugoslavia and Soviet Union could not afford full-fledged xenophobia. These two had to maintain vestiges of socialist internationalism to glue their multiethnic states together. This was the reason why, for example, despite Stalin’s repeated attempts to inject doses of Russian nationalism into Soviet ideology, internationalist socialism lingered on in the Soviet Union to the very end. Still, in 1948–1953, the cultivation of socialist internationalism within their empires did not prevent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union from locking horns with each other over whose interpretation of the creed was better—the Balkan model of “market socialism” or the Soviet uber centralized system. Eldridge Cleaver, a veteran of the Black Panther Party, who personally worked to marry radical Black Power nationalism with Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, found firsthand that the socialist creed, when planted into a national soil or assimilated by a mass movement, quickly evolved into ethno-nationalism. A fugitive wanted by FBI, in the 1960s, Cleaver escaped at first to Cuba and then across the big water to find a refuge in the Old World. Besides his quick disillusionment with the economic realities of “advanced socialism” in Eastern Europe that did not live up to his idealistic expectations, Cleaver was shocked by a deep-seated nationalism he discovered in all socialist movements and countries he encountered: “I lived out there for eight years. I lived in Cuba, I lived in Algeria, and I lived in France. I traveled throughout Africa, throughout the communist world. When you get a chance to see behind the

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scenes, behind the rhetoric of international solidarity and world revolution and all of that, there is naked national self-interest. You see the Soviet Union jockeying for power against China. You see the Koreans and Vietnamese trying to stay out of the clutches of both of them. And you begin to develop a little realism or cynicism.”63 The experiences he received in the course of his international ventures planted seeds of doubt about and eventually forced him to drop his own black nationalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and many other countries that claimed building socialism have shown that, despite their original internationalist and cosmopolitan rhetoric, by the end of the 1980s, all these regimes mutated into xenophobic projects that, instead of “class enemies,” came to target foreign and domestic “others” that were singled out on the basis of their culture, race, and ethnicity. When such nominally internationalist regimes as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union fell apart, all their former apparatchiks such as Slobodan Milosevich in Serbia or Nursultan Nazarbaev in Kazakhstan quickly reinvented themselves as open nationalists preoccupied with protecting their indigenous “blood and soil.” Furthermore, if we take a look at present-day Russia and China, we will clealry see how easily decades of intensive class-based propaganda later shapeshifted into virulent ethnic and national xenophobia. For example, in Russia, the opposition communist party reinvented itself after 1991 as a loose red-brown (national socialist) alliance that blends egalitarianism, nostalgia for Stalinism, patriotic “braces,” aggressive antiWestern sentiments, and pop Orthodoxy. Even seemingly tolerant and benign Western left could not avoid that slippery slope: in the 1970s–2010s, the mainstream left in Western Europe and the North America underwent the so-called cultural turn, ditching class in favor or race, gender, and identity. The most recent manifestation of that “identitarian progressivism” has been the emergence of the activist woke political religion that has been seeking to overcome capitalism, Western civilization, and the original sin of “whiteness.” No matter how hard socialists have fought to stay cosmopolitan and internationalist, their political projects and regimes always end up placating various forms of nationalism and identity politics. HOW DO WE NAME IT? “SOCIALISM,” “COMMUNISM,” AND “SOCIAL DEMOCRACY” I also need to address a terminological confusion that surrounds such closely related expressions as “socialism” and “communism.” In the course of history, these expressions changed their meanings. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, “communism,” “socialism,” and, prior to 1900, “social democracy”

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were used as synonyms to describe movements that aspired to make drastic revolutionary transformations in society accompanied by the elimination of private property.64 However, at that time, for some, communism had already meant the radical interpretation of what socialism had sought to accomplish. Yet, it was only when social democracy and communism formally split in 1919 that “communism” became fully associated with radical egalitarianism and the complete eradication of private property. Furthermore, since the 1950s, with the reputation of socialism being gradually tarnished, reform and moderate left began to increasingly rebrand themselves as social democrats, laborites (UK), and progressives (the United States). The expression “socialism” emerged in England among the friends and followers of great “utopian” Robert Owen. His disciples used the word to refer to an ideal humane society they contemplated in opposite to existing capitalism. For the first time, Owen used the word in 1827 in his article for Cooperative Magazine.65 It is also notable that, since the late 1840s, in England the expression socialism became increasingly associated with the government intervention into economy.66 At the end of the 1820s, the expression migrated to France where it was popularized by journalist and philosopher Pierre Leroux (1797–1871) in the early 1830s. Leroux claimed that he was the first to use it in print. To be exact, at first, this journalist used the word “socialism” not exactly in a positive light. In his discussion of indovidualisme and socialisme, Leroux dismissed these as absurd extremes of his time and distancing himself from both. Additionally, talking about socialism, he noted that it was a “tyrannical theory” that aspired to launch the new papacy. Yet, a few years later, Leroux drastically changed his opinion and began talking about socialism as the great new hope in contrast to individualism, which he stamped as immoral. Leroux wrote about individualism as a form of social disorder that should be eradicated. Most important, the journalist claimed that, in the guise of “political economy,” the “disease” of individualism had been brought to France from England, the “immoral nation” of artisans and shop keepers. This notion clearly spelled out the fear of the “industrial order” that was capturing France in the 1830s and the 1840s. One should not miss the fact that, picturing advancing modernization in dark colors, Leroux fondly described socialism as “religious democracy.” As for communism, the word had emerged in France at the end of the 1830s. From the beginning, it had been associated with calls for total expropriation of the rich as a result of a revolution.67 In print the word was used for the first time on March 11, 1840, in German newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine as a reference to radical French revolutionaries.68 In the 1830s and 1840s, in France and Germany, communism was also frequently linked to radical religious enthusiasm akin to the egalitarian and religious zeal of

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first Christians. In fact, in France and Germany, some radicals viewed communism literally as the worldly manifestation of holy communion.69 In the 1830s and the 1840s, German philosopher and émigré craftsman Wilhelm Weitling amplified the notion of communism as the radical manifestation of socialism. Before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared themselves communists in the middle of the 1840s, this Lutheran revolutionary true believer had already linked the expression “communism” to the total eradication of markets and money. By the 1840s, learned people of Europe already viewed communism as a barracks-like system that was more rigid and less tolerant than socialism.70 During the same decade, Marx and Engels purposely picked up the expression “communism” to make a point that they were radical socialists who were ready to drastically change the existing order by fomenting a workers’ revolution. Still, to further complicate things, in the late 1880s, many Marxists dropped the word “communism” and began to refer to themselves as socialists. As a result, “communism” was viewed as an old-fashioned synonym for what all people on the left at that time described as socialism. In 1892, Karl Kautsky, one of the major custodians of Marxist knowledge in those years, “cleared” the confusion: “The abolition of the present system of production means substituting production for use for production for sale. Such co-operative production for use is nothing less that communistic, or as it is called today, socialist production.”71 By the turn of the 1900s, the word “communism” almost disappeared from print media and regular usage. However, everything was rolled back after 1917 when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik followers inside and outside of Russia revived the term “communism” to stress their uncompromised commitment to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism: the overthrow of existing regimes, dictatorship of the proletariat, and the elimination of private property. Accordingly, Lenin and his Bolsheviks revived the original Weitling, Marx and Engels usage of “communism” as a synonym for radical egalitarianism.72 The Bolsheviks resorted to this name change in an attempt to disentangle themselves from the “traitors”—the mainstream Western reformed socialists who wanted to move toward socialism through existing democratic institutions and who played down the revolution. In 1919, the Russian revolutionaries formally stopped calling themselves “social democrats” and renamed themselves into communists. During the same year, along with the radical minority segment of Western socialists, Bolsheviks inaugurated the Communist International. In yet another etymological twist, under Stalin, the Bolsheviks began using “socialism” to describe the transitional “purgatory” stage between “oppressive” capitalist society and future communism. They argued that during this transitional state an empowered proletarian state was to aggressively weed out the vestiges of capitalism and to nourish the sprouts of communism. By

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the end of the 1930s, this view of socialism as a transitory stage on the way to the communist “earthly paradise” entered the radical leftist discourse and conventional dictionaries.73 Thus, in addition to the original usage (statesanctioned public ownership of the means of production), socialism also became understood as the first and impure stage of communism when collectivist principles were yet to anchor themselves in society. After the collapse of Eastern European socialisms, the Soviet Union, and the partial dismantling of Chinese socialism, scholars and writers began analyzing the nature of those societies. Authors with left-leaning sympathies came forward with a theological argument that political systems that had existed on the vast spaces of Eurasia either had nothing to do with “genuine” socialism or grossly distorted the socialist creed. The implication of such “reasoning” was clear: “real” socialism did not yet arrive. For example, Andrew Roberts, who devoted a whole essay to the terminology of socialism, has argued that we should not use such decent word as “socialism” for the description of the former communist countries. For him, even such a pejorative term as “state socialism,” which became widely popular with the anti-Stalinist left, could potentially taint the noble ideology and its “true” heirs—social democrats.74 Such utterances remind of one early twentieth-century progressive author who had similarly sought “to disinfect the term socialism of the virulent germs with which unauthorized persons have impregnated it.”75 To Roberts, the social democratic way is the ultimate “third way” or, using the famous Francis Fukuyama’s expression, the “end of history.”76 At the same time, his suggestion goes against the ethical standards of current Western humanities that require to respect self-identifications of various ethnic, gender, and political movements and societies. To bypass these moral requirements and simultaneously to save the ideology of his choice, Roberts has resorted to a bizarre intellectual game. He explained that one should apply the abovementioned “humanistic rule” only to small and “democratic” collectives and groups. However, it should never be extended to large “undemocratic” movements and regimes.77 Unfortunately, he failed to specify who and how will define the size of human societies and movements and their democratic nature for us to accept or reject their self-definitions. In other words, according to Roberts, when we talk about “good guys” (social democrats, democratic socialists, and all those who promote the “third way” between capitalism and socialism) we need to take their claims (if any) to socialism seriously. Yet, when we discuss “bad guys” (e.g., former “advanced socialism” in the former Soviet Union or a partially decomposed communist regime in current Cuba, Bolivarian Socialism in Venezuela, or socialism with national characteristics in China), we should deny their right to call themselves socialists. From an ideological standpoint, such attempt to separate heretics from “good” guys is understandable. Yet, promoted as a

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scholarly perspective in a humanities journal, this “reasoning” does not make any sense. A popular intellectual excuse such writers as Roberts use to unlink social democracy from communism is the fact that from the early 1900s, the former gradually began to challenge Marx’s major pillars, including the idea of revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the total abolition of private property. Yet, the emergence of factions within a creed does not automatically cancel their common roots and features. Protestant evangelicals in Africa and the United States are people who clearly belong to distinct cultural settings, but they do not stop being evangelicals. In the same manner, despite all their drastic differences, communism and social democracy, two major trends in the twentieth-century socialism, did share similar features and genetic roots. Moreover, in the first three decades of the past century, many social democratic parties continued to formally pledge their allegiance to Marxism—a practice that they followed to as late as the 1950s. Although two factions were fierce rivals, many social democrats continued to view communists as their estranged but not totally lost brothers and sisters.78 Incidentally, the rivalry factor that Roberts and other authors use to argue that the two movements had nothing in common does not hold any water either; factional rivalry within world religions has been a standard practice throughout history. If one follows the rivalry “logic,” we should not use the expression “communism” either when discussing former socialist/communist societies because these countries repeatedly fought each other (the bitter SovietYugoslavian ideological warfare in 1948, the 1969 Chinese-Soviet border war, and the 1978 Chinese-Vietnamese war). During such conflicts, each side routinely excommunicated another from the world of communism, arguing that another side did not practice the “true” communism. Still, using the expression “communism” to describe radical versions of socialism does make a perfect sense. After all, it was the debate about the ways to reach the radiant egalitarian future that originally split the mainstream left into social democrats and communists in 1919. Despite the terminological confusion and disagreements, there are authors who do not see any problems in generalizing about communism and social democracy as two currents in socialism. Neither do they see an issue in referring to communist regimes as socialist.79 In this book, I follow this broad usage, reserving expression “communism” for the discussion of radical socialist regimes and movements.80 As an historian of religions and cultures, I frequently had to deal with situations when acolytes of Christianity, Shamanism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Western New Age directly or indirectly reminded me that I must be an insider or even a member of a creed to have a right to speak about it. Being an insider, or as an anthropologist would say, “going native,” might be very helpful in producing an experiential research and grasping what spiritual or

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ideological rites and notions mean for the members of a fellowship. At the same time, the “indigenous” perspective has serious flaws. First, insiders tend to develop an uncritical attitude toward human collectives they blend with. Worse still, some become committed to a creed or a fellowship of their study. Second, even when insiders are capable to maintain their critical thinking, as an integral part of a fellowship, they hardly can speak freely about their experiences. It concerns both established conventional creeds and especially new religious movements, recent secular prophecies, ideologies, evangelical, and environmental movements. Indeed, it is hard to expect from an acolyte of Jerry Fallows, Al Gore, Louis Farrakhan, Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, or Ayn Rand to be unbiased about the creeds they have professed. When I embarked on this project of galloping through the 150 years of socialism’s history, I never suspected that it would be such an exciting and intellectually challenging venture. Above all, it was a great learning experience for me. Since many issues involving socialism go back to economics, I had to extensively educate myself about this field. As a scholar, whose original training was in anthropology and history, I quickly realized how little I knew about political economy and economics. Moreover, whatever rudimentary knowledge I acquired about these fields was heavily influenced at first by Soviet and then by Western progressive social scholarship. Thus, both in the Soviet Union, where I received my undergraduate training, and later in the United States, where I studied for my graduate degree, I was routinely exposed to such household names as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Michel Foucault, and Herbert Marcuse. Yet, I never heard about such individuals as F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Robert Nozick.81 An intellectual curiosity that prompted me to write this book led me to several personal discoveries that might sound as old news to experts in specific areas of history, political science, and economics. For example, despite being agnostic about the so-called Swedish “model of socialism,” I was totally unaware that dramatic improvements in Swedes’ living standards, which are frequently ascribed to the favorable influence of that model, in fact had been accomplished prior to the 1970s when that very model was activated. I also found out that, by the end of the 1990s, Swedish social democrats themselves had to trim their socialist temptations to avoid an economic stagnation. Another revelation was learning that it was the 1929 Great Depression in the West that indirectly amplified the brutalities of the Stalin genocidal collectivization of Soviet agriculture. One more discovery was to learn how xenophobic and racist Stalinist North Korean and Maoist Cambodian dictatorships were.

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Another “secret” that I discovered for myself and made it the second central thesis of my book was the recurrent pattern of the socialist class warfare mutating into ethno-nationalism and identity politics. Furthermore, exploring the way various cultures and countries assimilated socialism, I noticed that the degree and depth of this assimilation depended on their indigenous traditions. For example, it became obvious to me that northern European countries with the secularized Protestant tradition placed more stress on the individual agency and decentralization. As a result, they were leaning toward social democracy with its liberal notions instead of falling for communism. In contrast, in Catholic and Orthodox countries of south-western and eastern Europe, which were steeped in the tradition of catechism and hierarchy, large segments of the socialist movement gravitated toward communism and its command and control structure.82 It also became clear to me why communism with its tradition of the enlightened party vanguard still linger on in China to the present day. The fertile bureaucratic tradition of governance based on State Confucianism had allowed not only to easily inject the highly bureaucratic Stalinist brand of communism into the Chinese political culture, but it also helped to make it indigenous and traditional. Although we do have a vivid example of how the Sovietstyle socialism had been imposed by force on Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II,83 I have never fallen for a naïve view, which is still popular with many conservatives, that socialism had been enforced on an innocent populace by some powerful foreign cabals who wanted to put entire segments of population in bondage; the most famous proponent of such view was writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who, in his semi-fictional book about the Lenin, suggested that a small group of cosmopolitan Bolsheviks, who traveled on a sealed train through German lines into Russia in 1917, turned the former Russian Empire upside down and swayed it to communism.84 It is essential to remember such banal truth that, ultimately, it is a populace on the ground that is responsible for choosing or tolerating a political system or religion they are subject to. Socialism, which has enjoyed an uneven appeal in various countries and historical periods, is not an exception. Those writers on the right who deny people their agency and fall for the conspiratorial view on the origin of socialism are little different from their left-leaning counterparts who, for example, seriously believe that somewhere since the 1970s the cabal of malicious right-wing intellectuals along with international financiers singlehandedly orchestrated a sinister political project of the socalled neoliberalism that aimed to roll back all progressive achievements that the left were able to accomplish in their golden years (1930s–1960s).85 Ideologies, religions, and prophecies spring up, develop, and decline spontaneously, depending on an unpredictable combination of contingency factors,

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cultural traditions, economic and political circumstances, popular ideas and, yes, on the persuasive skills of charismatic spokespeople who contribute to a paradigm shift. Although I understood the effect of modern warfare on political and economic life, I originally could not comprehend how powerful was the influence of two world wars on the spread of socialism around the globe. Being raised in the Marxist intellectual bubble, I automatically assumed that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the 1949 revolution in China were first and foremost the products of irreconcilable class contradictions between the poor and the rich. By learning about the world-wide warfare that planted a total chaos and insecurity in society, I later realized that such radical manifestations of socialism as Soviet Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Maoism were in fact the ideological byproducts of that very warfare rather than the result of some inherent class rivalries and historical laws. The writings of Modernity Studies scholars convinced me that socialism had grown from the modern scientific and social engineering hubris. The command and control schemes of World War I and World War II further amplified this notion. In a sense, socialism became a radical child of modernity—a form of radical modernism that flourished during the martial twentieth century.86 Without the perpetual warfare that filled the first five decades of the past century, the socialist creed might not have expanded beyond Europe. Or it might have evolved along social democratic lines without producing communism. Although my book shows that, each time, utopian dreams of socialism break their teeth upon the imperfect nature of human beings, the very fact that those utopias have existed for so long and still enjoy the support of the millions of followers shows that they did resonate and still resonate with some segments of the population. I realize that utopian expectations about the “heaven on earth” linger on not only in the hearts of aged New Left baby boomers in the West and the former welfare beneficiaries of the Soviet “advanced socialism,” and among all others who feel nostalgia for “good old days” when the “socialist buffalo” roamed free. The fact that even in such traditionally individualistic country as the United States, where, after the crisis of 2007–2008, socialism has been experiencing a small renaissance shows that this creed is capable to resurface and resonate with the groups of the population that feel dislodged. My book that covers such broad subject is unavoidably selective. It represents a series of essays that sample socialist experiences from various parts of the world in the context of modern history. On the surface, there are hardly any commonalities among the benign “Scandinavian model of socialism,” brutal national communist dictatorship in North Korea, chaotic Bolivarian Socialism in Venezuela, village African socialism of Tanzania, and popular political performances of the now-extinct French communist movement. The

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goal of this book is to show both the varieties of these and other socialist experiences and also their similarities: the rhetoric of mass mobilization, radical equalitarianism, pop science worship, assertive social engineering, centralized planning, and the cult of a large benevolent state. The current left might say again that this is not what real socialism is about. Yet, it was precisely those ideological pillars that millions of people associated with the expression “socialism” in the past century. This book gradually grew out of my advanced undergraduate course on the history of socialism that I taught in 2016. In the process of writing, I enjoyed the support of my department, particularly its former chair Aram Gadzouzian who was instrumental in helping me secure a year-long study leave to compete this manuscript. I also benefited from my affiliation with the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, which provided me a conference and research venue to spell out some of the ideas you will find in this book. As early as 2014, when I only began contemplating this project, the institute granted me a summer residency with a full access to its library resources. I particularly want to thank Joseph Salerno, the academic vice president of the Mises Institute for his logistical help. For the past ten years, I was also stimulated by talks and writings of such colleagues as Richard Ellis, Paul Gottfried, Yuri Maltsev, Deirdre McCloskey, Allen Mendenhall, Joshua Muravchik, Yuri Slezkine, Nicholas Werth, Tom Woods, and Alexander Zubatov. Interactions with my Russian colleagues from the Modernization Studies department at the European University, St. Petersburg, were essential in developing my views on socialism and the Soviet Union. I especially benefited from the scholarship of Dmitri Travin and Pavel Usanov, two research associates from that center. I am also indebted to Sergei Kan, my friend and colleague for more than twenty years, who, by his conversations and advice indirectly contributed to this study. In fact, Sergei turned me into a multidisciplinary junkie whose interests now exists somewhere in the middle ground between anthropology, history, religious studies, and economics. I also appreciate my earlier (at the turn of the 1990s) interactions with Boris Kagarlitsky, one of the leading socialist dissidents in the late Soviet Union, who currently is a prominent left theoretician and spokesperson for the Russian left. At the end of the 1980s, through him, I became exposed to the variety of Western Marxism writings. Finally, I am grateful to the late Olga Domanski (1923–2015), who had welcomed me into the MarxistHumanism fellowship during my early American years (1991–1994); for the past fifty years, the mainstream Western left underwent a transformation, shifting from its fixation on class to embracing identity issues and gradually turning into an identitarian movement. In hindsight, I now realize that my brief interactions with the Marxist-Humanist tradition allowed me to better comprehend how exactly that ideological mutation happened.

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NOTES 1. Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973). 2. From early Marxist theoreticians, who called such angle “stupid” and “foolish,” to present-day socialist scholars, who politely call it “problematic,” progressive social scholarship flatly dismissed this approach. Nikolai Bukharin, “Marx Teaching and Its Historical Importance,” in N. I. Bukharin et al., Marxism and Modern Thought, trans. by Ralph Fox (London: Routledge, 1935), 3–6; Kevin Murphy, “The Making of the Soviet Ruling Class,” Jacobin Magazine, April 4 (2020), https​:/​/ja​​ cobin​​mag​.c​​om​/20​​20​/04​​/yuri​​-slez​​kine-​​the​-h​​ouse-​​of​-go​​v​ernm​​ent​-r​​eview​. 3. Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past & Future (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989); Danny Katch, Socialism: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015). 4. Gerald A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Norman Birnbaum, After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Beilharz, Socialism and Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 5. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Richard Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Jason Brennan, Why not Capitalism? (New York and London: Routledge, 2014); Thomas Di Lorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015). This discrepancy between humanities and economics/political science might be attributed to the nature of the mentioned disciplines. Humanities scholars are more concerned about and moral issues, whereas the students of economics and political institutions explore the effectiveness of economic and social policies. 6. Kevin Williamson, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011); Rand Paul and Kelley Paul, The Case against Socialism (New York: Broadside Books, 2019). 7. One of the first texts of this type that became a Cold War classic Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (New York: Harper, 1949). For others texts of the same genre, see Louis Budentz, This is My Story (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1947); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Chicago: Regnery, 1952); David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); Ronald Radosh, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (San Francisco: Encounter, 2001); Rainer Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt: inventur einer politische Idee (München: Knaus 2015); Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968–ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2008). 8. Thomas V. Mirus, “Eugene Genovese, a Communist Turned Catholic,” Catholic Culture August 10 (2015), https​:/​/ww​​w​.cat​​holic​​cultu​​re​.or​​g​/com​​menta​​ry​/th​​e​ -cit​​y​-gat​​​es​.cf​​m​?id=​​1119

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9. See, for example, the writings of two French writers and activists who drifted from socialism to Judaism: Annie Kriegel, Eurocommunism: A New Kind of Communism? (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1977); idem: Les juifs de France dans la seconde guerre mondiale (Paris: Cerf, 1992); Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times: A Stand against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2009); idem: The Genius of Judaism (New York: Random House, 2017). 10. Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974); Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003). 11. For me personally, the major challenge of living in the Soviet Union was not material shortages, which was the most widespread complaint about “really existing socialism,” but the lack of freedom of speech. It was suffocating to live a double life in the environment when government, media, and ideological watchdogs were forcing people to tow a politically correct line that was prescribed by various speech codes. 12. Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (New York: Harper, 1980); Yuri Maltsev, ed., Requiem for Marx (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, Auburn University, 1993); Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 13. Stéphane Courtois, [and others], Le livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreurs et répression (Paris: R. Laffont, 1997); for English translation, see Stéphane Courtois, [and others], The Black Book of Communism, trans. by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1999). 14. Gustave Le Bon, “The Psychology of Socialism,” in Gustave Le Bone: The Man and His Works, ed. Alice Widener (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1979), 108. 15. Nikolai Berdyaev, “Socialism as Religion [1906],” in A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1924, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 107–133; idem: The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1959). For the most recent study of Soviet Communism as a surrogate religion, see the Arthur Klinghofer, Red Apocalypse: The Religious Evolution of Soviet Communism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). 16. For more about this classic novel and how it contributed to the undermining of the communist faith, see John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York and London: Norton, 2009), 21–95. 17. Arthur Koestler, “The Initiates,” in Crossman, The God That Failed, 15–75. 18. Eric Voegelin, Die politischen religionen (Stockholm, Bermann-Fischer verlag, 1939); idem: Erzatz Religion (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1968); idem: Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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19. Raymond Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals [1955] (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). 20. Murray Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” in Requiem for Marx, ed. Yuri Maltsev (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, Auburn University, 1993), 224. 21. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 119–141; idem: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002); Gareth Stedman Jones, “Introduction,” in The Communist Manifesto, ed. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Penguin Classics) (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 3–162; Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 23–118. 22. Ibid., 74–75. 23. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 209. 24. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religions and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 25. John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), 71. 26. Ibid., 72. 27. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York, Picador, 2006); Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 28. The best example of this approach is Scott’s Seeing Like a State. 29. The most grotesque example of such attitude is a mindset of marginalized Trotskyite sects that linger on the fringes of the left. They view all their past and present competitors on the left, from Stalinists and Maoists to Social Democrats, Third World leftist regimes, and the Western cultural left as pseudo-left, traitors, and reactionaries who never practiced “authentic” socialism. David North, The Frankfurt School, Post-Modernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015), 212. 30. For an outline of this interdisciplinary scholarship that sprang up in the 1990s and that now accounts for hundreds of books and articles, see Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, The Handbook of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016); Kean Birch, A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017).

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31. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MS and London, 2009). 32. Norman Thomas, A Socialist Faith (Port Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1971), 4; Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 270; Beilharz, Socialism and Modernity, 2. 33. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longman, Green, 1902). 34. Birnbaum, After Progress, 1. 35. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Ronald Kowalski, European Communism, 1848–1991 (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); Robert Strayer, The Communist Experiment: Revolution, Socialism, and Global Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Harper, 2009); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (London: Penguin Books, 2010); Erik van Ree, Boundaries of Utopia: Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin (London and New York: Routledge, 2015); Stephen A. Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). The most comprehensive history of Communism is a three-volume collective study Silvio Pons, ed., The Cambridge History of Communism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3 vols. 36. Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Francis Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Nik Brandal, Øivind Bratberg, and Dag Einar Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). 37. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth. The first comprehensive studies of socialism are Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin (London and New York: Longman, 1946) and G. D. H. Cole, The History of Socialist Thought, 1889–1959 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1953-1960), 5 vols. For the first best popular account of socialism’s history, see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1940] 1953), which by now became a classic. Wilson, who had been a left-leaning writer and one time a Soviet fellow traveler, was able to produce a balanced and lively history of the Western left from Saint-Simon and Fourier to Lenin and Trotsky. For more recent general studies, see George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1970); Leslie Derfler, Socialism since Marx: A Century of the European Left (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); Albert Lindermann, A History of European Socialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Donald Sasson, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996); Newman, Socialism; William Smaldone, European Socialism: A Concise History with Documents (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).

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38. Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism. 39. The popular meme introduced by the political thinker Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. 40. Moses Hess, “Socialism and Communism,” in Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 105. 41. Thomas, A Socialist Faith, 4. 42. Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between Village and the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 29. 43. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, Secker & Warburg [1957); Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 75–78; Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon; idem: “Socialism in Our Past and Future,” in From Under the Rubble, ed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 24–65; Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1961). 44. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” 263. 45. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 32–33; Jones, “Introduction,” 3–162; Julian Strube, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical Approach to Socialism and Secularization in 19th-century France,” Religion 46, no. 3 (2016): 359–388; Gray, Seven Types of Atheism; Slezkine, The House of Government, 90–94. 46. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 78–80. 47. Strube, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism,” 380. 48. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 4. 49. For an example of such approach, see one of the most recent studies on socialism: Newman, Socialism. 50. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 244. 51. Slezkine, The House of Government, 115–116. 52. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [1880] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2008). 53. Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 145. 54. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 13; Slezkine, The House of Government, 114–116. 55. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 3. 56. Le Bon, “The Psychology of Socialism,” 118. 57. Ibid., 4. 58. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 255. 59. John Martin, “An Attempt to Define Socialism,” The American Economic Review, 1, no. 2 (1911): 348. 60. “Socialism,” in Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, December 2018, Oxford University Press, http://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/183741.

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61. Malia, History’s Locomotives, 283. 62. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Changes in the Nomenclature of the American Left,” Journal of American Studies, 44, no. 1 (2010): 88. 63. Lynn Scarlett and Bill Kauffman, “Interview: Eldridge Cleaver,” Reason Magazine, February 1 (1986), http:​/​/rea​​son​.c​​om​/ar​​chive​​s​/198​​6​/02/​​01​/an​​-inte​​rview​​ -with​​​-eldr​​idge-​​cle/4​ 64. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 7. 65. Gregory Claeys, “‘Individualism,’ ‘Socialism,’ and ‘Social Science’: Further Notes on a Process of Conceptual Formation, 1800-1850,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 47, no. 1 (1986): 83. 66. Claeys, “‘Individualism,’ ‘Socialism,’ and ‘Social Science’,” 88. 67. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 243. 68. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 22. 69. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 244. 70. David Ramsay Steele, From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992), 43. 71. Ibid. 72. Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review, 63, no. 2 (2004), 354. 73. Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, December 2018, Oxford University Press, http://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/183741. Angus Stevenson, ed., Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010) e-book; Berg Flexner, ed., The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1983), 1811. 74. Roberts, “The State of Socialism,” 350. 75. Martin, “An Attempt to Define Socialism,” 354. 76. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 77. Roberts, “The State of Socialism,” 355. 78. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 234. 79. See, for example, Gray, The Socialist Tradition; Cole, The History of Socialist Thought; Wilson, To the Finland Station; Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism; Lindermann, A History of European Socialism; Derfler, Socialism since Marx; Newman, Socialism; Smaldone, European Socialism. The authors of the most comprehensive three-volume study of world communism did not see any problem either in using the expression socialism to talk about communist regimes: Silvio Pons, ed., The Cambridge History of Communism (vol.1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country 1917–1941; vol. 2: The Socialist Camp and World Power 1941–1960s; vol. 3: Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present). 80. The 2018 Oxford English Dictionary too has stressed that the “range of application of the term is broad.” Moreover, the 2010 edition OED specified that the expression is routinely used to refer to Anarchism, Marxian Socialism, Social Democracy, and Soviet communist practices. “Socialism,” in Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Angus Stevenson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), e-book. 81. von Mises, Socialism; Hayek, The Fatal Conceit; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

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82. Judt and Snyder, Thinking Twentieth Century, 83. 83. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012). 84. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). 85. For the best example of such conspiratorial view on the rise of neoliberalism, see a book by UK Marxist geographer David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 86. I borrowed the metaphor “radical modernism” from Benjamin Balthaser, AntiImperialist Modernism: Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 85.

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Religion of Modernity How an English Textile Baron and a French Aristocrat Jump Started the Socialist Creed

Brethren, you have rejected Ducretot [the priest], and you have done well; but you did not do this out of impiety, for we are pious men. Nor did you do it because he is a priest, for we too are priests! The workman is a priest, like the founder of Socialism, the Master of us all, Jesus Christ! —a character from Gustave Flaubert novel L'Éducation sentimentale (1869) The authorities of the more civilized parts of the earth may immediately commence this new state of the true and superior existence of man, and may thus make the earth a terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by a new race of superior beings; and that, to effect this glorious change in the character and condition of the human race will now be a simple straightforward matter of business. —Robert Owen, “Socialism” in Cyclopedia of Religious Denominations (1853)

On April 27, 1825, Robert Owen (1771–1858) (see Fig. 1.1), a Welsh textile manufacturer and an enterprising self-made man, launched a small community of about 900 fellow believers, many of whom were former members of Protestant millenarian sects and followers of Swedenborg, a Swedish occult master. Addressing his fellowship, Owen spoke in prophetic terms, “The day of your deliverance is come, and let us join heart and hand in extending that deliverance, first to those who are near, then to those who are more and more remote, until it shall pass to all people, even unto the uttermost parts of the earth. Then will be the full time of that universal Sabbath, or reign of 1

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Figure 1.1  Robert Owen (1771–1858), One of the Early Spearheads of Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man's Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1.

happiness which is about to commence here, and which I trust you who are ready to put on the wedding garment, will long live to enjoy.”1 Called New Harmony and set up on the banks of the Wabash River, Indiana, Owen’s community was to become a nucleus of the commonwealth of equals. At that place, people were expected to work and live in harmony like brothers and sisters and to show the path to the rest of the humankind. It is said Owen was the first to refer to this ideal egalitarian way of life as socialism. New Harmony was one of the early manifestations of the socialist creed—a new ideology that emerged amid social concerns and spiritual crisis caused by the ascent of the Industrial Revolution. It was natural for emerging socialists to couch their sermons and writings into the familiar language of Christianity. European movements such as the one that was inaugurated by Owen represented a transitory “middle ground” phase between Christian eschatology with its “heavenly kingdom” and the secular religion of socialism with its “heaven on earth” prophecy that was

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emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical background for the gradual secularization of European spiritual life, which led to the Enlightenment and eventually to various secular creeds, including socialism, is well known. The process had been triggered as early as the 1600s by the religious disarray in the wake of the Reformation, prolonged religious warfare between Catholics and Protestants, the expansion of print culture and Bible reading, and a growing disillusionment with conventional churches. The role of Protestantism was especially crucial here. Protestants believed that one was capable to reach out to Jesus by reading the Bible. This mindset indirectly opened a door to the individual interpretation of the Bible, critical thinking, and the formation of the whole class of reading public and further secularization. In other words, Christianity was brought down to the earth. This, in turn, opened a door to the infusion of political ideas.2 Enlightenment and later the emerging socialist spirituality naturally built on that spiritual disarray. Seeking to cope with the modern world, some segments of Christianity reformed themselves, others sought to reject it, and yet others became secularized, evolving into moral preaching of socialism. Owenites and early socialist fellowships sincerely believed that they were the ones who were genuine believers in contrast to conventional denominations. For example, the acolytes of French socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) claimed to be more faithful to Jesus and the Gospels than the official Catholic Church. Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), one of the major spearheads of early socialism, whom we will discuss below, linked socialism to what he called the New Christianity that was to replace conventional religions with the “true” morality.3 The speed with which socialism disentangled itself from surrounding Christianity varied from country to country and from region to region. Yet, by the end of the ninetieth century, in Europe this process was complete, and one could see segments population preaching various brands of this secular creed. “RATIONAL BRETHREN OF THE WEST”: ROBERT OWEN, NEW HARMONY AND SOCIALIST HALLS OF SCIENCE To make a point that New Harmony signaled the coming of a new type of society, Owen and his associates composed “The Declaration of Mental Independence.” They assumed that their new perfect world would override the “imperfect” 1776 American Declaration of Independence. Prior to his moving to Indiana, Owen had been already a minor celebrity, who pioneered in his textile mill at New Lanark, Scotland what we would call today social welfare system. Thus, he introduced a sick fund and cut hours for child and

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young adult workers down to 10 hours; at the turn of the 1880s, a normal workday in England ranged from 12 and 16 hours. In his public speeches and conversations with various dignitaries, Owen explained that to create prerequisites for the new social order of happiness and equality, people should overcome what he called three vices: traditional region, conventional marriage, and private property. Unfortunately, despite welfare benefits he bestowed on his workers and generous funding to the Indiana socialist colony, Owen never got rid of his own private property to arrest this third capitalist “vice” in his soul. Despite being a successful businessman, Owen fully shared the old religious bias against commerce, constantly repudiating “money changers.” He kept repeating that practice of buying cheap and selling dear was “degrading and pernicious” because it was based on someone taking advantage of his neighbor.4 Owen did not restrict himself to improving material well-being of his 2,000 workers. He was also concerned about changing the moral life of his wards. Owen always viewed himself as a fatherly figure whose job was to instruct his proletarian children about proper ways of living. His moral guidelines included prescriptions when exactly workers had to take out garbage and at what hours in the evening they had to be at home. He also introduced a mandatory schooling for children of his workers. In his factories, for each employee, superintendents kept weekly “books of character,” in which they recorded how industrious each worker was. This very much resembles the “social credit” system that the current national socialist ruling elite in China wants to impose on society. While visiting Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, the pioneer of socialism became fascinated with the plantation slavery system that he found wellordered, well-oiled, and benevolent. Owen found Jamaican slaves “better dressed, more independent in look, person, and manners, and greatly more free from corroding care and anxiety, than a large portion of the working classes in England, Scotland, and Ireland.” Moreover, he chastised those reformers who wanted to abolish the slavery institution by stressing that to set the blacks free and established the relations of employer and free laborer as in Europe would be a movement “from good to bad; from slavery with abundance to liberty with destitution.”5 Interestingly, among the people who became fascinated with Owen’s barrack-like command and control order were English conservatives who lamented the bygone medieval orderly life with its “pastoral” peasants supervised by benevolent lords. Owen was convinced that a surrounding environment was solely responsible for shaping a person into a good or bad individual. He reminded that “the character of man is formed for him, not by him.”6 Moreover, in no uncertain terms, in his essay “Socialism,” Owen stressed, that “the rational system of society is based on the non-responsibility of the individual.”7 Hence, his call

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for a state and enlightened experts to shape human life in a “correct” direction in one shot: “The formation of these conditions may be commenced immediately over the earth, and carried forward simultaneously in all localities, including the islands of the oceans.”8 Owen particularly stressed a need for a public school system that was essential in molding personal characters and minds. This line of social activism—social engineering of “better” human beings—later became the hallmark of modern socialism. His nurture over nature attitude made him hate contemporary Christianity that insisted that individual sinners were responsible for their own actions and characters.9 Despite his bias against the conventional church, Owen was not less religious than the rest of clerics. Yet, it was another kind of religion. In 1816, opening his Institute for the Formation of Character, Owen explained that his teaching represented a new religion of charity. Like many prophets prior to and after him, Owen stressed that his way was superior to all “imperfect” creeds. He reserved for himself a place of the socialist messiah, and soon his acolytes began addressing him as the Social Father. The most zealous followers switched to a new Owenite chronology, counting the new age since the time when the master had announced his teaching. They also peppered their letters with such abbreviation as CM (Commencement of the Millennium), which was later inscribed on the main Hall of Science; Owenites referred to their temples as halls of science.10 Owen hinted that, unlike Jesus, who promised his followers the heavenly kingdom, he would deliver the paradise on the earth. What was the source of such arrogant confidence? The socialist prophet stressed that his message was superior because it was based on science. For this reason, he repeatedly objected his teaching to be called a revelation. Trying to distance himself from conventional religions, Owen insisted that his doctrine should be called “real knowledge.”11 To show to the world that his system based on socialist engineering was possible, Owen went to the United States to establish the abovementioned New Harmony community (see Fig. 1.2). The Social Father invested into the project $250,000. This was a huge amount of money at that time and included almost all his fortune.12 Equipped with communal laundries, kitchens, and dining facilities, the New Harmony fellowship was expected to work together, share the products of their labor, and avoid monetary economy. Two years later, his model community started falling apart. Its members, who were prone to intellectual activities, did know much about planting, seeding, harvesting, baking bread, and craftsmanship. Yet, most important, instead of harmonious teamwork, they quickly resorted to mutual suspicions and quarrels about who and how much worked and contributed to the community. New Harmony members tried to revitalize their fellowship by changing their constitution seven times, naively thinking that each time they would come up with a perfect system that would resolve their issues. Nothing helped,

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Figure 1.2  New Harmony, a Socialist Commune Set Up by Robert Owen on the Wabash River in Indiana (1825). Note the missing top of the church building: anti-church rationalists, Owenites purchased the premises from a Lutheran egalitarian community of Harmonists. This watercolor by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1832) caught the settlement in the state of decay. Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique du Nord, exécuté pendant les années 1832, 1833 et 1834 (Paris, A. Bertrand, 1840–1843). Plate 35.

and, in frustration, Owen gave up on them and left for Britain, throwing all responsibility on his son’s shoulders. In contrast to his father, the son became an ardent proponent of free enterprise and gradually shut down this island of socialism in Indiana. A few smaller communities inspired by Owen’s ideas similarly fell apart. The Social Farther explained away the debacle by a bad “human material” he had to deal with. At the same time, a small group of his die-hard socialist followers blamed the failure on him not being tough enough in his social engineering zeal. They expected him to rule the colony in a command and control manner as a military regiment by selecting a staff, appointing officers, and issuing orders.13 This debacle did not discourage Owen. After returning to Britain, he had more success with promoting cooperative societies—an attempt to find a middle ground and to tame a bit his appetite for social engineering, while simultaneously preserving the spirit of collectivism. In Britain, he maintained some following among all classes of people. Among them, one could find wealthy philanthropists, farmers, and lower-middle-class tradesmen. In 1835, to unite all of them, Owen set up the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists. Inaugurating this society, he again prophesized in an apocalyptic manner, “The Rubicon between the Old Immoral and the new Moral World is finally passed. This is the great Advent of the world,

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the second coming of Christ—for the Truth and Christ are one and the same. The first coming of Christ was a partial development of Truth to the few. The second coming of Christ will make the truth known to the many. The time is therefore arrived when the foretold millennium is about to commence.”14 His ultimate plan was to unite all workers into the so-called Grand National Moral Union of the Productive Classes. The goal of the project was to drop out of the advancing capitalist society and set up for toiling people a parallel socialist economy; the cooperatives were a part of this grand plan. Just like socialism in general, this project reflected fears of and anxiety about rapid changes and dislocations that modern industry along with its “satanic mills” brought to the life of society. The expanding Industrial Revolution, which started in the 1760s, scared people by its smoking chimneys, machines, crowded cities, and new lifestyles. To some, who embraced and immediately benefited from the emerging modern society, it was captivating and thrilling. For others, it was frightening. Artisans and hand weavers were losing to new more efficient factory labor, where machines were replacing manual labor.15 On the one hand, people saw that modern science, technology, and machines could perform miracles; incidentally, this became the source of an almost religious obsession with science. Yet, on the other hand, it was petrifying for peasants, artisans, and aristocrats to observe the speed with which the Industrial Revolution turned upside down their traditional society. These segments of people had a hard time finding a room in the new industrial order. Former peasants who moved to cities and became working-class people had to live by clock and adjust themselves to a new industrial discipline. In the UK and then in other areas of northwestern Europe, the world of small villages was falling apart, and the world of big cities was coming to replace it. Many felt disempowered by the new aggressive and enterprising middle-class folk: merchants, manufacturers, and bankers. In a hindsight, the Industrial Revolution did dramatically improve the life of people, including working class.16 Yet, that was not how many contemporaries viewed the expanding industrial order. It was not only the groups that were gradually displaced who expressed their discontent. It was also the new factory labor that had to experience both opportunities and miseries of city life, including slums and sixteen-hour working days. Many of these workers came to share a perception that the whole world was going to hell and that the life of people became more miserable than during “good old days.” Urban life was frequently associated with vice and moral degradation. Those who felt dislodged or offended by factories, cities, and monetary economy nostalgically longed for the return of the old life. The perception that the industrial order brought more misery to people and especially to those who came to work on textile factories and coal mines provided a powerful psychological and social backdrop for socialism. Later, this enduring perception became

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the cornerstone of the Marxist teaching about the natural radicalization of working class under capitalism. In his famous 1844 book dealing with the conditions of English working class, Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of Marxism, insisted that pre-industrial workers had lived a far better life than the industrial labor in the first four decades of the nineteenth century.17 The spiritual state of contemporary workers, many of whom were first- or second-generation peasants, made them susceptible to secular prophecies of socialism. Being uprooted and exposed to crowds of people from various regions, they were unable to maintain sustained relations with their congregations and churches. Instead, for the most discontent among them, urban ghettoes and pubs became the crucible of a new type of spiritual solidarity that was based on the traits of conventional Christianity and new secular prophecies that were feeding on pop science. Such mix sounded appealing to people with rudimentary education. What also antagonized workers was an arrogant attitude of many mainstream churches that preached the middleclass respectability, looking down upon common people as unwashed urban masses.18 Still grounded in Christianity, socialism emerged as a moral answer to spiritual and social concerns of the “deplorable” some of whom began to view it as their “safe space.” Socialist writers and activists who assailed the industrial order eagerly enhanced the negative notions about factories as “satanic mills” that made common people miserable. Yet, in contrast to romantic and conservative critics of modern society, socialists appeared rational and “scientific.” They did not call people to return to “good old” pastoral and traditional life ways. Reformers such as Owen were convinced that it was silly to cancel the modern industry that produced an incredible amount of wealth. The problem, in their view, was the unequal distribution of this wealth. Owen and the like concluded that, if they convinced governments and powerful elites to step in and ask expert scientists to design a full-proof social system for a fair distribution of the wealth, the modern industry would serve a good cause. In other words, they aspired to harness the machine civilization to recreate the old organic collective lifestyle only on a new advanced level. German historian of religion Julian Strube caught very well the essence of that mindset by referring to socialism as “progressive traditionalism.”19 There is a temptation to define early socialists as secular modern thinkers and downplay the role of the spiritual in their movements simply because socialists were singing unending litanies to science and the scientific ordering of contemporary societies. In fact, it was “science” that was turning into a surrogate spirituality that catered to their activities and teachings. The universal new order set up by the “intelligent design” of scientific experts, which some early socialists called a new religion, aimed at reconciling Enlightenment

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philosophy and science with a religious faith through the development of new “rational” and “scientific” forms of religion.”20 A random phrase from the 1830s French left magazine La Travail, which defined communism as “ a variation of Christianity applied to the relations of actual life,”21 captured well the contemporary sentiments regarding both socialism and communism. It was natural that the Owenite movement acquired the form of a church. Their socialist fellowships that met in “halls of science” on Sundays were exposed to sermons that featured achievements of human knowledge and contemplated ways of organizing society according to rational principles. Owenite lecturers, who delivered these sermon-like talks and who traveled all over England preaching the “Rational Religion,” became known as social missionaries. Not a small part of these sermons was hymns that were recited from a special Social Hymns book. The latter was used instead of the Bible. One of such hymns went as follows: Community! The joyful sound That cheers the social band, And spreads a happy zeal around To dwell upon the land. Community is labour bless’d, Redemption from the fall; The god of all by each possess’d, The god of each by all . . . Community does all possess That can to man be given; Community is happiness, Community is heaven.22

For newborn and deceased members of the fellowship, Owen himself performed baptisms and funeral orations, which reminded Christian sacraments in their format. The most zealous among his followers insisted on calling him the “First Patriarch of Socialism” and asked him to nominate sixty-two “bishops of socialism.” Owen personally preferred to stick to the Social Father—a title he established for himself.23 Many Owenites came from various Protestant millenarian sects that denounced city and factory settings and preached the end of the world. In fact, social activities of several of these sects, which were fixated on the revival of the “original” Christian egalitarianism provided organizational blueprints for the early socialists. Thus, Owen and his associates heavily drew

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on the experience of the Shakers, a Protestant sect that propagated equality and communal living. An important intellectual prerequisite for socialism was the mentioned Protestant practice of constant reading and interpretation of the Bible—a habit that gradually drove some inquisitive Protestants to rationalism. Before joining the socialist fellowship, William Ludlow, one of the prominent Owenites, resided in a Shaker community. He became known for a book with a characteristic title: Belief of the Rational Brethren of the West.24 John Witby, also a former Shaker, was instrumental in composing the first New Harmony constitution. Overall, the Owen movement created a subculture focused on the secularized prophecy, which provided a good niche for those who were upset about rapid industrial changes, but who, at the same time, did not want to reject technology.25 Earlier social scholarship downplayed the religious background of the Owenites and their spiritual quests. It was argued that the Owen fellowship had originally emerged as a secular movement friendly to the working class and later, it undid itself by degenerating into a religious obscurantism.26 In reality, the Owenites sprang up as a millenarian sect and later developed into a “socioreligious ideology” with a secular bent.27 One can easily learn about their status in England by consulting Cyclopedia of Religious Denominations (1853) that sandwiched Owen’s socialism between entries about Shakers and Mormons.28 To better understand the context in which the Owenite socialism was unfolding, one also needs to bear in mind that between the 1780s and the 1860s, Britain and the United States saw a vibrant religious revival. The Owen prophecy about the coming heaven on earth overlapped with that great evangelical fever. An important part of this Great Awakening was a stress on the moral uplifting of humankind. This spiritual push made the whole segment of evangelicals to turn to such issues as welfare of the urban poor, slavery, temperance, and emancipation of women. While proclaiming rationalism and the loyalty to science, Owenites were developing within the powerful apocalyptic Christian tradition and acted as other contemporary millenarian Protestant sects.29 Providence for Owen and his followers turned into a natural law, revelation was linked to reason, New Jerusalem was the equivalent of universal happiness (socialism), and talks about millennium gradually evolved into sermons about progress and human betterment. When they experienced failures, like any religious millenarians, Owenites routinely ascribed them to the wicked activities of people who corrupted and distorted the utopia. Later, this type of reasoning became a standard practice for many on the left who easily tossed aside failed socialist projects by claiming each time that they did not represent real socialism. Overall, Owenites, who grew out of the non-conformist Protestant tradition, became an intellectual bridge between the earlier millenarian Christianity and later socialism.

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“CONSPIRACY OF EQUALS” AND THE “NEW CHRISTIANITY” OF HENRI SAINT-SIMON The “science of happiness” pioneered by Owen captivated the minds of many middle- and working-class people in neighboring France. The Owenites and French socialists were involved into and cross-fertilized each other’s projects.30 Among people who apprenticed with Owen was Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), an activist lawyer who sought to replicate and perfect Owen’s project of building egalitarian communes. Inspired by his trip to England and meeting with the Social Father, Cabet wrote a utopian novel Voyage en Icarie (1839).31 The genre of the book mimicked the literary style that was popular in England. Cabet described the utopian land of Icaria, where people shared everything. Because of the book’s accessible style and captivating message, which resonated with those who were upset about social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, many in France fell for it. Some people who read Voyage en Icarie truly believed that there was such benevolent land out there beyond France. Incidentally, Cabet was among the first to popularize the expression “communism” that he used for the description of his project. He imagined his ideal egalitarian commonwealth as a society where a benevolent government completely squashed private property and exercised a total control over society. Hence, communism. At the same time, Cabet never advocated a violent revolution, preferring to reach his perfect order in a stealth manner through a gradual expansion of the government’s role. Like Owen, he considered his movement a form of revitalized Christianity, constantly comparing its activities with the early Christian “church of the poor.”32 By 1843, Cabet was able to lure up to 30,000 “communists,”33 some of whom followed his invitation to go to North America and set up there an Owen-type commune, at first in Texas and then in Illinois. No sooner had they settled in North America, a favorite playground for many early socialists, that they had to deal with the same host of problems: dissent, selfishness, and interpersonal quarrels. At one point, some distressed members of the community took over the land they worked on and turned it into their private properties. In an attempt to discipline quarreling members of the fellowship, Cabet began to act as a dictator. This antagonized the colonists who eventually deposed him, and the chief communist had to escape to St. Louis. In a special pamphlet designated for future communist organizers, unrepentant Cabet outlined the major rule for engineering a perfect society: “Centralization is the principle, the foundation, the soul, the strength and the life of the Community. For Communists, especially, this must be the ABC of all social doctrine and all propaganda.”34 To be fair, France already had its own vibrant socialist tradition that had developed in the wake of the French Revolution. In contrast to England with her Protestant tradition of spiritual decentralization and independent sects,

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in Catholic and hierarchic France, socialist tradition was more authoritarian and radical. Much of this tradition went back to the frustration of urban Jacobin radicals about the 1789 Revolution that they thought did not go far enough to establish the equality of outcomes. In their eyes, the demolished legal inequality practiced under the earlier feudal regime gave rise to a new “beast” of economic inequality. The radicals argued that the revolution was not complete and aimed to finish it by eliminating private property.35 An underground sect, the Conspiracy of Equals, headed by Francois-Noel “Gracchus” Babeuf (1760–1797) set out to accomplish that goal. Babeuf insisted that the revolution was stolen from people and, wishing to phase out the new aristocracy of property, he launched the underground “phalange” of about 1,000 followers. They met by torchlight in the crypt of the Convent of Saint Genevieve (“Cave of Brigands”). Invoking the name of Christ, whom Babeuf portrayed as the first sans-culotte (a working-class man), he was preparing an armed revolt. Yet, a wayward member of the sect betrayed the “equals” to the police, and all of them were executed except one foreigner named Philippe Bounarotti. This Italian aristocrat who was wandering over France on the quest for adventures, was not a French subject. This helped him avoid the death penalty. As the only surviving member of the conspiracy, Bounarotti felt obligated to take the torch. He began traveling over Europe, recruiting people for a new revolt, and becoming the first professional socialist revolutionary. Bounarotti chose Freemason lodges as the most convenient niche to spread his socialist message and to recruit new followers. Their educated middle-class membership, the universalist semi-secular approach to God as the great architect open to all creeds, and a sympathetic attitude to science and reason provided a fertile ground for would-be secular left-wing groups and sects. In fact, historian James Billington has argued that in French- and German-speaking countries the greater part of the socialist tradition sprang out from the cosmopolitan and transnational network of Freemason lodges. His research showed that in the early-nineteenth-century budding socialists used Freemason networks and cloned their organizational structure to launch their own political groups.36 Thus, after being expelled from Paris, Bounarotti moved to Genève, Switzerland, where he joined the Freemason Lodge of Perfect Equality, trying to use it as a front for his newly minted revolutionary organization he labeled as the Sublime Perfect Masters (note the name). Bounarotti modeled his underground cell of “masters” after the three-layered structure of the Bavarian Order of Illuminati: church, synod, and areopagite. What probably attracted the Italian revolutionary in the legendary Illuminati was high secrecy they cultivated around themselves in contrast to the rest of Freemason lodges. Goals and ethics of the Illuminati strongly appealed to the budding

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socialist. One trait that fascinated him most was the cunning missionary practice of the Illuminati who viewed other masonic lodges as front organizations that they had to infiltrate to recruit new members.37 The members of the Illuminati order, which was founded by a Bavarian university professor of law Johann Adam Weishaupt in 1776, pledged to detach themselves from all established religions and ditch loyalties to particular governments, focusing on remaking the entire humanity into a morally perfect collective. Unlike conventional Freemasons, the Illuminati viewed esoteric symbols and rituals as a smokescreen to camouflage their true goals. Like for many other contemporary socialist groups, “science” played a prominent role in the teaching of the Sublime Perfect Masters. Bounarotti “science” was represented by the Pythagorean occult mathematical tradition. Introduced by Renaissance spiritual seekers, it caught on with some educated Europeans by the 1700s. The Pythagoreans believed in the power of prime numbers and in perfect geometric forms that were to bring order to the surrounding chaos. Jumping ahead, I want to stress that later this quest for an order by using perfect geometric forms amid the “chaos” of life became a major pillar of what today we call modernity. As a radical manifestation of modernity, socialism fully absorbed this message. Among early French socialists, the celebrity status belongs to Henri Saint-Simon. In generic histories of early “utopian socialism,” his name is usually paired with the name of Owen as the one of two most prominent fountainheads of the new creed. Like Bounarotti, Saint-Simon was an offspring of an aristocratic lineage. As a young man, he was one of those French officers the French king sent to North America in 1776 to fight on the side of American revolutionaries against Britain, the major French enemy at that time. In fact, Saint-Simon fought alongside George Washington during the famous Yorktown Battle (1781). Yet, soldiering was never his passion. His real enthusiasm was reshaping social life and political institutions by using science. Although Saint-Simon never received a systematic university education, he eagerly picked bits and pieces of scientific knowledge from everywhere. He kept track of all major inventions and, hanging in Paris cafes, constantly conversed with teachers and students from Ecole Polytechnique, the major French college that was training engineers and applied scientists.38 SaintSimon also had a big ego, being convinced that he was destined to perform a grand worldwide mission. To feel good about himself, the philosopher instructed his butler to wake him up by a phrase, “Sir, great deeds await you.”39 This French aristocrat was on the quest for a “philosophical stone” that would help him pioneer a perfect social order. Saint-Simon was an authoritarian through and through, being convinced that the job of engineering such an ideal order should be firmly in the hands

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of a governmental elite and scientists. Yet, in contrast to people like Cabet, he stressed that the task of these enlightened masters was not to squash private property but to regulate it by fairly spreading the wealth. Still, recognizing private property, Saint-Simon accompanied it by the following disclaimer: “The individual right to property can only be founded upon common utility.”40 His vision of ideal society matched more the one advocated by modern social democrats and democratic socialists who embrace a heavily regulated welfare state capitalism based on the Keynesian model.41 Saint-Simon assumed that by harnessing science and taking advantage of modern technology, experts and governmental technocrats could mold a perfect state that would benefit all classes, including the rich, the poor, and the middle class. In fact, Saint-Simon argued that when economy was properly planned and managed down to its miniscule details, industrial system (idustriale) would create so much wealth that class warfare and poverty would naturally decline. Saint-Simon pointed out that one of the major jobs of government, was to organize grand public works projects not only to make sure that all people were employed but also because the sheer size and magnitude made industrial projects most efficient. He was confident that in economy, social life, and politics the best approach was the bigger the better. SaintSimon prophetically predicted the emergence of the “super-European parliament” that would manage industrial enterprises serving the entire European society.42 The French utopian became harbinger of centralized planning, which later prompted the Soviets to erect a monument to his memory in downtown Moscow. Overall, his conviction that a government could engineer a morally perfect society by relying on the “intelligent design” of enlightened scientific masters later became another consensus policy approach at the age of modernity, and it endured at least until the 1970s. All major twentieth-century projects, from the most “cannibalistic” such as Soviet communism and German National Socialism to the most “vegetarian” such as the American New Deal and Ujamaa Tanzanian socialism were informed by that top-down “scientific” tradition. According to Saint-Simon, society was divided into productive and parasitic classes. The productive ones, whom he called industrialists, were represented by those who either worked with their hands or who organized and managed economy. Saint-Simon relegated to the rank of industrialists everybody who were classified in France as the third estate (artisans, merchants, manufacturers, professionals, people of creative occupations, and scientists). The unproductive were represented by aristocrats, priests, military officers, and people who lived off their inherited wealth.43 The job of a good government was to sideline parasites and elevate the industrialists. What kind of system was to ensure this policy? Saint-Simon argued that society should

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be run by the policy board of expert scientists that he called the “Council of Newton.” This group was to become the modern priesthood, replacing conventional parasitic priests who belonged to the past and who were obsolete in the modern life. In addition to issuing expert advice about how to run the society, the Council of Newton was to organize modern-style worship services, research, and education, which would be conducted in specially built temples of Newton.44 This special role of scientists as the navigators of modern society was the major theme of his writings. To Saint-Simon, scientists were the only group that stood above all classes and was capable of acting as mediators. Using their superior knowledge, they could maintain the unity of society through a rational planning. In short, these enlightened masters held the key to the salvation of society.45 Saint-Simon detailed the blueprints of his new system in Political Catechism of Industrial Society (Catechisme politique des industriels) (1824).46 Incidentally, the catechism format was used by many other socialist and communist writers of the period. A year later, just before he died, Saint-Simon released another brochure where he labeled his system as the New Christianity (Nouveau christianisme) with himself as the messiah of this new religion.47 The name he attached to his system was not accidental. Saint-Simon did see a virtue in medieval church that held Europe together, brought order and stability to society. Yet, with the outdated medieval order being gone, conventional Christianity too became obsolete. The world needed a new type of religion that would glue modern society. His New Christianity, which elevated science and social engineering to a divine level, represented the gospel of human progress and happiness. The purpose of his new religion was to mobilize the entire society to build a perfect society of general plenty. On his deathbed, addressing Olinde Rodrigues, one of his closest students, Saint-Simon prophesized, “People have believed that the whole religious system would disappear, because they have succeeded in showing the decadence of the Catholic Church. They have been mistaken: religion cannot disappear from the face of the earth; it can only undergo transformation.”48 Just as they did it with Owen’s spiritual experiences, some scholars have separated Saint-Simon’s early scholarship from his later New Christianity that was dismissed as a bizarre death-wish “aberration” they ascribed to his progressing mental illness. In fact, that “mental degeneration” was the logical outcome of his life-long quest for a political religion based on pop science and centralized planning. Hence, the New Christianity.49 Disciples who surrounded Saint-Simon were former graduates and students from the abovementioned Ecole Polytechnique. In his Counter-Revolution of Science (1955), F. A. Hayek explored the pivotal role these people played in

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fomenting the network of social engineers who later became active not only in the European socialist movement but also in mainstream economic policies both in France and beyond.50 What concerned most Saint-Simon and people who congregated around him was a “chaos” and “anarchy” in surrounding economic, social, and political life. The contemporary society appeared to them as dysfunctional because it was driven by “sinister” market forces and “corrupted” by emerging political pluralism. Victor Considerant, Saint-Simon's contemporary, expressed well this mindset when he wrote, “The society in which we live is shaped by the blind accidents of earlier times, and modified each day by accidental and unforeseen events. Our society is governed not by a superior and intelligent foresight, but by hazard.”51 For the sake of general wellbeing, the “chaos” of contemporary life was to be replaced by a rationally designed perfect order. In fact, not only committed contemporary socialists but also masses of “common people” interpreted the competition of economic, class, and political interests as a vice that was to be eradicated. Many workers, housewives, bishops, merchants, and artisans looked for a universal and all-embracing system that would be able to remove this “hazard.” COMTE’S RELIGION OF HUMANITY AND SAINT-SIMONIAN APOSTLES One of the most prominent Saint-Simon’s followers was a young mathematician Auguste Comte (1798–1857) who too was a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique. Comte entered history as a major fountainhead of positivism and simultaneously the founder of sociology.52 For us to better understand the influence both Saint-Simon and Comte exercised on the contemporary intellectual culture, think about such currently popular humanities gurus as Michelle Foucault and Slavoj Žižek. Equally eccentric as his teacher and also prone to the bouts of madness, Comte joined Saint-Simon at first as the secretary and then became his collaborator. Later, when he matured and spread his wings, Comte felt an intellectual power to sail on his own, which upset Saint-Simon. As it often happens between collaborators who go their separate ways, each side began blaming another in plagiarism. To be fair, later SaintSimon’s writings and early Comte works are hard to disentangle—so similar they are in many ways. Eventually, out of their shared intellectual baggage Comte developed his own original approach, which was focused on developing positive knowledge. Positivism, the method he spearheaded, focused on a blind faith in what was considered raw scientific evidence. Continuing the SaintSimonian line of thought, Comte argued that society must be reshaped

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according to hard science. It never crossed his mind that society was too complicated to be measured and fit a universal blueprint. Neither did he consider the fact that scientific knowledge was always limited. Moreover, Comte never considered that a scientific consensus was a relative thing that was heavily influenced by peer pressure, surrounding culture, and targeted funding. The methodology promoted by people like Comte later opened a door to arrogant attempts to engineer social life according to pop science. The general message of Positivism was that the physical world and society were subject to natural laws. Individuals had no free will to act, and, to understand the way of the world, one needed to master the natural laws and flow with them. It was expected that, armed with the superior knowledge, technocrat-scientists would move society to a predetermined perfect state. This line of thinking promoted soon became the intellectual mainstream and affected other great minds, including those who spearheaded Marxian socialism. What was vaguely outlined by Saint-Simon as a “scientific” religion of New Christianity Comte presented as a well-articulated doctrine in Catechisme positiviste (1852). Going further than his teacher, Comte came to think about the well-ordered industrial society not as a vehicle to some abstract bright future but rather as the goal. He aimed at constructing an enlightened pan-European dictatorship armed with his scientific “positive rule.” At one point, Comte suggested that the best way to establish this Europe-wide positivist project was to accept the Roman Pope as the moral arbiter provided each country being controlled by industrialists and scientific experts. Comte invested much time into sending out packs of letters to various political and religious leaders of his time (a Russian czar, an Ottoman sultan, Jesuit leaders, and others), inviting them to try his system of an enlightened scientific rule. Just as Saint-Simon, who presented his teachings as the New Christianity, he framed his utopia as a grand spiritual project that he labeled as the Religion of Humanity. Comte viewed it as the church of the future in which humanity would worship itself. He went as far as developing scientific communions and confessions, which Comte ardently performed for the acolytes who joined his “scientific” creed. Furthermore, the scholar replaced conventional saints’ days with the days of deified scientists, poets, and musicians. In Comte’s Religion of Humanity, one could find such new saints as Archimedes, Aristotle, Dante, Descartes, and Newton. Wishing to be the social messiah of his own, Comte dissociated himself from Saint-Simonians and launched his own group of fans, who set up branches of his religion in Europe and Latin America. In 1857, he endowed on himself the title of “The Founder of the Universal Religion, High Priest of Humanity.” To sanctify this narcissism, Comte explained that, as the one who discovered the laws of

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social evolution, he became the manifestation of the Great Being. The sociologist came to believe that in this role he was more sacred than the Roman Pope.53 By the second half of the nineteenth century, Comte “positive church” evolved into an esoteric spiritual fad that caught up mostly with people in Iberian countries (Spain, Portugal, and Latin America). In these areas, some members of educated elites were frustrated about the “backward” Catholic Church. At the same time, they wanted to have around a church-like spiritual shell adjusted to the modern age. The Religion of Humanity that was focused on the redemptive nature of science filled this spiritual void. In Brazil, the Creole elite accepted Comte as its philosopher and later had the moto of the Positivist church “Order and Progress” inscribed on the Brazilian national flag, where it remains to the present day. Still, Comte’s creed was marginal and never generated much following. In contrast, missionary-prone Saint-Simonians captivated attention of the educated middle-class people both in France and beyond. Modest in the number of actual followers, this school of thought nevertheless became the most popular countercultural movement in the country. In the 1820s and the 1830s, thousands of people in France and beyond shared Saint-Simon’s ideas, although the core group of activists never exceeded 600 people.54 After the death of Saint-Simon, his followers worked to expand the New Christianity into an organized creed, literally referring to themselves as a new religious fellowship and comparing their deceased master with Jesus Christ who revealed to the humankind the “living law.” Their pamphlets and flyers carried a characteristic head mast Religion Saint-Simonienne. Incidentally, earlier scholars who had studied the Saint-Simonian teaching, routinely referred to it as a religion.55 Rituals of the fellowship were based on reworked Freemason and Roman Catholic rites.56 To carry their teaching into society, at the turn of the 1830s, his acolytes organized popular lectures that were later released as Doctrine de Saint-Simon. This volume became the Bible of early socialism.57 When Saint-Simon died, the torch was picked up by Saint-Amand Bazard (1791–1832) and Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864) (see Fig. 1.3). Both declared themselves Supreme Fathers. Between these two, Enfantin played a leading role in shaping the master’s doctrine into a mystical religion. In addition to worshipping science, Saint-Simonians elevated the entire concept of industry to a divine level: “The purpose of industry is to exploit the earth’s resources and, just as in performing this task, the earth will be changed, man will contribute, in some respects beyond his own awareness, in the manifestation of divinity and carry on the work of creation. By these means industry will become faith.”58 Enfantin was born in Paris in the family of a banker. Like many other Saint-Simonians, he was schooled in the Paris Ecole Polytechnique. Taking

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Figure 1.3  Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), the Leader of the Saint-Simonian Religion, 1832. Eugéne Fourniére, Histoire Socialiste: le régne de Louis-Philippe (1830– 1848) (Paris: J. Rouff, 1908), vol. 8: 189.

a job of a wine merchant, Enfantin traveled all over Europe, from France to Russia. Returning to Paris in 1823, he read Saint-Simon’s Catechisme des industriels that changed the way he viewed the world. Soon he befriended the author and became one of his chief missionaries. Enfantin and Bazard did not view themselves as theoreticians of the politico-economic doctrine but rather as “apostles” who had a duty to carry around the revelations of the deceased “prophet.”59 Enfantin explained to the “family,” “Up to now, Saint-Simonianism has been a doctrine and we have been doctors. Now we are going to realize our teachings. We are going to found the religion. We are now apostles.”60 Like the Owen movement, Saint-Simonians practiced a revivalist style of preaching that they wrapped in the language of science and reason. During their meetings, the members of the fellowship passionately

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chanted songs and benedictions that frequently put them in the state of trance and were accompanied by emotional outbursts of brotherly love.61 In total, 330 committed Saint-Simonians, including 100 women, decided to become the missionaries of the new faith. These were mostly young middleclass people associated with the Ecole Polytechnique. A large segment of them was the offspring of assimilated Jewish families.62 In addition to its stress on science and reason, the New Christianity, which was not tied to any brand of conventional religion, attracted the emancipated Jews by its universalism and cosmopolitism. In the 1830s, this prompted nationalism-driven Zygmunt Krasinski, a Polish poet living in France, to compose a play where he depicted the Saint-Simonian teaching as a Jewish conspiracy that aimed to subvert Christian civilization and plunge Europe into moral debauchery.63 Messengers of the New Christianity, usually working in pairs, traveled from their Paris center to various parts of France and beyond. Soon local branches of this universalist political religion were set up in all major cities of France as well as in several cities of Belgium, England, and Germany. In Moselle, the westernmost wine-producing part of Germany, the Saint-Simonian religion was able to recruit so many adherents that a local Catholic archbishop had to issue a special warning against this heresy. Saint-Simonians nourished a grand totalitarian ambition of converting the whole world to their creed. They aspired to put an end to the economic and social “anarchy” in the contemporary society and make society prosper by imposing a unified scientific plan. Saint-Simonians ascribed crises, inefficiency, and waste to the fallacy of free-market approach. The latter appeared to them as the most inefficient way of using economic resources. For a property to be managed efficiently and to benefit everybody, it had to be put in the experienced hands of expert scientists and social engineers. Like Cabet’s communists, some Saint-Simonians embraced radical egalitarianism. Still, most of them rejected total communism, advocating instead a tight control over private property. Although one of Saint-Simon’s commandments was phrased in a totalitarian manner (“all men must work”), they nevertheless preached “to each according to his capacity” instead of communist “to each according to his needs.”64 In 1832, Enfantin and group of forty ardent Saint-Simonians launched a model town commune in Ménilmontant (the vicinity of Paris). Their goal was not to set up an Owenite-like utopia in wilderness but to launch an urban collective that would dramatize for the rest of the capital city socialist practices in action.65 One of the most flamboyant among these practices was their peculiar coats buttoned from behind. This was both a socialist virtue signaling for the public and simultaneously the enhancement of altruism, mutual dependency, and collectivism within their own fellowship. Saint-Simonians were also among the first to start a public campaign for the emancipation of

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women. The most exotic project on their agenda was a quest for a female messiah. She was expected to be a Jewess from the Middle East who would announce to the world the coming of the new age. In the second half of the next century, this quest resurfaced in the form of the New Age feminist spirituality fixated on “recovering” the Mother Goddess. In the 1830s and the 1840s, France was undergoing a revolutionary turmoil. With this in his mind, Enfantin reminded his fellowship that, as social engineers who knew the way, they were to become the new elite that would step in to lead the country out of the chaos and anarchy. He reminded them, “We alone have faith in authority and command obedience. We alone can discover the presently existing elements of order, uniting them and making them productive, calling together everything which is truly progressive. Because the Future is ours. We alone can thrust off all that is used up and antiquated, reject the decrepit tools of a useless struggle, and anticipate and calm any retrograde opposition.”66 Saint-Simonians were convinced that disorder and anarchy were very useful, helping the new authoritarian social order to germinate. It was from this angle that they viewed the French Revolution of 1830. Enfantin called his fellow comrades to take advantage of the unfolding revolutionary chaos. For him, “bourgeois” liberal freedoms of press and speech that people were fighting for during the revolution were important not by themselves but because, in his view, these freedoms helped spread around chaos and disorder. The “disorder” of the liberal freedoms was to “enable progressively minded men to detach themselves from the anarchic movement, and rally to the new hierarchy.” Saint-Simonians envisioned socialism as a hierarchical centralized system. They did not believe in parliamentary procedures, stressing that their ideal was the rule of the “competent.” Detailing their ultimate plan, Enfantin stressed, “We demand at this moment freedom of religions so that one single religion may more easily be built on all these ruins of humanity’s religious past. We want freedom of the press because it is the indispensable condition for the next creation of a truly legitimate direction of thought, that of morality and science. We lay claim to freedom of education so that our doctrine may be propagated more easily, with no obstructions, and be one day the sole affection, followed and practiced by all.”67 The celebrated English thinker J. S. Mill, who once too was hooked on Saint-Simon and Comte teachings, later in his life defined their rule of the “competent” as a political prescription to a complete despotism akin to the Jesuit Order.68 Although, by the 1870s, both Comte’s Religion of Humanity and the Saint-Simonian teaching waded as intellectual fads, their legacy had a lasting influence on European intellectual life. Saint-Simon’s and Comte speculations about scientific laws of society and enlightened social engineers were

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later assimilated by various Western thinkers, including Karl Marx and other prophets of socialism. The mode of thinking Saint-Simon and Comte promoted became the common intellectual property shared by all segments of the left and by the contemporary mainstream.69 Thus, it was through SaintSimonian countercultural media that Europeans became introduced to such loaded popular expressions as “class struggle,” “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” “positivism,” and “organization of labor.”70 One can compare the great impact of Comte and the Saint-Simonian “family” on Western intellectual life with the influence exercised by the so-called Frankfurt School and followup post-modernism in the twentieth century. Although similarly gone by now, the mode of thinking they promoted became deeply embedded into the present-day intellectual and cultural mainstream.

NOTES 1. John Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 106. 2. Edward Berenson, “A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815–1848,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), vol. 3, 550. 3. Ibid., 553–554. 4. William Lucas Sargant, Robert Owen and his Social Philosophy (London: Smith, 1860), 230. 5. Ibid., 266, 268. 6. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 236. 7. Robert Owen, “Socialism,” in Cyclopedia of Religious Denominations: Containing Authentic Accounts of the Different Creeds and Systems Prevailing Throughout the World (London: R. Griffin, 1853), 284. 8. Ibid. 9. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 234. 10. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 134; Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 240. 11. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 107. 12. Pamela Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France: From Free Love to Algeria (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 99. 13. Sargant, Robert Owen and his Social Philosophy, 255. 14. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 239–240. 15. Marxist historian E. P. Thompson explored well these fears and anxieties in his classical book The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz 1963). 16. From 1840 to 1910, real wages in Britain more than doubled and people’s nutrition radically improved. To water down and problematize this picture, Marxist critics came up with a relative deprivation thesis. They also stressed that one should explore how the Industrial Revolution affected living standards of various age, gender,

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and professional groups: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, 1967 (38): 56–97. For a summary of the classic Marxist take on this issue, see E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Standard of Living during the Industrial Revolution: A Discussion,” The Economic History Review 16, no. 1 (1963): 119–134. For the classic liberal and libertarian interpretation of the labor’s living standards in the wake of the English Industrial Revolution, see T. S. Ashton, “The Standards of Life of the Workers in England, 1790–1830,” in Capitalism and Historians, ed. F. A. Hayek (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954), 127–159; Clark Nardinelli, “Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, https​:/​/ww​​w​.eco​​nlib.​​org​/l​​ibrar​​y​/Enc​​/Indu​​stria​​lRevo​​lutio​​nandt​​heSta​​ndard​​​ ofLiv​​ing​.h​​tml. 17. Friedrich Engels, “Conditions of the Working Class in England [1845],” https​:/​ /ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/d​​ownlo​​ad​/pd​​f​/con​​ditio​​n​-wor​​king​-​​class​​-engl​​ and​.p​​df 18. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 258–259. 19. Strube, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism,” 379. 20. Ibid., 361. 21. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 262. 22. J. Hobson, ed., Social Hymns: for the Use of the Friends of the Rational System of Society (Leeds, UK: Central Board of the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists 1840), 129. 23. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 136–137; Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 240. 24. William Ludlow, Belief of the Rational Brethren of the West (Cincinnati, OH: Printed for the Society, 1819). 25. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 100. 26. G. D. H. Cole, Socialist Thought (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), 127–131. 27. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 102, 139. 28. Owen, “Socialism,” 283–288. 29. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, 137. 30. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 92–98. 31. For an English translation, see Étienne Cabet, Travels in Icaria, trans. Leslie J. Roberts, ed. Robert Sutton (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 32. Cole, Socialist Thought, 78. 33. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 259. 34. Paul E. Corcoran, ed., Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France, 1830–1848 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 89. 35. Moses Hess, who contributed to the rise of what became known as Marxism, considered these frustrations about the 1789 revolution the first form of socialism (communism). Hess, “Socialism and Communism [1843],” 108. 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Ibid., 91, 93–94. 38. F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 119, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mis​​es​.at​​/stat​​ic​/li​​terat​​ur​/Bu​​ch​/ha​​yek​-t​​ he​-co​​unter​​-revo​​lutio​​​n​-of-​​scien​​ce​.pd​​f; Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte (New York: Harper, 1962), 105–109.

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39. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 117. 40. J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger, 1960), 64. 41. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, 141, 178; Gray, The Socialist Tradition, 159. 42. Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin (London and New York: Longman, 1946), 154–155. 43. Ibid., 150–154. 44. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 120. 45. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, 115–116. 46. For the English translation, see Henri Saint-Simon, “Catechism of Industrialists,” in The Political Thought of Saint-Simon, ed. Ghita Ionescu (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 182–203. 47. Henri Saint-Simon, “New Christianity,” in Ibid., 203–217. 48. Talmon, Political Messianism, 70–71. 49. Strube, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism,” 364–365. 50. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science. 51. Ibid., 182. 52. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 229. 53. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 267. 54. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 40. 55. E. M. Butler, The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany [1926] (New York, H. Fertig, 1968). 56. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 26–27. 57. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 144, 147. 58. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 28. 59. Talmon, Political Messianism, 71; Strube, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism,” 365. 60. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, 154; Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 228. 61. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 29; Talmon, Political Messianism, 74, 76 62. Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France, 13, 16. 63. Talmon, Political Messianism, 78. 64. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, 311. 65. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 155. 66. Corcoran, Before Marx, 201–s202. 67. Ibid., 204. 68. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 140. 69. Ibid., 164. 70. Ibid., 152.

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Chapter 2

“Sabbath of History” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Moses Hess Make Socialism “Scientific”

Once we unite and live in communism, hell will no longer be on earth and heaven will no longer be beyond this world; everything which has been presented to us by Christianity in prophecy and phantasy is about to be wholly realized in the true human society according to the eternal laws of love and reason. —Moses Hess, “A Communist Credo” (1846)1

The Saint-Simonian view that society could be organized by enlightened experts from above according to positive “scientific” principles captured the imagination of many European radicals and reformers, both socialists and non-socialists. In fact, that vision became the prevailing feature of the so-called modernity—the expression that scholars use to label economic, cultural, and social policies and sentiments that were widespread during the period roughly from the early 1850s to the 1960s. In the age of modernity, the old mode of thinking that everything was in the hands of God became replaced by a notion that everything was in the hands of human beings and ruled by natural laws. The practical manifestation of such thinking was “science worship,” a perception that people could build a morally perfect society by applying to social life what appeared to them as scientific laws. Since socialism was the child of modernity, it too assimilated that positivist view. Marxism, which was able to position itself as the most popular revolutionary segment of socialism, justified its superiority over competing versions of the creed by claiming that its eschatological prophecies represented “hard science.”2 In fact, it was this blend of science and prophecy that propelled Marxism to the socialist mainstream and made Marxism attractive to millions 25

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of people around the globe. Modern people wanted to believe in their liberation from misery and to dream about a bright utopian future where everybody would be happy. In the age when the increasing number of learned people came to the realization that “God is dead,” it was comfortable to feel that their utopian dreams were backed up by rational arguments. “Marxian socialism,” which, like any other world religion, captivated the minds of millions around the globe, provided that scientific faith. TOWARD “SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM”: MARX, ENGELS, AND HESS Karl Marx (1818–1883) (see Fig. 2.1), Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), and their one-time collaborator Moses Hess (1812–1875) completed the transformation of socialism into a secular religion. Since then on, socialism was to become the science of liberation pure and simple. Contemplating the format of the celebrated The Communist Manifesto (1848),3 Marx and Engels at first thought about labeling it “A Communist Confession of Faith.”4 Then they changed their mind. As Engels wrote to Marx, “Think over the Confession of Faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable.”5 The world of utopian enthusiasts who followed Saint-Simon and Owen types was to be shattered. Socialism was poised to become the product of natural historical laws of evolution just like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. A meeting of Marx, Engels, and Hess was pivotal for the history of socialism. This triumvirate, as one contemporary anti-communist referred to them, represented a working group of three partners who became acquainted between 1841 and 1843 and who cross-fertilized each other.6 Marx’s and Engels’ life histories are well known through multiple scholarly and popular literature that cover their lives in miniscule details.7 Yet, we know less about Hess who, in fact, inspired much of Marx’s original thinking. Conventional histories of socialism have downplayed his role. This reticence goes back to Karl Marx himself who did not like to acknowledge that he and Engels worked together with Hess in launching the whole Marxist prophecy.8 Marx became friends with Hess in 1841, and together they started working for radical Reinische Zeitung. Hess, who already knew Engels, introduced both to each other, which triggered the famous lifelong Marx-Engels partnership. Engels later acknowledged that it was Hess who was the first to expose him to communism as a moral ideal. Standard histories of socialism and Marxism have frequently attributed to the Marx-Engels partnership the beginning of “scientific socialism,” a definition introduced by Engels who wanted to

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Figure 2.1  Karl Marx (1818–1883), the Founder of the Most Popular Brand of Radical Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man's Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1.

separate his and Marx’s “genuine” socialism from its earlier “false” and “utopian” versions.9 Humble and unpretentious Hess was fascinated with ambitious Marx, who was a few years younger than him. Hess was overwhelmed with the power of his new friend’s erudition, called Marx “my idol,” and praised his mind that combined Rousseau, Voltaire, Heine, and Hegel in one person.10 In 1843, Hess and Engels began contemplating a communist party—a group of educated revolutionaries who would lead unpolished and poorly educated working-class people to the revolution. Later, Marx joined and expanded this enterprise.11 The founders of Marxism parted ways with Hess when the latter started drifting toward socialist Zionism. In fact, Hess is considered the forerunner of Zionism, and the Israeli government moved his ashes from Germany to the holy land, where it erected a monument to commemorate his memory. Hess’s life is a story of an alienated Jewish intellectual who could

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not find a room in surrounding society. Out of his insecurities, the youth carved a countercultural intellectual niche that took him on the path of secularization, radicalization, and further toward socialism.12 Hess was born in a family of a well-to-do man who made money in sugarrefinery business. His mother died when he was fourteen, and the father, who moved from Bonn to Cologne, turned the boy to the hands of a pious maternal grandfather. The latter taught Hess Hebrew and caged him into the world of traditional Judaism, hammering into the young mind the wisdom of Old Testament and Talmud. Later Hess remarked that he was “beaten black and blue over Talmud until my fifteenth year.”13 Reluctantly, his father, who was upset that the youth did not want to continue the family business, allowed him to enter Bonn University. The university environment exposed young Hess to secular ideas, especially Hegelian philosophy that was an intellectual fad among German learned public in the 1830s–1840s. In a further defiance of the tradition, in 1840, he married a poor non-Jewish seamstress, with whom he happily lived to the end of his life. The angry father condemned him, refusing to provide any financial support.14 Hess traveled to England, where he lived the life of a pauper and frequently starved. Eventually, in 1832, he ended up in France, where he finally found his niche. In that country, which was literally saturated with revolutionary ideas, Hess began hanging with rebellious artisans, German exiles, and revolutionaries from Russia and Poland. Simultaneously, he voraciously read everything from science books to volumes on social issues. A bookworm through and through, by nature, Hess was not good in practical matters. His former friends noted that he was pathologically honest, excessively trusting, and benign to an extreme. Hess was full of ideas, but, unlike Marx and Engels, he was not a systematic thinker. In hindsight, his major historical role was an ideological broker who introduced the entire generation of German intellectuals to French socialism. He also argued that, to be successful, a socialist revolution was to win in several European countries together (England, France, and Germany). Later, this notion became the major pillar of classical Marxism and early Bolshevism with its slogan of a world revolution. To be fair, Hess did believe in a revolution, but he was never romanticized it in contrast to later Marxian socialists. He rather viewed it as an unavoidable evil people had to pay to overcome class struggle in society and bring about harmony.15 Like many radical intellectuals of that time, Marx, Engels, and Hess were looking for a theory that, like a “philosophical stone,” would show the way of moving society in a “right” direction. Along with many of their contemporaries, those three were unhappy about “satanic” mills that caged workingclass people, forcing them into the drudgery of hard labor that frequently lasted from 10 to 16 hours a day. It was easy for secularized people who

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were raised within the Judeo-Christian tradition to mentally link the plight of workers (proletarians, according to the later Marxist jargon) that congregated in crowded factories to the plight of the biblical Hebrews in the Egyptian bondage. In this context, it was also natural to conclude that these factories were the breeding ground of discontent and a future gravedigger of the capitalist order. Hess and then Marx and Engels argued that the radicalization of workers, which was to lead to a revolution, was the result of a natural process of a complete industrialization of society. Unlike, their “utopian” colleagues, many of whom believed that socialism/communism could be introduced anytime, they pointed out that it was to come at a right time when the productive forces of capitalism would exhaust themselves.16 Eventually, Marx, Engels, and Hess came to the conclusion that it was the working-class people that were chosen by history laws to perform the job of liberation of humankind from all misery and oppression. Thus, reconfiguring and secularizing the Judeo-Christian tradition, they replaced the Jews as the biblical chosen people with the proletarians who came to fulfill the role of redeemers. Hess’s essay “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat (Die Folgen der Revolution des Proletariats)” (1847) that made this point was published simultaneously with the celebrated The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels.17 The three communist seekers were not the first to talk about the proletariat and its revolutionary potential. Many “utopian” socialists mentioned this too. What was novel about Hess-Marx-Engels speculations was that they were the first to “scientifically” prove that, according to the laws of history evolution, proletarians were the class to deliver the humankind to the future communist utopia. Hess metaphorically labeled the latter the “Sabbath of History.”18 There could be also an implicit ethnic element in that theory, at least for Marx and Hess: the workers’ revolution, which would lead to the liberation of the entire society, was to automatically free the Jews. That is why Hess scorned those of his fellow Jews who desperately wanted to be assimilated into the surrounding society. He argued that the assimilation would not do any good to them, for society would never accept them as equals under the existing capitalist system. It was only through the elimination of private property and the ascent of socialism that his fellow Jews would be set free. Hess believed that the private property was the major evil in society—the idea that Marx shared with him. Still, unlike Hess, Marx was never steeped in the Jewish tradition. The would-be classic of Marxism came from a highly assimilated family. Because of a discrimination against Jews in German states, his father switched from Judaism to Lutheranism to have a chance to practice as a lawyer. Marx’s mother soon too followed the suite. Yet, Marx might have felt uncomfortable about the “Jewish stigma” surrounding him. At least, he never missed

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a chance to show off his despise for what he called “Jewishness.” On many occasions, through numerous ethnic slurs regarding Jews that he shared with friends, Marx sought to distance himself from his “inconvenient” legacy. Internalizing German stereotypes about the “people of the book,” Marx identified Jews with capitalism and spoke about them as moneybags and parasites who were involved in constant scheming and dealing. In fact, his first major writing, “On the Jewish Question” (1844),19 revealed how Marx tried to cope with his Jewishness. Sometimes, this lengthy article filled with slurs against Jewish culture is called anti-Semitic.20 In reality, careful reading of this text shows that it was not exactly a case. Marx essay is a clear attempt of self-exoneration through a self-purging. Bruno Bauer, one of German intellectual stars at that time, argued that to socially liberate themselves, people had to shed off their religion. For Christians of various nations, it was an easy task to accomplish because Christianity was a universal creed that transcended ethnic loyalties. Yet, for Jews, continued this one-time friend of Marx, it was nearly impossible because Judaism was deeply linked to their parochial ethnic concerns. Bauer concluded that because of this religious self-segregation, Jews would be incapable to liberate themselves and become truly universal people. Marx did agree with Bauer that Jews were debased people, who were “corrupted” by their tradition saturated with the spirit of money-making. At the same time, he challenged Bauer’s argument by suggesting that the whole issue of emancipation was not about religion but about rotten market- and property-based economic system that was equally rooted both in Christianity and Judaism. Thus, according to Marx, the major problem was not Jews and Judaism but the entire Judeo-Christian tradition that institutionalized and endorsed profit-making, haggling, and bargaining. Jews simply were able to ride it better than anybody else because, historically, they had been better prepared for commercial activities than other people. What was the solution? Marx stressed that the only solution was for society in general and for Jews in particular to smash the oppressive profit and market-based system: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”21 Judaism here clearly stood for what Marx later labeled as capitalism. Thus, “On the Jewish Question” became the first Marx’s work where he argued that human emancipation involved the end of capitalism. Three years later, cleared from references to Judaism, this revolutionary strategy was spelled out in the famous Communist Manifesto.22 Essentially, Marx suggested here that it was “evil” capitalism that sustained and nourished such “bad” habits of his “tribe” as commerce and usury. Phasing out the corrupt and debased free-market economic system would lead to the emancipation of the entire humanity, including the Jews. Thus, Marx psychologically emancipated himself by showing that he was concerned not

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about his personal ethnic wounds but about the oppressive global system. Hooked at that time on the same vision of history, Hess was thinking along the same lines. In fact, while composing his essay, Marx drew on Hess’s earlier manuscript “On the Essence of Money.”23 In this work, Hess maintained that Christianity inherited the “predatory mission of Jews” and integrated it into broader society. He also added that the materialistic Judeo-Christian tradition opened a door to money-based “modern serfdom” that gradually undermined benevolent medieval estates and corporations that had been blessed with a communal spirit. According to Hess, that was how bankers, capitalist predators, and “kicks” emerged. Similarities on this issue between Marx and Hess were striking. Both drew links between such “predatory” religions as Judaism and Christianity and capitalism, while casting the latter against a romantic anti-capitalism and sentimental socialist utopia.24 Engels, the third man in the foundational history of Marxism, was a German writer, socialite, and a revolutionary who was mostly responsible for popularizing the creed he and Marx were preaching. Unlike impoverished Hess and struggling Marx, Engels was a person with money. Using presentday pejorative expressions, he could be called a “Starbucks Marxist” or “limousine left,” who preferred to challenge the system while indulging into a luxurious lifestyle. Dubbing in left activities, Engels simultaneously liked to hang out with the English gentry, being part of its elite clubs. Speaking on behalf of working-class people, in his actual behavior, he showed scorn for the “deplorable.” Engels originated from a pious Lutheran family of a rich textile manufacturer, whose business encompassed both Germany and England. A small town of Barmen where he was born had been the center of evangelical revivalism, and his father was a prominent local lay organizer. As a teenager, Engels had a crisis of faith, intensified by his reading of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus that questioned the literal interpretation of biblical miracles.25 Unlike Hess and Marx, he never got a systematic university education. Moreover, Engels did not complete a formal secondary schooling. Yet, endowed with an inquisitive mind and learning skills, through self-education, he became well-versed in social scholarship and sciences. On top of this, he was an accomplished linguist, mastering several European languages and Persian. When, in the 1850s, New York Herald Tribune commissioned Marx to write a series of political essays, Engels, who became fluent in English, ghost wrote these articles. Like Hess, who chafed under his granddad’s Talmudic studies, Engels despised the pious evangelical environment of his family. For him, leaving his home and escaping into the big world to join a revolutionary cause was not only the atonement for the “sins” of his bourgeois origin but also a direct countercultural rebellion against the household’s suffocating religious

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control. Engels’ commitment to communism, when he was twenty-three years old, was the logical outcome of this rebellion. To the end of his life, Engels hated conventional religion with all his heart. In the same rebellious manner, he committed himself to the life of a bachelor, defying bourgeois family values that he considered superficial and oppressive. Devoid of any means to pursue the life of an independent revolutionary intellectual, in 1850, Engels stroke a compromise with his father. He agreed to go to Manchester in England to supervise one of the family’s textile mills. A stereotypical German, disciplined and punctual, Engels was able to become a successful businessman despite his contempt for commerce. When reaching his fiftieth, Engels was able to safely retire with large funds that allowed him to finance various left-wing projects and support Marx. As the manager of his Manchester mill, Engels had a chance to observe the conditions of the working class. Marx became fascinated with Engels’s 1844 paper “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,”26 where the young businessman-revolutionary traced the development of modern capitalism and exposed the exploitation of the industrial labor. Filled with a moral indignation regarding the oppressive nature of the factory labor, this text became crucial in converting Marx to communism. “Outlines” also drew Marx’s attention to economics of capital and labor— a theme that he later expanded into his Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital. Marx and Engels silently agreed that between the two, Marx, who had a formal doctoral degree, was to be a genius. Despite his Teutonic appearance, Engels was a soft, quiet, self-doubting, and gregarious man—a deep contrast to disorganized, aggressive, intolerant, explosive, and authoritarian Marx, who always felt an urge to dominate. Since Engels masochistically craved to have a strong intellectual personality around to confirm his ideas, they perfectly complemented each other. Although it was Engels who wrote all texts that rendered Marxism in a user-friendly language for the rank and file members of the movement, the communist businessman always humbled himself, giving the first credit to Marx. In fact, it was Engels who, in addition to “scientific socialism,” introduced and popularized expression “Marxism.”27 While Marx and Engels further developed communism, which eventually materialized in the International Workingmen’s Association (so-called the First International) (1864–1876), their friend Hess began having second thoughts about the liberation potential of the proletariat-focused cosmopolitan message he helped to peddle. In the 1850s and the 1860s, observing how passionately Germans, Italians, and Poles propagated their national unifications and their indigenous cultures, he simultaneously witnessed the ascent of anti-Semitism in the European mainstream. “Red Moses” became unsure if international socialism would be able to cancel nationalism and

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anti-Semitism: “It dawned on me for the first time, in the midst of my socialist activities, that I belonged to my unfortunate slandered, despised and dispersed people.”28 The outcome of his doubts was a powerful book Rom und Jerusalem: Die letzte Nationalitätenfrage [Rome and Jerusalem: the Latest National Question] (1862), which Zionists later came to consider the fountainhead of their teaching.29 Hess stressed that, like a family, a nationality was a real thing, which overrode such abstract things as humanity. Europeans would always consider the Jews as anomaly amid them. Attempts of his fellow ethnics to assimilate were futile. The only solution for the Jews was to reinvent themselves as a nation, which meant rooting themselves in the ancient Palestinian soil. Denying ones’ own Jewishness would only bring disrespect and scorn from a surrounding society. Homelessness of the Jews was the problem: without soil “a man sinks to the status of a parasite, feeding on others.”30 He kept stressing that Germans were inherently anti-Semitic, and nothing could be done about it. Most important, Hess added, it was not the Jewish religion that was disdained but the Jewish “noses,” or in other words, their race. While condemning chauvinism and aggressive nationalism, Hess nevertheless stressed that a loyalty to one’s own nation and race was a good and healthy thing. His argument was that Jews, like all other nations, needed a normal national home. Moreover, he came up with a concrete project of settling Palestine by Jews from Eastern Europe and establishing agricultural settlements in the “promised land.” That was exactly what later the Zionism and socialist Zionism accomplished in Palestine between the 1910s and the 1950s. Interestingly, Hess did not become a naked nationalist. He continued to consider himself a socialist. In fact, he was advocating the socialist colonization of Palestine, imagining a future Jewish state as an egalitarian society. This was another prophecy that at least partially came to fruition in a form of the so-called kibbutz socialism that flourished in Israel and that was feeding on communism and socialist Zionism; a special chapter in this book covers this topic. All in all, one can consider Hess the first true national socialist in world history. After toying for a while with the proletarians as the chosen people, Hess returned “home” by switching back to the Jews as the ultimate redeemers of the humankind, although he framed the whole thing in socialist terms. According to Hess, his “tribe” was famous for two essential things: the tradition of mutual help and passionate messianic feelings driven by the longing for the homeland. These qualities were to help the Jews to become the first people on the earth to build socialism in Palestine. “Red Moses” implied that by building for themselves “national socialism” in the holy land the Jews would simultaneously set an example and teach the rest of the humankind the best social system. In other words, in his secular rendition of the biblical

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prophecy, the Jews were “chosen” by history to become the trail blazers to show the world the beauty of socialism. As such, they were destined to bring about the “Sabbath of history” to this earth.31 According to Hess, molding socialism in the holy land would be more productive way for the Jews to channel their creative energy instead of going around and meddling into other peoples’ liberation movements, which was to bring them nothing except despise and anti-Semitism.32 “SCIENTIFIC” MAGIC AND COMMUNIST MILLENNIUM: MARX AND ENGELS INVENT THE PROLETARIAT Although Hess formally remained part of the socialist movement and later even joined the Marx-Engels Communist International, their paths separated. In fact, Marx and Engels never missed a chance to scorn Hess, calling him Rabbi Moses and Rabbi Hess and making fun of his ideas and his persona. In all fairness, he was not the only target. This was the routine treatment the founding fathers of Marxism gave to all people who did not share their views. If Marx and Engels disagreed with people, they not only tried to defeat them intellectually, but they also aimed for a character assassination, seeking to dehumanize the opponents. As a person with a benign demeanor, Hess never responded to their slurs, and continued to consider both of them his friends. For Hess, socialism always remained an ethical ideal, and he was always concerned about righteous means to bring about the noble utopia, which included the way one treated people around you. In contrast, for Marx and Engels, the future society of eternal happiness was to come along not only according to iron laws of history but also as a result of a violent proletarian revolution, which they viewed as a joyful event—the feast of the oppressed that would culminate in forceful confiscation of private properties. Even though Hess advocated a working-class revolution, he never called for a forceful take over other people’s property. He naively believed that this would happen gradually through a persuasion and creation of social and political mechanism that would gradually squeeze the “evil” out.33 Today, one would have described such stealth strategy as democratic socialism. That is why Marx and Engels relegated him to a group of “utopian socialists” along with Owen and Saint-Simon. Ironically, another “utopian” who aroused the scorn and despise of Marx and Engels was a self-educated poster proletarian named Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871). Unlike friendly, compassionate, and unpretentious Hess, this blond and tall German Lutheran, a bastard son of a French soldier and a tailor from Magdeburg, liked to think about himself as a communist messiah who

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was greater than the first one—Jesus Christ. Like Marx, Weitling was intolerant and recognized people only if they were his acolytes. He propagated “evangelical communism” that appealed to the egalitarian lifestyle of early Christians and that in its prescriptions resembled later command and control Stalinist system: the industrial armies, obedience to a superior officer, total nationalization, no private property.34 Many Weitling’s followers viewed his movement as a spiritual quest. His charismatic personality was able to sway several hundred German immigrant artisans in France, England, and Switzerland; socialist activities were outlawed in German lands at that time. The fact that this worker-intellectual seized much of the “proletarian playground” with his “unscientific” ideas was scandalous for Marx and Engels who were thinking about building their own communist party. They needed to debunk Weitling and to secularize the “communist evangelicals.” To be fair, at first Marx and Engels were fascinated with Witling who was arrested for blasphemy in Zurich and had to spend a brief time in prison in 1843. The prison term was an official Swiss response to his Gospel of a Poor Sinner that declared that Jesus was the forerunner of communism. Although not a hell hole like Russia or China, Switzerland did not yet reach a fullfledged appreciation of the freedom of speech at that time. Weitling aggressive desire to play the role of both Jesus and St. Paul for the German left emigres along with his patronizing tone infuriated Marx and Engels. In his letter collectively addressed to Hess, Marx, and Engels, Weitling addressed them as “boys.” He also unceremoniously wiggled himself into their emigre community that congregated in Brussels since the 1830s: “I would like for once to see your women, drink your beer, taste your grub, and smoke your cigars.”35 At that time, there were two major groups of the German left exiles. The first one called League of the Outlaws brought together nationalist-oriented artisans and intellectuals who aspired for the unification of their country divided into numerous kingdoms and principalities. Socialist ideas were an integral part of their nationalist revolutionary agenda. These people argued that bandits and other outcasts were to serve as true spearheads of a German revolution. The League of the Just, a second group that split away from the “outlaws,” united mostly artisans who focused exclusively on propagating Christian socialism. It was this second group that contemplated to accept Weitling as their charismatic leader. And it was the same group that Marx and Engels wanted to take over to reshape it according to their own “scientific” prescriptions by purging it of its Christian traits. Incidentally, Weitling too believed that criminals were to become the motor of the coming revolution. In a strange anticipation of the 1960s New Left, Weitling also added young people to that revolutionary group of “primitive rebel.”36 Like other fraternities of the exiled German proletarians, members of the league, who were

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traveling craftsmen, practiced elaborate rites and initiations appropriated from Freemasons. The members of the league referred to local branches of their organization as congregations. In fact, after Marx joined the league, he became the president of the Brussels congregation.37 The “just” were people with some elementary education. Protestant tradition of the Bible’s reading and interpreting indirectly unleashed the floodgate of learning and dramatically increased the level of education among the grassroots. This made northern Europe shine compared to its southern part and other areas of the world. At the same time, many of those craftsmen were deeply religious people, who imagined the future ideal social order as a return to “original” egalitarian Christianity. Weitling argued that he was acting as “social Luther”—another attractive analogy this charismatic Lutheran used in addition to the Jesus one; as we know, historical Luther had aimed to purge the contemporary church of vice and papal bureaucracy and take Christendom to its original “pure” roots. Marx and Engels detested Mason-like sacred rites, secret fraternities, and the entire spirit of “evangelical communism.” Their goal was to arm revolutionary movement with the only “true” and “scientific” vision of society as a product of natural history laws. Marxism founders insisted that in its evolution society was to go through the following stages: a tribal age of primitive communism (the Eden), then the ascent of the oppressive society based on private property (the Fall), the socialist revolution (the Apocalypse), and finally communism (the Paradise).38 On March 30, 1846, Marx publicly confronted Weitling and destroyed his charisma. Hammering a table with his fist, Marx called him a fraud and put the proletarian prophet down with such words: “In Germany, to appeal to the worker without a strict scientific idea and without a positive doctrine, is like an empty and conscienceless game of propaganda.”39 Pavel Annenkov, a Russian friend of Marx, who left a detailed description of that confrontation, stressed the authoritarian tone Marx used to speak with the self-proclaimed messiah. Annenkov noted that Marx’s voice, look and gestures revealed a man with messianic aspirations to dominate men’s minds and prescribe laws for them: “Before my eyes stood the personification of a democratic dictator.”40 In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote their famous The Communist Manifesto that was to debunk Weitling-type socialists and inaugurate “scientific socialism.” After Marx and Engels completely squeezed out Weitling from the business of revolution, the poor man, who did not have any money, had to turn to Hess for help. Eventually, seeing that there was no room for him, Weitling left for America where he followed the usual route established by his left predecessors—launching a utopian socialist community. Set up in Illinois, it was simply called Communia. Weitling’s project followed the fate of similar experiments that popped up in various corners of

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the United States prior to him and after him: in 1853, the commune fell apart, and the communist evangelical died in obscurity in 1871. In addition to accusing him in preaching Christian “artisan communism,” Marx and Engels blamed Weitling for prematurely instigating people to revolt. A few days after his verbal fight with Marx, in one of his letters, Weitling himself outlined the cause of his clash with the “scientific socialist.” As a proletarian “evangelist,” Weitling insisted on an immediate working-class revolt, whereas Marx argued that “at the moment there can be no talk of the realization of communism, the bourgeoise must first take control.”41 On the Marxist evolutionary scale of history, it was the bourgeoise that had first to come to power to fertilize the ground for would-be communism. According to Marx-Engels’ laws of history, in a self-destructive mode, by advancing the industrial order, the bourgeoisie was destined to “breed” its own gravedigger, the proletariat, and create material wealth that proletarians would seize and use to launch the future communist society. In the Marxian vision, revolutionaries could not simply leap from an undeveloped pre-industrial society straight into communism. One needed to make sure the society was “ripe” for communism. Metaphorically speaking, the oppressive system of capitalism was to become a donkey for the proletarian messiah to ride on its back straight into the gates of the earthly kingdom.42 Marx argued that Germany was still economically backward. She did not matriculate through a capitalist stage, and did not “breed” enough proletarians to make the revolution. Incidentally, besides their frustration about Weitling’s reckless calls for an immediate revolution, Marx and Engels were appalled with his insistence that the criminals could be too a revolution class. By 1846, Marx, Engels, and Hess were already coming to realization that the class to liberate the world from the evils of capitalism was the industrial workers rather than the dregs of society. The triumvirate surmised that workers, laboring in large collect ives under the same factory roof, gradually developed a sense of solidary and class animosity against their capitalist employers. These were to be natural preconditions to nourish a revolutionary mindset. Into this picture, there would enter “enlightened masters,” people like Marx and Engels, who were to steer the workers in the right direction and show them how to make a revolution. To be exact, they did not fully develop this idea. It was Vladimir Lenin who later, in the early 1900s, stepped in and completed this job by fomenting the idea of a vanguard communist party that was to lead the proletariat into a class battle against the bourgeoisie. The idea of the proletariat as the class-savior that was chosen by history to smash oppressive bourgeoisie and launch the communist utopia was a secularized version of the Judeo-Christian vision of history: Jewish messianism and Christian apocalyptical battle between Christ and Antichrist.43 In Christianity,

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it was God who was responsible for launching Apocalypse. Since Marxism substituted human beings for God, it was now people (proletarians) who were destined to speed up the inevitable Apocalypse (crisis of capitalism). The proletariat was also to launch the final battle (revolution) between the forces of light and forces of darkness and become the messiah (the driving force) to usher in a new world. Thus, in the secularized Marx-Engel prophecy, the messiah became the proletariat, soul turned in “consciousness,” the faithful into “comrades,” and paradise into “classless society.”44 In other words, the “scientific” determinism of the Marxian teaching became a secularized form of the Judeo-Christian tradition customized for the age of modernity. This explained why later Marxism along with various communist and socialist movements it inspired came to resonate so well with sentiments of millions of people. Arguing that history developed in an evolutionary manner through three major stages: primitive communism, class society, and communism, Marx and Engels unconsciously drew on the Judeo-Christian eschatological tradition that went back to Joachim of Fior (1145–1202), a Calabrian abbot who sought to reveal the concealed meaning of the Scriptures. He thought that hidden wisdom of the sacred books would help to find history patterns and prophesize in detail future stages of human development. Joachim “discovered” that history was moving in three successive stages: Age of the Father, Age of Son, and Age of Spirit, which corresponded the state of fear and servitude, then the stage of faith and submission, and finally the state of life, joy, and freedom. This three-stage view of history “completing” itself in the state of the final bliss was later appropriated by prominent European philosophers, including Wilhelm Hegel’s famous theory of the World Spirit’s three-stage evolution. August Comte, whom we explored in the previous chapter, too viewed history as an ascent from the theological stage, through the metaphysical period, to the final scientific stage.45 Both of them heavily affected Marx and Engels. Founding fathers of Marxism elaborated the vision of human history by breaking the second “fall” stage of human evolution into three periods that they called socioeconomic formations. These formations rose and perished, exhausting their progressive potential and giving rise to a next one. The first stage was primitive tribal communism, where everybody was equal in poverty. At some point it was to give rise to the next stage of slavery. The historical logic here was very simple: without alienation and exploitation of some groups of people by another there was no way to create material wealth. Thus, the “fall” of the humankind or the exploitation of one class by another was an unavoidable evil. At this slavery stage, slave holders were exploiting slaves. Gradually slavery gave rise to a more progressive stage called feudalism, where feudal lords exploited peasant serfs, who were more productive in

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their labor than slaves. Eventually, feudalism too was to exhaust its potential and give rise to the last oppressive stage in history—capitalism. At the last period of human pre-history, capitalist industry was breeding new opposing classes: capitalists (the bourgeoisie in Marxism jargon) and working-class people (the proletariat). Through the industrial revolution, the productivity of labor was to reach its peak, and all material preconditions to make a leap into the earthly paradise would be all ready. Exploited workers, personally free, had to sell their labor to capitalists who exploited them, pocketed a large part of their labor to invest and make more profit. Marx argued that at the end of the capitalist stage a class war between workers and the bourgeoise would escalate, and society would be pregnant with a revolution. Thus, by giving birth to its gravedigger—the proletariat—capitalism would negate itself. According to this “law” of history, proletariat would then revolt and set up its dictatorship over society to phase out old institutions and classes. This was to liberate the entire humanity and clear the ground for the ascent into communism. Later, in his The ABC of Communism (1919), a popular Marxism primer, an early Bolshevik ideologist Nikolai Bukharin explained this as follows, “Communism can be released by the proletariat, the proletariat is today the true savior of mankind from the horrors of capitalism, from the barbarities of exploitation, from colonial policy, incessant wars, famine, a lapse into savagery and brutalization, from all the abominations that are entailed by financial capital and imperialism. Herein lies the splendid historic significance of the proletariat.”46 Marx, Engels, and their followers cultivated the image of the abstract proletarian that was the embodiment of collectivism and solidarity. According to contemporary Victorian standards, he was portrayed as a muscular superman, handling machines, rails, or other heavy metal tools and materials. This imagined proletarian (see Fig. 2.2) remained for the left their ultimate “noble savage” at least until the end of the 1940s. Out of this left perception of the industrial working class as the class-messiah, there emerged the romantic idealization of proletarian wisdom, its organic spontaneity, inherent sense of community. In former communist countries and among some pockets of the left subculture in the West, this romantic meme survived as an ideological cliché until the 1970s, when it was finally demolished by the so-called cultural turn (“Cultural Marxism”); the New Left came to elevate new revolutionary redeemers to be worshipped and idealized. In contrast to the “utopian” socialist message that all people were brothers and sisters, Marx and Engels argued that it was never the case. Throughout history, society was composed of oppressed and oppressors classes whose economic interests clashed and who were involved into a perpetual warfare with each other. The “peaceable kingdom” of communism would emerge out of a mortal fight between industrial workers and the bourgeoisie. In

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Figure 2.2  Proletarians (the Industrial Working Class) Became the “Noble Savages” of Classical Marxism that Elevated Them to the Status of the “Chosen People” Who Were Destined to Liberate the World from Oppression. Der Wahre Jakob, 39 (1922).

the Marxist prophecy, an important role belonged to human suffering and victimhood. Marx argued that before the end of capitalism human suffering and alienation would reach absolute proportions.; contrary to existing facts he insisted that with the progression of capitalism the living standards of workers would decline. Like the Book of Revelations, Marx prophesized that before things would get better, they would become much worse. Each step into the abyss of misery to Marxists appeared as a sign of approaching Armageddon that was to give rise to a working people paradise. For Marxists, wars and capitalist depressions became the signs of time that signaled the coming of the Judgment Day (revolution) and the eventual paradise. It was

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clearly an apocalyptic view of history.47 Marx explained to his acolytes that you needed to read correctly the signs of the capitalist apocalypse. Wars, various conflicts, and economic crises were screened for signs of the approaching global crisis. For example, when he happened to read about the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850s–1860s), Marx became agitated and enthusiastic: he came to view it as a spark that might ignite a long-awaited general crisis of capitalism and lead to its collapse.48 Historian Landes, who explored the millenarian aspects of the Marxist prophecy, aptly remarked that intellectually Marx, Engels, and their acolytes resembled the rabbi who had his bags all packed expecting the messiah to arrive any moment.49 More preoccupied with the smashing of the existing capitalist system than about a blueprint of the earthly paradise that was expected to replace it, Marx and Engels did not have much to say about how the future ideal society would be organized. This too conveniently set them apart from their predecessors such as Owen and Saint-Simon, who enjoyed to speculate about how precisely the bright socialist utopia would look like.50 Marx and Engels did pepper their writings with a few vague statements that under communism state gradually would wither away and that people would be self-organized into free associations of free toilers. What they explained well was how capitalism should be phased out and what immediate steps revolutionaries were to take to solidify their power. First and foremost, revolutionaries were to forcibly “overthrow of the whole existing social order.” Detailing how it was to be accomplished, The Communist Manifesto focused on the expropriation of landed property, the introduction of progressive income tax, and the abolition of the right of inheritance. The entire financial system was to be monopolized by a state, which, in a centralized manner, would issue credit through the central bank. A state would also control all means of transportation, run “national factories,” and develop uncultivated lands according to a general plan. Moreover, the entire population capable of working was to perform obligatory labor. To guarantee the efficiency of this labor, especially in agriculture, Marx and Engels insisted on organizing industrial armies. The latter subsequently materialized into the Stalinist and Maoist genocidal project of collective farms where all peasants became ascribed to their collectives with no right to leave them. Last but not least, according to The Manifesto, all children were to be forced into the public education system.51 These speculations show that, like their contemporaries, Marx and Engels fully believed in social engineering and centralized planning. They assumed that industrial enlargements and all kinds of centralization schemes were good and progressive and would somehow pave the way to free associations of people. For example, Marx expected that small firms would completely disappear, giving rise to large firms, which, in turn, would grow further into

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larger cartels until they would be “ripe” for the complete nationalization by a state. In his mind, this was an objective law that was to create preconditions for the future communist society, which would be run according to the single grand plan. That was why Marx praised joint-stock companies that, in his view, were watering down and destroying private property by the sheer fact of the unification of capital. He commended such companies along with cooperative societies as transitory forms of property in the historical evolution toward complete socialization.52 Later, in the early 1900s, Vladimir Lenin perfected this “big is beautiful” vision, coming with a theory of statemonopoly capitalism that was pregnant with socialism. Originally, Marx and Engels linked the fulfillment of their prophecy (the proletarians smashing capitalism) to the revolution of 1848. During that year, large European cities became battlegrounds that involved workers fighting for their rights, middle class struggling against remnants of aristocratic privileges, and nationalists seeking to unify their ethnic groups into nations. The underlying theme of all these protests was a democratic impulse—the quest for a wider political representation and parliamentary democracy. The expected apocalyptic transition from capitalism to socialism envisioned by Marx and Engels did not happen. Marx was deeply disappointed and embarrassed. He isolated himself, retreating for a while from political activism. Was he wrong after all? As an ideologue, Marx could not accept this notion. Settling in London, he buried himself into books in the British Library, trying to prove that he was correct about the overall prophecy but wrong only about its timing. Much of what Marx and Engels wrote after 1848 was to show to their acolytes and potential followers how to read correctly the signs of capitalism’s collapse and detect if society was ripe for a revolution or not.53 Far from losing its ground, the Marxist prophecy was expanding because of its powerful spiritual impulse: human beings were expected to become active agents of the liberation prophecy by mastering the laws of history, reading them correctly, and acting upon them to change their lives for better. Marxian socialism gave hope to the insecure, marginal, and vulnerable people who wanted to believe that they were destined to go through darkness and chaos toward the bright future. Again, the fact that the prophecy was “backed up” by the “science” of history gave it a powerful psychological boost in the eyes of learned people who were skeptical about conventional religion. The end of the contemporary wicked order was expected to be a revolutionary apocalypse triggered by the development of economic relations and class warfare rather than by divine forces. Still, it would an apocalypse all the same.54 Acting as rigorous “scientists” of society, Marx and Engels positioned themselves as the ones who finally found the keys to the superior knowledge that outdid all earlier socialist doctrines tinged with religion. In 1883, while giving a funeral oration to his deceased friend, Engels compared

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Marx’s teaching about the natural evolution of society and its final exit from capitalism with Charles Darwin’s discovery of the theory of evolution. This stance perfectly fit the zeitgeist (spirit of the time) of the modern age. Replacing religious certainly of old times with solid “science” of history and revolution, Marxism essentially offered an old wine in new bottles. English philosopher Scruton remarked that the most cunning feature of Marxism was that it was able to masquerade as science in contrast to contemporary religious and ideologically driven doctrines.55 Thus, selling its prophecy as the ultimate rational knowledge, Marxism was able to outdo many of their competitors on the left. MARX AND ENGELS PURGE ANARCHIST HERETICS Seeking to transform their revolutionary prophecy into concrete activism, Marx and Engels wanted to unite like-minded people of Europe who could accept them as leaders. For a while, they were able to accomplish this goal by launching the First Communist International in 1864. Ironically, like in the case of the League of the Just, moving ahead with this project, they had to battle another proletarian who challenged their “scientific” doctrine. It was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a self-educated printer from France whom Marx met in 1844. A lest-taught man, he was well-read about history and politics and also was able to master the basics of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Proudhon enjoyed much influence in the French socialist movement. If he had agreed with Marx and Engels, the printer would have made a perfect Marxist proletarian. Unfortunately, his mind was infested with naive “petty-bourgeois” ideas—a label Marxists applied to those on the left who disagreed with them. Proudhon the proletarian did share their notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The founders of Marxism (a middle-class intellectual and a capitalist) were firmly convinced that they knew what the proletariat wanted as a class. They were angry that such influential people with a working-class background as Proudhon could not grasp this. Later, the left came to call this ideological immaturity “false consciousness,” assuming that some bad apples among designated groups of oppressed people (workers, women, people of “color” and so forth) did not “understand” what they really needed or, worse, shared “wrong” and “reactionary” ideas that were not expected from them as members of oppressed classes. These misfits had to be either reeducated or purged. Marx fought with Proudhon a bitter fight over the leadership in the rising working-class movement. Marx believed that the proletarian revolution would fail if not guided by a solid scientific ideology, which meant his and Engels’ teaching. Proudhon insisted that proletarians did not need any

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unified ideology or dictatorship that would only undermine an individual freedom. With these ideas, the French printer launched an anarchistic libertarian trend in the socialist movement. In fact, he was the first to use the expression “anarchism.” Marx turned out to be right in a short-term perspective—in the first half of the 1900s, Marxist ideology did become a powerful unifying force that brought to power regimes that claimed building socialism and communism. In the meantime, fluid and fragmented anarchism lingered somewhere on the margins. Still, later, when by the middle of the twentieth century it became clear that Marxism-inspired ideologies retarded economic development and creative initiatives, Proudhon’s warnings began to make sense to some committed socialists who were able to maintain crucial thinking. From London, Marx at first wrote Proudhon a friendly letter, suggesting that the Frenchman become part of a local correspondence committee to propagate Marxist ideas. Proudhon instinctively sensed the danger of the total ideology that Marx wanted to impose internationally on the working-class movement. Apprehensive about the “scientific” ways the two secular prophets offered as the ultimate knowledge, Proudhon prophetically remarked in his response letter, “You will never imagine the terrible effect which a learned theory produces when used in a destructive way.”56 This worker-intellectual did agree that the world developed through class conflicts. Yet, unlike Marx and Engels, Proudhon was not sure that history would have a happy closure in the end, after the oppressed would phase out oppressors. This doubt about the “happy end” infuriated Marx who denounced the French anarchist for failing to see the destination—the perfect society where the humankind must arrive. Proudhon again made it clear that he did not believe into any mystic “end of history.” Social and economic contradictions and conflicts would exist forever, and no revolutionary science would be able to resolve them. To Proudhon, the best that people could hope was finding a good balance among contradictory economic and social interests. Instead of engineering social, economic, and political life of people, socialists should aspire to bring to this world justice that was to serve well both to capitalists and proletarians, and to everybody else. At the same time, like most contemporary socialists of various brands, Proudhon was the enemy of private property. Moreover, this French anarchist became famous for his catchy phrase “What is property? Property is theft.” Despite this attitude, Proudhon did not call for the destruction of capitalism. In fact, he was convinced that, like yin and yang, capitalism and socialism should coexist and balance each other, which would work to benefit the entire society. Later, in the second half of the past century, this notion came to resonate well with a segment of the reformed left, especially after the grand debacle of the centralized command and control communist systems in the

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Soviet Union and China in the 1970s–1990s. Proudhon focused on preaching cooperation of toilers in free associations (he called it mutualism) without any centralized state and enlightened elite. For this reason, he and his followers promoted trade unions and cooperatives, trying to stay away from politics. This explained why the anarchist printer was critical of not only Marx’s proletarian state but also of Saint-Simon’s “Council of Newton” staffed with enlightened master scientists. A bitter enemy of a centralized state, Proudhon embraced federalism, self-determination for ethnic groups, and all kinds of secession movements. Interestingly, this fixation on federalism prompted Proudhon to morally support the Confederate cause during the U.S. Civil War. He saw only one important issue in that war—the confederates fighting for states’ rights against the power of the centralized state. Proudhon did not see another major issue—the fight over slavery. At the same time, Proudhon denounced both sides for choosing a war as the way to resolve the conflict between the North and the South. Moreover, he condemned warfare in general, correctly noting that societies that indulged into warfare not only empowered a state and lose their freedoms, but they also normalized immoral habits and traditions. For the same reason, he did not see anything good in revolutions that, like wars, ruined economy and freedoms, simultaneously empowering a centralized state. Harshly criticizing Marx’s faith in a revolutionary social change, Proudhon remarked that he preferred gradual changes to “making a Saint-Bartholomew of property owners.”57 If a society without property were to be built, it would emerge gradually out of a mutual consent of people instead of a grand revolt of the proletariat. In contrast to Marx, who was fond of speculating about large scale economies, big states, and centralization in general, libertarianoriented Proudhon preached the value of small communities, local autonomy, and decentralized economies. All these notions were out of touch with the dominant trend of his time. Addressing Marx and his “scientific” gospel that showed people the “correct” way, Proudhon famously warned, “Because we are the head of a movement, let us not make ourselves the chiefs of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it should be the religion of logic and reason. Let us welcome, let us encourage all the protests; let us condemn all exclusions, all the mysticisms; let us never regard a question as closed.”58 To ideologically crash Proudhon, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and subsequently began to purge anarchists from his International. Although a fringe element, anarchists remained influential in the socialist movement especially in southern and southwestern Europe (Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France). Moreover, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was taken for granted that socialism was developing along two competing lines: “A collectivist party supporting a strong central administration, and a

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counterbalancing anarchist party defending individual initiative against that administration.”59 Besides Proudhon, Marx and Engels had to deal with another anarchist, a flamboyant, rowdy, and aggressive Russian-born aristocrat-turned revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). The latter lived a picturesque life filled with violent plots, a long prison term, a daring escape from a Siberian exile, and a travel through Japan and California back to Europe. Although, like Proudhon, Bakunin was the enemy of a state, the way he wanted to dispose of this institution was a far cry from building voluntary associations and cooperatives. According to Bakunin, the major method was a terror against state officials, which in his mind would destroy the elite and push passive people to join a revolution that was to smash a state. Bakunin was part of the Russian populist movement (see the end of this chapter), which unsuccessfully tried to gain support among peasant grassroots and which had nothing to do with being popular. His love of terror grew out of that political desperation among the contemporary Russian left who could not ground themselves among people and who lacked any space to act legally in the authoritarian tsarist empire. Essentially, Bakunin became one of the major precursors of modern left-wing terrorism. Yet, it was the terror that Bakunin and Marx locked their horns. It was about the nature of a state. Bakunin argued that any state was evil. In contrast, Marx contended that it was a bourgeois capitalist state that was wicked. If the proletariat took over a state power and use it to its own benefit, it would become a benevolent state. A national animosity added more fuel to their conflict. Stressing that the Russian Empire was the bastion of despotism and conservatism that was looming over Europe, Marx and Engels openly scorned that country, including her backward economy and population. In his turn, Bakunin said that he utterly distrusted Germans because, to him, they were cold statist disciplinarians devoid of any sense of freedom. He added that the Marx-Engels centralized Communist International would lead to despotism in the name of socialism. Unlike Hess and Proudhon, who were open and honest, trying to keep a high moral ground when debating Marx, in Bakunin Marx found his dangerous match. At some point, in a proverbial cunning Russian manner, Bakunin assured Marx that he was ready to humble himself and accept him as the ideological master. In hope to disarm the prophet of Marxism, Bakunin massaged his ego, declaring himself to be his student while simultaneously undermining the authority of the prophet within the International. When rumors about such backstabbing reached them, Marx and Engels became paranoid, and Marx kept repeating, “I do not trust any Russian.”60 Although a well-educated man, Bakunin was crude and street smart person who mastered the language of the street and who felt comfortable hanging

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around the underclass people. Incidentally, like Weitling, Bakunin believed that it was not proletarians but outcasts and bandits that were the “salt of the earth” who were destined to become the major revolutionary class. With his radicalism, Bakunin was able to sway to his side several hundred “deplorable” among the members of the International. The whole bickering between Marx’s faction and Bakunin’s anarchists created such a poisonous atmosphere that the International quickly began to disintegrate. Marx feared that Bakunists might highjack the entire organization and turn it into an anarchist association. To prevent this potential taking over, Marx and Engels shut down the whole project in 1876. HOW TO ASSIMILATE A PEASANT COMMUNE INTO MARXISM: MARX AND RUSSIAN POPULIST SEEKERS Bakunin was not the only Russian revolutionary Marx had to deal with. In all fairness, Marx’s anti-Russian slurs thrown amid the heated debate did not target all populists, some of whom in fact looked up to Marx and eventually converted to his “scientific socialism.” In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was an absolutist monarchy, whose majority population was represented by the illiterate peasantry. These peasants, many of whom were serfs until 1861, lived in communes and practiced a medieval-type agriculture. Sparse industry and the proletariat (many of whom were recent peasants) existed only in Moscow, St. Petersburg as well as in a few areas of the westernmost part of the empire such as Poland. The tiny group of the Russian populists were breaking their heads about how to bring socialism to Russia. We know that Marx and Engels explained to their followers that a socialist revolution would take place first and foremost in the most advanced industrial countries like England, the United States, or France. By all means, Russia did not fit this evolutionary paradigm because she did not “mature” yet to become a full-fledged capitalist country. Yet, at the turn of the 1880s, before he died, Marx became fascinated with those Russian militants who at some point decided to challenge the czarist regime by shooting out its elite to stir a socialist revolution in the empire. To him, they appeared a breed of people that were different from cunning Bakunin. At the same time, Marx was not happy about the fact that these revolutionaries idealized the Russian peasant commune as the cradle of socialism. Like their later spiritual descendants among the New Left who came to idealize non-Western “others” as the carriers of ultimate wisdom, collectivism, and revolutionary instincts, the populists romanticized peasant communes as the embodiment of organic collectivism and viewed them as the fountainhead of future socialism. The peasantry appeared to them as

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authentic “primitive socialists” who were rooted in their soil. As such, they were a natural antidote to the expanding Western-style industrial order that infected the collectivist countryside with the “satanic mills” that degraded and caged working-class people. In an attempt to foment socialism, populists concluded that the best way to the system was to bond with peasants, learn their trades and gain their trust, simultaneously conducting revolutionary propaganda among these “noble savages.” The 1870s saw groups of woke radicals, mostly sons and daughters of aristocrats and middle-class parents, streaming into the countryside to learn from the “real people” and to teach them how to rebel against the regime. This campaign that involved about one thousand people became known as the Going to the People. Peasants’ misery, hard labor, and poverty made them into saints in the eyes of the populists who felt guilty about their won well-to-do existence. As the victims of the regime, peasants appeared to them as natural martyrs. Vladimir Debagorii, one of the those who went “native,” wrote that when he was able to grasp the saintly nature of the common people it was like an epiphany for him—“an ecstatic feeling began to overwhelm me, until it had completely conquered me.”61 To this offspring of middle-class and aristocratic lineages, performing hard labor in the countryside and being close to the soil was a form of ritual purification. By merging with the “real people” not as superiors and supervisors but as equals, these Russian, Jewish, and Polish woke were to partake of “real life” and learn about people’s daily sufferings. Later, one of the populist pilgrims described his experiences of going peasant as a political crusade distinguished by the “all-embracing character of a religious movement.” About himself and his comrades he wrote that they “sought not only the attainment of a definite practical goal, but at the same time satisfaction of a deep need for personal moral purification.”62 Dressed in a peasant garb, populists strolled into villages and engaged their populace into conversations, drawing on Christian imagery and stories. These seekers did it not only because they wanted to find a better way to convey the message of socialism to illiterate peasants but also because they shared the spiritual fervor those metaphors evoked. The populist pamphlets were always peppered with biblical images and stories that propagated collective work and equality. Many populists were entirely swept up in the mysticism of their own preaching. Not infrequently, after doing rounds of their folk propaganda among the “real people,” they returned to their revolutionary cells, where they collectively sang “revolutionary hymns.” Moments like this reminded these radicals the scenes from the life of early Christians.63 There was a clear countercultural element in this project. Peter Kropotkin, who later became another prominent anarchist philosopher, and who too became woke in his earlier years, used to brag how in the course of the same

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evening he shape-shifted from an aristocrat to a peasant and back to an aristocrat. A high-ranking noble by origin, he occasionally left elegant elite dinner parties, put a peasant sheepskins coat along with rough boots and plunged himself in the night, enjoying St. Petersburg slums. The contemporary writer Ivan Turgenev’s ironic remark about such populist pilgrims as worshippers of peasant sheepskin coats was not devoid of truth.64 In their woke zeal, some populists overdid in reenacting common folk behavior and garb. One radical remembered how peasants he visited did not take his peaching seriously because his clothing was so shabby.65 Not infrequently, peasants took these populist “hippies” for religious sectarians. Others among the “real people” were puzzled why these aliens tried to deskill themselves of valuable medical and clerical experiences. Yet, more often, suspicious “noble savages” simply turned the rascals to the police. Incidentally, it was out of their frustration to stir the peasant populace to a revolution that some populists turned to terror, thinking it was the only way out. Yet, the government quickly caught and locked them up, hanging a few of them who were directly involved into bombing and assassinations. The reality peasant communes were a far cry from a romantic “socialist” oasis that middle-class revolutionaries envisioned for themselves. Instead of encountering harmonious peaceable collectives, populists frequently had to face greed, drunkenness, and rampant violence in the peasant countryside. Husbands routinely beat their wives and children. Aliens or locals who somehow stuck out in their views or behavior from the rest of a crowd immediately became outcasts and objects of ostracism. All major Christian feasts were routinely accompanied by collective drinking sprees and feast fights, which often ended in deaths.66 The visiting revolutionaries ascribed all these vices to the oppressive influence of the regime. In their noble dreams, the populists assumed that, with the authoritarian czarist bureaucracy being surgically removed, Russia would somehow organize herself on the basis of peasant communes and move toward socialism. This peasant socialism envisioned by populists did not fit the Marxist teaching. The latter invited the socialist faithful to see the backward countryside as the embodiment of intellectual idiocy and economic backwardness that coming industrialization and modernization were to overcome. Only with an advanced industry and factory labor becoming the dominant part of society, a country would be ready for socialism. When the Going to the People campaign failed and after the attempts to foster a political turmoil through terror too fell through, some Russian populists began to question their romantic expectations regarding “organic” peasant collectives. This prompted a search for new ideological pastures and a new revolutionary class. As a result, several of them either converted to Marxism or were on the way to such conversion.

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One of such new converts was a seasoned terrorist Vera Zasulich (1851– 1919), who became famous for making an appointment with the governor of St. Petersburg and shot him in his office in 1878 (see Fig. 2.3). Having escaped to Switzerland, she joined there a small cell of Russian populists who became disillusioned with the terror tactics and tuned in budding acolytes of Marx. Unsure about which road to socialism to take, in 1881, she wrote to the founding father of “scientific socialism.” Zasulich directly asked Marx if it was possible to move toward socialism in Russia through the peasant commune, bypassing the capitalist stage.67 Her personal path toward Marxism deserves a special story, for it might reveal to us something about motives that drove populists to the revolutionary cause. Zasulich admitted that she did not turn to socialism because of a sympathy toward suffering masses. It originated from her aspiration for martyrdom when she was seventeen. This craving for martyrdom was the product of her deep religious feelings she experiences as a girl. Zasulich remembered that her first radical impulse came during her reading of the New Testament. In her imagination, she began to live with Christ, who loved children, the oppressed, the humiliated. Zasulich started imagining how she would have

Figure 2.3  Vera Zasulich (1851–1919), a Populist Terrorist Who Later Became One of the First Marxian Socialists in Russia, is Depicted Here in an Act of Shooting at St. Petersburg’s Mayor (1877). Le Monde illustré, March 9 (1878): 172.

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saved Christ by calling the people of Jerusalem to come together. At the same time, she became fascinated with him dying on the cross for the cause. As she later stressed, this image of the Savior on the cross remained with her forever. Later, when already a socialist, she wrote, “Christ remained with me, engraved in my heart. In fact, it was as if I were more tied to Him than ever.”68 By her seventeenth year, she became a committed socialist devoting her life to saving humankind from oppression. Years later, she kept repeating that the true meaning of revolution was self-sacrifice, stressing that the goal of her lifelong socialist quest was “to join the ranks of the martyrs.” In fact, her populist comrades too pointed to religious motives as a driven cause of their revolutionary life. In fact, historian Ana Siljak, who wrote the most comprehensive biography of the “girl assassin,” debunked two feminist writers who tried to reduce Zasulich’s shift from her youthful Christian religiously to socialist radicalism to her experiences as a female. Politely dismissing this tunnel vision, Siljak pointed out that both male and female populists underwent similar spiritual experiences converting from Christianity to the secular religion of socialism. Vera Figner, another revolutionary terrorist who was part of an 1881 abortive plot to assassinate tsar Alexander II similarly noted how gospels ignited a revolutionary spark inside her: “Sacrifice, expansive devotion to oppressed, martyrdom,—the values of the fundamental Christian message infused themselves into young revolutionary hearts.”69 As teenagers and young adults, some populists aspired to become monks and nuns before discovering the “true” faith of socialism. Notorious anarchist Bakunin went the same route, switching from passionate Christianity of his youth to socialism. As a young adult, he was a zealous Eastern Orthodox Christian. In 1830s, he became convinced that his destiny was to serve Christ and to teach surrounding people how to better do it. As an offspring of a noble lineage, he had vast resources to reenact his dream. In his land estate, Bakunin set up an informal monastery, acting as a domestic master abbot, trying to mold the life of his family in a proper pious manner. At that time, he told his friends, “I feel God within me. I sense paradise within me.”70 Seljuk summarized, “Bakunin was not alone. The most atheistic revolutionaries, who had nothing but contempt for religion, often came from keenly religious families. And passed through periods of intense religious fervor. Some radicals affectionately remembered devout parents who fasted strictly, prayed daily, and set an example of self-negation for their children, even teaching them to follow the example of Christian martyrs.”71 These were the committed revolutionary true believers who on a personal level fascinated Marx because they were actual militants fighting against the regime he hated very much. Marx found himself in a tough situation. On the one hand, he sympathized with these brave people who confronted the beast of Russian czarism with a six-shooter. He was equally happy that in Russia

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the translation of his Das Kapital (1871) became more popular than in other countries. Moreover, Marx invested some time into learning basic Russia and began reading Russian media. On the other hand, his nicely shaped theory of “scientific socialism” contradicted the populists’ obsession with the peasant commune as the cradle of future socialism. After all, Marx argued that peasant traditional societies had to be grinded by the modern industrial order. One could not just leap into socialism without going through that capitalist stage—an unavoidable evil all countries pass through before reaching the gates of the “socialist heaven.” On these grounds, Marx also defended free enterprise, free trade, and colonization.72 According to his “history laws,” the sooner premodern communes fell apart and the sooner peasants turned into proletarians, the faster a socialist revolution arrived. Agonizing over the Zasulich letter, Marx rewrote his reply five times before coming up with a compromise answer. He did see that the Russian populists were challenging his scheme of capitalism as a must period in human development. Yet, he did not want to alienate the revolutionaries who fought the tsarist regime and, most importantly, were seeking his advice as the socialist master. Marx wrote back and said that, yes, Russia could move toward socialism through the peasant commune bypassing the capitalist stage but only in case socialism had already won in the most advanced Western countries. The latter would provide Russia a solid proletarian backup to navigate her peasants in the correct direction. Without this structural support, on her own, Russia and the peasant commune would not make it into the bright future. This 1881 letter to Zasulich later opened a door for Lenin and his Third World successors such as Mao who had to operate in predominantly peasant countries and who now could claim Marxism as their guiding light. However, in the 1890s, Engels tried to close this loophole by playing down the speculations of his late friend who had blurred the clear-cut theory. As the keeper of the creed, Engels reiterated the original message: Russia must overcome first her economic backwardness, and peasants should become proletarians before any socialist revolution could manifest itself in that underdeveloped country. NOTES 1. Moses Hess, “Kommunistisches Bekenntnis in Fragen und Antworten,” Rheinische Jahbucher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform 2 (1846): 169. 2. Slezkine, The House of Government, 113. 3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, With a New Introduction by Robert Conquest (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009). 4. Friedrich Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith [1847],” https​:/​/ ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​8​47​/0​​6​/09.​​htm

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5. idem: “The Principles of Communism [1847],” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​847​/1​​​1​/pri​​n​-com​​.htm 6. Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright, 2013), 83, 135. 7. The most comprehensive and balanced Marx’s biography in English is Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge, MS: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). Less bulky and equally balanced biography I recommend is Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life that has shown Marx as a man of his time whose mind was infested with contemporary biases. 8. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 338. 9. Engels, Socialism. For more on Marx and Engels peddling themselves as scientific revolutionaries, see Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (New York and: Oxford University Press, 2011), 310–314. 10. Saul Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 127. 11. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 265. 12. For more on Hess’s life both as a socialist and the fountainhead of Zionism, see Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Aryei Fishman, “Moses Hess on Judaism and Its Aptness for Socialist Civilization,” Journal of Religion 63, no. 2 (1983): 143–158. 13. George Lichtheim, The Origin of Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1969), 278. 14. Adam M. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 124. 15. Lichtheim, The Origin of Socialism, 179–182. 16. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 142. 17. For an English translation, see Moses Hess, “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat,” in The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, ed. Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 128–135. 18. Fishman, “Moses Hess on Judaism and Its Aptness for Socialist Civilization,” 149–150. 19. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question [1844],” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​844​/j​​e​wish​​-ques​​tion/​ 20. See, for example, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism. 21. Marx, “On the Jewish Question [1844].” 22. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 110, 161. 23. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism, 125. 24. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom, 53. 25. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 161 26. Friedrich Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy [1844],” https​:/​ /ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​844​/d​​f​-jah​​rbuch​​​er​/ou​​tline​​s​.htm​ 27. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 69. 28. Isaiah Berlin, “Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 296.

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29. For an English translation, see Hess, Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism (New York: Bloch, 1918), https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​ subje​​ct​/je​​wish/​​rome-​​jeru​s​​alem.​​pdf. 30. Berlin, “Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” 294. 31. Waxman, “Introduction,” 31. 32. Fishman, “Moses Hess on Judaism and Its Aptness for Socialist Civilization,” 145, 155. 33. Hess, “Socialism and Communism [1843],” 123. 34. Carl Wittke, The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer (Baton Rouge, LS: Louisiana State University, 1950), 56–69. 35. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 228. 36. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 269. 37. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 162. 38. Lichtheim, The Origin of Socialism, 170. 39. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 232. 40. Ibid., 230. 41. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 150. 42. Landes, Heaven on Earth, 299. 43. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 44; Weisberger, The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism, 126. 44. Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 13; Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 250. 45. Gray, Seven Types of Atheism, 87; Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 105–108. 46. Nikolai Bukharin and Evegenii Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism: A Popular Explanation of the Program of the Communist Party of Russia [1922] (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1966), 137. 47. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” 222; Landes, Heaven on Earth, 295–296. 48. Ibid., 308. 49. Ibid., 309. 50. Rothbard, “Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist,” 223. 51. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. There are hundreds of interpretations of The Communist Manifesto. For a critical perspective on this book, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, With a New Introduction by Robert Conquest (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009). One can find a neutral and reader-friendly explanation of the manifesto’s content, and how it was created in Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 241–250. 52. Steele, From Marx to Mises, 272–273. 53. Landes, Heaven on Earth, 306–307. 54. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 269. 55. Roger, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 13. 56. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 297–298.

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57. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 292. 58. Wilson, To the Finland Station, 155. 59. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The First Fabians (London and New York: Quartet, 1979), 81. 60. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 406. 61. Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The Girl Who Shot the Governor of St. Petersburg and Sparked the Age of Assassination (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 142. 62. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 299. 63. Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 144. 64. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 299. 65. Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 140. 66. Jörg Baberowski, Scorched Earth: Stalin's Reign of Terror (Cumberland: Yale University Press, 2016), 31. 67. “Letter from Vera Zasulich to Marx (1881),” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​ /ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​881​/z​​asuli​​​ch​/za​​sulic​​h​.htm​ 68. Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 30. 69. Ibid., 28. 70. Ibid., 26. 71. Ibid., 27–28. 72. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 166.

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Great Schism Social Democracy, Radical Cosmopolitans, and War Socialism (1870s–1920s)

The State is God. — Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), the chief socialist organizer in Germany at the turn of the 1860s.1

By the end of the 1870s, socialism in its Marxian garb gradually caught up with many people on the left, and by World War I, it became the dominant brand of socialism in Europe. Authoritarian Germany, Catholic and hierarchic Austria-Hungary and France, and later Orthodox and authoritarian Russia were leading the way, while England with its decentered Protestant culture was lagging. Marx and Engels did provide radical intellectuals and workers with a potent faith to supplement or substitute conventional religious creeds that were losing their influence. In the secular religion of Marxian socialism, the working class became the messiah that was to bring an earthly paradise as a result of a world-wide revolutionary apocalypse.2 By the beginning of the 1900s, in Germany, the cradle of the organized left, socialism became the dominant form of an alternative political religion. During an opening ceremony of a world socialism congress in Stuttgart in 1907, its participants were singing a secularized version of a German Lutheran hymn, in which the word “god” was replaced with “party” (Bund): “Ein feste Burg ist unser Bund” (“A fortress is our party”).3 Gone were masonic lodgestyle brotherhoods. German socialist movement became the first modern mass party of the working-class people with its own party machine, newspapers, and a representation in the parliament. The German Social-Democratic Party became not only the largest political party in the country but also the most powerful socialist movement in the world that began to set up political 57

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standards for the rest of the left in Europe and beyond.4 German, which was in vogue among radical intellectuals at that time, became the established language of communication among socialists.5 SOCIALIST ORGANIZER AND WOMANIZER: THE FAST LIFE OF FERDINAND LASSALLE The person who stood behind that party machine was a German-Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (see Fig. 3.1), a charismatic, emotional, and explosive person who grew up to believe that he was destined to lead people. Born in a family of a Jewish silk merchant from Breslau, throughout his life, Lassalle blended the qualities of a poet, showman, philosopher, organizer, publicity seeker, and passionate womanizer. Unlike Marx, Lassalle was a

Figure see the text 3.1  Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), a Prominent Socialist Organizer in Germany In the 1850s–1860s and One of the First Spearheads of a Welfare State. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man's Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1.

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great public speaker who also excelled in bringing people together and mainstreaming socialism. Once Lassalle crashed a large hostile gathering of working-class people who sided with classical free-market liberals and, through his two-day eloquent talks, completely swayed them to Marxian socialism.6 Lassalle’s powerful charismatic presence and public visibility aroused Karl Marx’s jealousy. Although the former was ready to learn from Marx and use his ideas to shape the ideology of the German socialist movement, the founding father of Marxism rarely blessed him with positive remarks. In private, Marx derogatorily referred to dark-skinned Lassalle as a “union of Jew and German in a negro foundation.”7 Like Moses Hess, Lassalle was raised in the spirit of traditional Judaism and then as a teenager broke with his indigenous tradition and went secular. He too came to hate the family business, devoting himself instead to the study of philosophy and history. Incidentally, it was Hess who assisted Lassalle in organizing German socialism movement into a party. From his yearly school years and well into adulthood, Lassalle always acted as a troublemaker in an Abbie Hoffman-type show-off manner, building up an image of a bad boy, wearing on his sleeve a despise for existing norms. On every possible occasion, if something appeared to him wrong or unfair, Lassalle immediately sought to organize a protest. Despite his passion for community organizing, he found some time for arts and letters, enrolling into the Berlin University, where he immersed himself into Hegel’s philosophy. In fact, Lassalle became so absorbed into Hegelian dense texts that he began imaging himself as the manifestation of the world spirit, whose evolution Hegel placed at the center of his teaching. Between 1846 and 1854, Lassalle became involved with the Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt, who was twenty years older than him. The woman was separated from her husband, battling him over their common property and the custody of children. Lassalle, who began to live openly with the countess, assisted her in the legal battles. The contemporary German system denied a woman a right to initiate a divorce. Lassalle decided to challenge not only this practice but also existing social barriers. As a Jew who had an open affair with a woman of a noble lineage, he directly confronted not only her aristocratic husband but also accepted estate categories. This brought him a German-wide notoriety and wide publicity. Lassalle purposely treated the whole thing as a political act. He pointed to the countess, “Your body has been borrowed by an idea of permanent historical importance.”8 On her part, trying too to plug into the creed shared by her lover, von Hatzfeldt declared herself a proletarian who was oppressed by the system. Lassalle went as far as storming her husband’s estate and organizing his peasants for a demonstration against the aristocrat. The intimidated husband agreed to compromise and finally gave her a divorce, but Lassalle was unrepentant. He demanded a public apology from

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the humiliated Teutonic noble and again basked in publicity. Through Sophie von Hatzfeldt, Lassalle was able to wiggle himself into German high society. At some point, he began looking down upon some of his “deplorable” Jewish friends, whom he considered too provincial and culturally unpolished to hang around. Moreover, defending the countess from her nasty spouse, in a few years, Lassalle himself came to act toward her as a male master, giving her orders on how to behave and organize her daily routine. Since 1848, after he left Berlin for the Rhine country, Lassalle attached himself to the Marx-Engels group; the Rhine country was considered a cosmopolitan area saturated with ideas of French socialism. Lassalle picked up from Marx various memes that became the pillars of the contemporary Marxism such as absolute pauperization of workers, class struggle, and the proletariat as the “chosen people” destined to demolish capitalism. Essentially, Lassalle served as a missionary, channeling elements of Marxism into society and digesting them for working masses. Particularly, he was instrumental in spreading among German left-leaning public the Marxist concept of “scientific socialism”—the assumption that the society’s march toward socialism was unavoidable and conditioned by objective historical laws.9 Where he differed from Marx was the concept of a violent revolution. The socialist organizer did not believe that workers needed to revolt and overthrow the regime. Lassalle sought to mute the Marxian revolutionary message, suggesting instead that a left party could well work within the system. The way to accomplish this was to expand socialism in a piecemeal manner, moving from one proletariat-friendly reform to another until the entire society was absorbed by socialism. In contrast to Marx and his associates, Lassalle argued that one could do many good things for the labor by using the existing government. On the one hand, in his speeches, the community organizer invited workers to partake of a class war against classes he defined as their exploiters. Yet, on the other hand, Lassalle warned them not to fight the state that he considered a potential friend.10 According to Lassalle, a revolution was to be a symbolic decorative cherry on the top of a socialist cake that would have been already baked. In other words, a revolution would arrive as the endorsement of progressive changes that would had already taken place in society. As an advocate of a benevolent state, Lassalle developed passionate faith in the power of a ballot box. He assumed that through a universal suffrage, as a growing voting bloc, the working-class people would be able to win over the government and gradually implant socialism. The General Union of German Workers Lassalle helped to jump-start in 1863 and its successor, the German Social Democratic Party, became focused on winning a universal franchise for all male workers. Intellectually, Lassalle’s obsession with a state as the major vehicle of building socialism might have originated from his dubbing into Hegel. Hegel’s notion that the well-ordered Prussian State was the manifestation of

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the perfect social system was ingrained into the contemporary political culture of Germany.11 This notion became assimilated with the popular ideas of Saint-Simon and Comte who essentially talked about the same thing without tying the well-ordered system to a particular national state. Historically, one can consider Lassalle the intellectual fountainhead of the modern German welfare state. Later, in the twentieth century, other Western nations modeled their socioeconomic systems after this German blueprint. Lassalle extended almost lyrical praises to a benevolent government that would take care of people as a good mother. He believed that, if turned into a people’s friendly machine, a state was capable to morally uplift the humankind. It was hardly surprising that Lassalle viewed free-market classical liberals as the major enemies of the working class in contrast to the Prussian well-organized bureaucracy that he considered a vehicle to foment socialism. It was also natural that, like many contemporary Germans, Lassalle became fascinated with Otto von Bismarck, an assertive alpha male “iron chancellor” and state builder. In the 1880s and the 1890s, Bismarck, who served as the Prussian prime minister and presided over the unification of Germany in 1870, stole much of Lassalle’s earlier thunder by becoming the first Western politician to introduce a welfare state (compulsory health insurance, and later accidents and disability insurance). Interestingly, before Germany pioneered these state-mandated measures, which were later replicated in other Western states, 25–30% of workers in northwest Europe had already had their own mutual sickness funds independent of states12—a welfare model that did not catch on at the age of state worship. In contrast to Lassalle, who believed that state welfare measures would empower the labor, Bismarck thought about them as a way of making workers dependent on a government. The chancellor, a die-hard state conservative, was afraid of the radicalization of the labor. For this reason, while cracking down on socialists, he simultaneously sought to placate and trap the “chosen people” in the governmental “cage”: “Many of the measures which we have adopted to the great blessing of the country are Socialistic, and the State will have to accustom itself to a little more Socialism yet.”13 Calling his reforms “State Socialism,” Bismarck explained, “Whoever has pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle that the one who has no such prospect. Look at the difference between a private servant and a servant in the chancellery or at court; the latter will put up with much mire, because he has pension to look forward to.”14 Acting as a spokesperson for humble proletarians, Lassalle nevertheless never felt guilty about indulging into good food, wines, and luxurious lifestyle. The working-class hero moved to a large house with four reception rooms that were staffed with books and wines. Here, he entertained various dignitaries who felt it was cool to befriend the countercultural political celebrity. With one of these visitors, a Russian lady aristocrat, Lassalle became

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intimately involved, and at one point decided to marry her. To maintain his image of a notorious rebel, Lassalle traveled to Italy to meet and hang out with Garibaldi. To nineteenth-century middle-class bohemian revolutionaries, Garibaldi played the role of an ultimate rebel celebrity to be worshipped and imitated. Lassalle always admired Marx and propagated his ideas, but the latter could not stand him because of Lassalle’s habit of talking in a patronizing manner. When Lassalle applied for a membership in the Marxian UK-based Communist League, scared of his strong personality and suspicious of his leadership ambitions, Marx and Engels refused to admit him. The founders of Marxism became very jealous of his popularity, and they could not stomach that many Germans referred to Lassalle as “the new messiah of the people.”15 Incidentally, earlier in the 1840s, Marx had been similarly venomous about one Karl Ferdinand Grün, a popular German journalist, who was channeling French socialism into German lands and who wrote the first book in German on socialist and communist movement in France and Belgium. Wishing to reserve this role for himself, Engels, and Hess, Marx worked hard to squeeze the rival out of the left landscape. Commenting on their ugly bickering, frustrated Grün later wrote that Marx was an “intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority,” who only allowed socialist ideas to pass if he personally approved them.16 Marx also frowned upon Lassalle’s flirt with Bismarck and his attempts to use the existing state to gradually instill socialism instead of thinking how to better smash the whole capitalist system.17 Eventually, Marx became disgusted with the Lassalle revisionist approach and devoted his famous Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) to its debunking. Addressed to the participants of the convention that launched a united German social democratic party, Marx essay called Lassalle’s methods “vulgar socialism.” Having this essay integrated in the party program, the founder of Marxism famously reminded the left that they needed to overthrow the existing regime and replace it with the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”18 He argued that this dictatorship was needed to overrun the resistance of the propertied class during a transitional stage from the state of oppression to communism; later, under Stalin, communists began to label this transitional “purgatory” stage as socialism. A household issue that finally put an end to the Marx-Lassalle relations in the 1860s was money. Never having a regular job and always in a chronic poverty because of his reckless spending habits, Marx constantly needed money. In addition to paying him a regular allowance, Engels repeatedly rescued his friend with additional funds. At one point, when Engels was not around and with Lassalle visiting London, Marx borrowed from Lassalle 15 pounds, which was a lot of money at that time. Since Marx got used to never return whatever he borrowed from Engels, he tried to play the same game

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with Lassalle. The latter wrote an angry letter, asking to return him money and also a book with notes that Marx too had borrowed from Lassalle and conveniently forgot to return. Marx had to turn to Engels to foot the bill. As for the book, Marx wrote back to Lassalle, pointing that the postage was too expensive for him to send the volume from England to Germany. After this incident, they never communicated with each other. By 1864, Lassalle found out that he was deadly sick, being at the last stage of chronic syphilis that he had picked up during one of his amorous adventures. One can speculate that, in fear that the shameful ailment might taint his charisma of a working-class hero, he might have started looking for a heroic death to have a beautiful closure for his career. By chance, that year he happened to meet a young girl Helene von Donniges, a daughter of then famous German historian. Helene was already engaged to a Romanian nobleman, but Lassalle was so invigorated that he wanted to immediately start an affair with her. The parents interfered and Lassalle challenged the fiancée for a dual. A social democrat friend warned the flamboyant revolutionary to have some shooting practice before the duel. Yet arrogant Lassalle rejected it and went straight to his death being shot before even firing his pistol.19 After Lassalle died, Marxism continued to gain popularity among German social democrats, especially since the 1870s, when Engels released his catechism-like brochure Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,20 which was the first ABC rendition of Marxism for masses. Engels, a good writer and linguist, became for the millions of socialism acolytes and fellow travelers the major resource from which they learned about Marxism and its main pillars. In contrast, because of their dense style, Marx’s own writings were hard to digest not only for workers with elementary education but also for many well-rounded educated readers. For example, his famous Das Kapital, the comprehensive analysis of the capitalist economy, was rarely read. Members of the movement purchased this volume mostly to shelve as a token show off symbol of belonging to the Marxian fellowship. Incidentally, the first foreign translation of Das Kapital, which was produced in Russia, went smoothly through a censorship commission on the grounds that this text would be totally incomprehensible to common people.21 REFORMING THE CREED: BERNSTEIN REVISIONISM AND FABIANS Three decades after Marx death, German Social Democratic Party grew into the most powerful socialist group in the world and became part of the German political system. By 1910, it numbered about 720,000 members,22 which was more than the combined number of socialists in Austria, Belgium, Denmark,

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France, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and Sweden. Its new Erfurt program (1891) made Marxist “scientific socialism” into the official ideology of the party. For a large segment of working-class people and their middle-class allies, a social democratic community became a self-contained subculture that replaced mainstream Christian churches. Special clubs, gyms, pubs, libraries, newspapers, funeral homes, and public festivals, which were maintained or sponsored by the party, catered to the needs of the people who shared the socialist creed. Socialist meetings were routinely accompanied by liturgies where choirs sang alternative socialist hymns that replicated traditional Christian tunes. During Palm Sunday feasts, German socialists celebrated Lassalle’s birthday. On such days, displayed portraits of the leader were surrounded with leafy greenery. Not infrequently, one also could see banners with the following words: “The workers are the rock on which the present shall be founded.”23 In many working-class families, images of Martin Luther and the Virgin Mary were hanging next to the portraits of August Bebel, another charismatic leader of German social democrats at the turn of the twentieth century. When in 1895 Engels died, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938) and Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) (see Fig. 3.2), two loyal activists who stood close to him, became the major custodians of the creed. Kautsky developed almost religious devotion to the Marxist orthodoxy, and, acting as a seventeenthcentury Puritan, he was looking for its guidance in all aspects of surrounding life.24 By his family background and training, Kautsky was a bohemian intellectual through and through. Raised in a well-to-do multiethnic literary family of a Czech father and a German mother who was a known play writer, he was groomed in arts and letters and received a good education at the University of Vienna. In contrast, Bernstein was a self-made man of a very humble background. He was one of the fifteen children in a German-Jewish family of a plumber and housewife. Yet, in the spirit of the Jewish tradition of investing into children’s education, his parents selected him to be the one to get educated. The family sacrifice and Bernstein’s own hard work paid back. He eventually secured a white-collar job as an accountant in a bank. Like many learned and working-class people of his ethnic background, Bernstein joined the Socialism Democratic Party—the only available niche for a politically conscious Jew who had to cope with reigning German nationalism and who, at the same time, did not want to slip into Zionism. After contributing several times to socialist media, Bernstein quickly found out that he was a good writer. Soon this talented man of words became the chief editor of the major socialist newspaper Vorwarts. For many years, both Kautsky and Bernstein lived as emigres in London, hanging around Engels and assisting him. Following Engels’ last wishes, they

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Figure 3.2  Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932); by Revising Marxism and Muting Its Revolutionary Zeal, He Triggered Reformist Movement in Socialism. Hans Helmolt, The History of the World: A Survey of a Man's Record (London: Heinemann, 1907), vol. 7, part 1.

were the ones who carried an urn with his ashes into an open sea—a symbolic act that confirmed their apostolic succession. At the turn of the 1890s, with Engels blessing, Kautsky began promoting an idea that a proletarian revolution would arrive inevitably on its own. One could not speed it up. Neither could one delay it. There was a growing optimism among the socialist faithful that, in a natural law manner, this revolution was to come when the working-class party would take over the state by ballot. Kautsky insisted that, if they became an electoral majority, social democrats would set up Marx’s dictatorship of proletariat without resorting to any violent takeover.25 Arguing that socialism could be brought by ballot, Kautsky somewhat diluted Marx’s eschatological prophecy that was tied to a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system.

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At the same time, he never questioned one of the major pillars of contemporary Marxism that with the advancement of capitalism the life of laboring people was becoming more miserable. In contrast, Bernstein became the first prominent Marxist to point out that this notion did not make any sense. By 1900, it was visible that in all Western countries the living standards of workers greatly improved. Not only did Bernstein mention this, but he also started arguing that the development of capitalism benefited everybody. With a general material growth, society was becoming more affluent, including the industrial labor. For the members of the Marxian fellowship, whose very identity was tied to the “misery” thesis, it was very uncomfortable to hear. Like in any creed based on a doomsday social prophecy, the failure of the prophecy threatened the fate of the creed. There was an urgent need to revisit the whole prophecy and adjust it to the changing conditions. This unavoidably triggered the resistance of true believers. In his Evolutionary Socialism (1899), Bernstein challenged the sacred texts of classical Marxism,26 dismissing the need for a forceful revolutionary transformation of capitalism. He also abandoned the faith in the imminent collapse of capitalism and removed from Marxism much of its romantic and millenarian fire, pointing that the socialist movement should work simply to improve the living conditions of workers within the existing system. Still, Bernstein did not give up on socialism. He assumed that the latter would gradually grow out of capitalism. What Bernstein did with the left tradition later became labeled as revisionism—the word that for the radical segment of socialists acquired a derogatory meaning akin to treachery. Inviting his colleagues to reform the creed, Bernstein asked them to stop dreaming about the distant utopian future. It would make much more sense to take care of the daily needs of actual workers. Bernstein clearly built on the tradition set up by Lassalle. Referring to workers and their daily needs, he repeated Lassalle’s words, “You are the rock upon which the church of the present shall be built.”27 Further invoking biblical metaphors, Bernstein explained that socialists were like Jews, who, failing to reach the Promised Land, had to get used to the life in diaspora. Therefore, like the “people of the book” who retained their solidarity through daily struggle, prayers, and rituals, socialists should focus on the daily concerns of their community and drop their millenarian dreams about a future utopia.28 Besides challenging the traditional Marxist creed, Bernstein’s revisionism posed a direct threat to the status of the established bureaucratic network of social-democratic organizers and activists, who literally became a state within the German state. Ironically, during the debates over the Bernstein heresy, people who sided with his compromising attitude to “evil” capitalism mostly came from rank and file workers, whereas party bureaucrats and activists aggressively resisted the suggested reform of the creed. Wilhelm Liebknecht,

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one of the influential Marxist bureaucrats, wrote to Bernstein, warning him about a mortal threat posed by his revisionism and drawing a historical analogy: “Islam was invincible as long as it believed in itself. But the moment it began to compromise, it ceased to be a conquering force. Socialism can neither conquer nor save the world if it ceases to believe in itself.”29 Much of his revisionist baggage Bernstein picked up during the years of his life as an emigre in England. The would-be reformer observed her tolerant politico-economic system based on checks and balances and how it gradually improved living conditions of lower classes. The crucial role in his conversion to revisionism belonged to the so-called Fabians, with whom the German emigre closely interacted and who were the first to turn the evolutionary stealth socialism into a doctrine. The Fabian Society, which was founded in 1884, named itself after Quintus Fabius, one of the Roman generals, who received a nickname “Delayer.” The general preferred to sit tight and delay an immediate attack, waiting for an appropriate moment to strike against an enemy. The society grew out of the interactions among prominent socially conscious English intellectuals and politicians who met at the place of Edward Pease. This stockbroker clerk became disgusted with his work that he viewed as an anti-social parasitic occupation that was poisonous to his soul. Many people who joined him originated from families with strong evangelical, especially Quaker, backgrounds, and they were driven by similar moral ideals. Although the Fabians shed much off their formal religious garb, their general radical Protestant demeanor was very much alive. Having acquired a secular form, this zeal was channeled into a desire to mold surrounding people according to their moral standards as they understood them. For these new evangelicals, who were shedding off conventional church-tied beliefs, it was natural to believe in the power of “positive science” to perfect society and move it in a “correct” direction.30 The life of the Fabian Society was energized when Annie Besant (1847– 1933) (see Fig. 3.3), a passionate spiritual seeker joined it. Prior to her conversion to socialism, she had succeeded flamboyant Madam Blavatsky as the leader of British theosophists—a group of people who preached unchurched esoteric spirituality in yet another attempt to marry science and religion and to give a spiritual anchor to cont‑emporary intellectuals who were frustrated about both mainstream Christianity and the modern world. Well-read and very attractive, Beasant was raised by her spinster stepmother, a zealous evangelical activist. She indoctrinated the girl to such an extent that, during her teenage years, Besant was seeking to tame her flesh through constant fasting and flagellation. Besant was daydreaming about being a great religious leader that was to bring a new faith to humankind.31 Unhappy in her marriage to a minister, a cynical church bureaucrat who did not care about actual spirituality, she escaped to London, where, in a

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Figure 3.3  Anne Besant (1847–1933), a Known Theosophist and Fabian Leader Who Advocated Stealth Socialism. Source: Photograph by H. S. Mendelssohn, London, 1885. Annie Besant, Anne Besant: An Autobiography (London and Leipzig: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1908).

countercultural impulse, she soon moved away from the “church established by law” to the spirituality of militant secularism. In London, charismatic Besant acquired a wide notoriety by becoming the first to openly advocate contraception, which appalled Victorian moralists and brought her to court. Among other prominent Fabians, one could see Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) and Sidney Webb (1859–1947) were another prominent Fabians. These two set up the famous London School of Economics, which later became the crucible of European and Third World political and financial elites. Thus, socialism-prone Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime-minster of independent

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India, and Julius Nyerere, the spearhead of the so-called African socialism, were both trained at that school and fed on Fabian ideas. The number of Fabians never exceeded a few thousand people. Yet, they exercised a disproportionally large influence on British society. These were the members of the British elite, an exclusive club that united prominent journalists, writers, politicians, engineers, and civil servants who agreed that the future of the United Kingdom was tied to the power of the state, centralized planning, and collectivism. Jumping ahead, I want to stress that in 1945, when the Labour government made the first comprehensive movements to dramatically increase the role of the state in UK to move the country toward socialism, of 394 Labour representatives in the English parliament, 229 were the members of the Fabian society. Moreover, Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister who presided over that postwar project, was a Fabian too.32 Under a broad ideological umbrella, this elite club welcomed dignitaries of all political preferences from socialists to spiritualists provided they were left of the center progressives. To join the society, one had to secure reference letters from two other Fabians and to be a prominent member of the ruling class with progressive convictions. Fabians rejected the whole idea of a revolutionary change and the Marxian teaching about industrial workers as the “chosen people.” Instead, they advocated working toward socialism and “better” forms of life through existing institutions, especially on a local municipal level. To be exact, some Fabians did like reading Marx. What attracted them most in his teaching was not the Armageddon-like revolution performed by the working class but the theological belief that socialism was to arrive naturally according to “history laws.” If this was the case, there was no need to jump to barricades and preach the revolutionary holocaust. The Fabians reasoned that it would be more productive to work gradually in a piecemeal manner to flow with those “laws of history.” They were driven by a conviction that they were the “priests of humanity” destined to shape economic and moral life for the sake of public good. In his The Unsocial Socialist (1887), the first English novel influenced by modern socialism, writer George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), one of the prominent Fabians who was responsible for shaping their program, revealed the mindset of people who joined that society. The major character in the novel put on a working man’s garb, trying to speak and act as a “common man.” Yet, eventually, he became frustrated about crude proletariat ways, preferring instead to assail the ills of society while dining and wining in aristocratic clubs.33 In fact, Pease, the founding member of the society, too tried to play “native” by going proletarian. Using his hobby of carpentry, he sought to identify himself with “the manual labour class.” Yet, rubbing shoulders with actual workers became a frustrating experience. The Fabian was upset that these regular

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people acted as breadwinners who were also mostly interested in racing rather than in socialism or politics.34 Although they did not mind working among proletarians, Fabians assumed that, endowed with superior brains and organization skills, they were the elite destined to perform a civilization mission among the “deplorable” classes. RADICAL COSMOPOLITANS: LENIN, LUXEMBURG, AND THE 1917 BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION Not everybody on the left was happy about Fabian and Bernstein’s attempts to make socialism more “vegetarian.” Gradually, by the turn of the 1900s, there emerged a vocal minority that protested the revisionist efforts to dilute Marx’s radical prophecy. In all fairness, Marx himself never gave a definitive answer to the best way to bring about socialism. On the one hand, he criticized German Social Democracy for excessive compromises with Lassalle’s welfare state project and talked about dislodging propertied classes through the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Yet, on the other hand, during his polemics with anarchists in the early 1870s, Marx suggested that in such western democracies as the United States, Britain, and Netherlands workers might take power through a ballot box. To be fair, Marx approached the subject creatively by arguing that socialists’ strategies should vary depending on what regimes they dealt with: democracies or autocracies.35 Yet, ideological acolytes are rarely satisfied with ambiguous answers. For this reason, Marx’s ambiguity triggered an ideological contest between socialists who later became known as social democrats and those who labeled themselves as communists. Conflicts over the creed between two factions were fought with a passionate, resentment, and bitterness which always characterized theological controversies in churches.36 It did not help that, by the 1890s, aged Engels mellowed and turned into an armchair revolutionary, leaning toward socialism without barricades and being inclined to wait for “history laws” to kick in and do their job. The people who took the baton of radical revolution and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” came from the authoritarian lands of Eastern Europe, particularly the Russian Empire, where the lack of elections, legalized party system, and free press pushed socialists to violent solutions. Two famous names stand out in this respect: Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) (see Fig. 3.4), both of whom were people of multiethnic cosmopolitan backgrounds. Lenin was one of several children born in a petty noble family of a school inspector of a Russian-Kalmyk origin and a housewife of a Russian-Jewish background. There are hundreds of biographies of this prominent revolutionary who was the founder of the Soviet Union.37

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Figure 3.4  Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), on the left in a white blouse. This cosmopolitan firebrand preached a spontaneous international workers revolution and sided with Lenin’s Bolsheviks but did not approve their totalitarian vanguard practices. Source: Provided by the author.

Since the life story of the chief Bolshevik is widely known, here we will only emphasize several important things. Culturally, this man belonged to Eurasia, being born literally at the intersection of Russian-European and Asian realms—the steppe area between Europe and Asia. Personally, he harbored a deep animosity toward the czarist regime that killed his elder brother Alexander, who was a member of the terrorist network of populists whom we discussed in the previous chapter. Lenin was trained as a lawyer, but never worked in his profession, embarking on a radical revolutionary path from early on. Yet, it was not his brother’s emotional terrorist path. Instead, as his potent weapon, Lenin embraced the power of the Marxian “science.” Later, Soviet propaganda ascribed to him the following apocryphal words he allegedly uttered when his family received the sad news about his brother’s execution: “The way of terror is senseless. We shall go another way.”38

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In 1897–1900, Lenin was exiled to Siberia for organizing in St. Petersburg one of the first Marxists groups in Russia. It was during his exile that he found out how Bernstein was trying to dilute revolutionary Marxism. Full of indignation he impatiently was waiting for his brief and comfortable exile term to be over to go to Europe to challenge the traitor. As a new kid on the Marxist block, he was eager to show that he was more loyal to the spirit of the creed than its Western custodians. Lenin wanted to become the guardian of the revolutionary spirit of the Marxist faith, trying to get hold of the “seal of the prophet.”39 From 1900 to 1917, he stayed in Europe, mostly in Switzerland, living the life of a revolutionary émigré, shaping a disciplined group of committed revolutionaries who would lead industrial workers into a revolution. He referred to his group of professional revolutionaries a vanguard party that was to become the navigator for the proletariat. Lenin was convinced that, if left to themselves and not organized by the enlightened revolutionaries, working masses would never be able to figure out their true class interests, make a revolution, and move beyond the welfare state. In other words, the party vanguard was to act as a proverbial prince who was to wake up the proletarian sleeping beauty.40 In his hands, the party acquired the status of a Jesuit-like order—a disciplined force that was to hammer the “true ideology” of Marxism into the masses of the proletariat and then to orchestrate a socialist revolution. It was not accident that Lenin frequently talked about “devotion to the party” as a must condition for an admission into this elite group who possessed the knowledge about past, present, and future of society. Lenin found a temporary and wayward ally in Luxemburg, a cosmopolitan and multilingual revolutionary who was born in a family of a Polish-Jewish timber trader in the westernmost part of the Russian Empire. While studying at the University of Zurich for her doctorate, she was hanging with the Plekhanov-Axelrod-Zasulich group of populists-turned Marxists in the 1890s and eventually settled in Germany. In fact, Luxemburg grounded herself so well in German social democratic movement that she later became the leader of its radical wing. A secularized diaspora Jew, she became a natural advocate of revolutionary internationalism, never making any compromises with nationalism. Like Marx, she took an extra effort to downplay, denigrate, and purge her Jewish identity. Luxemburg joined Lenin in his attempts to arrest revisionism that was spreading among Western socialists cushioned and spoiled in their secure parliamentary systems. At the same time, she was very uncomfortable about Lenin’s vanguard approach toward the industrial workers, whose revolutionary grassroot wisdom she held in high esteem. Luxemburg was convinced that, instead of building up centralized parties and bureaucratic structures, Marxists should rely on radical, organic, and spontaneous self-organization of proletarians from bottom up. Incidentally, since the 1960s, when the traditional socialist culture of

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state worship and authoritarianism was miserably failing, the left excavated and embraced Luxemburg. Her idealization of spontaneous activities of proletarian “noble savages” and their organic wisdom represented a convenient alternative to authoritarian top to bottom Lenin’s “civilization” mission. Still, until 1917, when Lenin’s Bolsheviks picked up power in Russia, Luxemburg was not too outspoken about Lenin’s totalitarian longings. Like Marx and Engels, Lenin hated the countryside as the bastion of backwardness, and he was very critical of the populists’ idealization of the Russian peasant commune as the cradle of socialism. Yet, building on MarxZasulich correspondence (see the previous chapter), by 1917, Lenin came to the conclusion that with the working class composing 2% of the population, Russia was capable to make a revolution by using peasants as allies. Still, to fully justify his agenda, Lenin needed to correct the traditional Marxist theology that implied that the revolution was possible only in highly advanced industrial countries; Marx and Engels argued that a socialist revolution would succeed only when it happened simultaneously in several advanced countries. In case it happened in one country, it would be quickly squashed by the surrounding hostile capitalist environment. The backward Russian Empire with her predominantly peasant population did not fit that classical Marxist paradigm. In fact, the debate about whether Russia was economically ripe or not ripe to the revolution was the major apple of discontent between the socalled Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks among Marx’s Russian acolytes. The former wanted to sit tight and wait for backward Russia to be industrialized and have a substantial proletarian class-messiah to topple down the regime. In contrast, the Bolsheviks headed by Lenin took an activist position, arguing that, globally speaking, capitalism already matured, at least in its chief centers of Western Europe and North America, and the rest of the world became part of its economic orbit as the exploited periphery. So, according to Lenin, the economic basis for the revolution in Russia, became a secondary issue. Moreover, in 1917, Lenin rationalized that, while capitalism was ripe for a socialist revolution in its core areas of Europe and North America, its periphery in fact could be a better place to ignite a revolutionary storm. He argued that such capitalism’s periphery as Russia represented the whole knot of contradictions. On top of the emerging conflict between capitalists and industrial workers, there was an old one lingering on that remained from the previous socioeconomic formation. This was an animosity of landless peasants against landlords who owned large chunks of fertile land. These contradictions amplified by the war were to create an explosive revolutionary situation. The most important element of his revision of classical Marxism was the role of peasants—a deplorable splinters of the premodern backward stage. Lenin argued that the vanguard party and its base, industrial workers, would use them as allies in the fight against the regime.

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To make those conflicts worse, Lenin suggested to exploit rising ethnic and national sentiments in the Russian Empire, especially in her western borderlands where Poland and Ukraine were shooting for nationhood. All in all, as Lenin argued, Russian backwardness could be a great asset because it represented the “weakest link” in the world of capitalism. Socialists, he continued, could take advantage of this backwardness not only to tear the empire apart but also to jump-start the world revolution. Later, Mao, the charismatic head of Chinese communists, picked up where Lenin stopped and pushed further this argument about the revolutionary potency of the backward periphery, turning it into a concept of a peasant revolution. Mao insisted that the Third World peasantry could act as surrogate proletarians. Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and radicals who sought to keep the revolutionary fire burning were marginal figures in the social democratic movement that was growing more reformist and less militant. Such situation continued until 1917 when people in Russia and the rest of Europe were disrupted by Word War I, which mainstreamed martial sentiments, mobilization, centralization, collectivism, and violent revolutions. If it had not been for the war, such figures as Lenin would have remained obscure characters. As soon as hostilities broke out, mainstream social democrats voted to support their own national governments. Once again, their professed internationalism evaporated and gave rise to nationalism. The radical minority of cosmopolitan revolutionaries such as Lenin and Luxemburg were disgusted with such behavior that they called treasonous to socialist internationalism. At same time, Lenin’s Bolsheviks welcomed the war as a natural blessing because they hoped it would unleash the transnational civil war of the “toilers” against the bourgeois “parasites.” By 1917, people of the Russian Empire came to hate the useless war, which presented a window of opportunity for the radical revolutionaries to railroad their agenda. Lenin began to openly appeal to masses of warring nations to turn what he called an imperialist war into a civil war of the lower classes against their elites: “You are given a weapon and modern cannon. Take these tools of death and destruction. Don’t listen to sentimental crybabies, who are afraid of war. They are still things in this word that need to be destroyed by iron and fire in order to liberate the working class. If masses are angry and desperate, be ready to organize yourself, and use these useful tools of death and destruction against your government and the bourgeoisie.”41 Lenin explained that the devastating warfare was not an accident but the product of natural evolution of capitalism, which at its last stage of degeneration turned into a worldwide competition for the sources of raw materials and new markets. Following an Austrian Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, Lenin called this stage “Imperialism.” In other words, the war was not an unpredictable man-made catastrophe but a historical stopping point in the

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history evolution, a natural Armageddon that was destined to usher in the new communist civilization.42 The 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent emergence of communism as a movement were the direct result of the chaos and social breakdown produced by World War I. The 14 million Russian army that fought against Germany mostly consisted of drafted illiterate peasants who were taken away from their traditional setting and occupations to fight the war they did not understand. The mass draft totally uprooted the empire’s agriculture, whose production fell by two-thirds. This eventually led to disruptions of grain shipments to cities. Along with the economic breakdown, military defeats suffered by the poorly fed and understaffed Russian troops along with rumors about the treasonous behavior of the court created a political chaos and triggered the 1917 revolution. In contrast to conventional Marxist histories that insisted that it was class warfare that stirred the Bolshevik revolution, the spark that planted an animosity toward the regime was wounded nationalist sentiments of elites and the populace. By 1917, backward industry that could not produce enough rifles and ammunition for troops as well as a series of devastating military defeats created a fertile ground for discontent. Elites began to ascribe military blunders to the “treacherous” behavior of German-born czarina Alexandra, her spiritual confidant Grigori Rasputin, and her subservient husband tsar Nicholas II. Soldiers in tranches, illiterate people of a peasant culture, and the populace in major cities spread a word that the first two spied for the Germans with the tsar himself sharing military secrets with his uncle, the German Kaiser. Another popular rumor soldiers eagerly shared was a story about the empress withholding shells, food, and medical supplies from troops, and sending them secretly to Germans.43 The fact that a large segment of state bureaucracy and office corps was staffed with Baltic Germans did not help either. The road to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution became wide open when, following defeats and subsequent demoralization, masses of soldiers began to desert tranches, flocking into inland areas, where many of them created gangs that lived by looting and banditry. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major Russian cities, masses of the armed deserters mingled with millions of civilian Estonians, Jews, Latvians, and Russians who were deported to inland Russian away from the front lines in the western part of the empire. The first acts of “revolutionary” violence that eventually opened a door to the communist revolution were pogroms of German stores and offices with German-sounding names by self-proclaimed Russian patriots.44 A spontaneous consensus was growing that the pro-German “traitors” at the top must be removed. By its reckless behavior, the royal family only fueled existing discontent. While Nicholas II went to the front lines to personally boost troops’

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moral, his wife remained in St. Petersburg. To show off that the government was functioning, she began to receive high imperial officials. Unfortunately, in patriarchic Russia this did not fly. Such behavior made people angry at the “weak” tsar and further undermined the autocratic power. Orlando Figes, the author of the best brief account of the 1917 chaos, stressed that the condemnation of the Russian court as “German” and “corrupt,” which opened a door to the abdication of the tsar, served to justify the revolution as a patriotic act.45 On the heels of this nationalistic upsurge, there emerged a social discontent and mass disgust with the war. Bolsheviks, who were the only political force in the country to fully exploit the unfolding chaos, were at first a tiny group of radical revolutionaries. In St. Petersburg, the major hub of revolutionary activities, they numbered fewer than 500 people.46 Yet, in 1917, their number skyrocketed because other political parties both on the left and on the right either defended the unpopular war or were reluctant to condemn it. When in February of 1917 workers in Petrograd (in the heat of the anti-German patriotic hysteria, St. Petersburg received a Russian-sounding name) went on strike protesting the war, local peasant soldiers joined them against the police. This was the beginning of the revolution, which at first dislodged the tsar and then, after a few months of chaos and anarchy, led to the Bolshevik takeover and dictatorship. Martin Malia, a prominent historian of the Red October and modern revolutions, wrote, “It was war that made possible the Bolshevik seizure of power; and it was war that would set the parameters within which the basic institutions of the new Soviet order would be built. The Party’s ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ thus was born in the world of War Communism. And this rough beast would be a hybrid of military communism and militant communism, in which each component fed on, and at the same time reinforced, the other.”47 Other warring countries (Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and Italy), where populations were similarly fed up with the war, too had to face social breakdown and the increasing radicalization of the left and the right. Overall, World War I became the crucible for the radical faction in socialism that constituted itself as the communist movement in 1919. The enforcers of the 1917 Bolshevik takeover viewed it as a scientifically justified act of political surgery and thought about themselves as righteous redeemers who were riding the wheel of history. The coup designed by Lenin and executed by Trotsky appeared as a social science in action—a truly “scientific revolution” that brought to closure the working of economic forces. In his memoir, Trotsky noted how in November 1917, after taking over power, Lenin was walking around being caught in a millenarian frenzy. Daydreaming, he kept repeating that they would surely have socialism in six months. Then, in February 1918, Lenin unfolded the blueprints of socialist construction: dictatorship of proletariat, nationalization of all banks and

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large-scale industry, abolishment of money, and the introduction of an inkind exchange between towns and villages. Calling these prescriptions “economically feasible,” he never thought about them as emergency or temporary measures. He was convinced that these schemes represented true socialism and, if fulfilled, would make it invincible both in Russia and worldwide.48 The sudden rise of the Bolsheviks caught most Western socialists by surprise. Although Lenin and his followers denounced them as traitors to the Marx cause, mainstream social democrats did not know how exactly to react to this emerging radical millenarian sect within their ranks. As a result, the Western left could not come to an agreement whether to condemn or to endorse these kindred spirits who wanted to erect the same paradise on the earth only in a helter-skelter manner. After they proclaimed the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Bolsheviks immediately launched total nationalization, centralized planning, squashed market economy, curtailed the freedom of press, and built up a secret police apparatus. A few months later, they unleashed a Red Terror campaign against those on the right and on the left who spoke against their takeover. In combination, these mobilization and centralization schemes became known as War Communism. Still, as late as 1919, when the stories about the Bolshevik Red Terror became widely known to European audiences, Western socialist parties were wrestling with the issue of how to approach the Bolshevik experiment. To be fair, part of social democrats did condemn Lenin and his one-party dictatorship. Yet, the significant number of socialists called for a sympathetic treatment of their militant brethren. It is notable that a person who came to advocate this second approach was Karl Hjalmar Branting (1860–1925), the father of the benign Swedish model of socialism. Particularly, he suggested that all socialists welcome “violent revolutions in Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany” and fight against attempts of imperialist powers to topple them down. At the same time, he did condemn the “path of dictatorship that drew support only from one segment of proletarians.” Interestingly, Branting disapproved the path of dictatorship not out of his despise for the authoritarian rule but for tactical reasons. He pointed out that for socialists to introduce a dictatorship was the waste of “proletarian energy” for a useless civil war, which might open a door for the restitution of a reactionary regime. Eventually, the greater part of social democrats agreed with the Branting suggestion. The most severe condemnation of the Bolshevik takeover came not from the mainstream Western left but from Mensheviks, Bolsheviks’ moderate cousins, who were battling Lenin within the Russian social democratic party and who were well familiar with his totalitarian temptations. Still, many European socialists did not welcome the Menshevik outright denouncement of the Lenin regime as a reactionary dictatorship. Western social democrats hoped that the two factions of the same

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creed and with the same Marxist genetic links would somehow get together in the future.49 In fact, when in 1918, in Germany radical socialists rose in a violent uprising trying to replicate the Bolshevik experiment and seize power, to the very last moment, no mainstream left dared to confront the rascals, being reluctant to offend their comrades.50 In fact, in the 1920s, Western social democrats who assailed Lenin’s War Communism, still clung to the same mantra of a large centralized planning, nationalization, and all kinds of mobilization projects. For example, such socialist leaders as Kautsky, who publicly condemned the Bolshevik regime as terrorist, nevertheless, in various degrees, shared social engineering and mobilization approach to society—the attitude that was enhanced by the 1914–1918 warfare. The behavior of Otto Bauer, a charismatic leader of Austrian social democrats illustrated well that attitude. In 1919, mesmerized both by German mobilization practices that became known as War Socialism and by Bolshevik War Communism, he was all ready to nationalize the country’s economy that lay in ruins. Ludwig von Mises, an unrepentant free-market economist and Bauer’s classmate during their student years, happened to be working for the Austrian government at that time. Mises used all his persuasive skills to talk his socialist friend out of the contemplated nationalization. As a result, despite its tribulations, for a while, Austrian economy was able to stay alive. Still, feeling guilty about betraying what the contemporary left viewed as the correct way of ushering in the “bright future,” Bauer began having second thoughts about his act of heresy. Soon, overpowered by the guilt feelings, he severed all relations with Mises who “blinded” his eyes and cracked his political religion.51 This small example shows how deeply popular modernity practices, which were amplified during war years, became embedded into the socialism creed. Moreover, these practices became an article of faith that shaped the entire identity of the twentieth century left. STATE OF THE FUTURE: “WAR SOCIALISM” TO “WAR COMMUNISM,” 1914–1918 For the past twenty years, scholars began placing the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet experience within the general context of modern world history, showing that the Bolshevism was, as James Scott put it in his famous Seeing Like a State, an extreme manifestation of the high modernism drive toward social engineering.52 War enhanced this trend to an extreme. It is common knowledge that World War I legitimized martial policy prescriptions, which later the Bolsheviks, and, to a lesser degree, the rest of progressives assimilated into their economic and political doctrines. The sheer magnitude of war

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carnage, multimillion losses, and destruction led to the complete or partial breakdown of such Western institutions as constitution, rule of law, individual and economic freedom. The whole genre of doom and gloom pessimistic literature that flourished in the postwar period illuminated well that situation. By 1917, devastated Europeans, who were caught in the grips of poverty and hunger, had to deal with the following questions: “What does a nation do after it has lost a war that it identified as holy?” and “What does a country do after it has won such a conflict?”53 In the world where Christian god “died” in the carnage of the war and where intellectual elites were increasingly preaching materialism and science, emerging solutions were expected to be found by charismatic leaders in the realm of “positive science.” It was natural that such new secular creeds like Bolshevism and National Socialism, the most extreme reactions to modernity, spoke the language of ferocious anti-clerical and anti-constitutional rhetoric, imagining the future in terms of science, state, race, and class. The process of “disenchantment” accelerated by World War I empowered Bolshevism and other modern ideological creeds that came to “re-enchant” the world. Philip Jenkins, who explored how World War I contributed to this intellectual shift, wrote about the role of revolutionary Marxism in that context: “In the ensuing chaos, the Bolsheviks did much better job than the church in seizing on millenarian hopes and nightmares, and channeled them into social revolution.”54 They embedded into their secular practices the forms of old religious iconography and began to valorize revolutionary martyrdom, apocalyptic notions of a final battle between good and evil.55 Yet, Bolsheviks’ millenarianism was dressed in the secular garb of modern science. They assimilated the intellectual baggage of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx-Engels, yet again proving that the sacred continued to exist in the modern age in the form of “science worship.” Like other contemporary socialists, Bolsheviks scholar-bureaucrats peppered their omnipotent utopian projects with economic calculation and statistics. Ideologically charged “science” provided a justification for various social engineering schemes no matter how insane they could be. Incidentally, the Bolsheviks felt very much uncomfortable when their opponents were trolling Marxists as millenarians who turned “science” into religion. Thus, Nikolai Bukharin complained, “One of the most widespread forms of ideological class struggle against Marxism is its treatment as an eschatological doctrine, with all its accompaniments of chiliasm, of soteriology, of myth. All these analogies are playing with words. . . . Logically, Marxism is a scientific system, a scientific outlook and scientific practice, and for this reason alone cannot be stupidly ‘compared’ to the prophets of Judea, to the medieval Taborites, etc., with their corresponding eschatologies. It is utterly foolish to compare Marx’s scientific forecast to eschatological Utopia.”56

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From the very beginning, the eschatology of revolution was closely linked to the top-down nationalization schemes. According to the contemporary mainstream thinking, this was the only correct way of engineering “better” forms of the future. In addition to such ideological memes of Marxist “science” as “class,” “dictatorship of proletariat,” “socio-economic formation,” Bolsheviks canonized the concept of an omnipotent “plan.” The idea of the centralized plan that was to navigate all large and small aspects of human life was present in various socialist utopias and programs far prior to 1917. Much of that knowledge had come from the nineteenth-century social engineering mindset that had been dominant on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The “big is beautiful” mentality and the perception of socialism as a grand project of social engineering performed from above had been already taken for granted by the educated public in Europe since as early as the 1830s. Even such country as the United States with its unique tradition of individualism, which by chance had sprouted in the eastern part of North America since the 1600s, was not immune to that general trend. For example, by the turn of the 1900s, a bestselling utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898),57 who sang praises to centralized planning as the way to arrest capitalist “anarchy,” captivated the minds of American reading public and influenced the entire generation of U.S. progressives. Between the 1890s and 1914, more than 500,000 copies of the book were sold in addition to its numerous foreign editions. This signaled in which direction the intellectual mainstream was evolving. The novel’s major character, Julian West, a wealthy Bostonian, put himself into a hypnotic sleep. Then, after waking up in 2000, he was pleasantly surprised to see around an egalitarian utopia, where private property was eliminated, and where a state controlled entire industry and commerce. In the meantime, all citizens received from the governmental equal stipends irrespective of jobs they performed. Those few people who disagreed with that benevolent system were viewed as mentally ill and underwent treatment. In this society of total justice, there was no need for a representative government because all power was vested in the general-in-chief and technocrat-experts who possessed superior knowledge. The rest of the population was united in the industrial army of laborers. Note Bellamy’s martial jargon—a quarter of a century prior to World War I. In a special postscript to his novel, Bellamy stressed that, although the book was the work of fiction, he meant business and wanted to send society an important message. The writer explained that the portrait of the perfect society of the future he painted in the novel was in fact an educated forecast based on his analysis of the dominant trend of social evolution. Before writing Looking Backward, Bellamy, an offspring of a highly pious evangelical lineage, became captivated by both August Comte’s Religion of Humanity

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and the Social Gospel tradition—an activist trend of American Protestantism that glorified human potential and sought to morally perfect people’s life; the latter tradition was part of Christian socialism. As a result, Bellamy wrote a moral essay The Religion of Solidarity (1874), where he denounced his Calvinist family tradition and portrayed collectivism as a superior and sublime feeling in contrast to Protestant individualism that he linked to a moral degradation.58 The writer suggested that individuals would gain the true freedom only when they squashed their personal identity and embraced collective values. Bellamy concluded that the way to acquire such collective identity was to subordinate oneself to a state. Another interesting aspect of his message was that Bellamy generalized about his project of the bright future by using the expression “new nationalism” instead of socialism. Bellamy stressed that he purposely hid the socialist content of his utopia to not alienate those Americans who were not yet educated about the progressive ways of living. Moreover, when his numerous fans launched a campaign to plant self-governing socialist communes in various parts of the United States, he dismissed these local initiatives as false shots that only distracted the progressive populace from building a centralized network on a national scale. Eventually, the writer and his acolytes set up more than 160 Nationalist Clubs that heavily contributed to the rise of the progressivist movement fixated on establishing an efficient government and scientific management. This thought collective became one of the major spearheads of socialism in the United States at the turn of the 1900s.59 Similar Bellamy-like socialist schemes were popular in Europe between the 1890s and World War I. One of them was developed in 1898 by Karl Ballod (1964–1931) a Lutheran minister-turned economist who later heavily contributed to German War Socialism. His The State of Future (Der Zukunftsstaaat) became so popular as a manual for engineering centralized planned economy that it went through five editions in Germany and five in Russia/Soviet Russia.60 Jumping ahead, I want to stress that Lenin and his Bolshevik managers drew their first Soviet plan in 1923 by using Ballod’s blueprints.61 In fact, compared to Bellamy and other vague scientific utopias, this was the only one that outlined in detail how a state was to plan the production of all items from shoes and tobacco to meats and pencils. During World War I, Ballod joined the war rationing program in Germany. Masterminded by General Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) and politician Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), this program was able to effectively mobilize and allocate labor force, food, raw materials, and fuel, which allowed Germany to linger on until 1918. As an advisor to War Ministry, Ballod engineered the system of food ration cards. Although people scornfully nicknamed Ballod a “Schwerin professor” for adding pig’s fodder to human food rations, War Socialism

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did help Germany survive the food blockade that nevertheless killed about 400,000 people. Inspired by the success of these rationing methods, Rathenau and his associates continued them after the war.62 As Ludwig von Mises metaphorically remarked, “In the desert of the ration cards the seeds of communism are thriving.”63 Having explored German War Socialism and Ballod’s prescriptions, Lenin and his Bolsheviks used them as a “scientific” backup for their own central planning and rationing schemes. Although he spoke fondly of such utopias as New Atlantis of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Ballod argued that the major flaw of all previous socialist projects was the lack of solid science behind them. The basic idea Ballod tried to instill in the minds of contemporary and future political technocrats that they must plan economy and social life down to miniscule details. In his view, this was to dramatically increase the productivity of labor. Ballod kept up with the enthusiasm for centralization that was escalating during the war. In the first 1898 edition of his book, he called for guaranteeing jobs to all people capable of work. He also noted that for economy to become more productive, a state should introduce five to six years of mandatory labor draft for all boys and girls who completed high school. Yet, in the 1919 edition of The State of Future, Ballod already advocated mandatory labor for the entire workable population. The economist explained that his original rational for the right to work became irrelevant because, as a result of the war mobilization efforts German national consciousness became so “advanced” that it was ready to embrace mandatory labor. Yet, to be fair, Ballod spoke against any revolutions, advocating stealth socialism in the spirit of Bernstein. World War I further empowered and legitimized the existing martial and mobilization ethos. Randolph Bourne, one of those few contemporary leftists who were skeptical about the benevolent nature of a total state, uttered a prophetic phrase: “War is essentially the health of a state.”64 People like Ballod and Rathenau, who passionately advocated mobilization methods, acted as champions of socialism and nationalism.65 In his turn, explaining to the communist faithful how important warfare was for planting the seeds of socialism, Nikolai Bukharin stressed in 1919, “The war contributed to the centralization and organization of the capitalist economy. That which the syndicates, the banks, the trusts, and the combined undertakings, had not yet fully achieved, as speedily finished by State capitalism. It created a network out of all the organs regulating production and distribution. Thus, it prepared the ground even more fully than before for the time when the proletariat would be able to take the now centralized large-scale production into its own hands.”66 Many on the left, especially such radicals as the Bolsheviks, came to view the war-driven emergency measures as signature blueprints of socialism.

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NOTES 1. Gustav Mayer, “Lasalleana,” in Archiv für Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1 (1911): 196. 2. Thomas, A Socialist’s Faith, 23. 3. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 379. 4. S. F. Markham, A History of Socialism (London: Black, 1930), 86–93. 5. Norman and MacKenzie, The First Fabians, 66. 6. Markham, A History of Socialism, 65. 7. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 372. 8. Wilson, To the Finland Station, 235. 9. Gray, The Socialist Tradition, 335. 10. Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 31, https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/li​​ brary​​/omni​​poten​​t​-gov​​ernme​​nt​-ri​​se​-to​​tal​-s​​tat​e-​​and​-t​​otal-​​war. 11. Gray, The Socialist Tradition, 340–341. 12. Lorraine Boissoneault, “Bismarck Tried to End Socialism’s Grip-By Offering Government Healthcare,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 14, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.smi​​ thson​​ianma​​g​.com​​/hist​​ory​/b​​ismar​​ck​-tr​​ied​-e​​nd​-so​​ciali​​sms​-g​​rip​-o​​fferi​​ng​-go​​vernm​​e​nt​-h​​ ealth​​care-​​18096​​4064/​ 13. Tom G. Palmer, “Bismark’s Legacy,” in After the Welfare State, ed. Tom G. Palmer (Ottawa, IL: Jameson Books, 2012), 35. 14. Ibid. 15. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 270. 16. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, 152. 17. Wilson, To the Finland Station, 373. 18. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program (1875),” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​ archi​​ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/​1​​875​/g​​otha/​ 19. Wilson, To the Finland Station, 250. 20. Engels, Socialism. 21. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 371. 22. Burleigh, Earthly Powers, 265. 23. Ibid., 270. 24. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 377. 25. Ibid., 378. 26. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie) (London: Independent Labour Party, 1909). 27. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism, 149. 28. Ibid., 150–151. 29. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 383. 30. MacKenzie, The First Fabians, 16, 61. 31. Ibid., 46. 32. William Ebenstein, “Democratic Socialism and the Welfare State,” in Great Political Thinkers: Plato to the Present, ed. William Ebenstein (New York: Holt, 1969), 767–768.

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33. Bernard Shaw, The Unsocial Socialist [1887], https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​refer​​ ence/​​archi​​ve​/sh​​aw​/wo​​rks​/u​​nsoc​i​​al​/in​​dex​.h​​tm 34. MacKenzie, The First Fabians, 67. 35. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, 425. 36. Thomas, A Socialist’s Faith, 31. 37. Despite the voluminous Lenin Studies, the best user-friendly and popular account of Lenin’s life was produced by Polish writer Ferdynand Ossendowski, whose book was in fact the first comprehensive biography of the Bolshevik leader: Ferdynand Ossendowski, Lenin, God of the Godless (New York: Dutton, 1931). 38. Philip Quarles, “Lenin’s Family History According to the Soviet Union,” New York Public Radio, April 22, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.wny​​c​.org​​/stor​​y​/len​​ins​-f​​amily​​-hist​​ory​ -a​​ccord​​ing​​-s​​oviet​​-unio​​n/. 39. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men 384. 40. Slezkine, The House of Government, 36. 41. Quoted after Aleksandr Vatlin, Komintern: idei, resheniiaa, sudʹby (Moskva: Rosspen, 2009), 13. 42. Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 43. Orlado Figes, Revolutionary Russia (1891–1991): A History (New York: Picador, 2015), 60–61, 64. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. Ibid., 61. 46. Ibid., 66. 47. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 110. See also his posthumously published book that deals with the intellectual history of European revolutions, from the millenarian revolts in the late middle ages to the Bolshevik revolution: Malia, History’s Locomotives. 48. Landes, Heaven on Earth, 331. 49. Vatlin, Komintern: idei, resheniiaa, sudʹby, 50–51. 50. von Mises, Omnipotent Government, 195, 199–200. 51. Ludwig von Mises, Memoirs (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2009), 14–15. 52. Scott, Seeing Like a State. For more on the link between modernity and Soviet state practices, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Mark Edele, Stalinist Society, 1928– 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–220; Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses. 53. Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (San Francisco: Harper, 2014), 190–191. 54. Ibi., 200. 55. For more about the eschatological elements in the early Bolshevik creed, see David G. Rowley, Millenarian Bolshevism, 1900 to 1920 (New York and London: Garland, 1987); Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Halfin, From Darkness to Light; James Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War,” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (2015): 808–831.

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56. Bukharin, “Marx Teaching and Its Historical Importance,” 3, 6. 57. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (Boston, Ticknor, 1888). 58. Joseph Schiffman, “Edward Bellamy’s Religious Thought,” PMLA, 68, no. 4 (1953): 723–725. For a separate edition of this essay, see Edward Bellamy, The Religion of Solidarity (1874) (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Bookplate Company, 1940). On the Social Gospel movement and Christian socialism, see James Dombrowski, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). 59. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 46–47, 50, 63. 60. Karl Ballod, Produktion und Konsum im Sozialstaat (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1898; idem: Der Zukunftsstaaat: Produktion und Konsum in Sozialstatt (Stuttgart: Dietz, 1919). For the Soviet edition, see Gosudarstvo budushchego (Moskva: Izd. Vserossiiskogo tsentral’nogo Soiuza potrebitel’nykh obshchestv, 1920). 61. Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 139, 166. 62. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 98–100. 63. Mises, Omnipotent Government, 221. 64. Randolph Bourne, “The State [1918],” http:​/​/fai​​r​-use​​.org/​​rando​​lph​-b​​ourne​​/th​ e-​​state​/ 65. Mises, Omnipotent Government, 148. 66. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, 119–120.

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Prophecy of the World Revolution and Nationalist Temptations, 1917–1930s

Fighters for the world revolution, steer your gaze to the West. It is in the West where the fate of the world revolution is now decided. Through the corpse of white Poland there lies the path to the worldwide holocaust. Our bayonets will bring happiness and peace to the toiling humankind. Onward to the West! Onward to decisive battles and thundering victories. —Mikhail Tukhachesky, a commander of the Red Army addressing his troops (1920)1

The Bolsheviks, who viewed themselves as custodians of the radical Marxian creed, embraced the message of the dictatorship of the proletariat that European social democrats diluted and muted. In the chaotic environment of war-torn 1917 Russia, better than any other political force, the Bolsheviks learned how to capture the sentiments of people and speak the language of violence that became the new normal on the vast spaces of the former Russian Empire.2 For a brief while, Lenin’s Marxists scored highly in the eyes of masses (see Fig. 4.1) by terminating the unpopular war and riding a widespread animosity toward what masses of peasants, urban underclass, and their intellectual allies labeled as the “bourgeoisie.” The latter included not only well-to-do people but also middle-class professionals and frequently those who did not wear working class, peasant, or soldier garb and who were not speaking the language of the street.3 The 1917 Bolshevik takeover became the product of aggressive passions of the grassroots who were hardened and brutalized by the war. Along with the old regime and its elites, the urban and

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Figure 4.1  A Bolshevik Commissar Enlightens Russian Peasants about the 1917 Communist Revolution by Showing Them Trotsky’s Portrait. From a painting by Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov (1922). Source: Courtesy of Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov paintings, 24001.005, Hoover Institution Archives.

peasant underclass wiped out many traits of European civilization that had begun to penetrate the Russian Empire since the 1700s.4 Once in power, the Bolsheviks launched a set of measures that became known as War Communism and that lasted until 1921. These included the total nationalization of industry and finances, abolishment of all parties except the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries (who were ditched a year later), food rationing, and the confiscation of grain from peasants. Most important, the Lenin regime immediately cracked down on free press and established the Cheka (secret police). The latter launched a campaign of arrests and summary executions of people who belonged to the classes of “oppressors.” Known as the Red Terror, this practice was easy to normalize amid war-time brutalities. In fact, the Bolshevik terror that aimed to “disinfect” the country from the oppressive classes of the “former people”5 only amplified modern “scientific” practices that had already present in the socialist thought by the early 1900s. That social cleansing approach manifested itself in an often-quoted utterance by Martin Latsis, a radical Latvian expat and one of the early heads of the Soviet secret police. In November of 1918, he instructed his agents on how to deal with potential class enemies, “We are not waging a war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or

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word against Soviet power. The first questions that your ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and the essence of the Red Terror.”6 As a country with a weak civic tradition and that was also devastated by war and saturated in violence, the former Russian Empire had little political options except either to accept the Bolshevik dictatorship with its class warfare or to move toward some type of an authoritarian Russian nationalist regime. Because of the multiethnic nature of the empire, the latter was out of question. To be exact, Bolsheviks did not need to seize the power. In the conditions of the total chaos and collapse of all institutions, they simply picked it up when no one else would.7 The summer 1917 attempt of right-wing monarchist general Lavr Kornilov to dislodge the impotent socialist-leaning provisional government prompted its head Alexander Kerensky to turn to Bolsheviks for help. By arming their paramilitary Red Guards and using the radical left to arrest the unfolding right-wing coup, Kerensky signed a death warrant to his own regime. The rest of the story is already widely known. With Lenin as their theoretician and with Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) being responsible for logistics, the Bolsheviks easily took over in October of 1917. Ten years later, their ideological machine enshrined this coup as the Great October Socialist Revolution. “RED JESUITS”: BOLSHEVIK DREAMS OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION, 1917–1923 In contrast to other political forces, the Bolsheviks were the only party that consistently opposed World War I, which most of the empire’s population came to hate by 1917. The weak semi-socialist provisional government, which presided over the country for several months in 1917, pledged to continue the unpopular war. It also refused to endorse land seizures peasants started as early as the spring of 1917. All this alienated soldiers and peasants who began viewing the provisional government as too bourgeois. That is why most of them were indifferent to its fate when the Bolsheviks came to dislodge it. With their slogan to turn imperialist World War I into a war of the poor against the rich, Lenin’s regime began to channel war-time anger into a civil war of the “red” underdogs against the privileged “white.” Bolsheviks expected to extend this mortal fight to Europe and beyond. They assumed that the spark of the socialist revolution ignited in the former Russian Empire would soon turn into a world-wide revolutionary holocaust that would phase out classes they defined as alien and oppressive. Bolsheviks gambled on waking up the consciousness of the industrial workers in the West and inciting

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them against their national “bourgeoise.” Originally, in their millenarian vision, Lenin, Trotsky, and their associates naively believed that they would be spearheading this world revolution by relying on volunteer Red Guard units. Yet, having quickly realized that the proletarian “chosen ones” were not too eager to flock to man their revolutionary force, Bolsheviks had to resort to the old system of a military draft, eventually creating a four-million army that they glued by the discipline of terror. According to Lenin and his comrades, the Russian revolution was at first to spread to Germany, the cradle of the organized socialist movement and advanced proletariat, and then to the rest of Europe. Eventually, the revolution was to expand further to the west and east, bringing to life the world-wide socialist commonwealth of Soviet republics. The name of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that the Bolshevik government attached to the territory they were able to hold together in 1922 after the collapse of the Russian Empire was not accidental. This union was considered an open project that was to absorb new Soviet states both in Old and New Worlds. Unfortunately for the radical cosmopolitans, the war and the breakdown of the Russian, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman, and the Quin empires did not lead to the feast of international brotherhood of people. Instead, the world saw the revival of ethnic tribalism. As soon as the empires began to disintegrate, potent ethno-national and ethno-religious movements came to fill the power vacuum. Bolsheviks and their radical left allies in other countries at first did not want to see this. Captivated by their own prophecy of a class struggle, they viewed the 1917 coup as the first step toward the global commonwealth of toiling classes that would transcend national borders. They experienced a true millenarian fever, believing that they were the vanguard of the social forces predestined by natural laws of history to take the humankind to the radiant future.8 Several events beyond Russian borders boosted utopian expectations of Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades. In 1918–1920, groups of pro-Bolshevik leftists were able to briefly take over in Hungary and Finland. Radical socialists also attempted revolutionary coups in Germany in 1918, 1919, and 1920. Moscow interpreted all those events as the signs of the coming global revolutionary Armageddon that Bolsheviks needed to harness. Seeing that many German workers did not display enough revolutionary zeal, in October 1918, Lenin stressed, “Let use all our efforts to speed up the German revolution. There is no other choice.” Karl Radek, a Marxist polyglot-adventurist, who was shining in the early days of Bolshevism, added, “Until European [revolutionary] movement get enough experience, we will give them our officers. Masses are all now in the mood. Like a vulture, they instinctively feel the coming revolution.”9 Bolsheviks expected to stretch out a helping hand to

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the German revolution by going through Poland in order, as Bolshevik newspaper Northern Commune put it, “to build a bridge connecting the Russian soviets to the proletariat of Germany and Austria.” In July 1920, the Red Army was marching fast forward toward Warsaw. There was a conviction that, as soon as the Red Army entered the Polish territory, Polish “toiling masses” would join the Bolsheviks against their indigenous bourgeoisie. In fact, Lenin’s expectations regarding Poland were so high that he viewed the crusade into Poland as a done business. In July 1920, in his cable to Stalin, who was to ideologically supervise the military campaign to Warsaw, Lenin wrote, “Zinoviev, Bukharin and I think that we need to promote a revolution in Italy without a further delay. My personal opinion is that to do this we need to Sovietize Hungary and possibly also Czechoslovakia and Romania.”10 To be fair, Bolsheviks had a legitimate excuse to advance against Poland. The latter took advantage of the chaos and anarchy of the Russian Civil War by invading Ukraine and Belorussia and claiming these territories as her own. This occupation defied local aspirations for self-determination. Bolsheviks took advantage of this and succeeded in driving the Poles away from those areas. Yet, as soon as it entered the ethnic Polish territory, the Red Army experienced a grand fiasco. To the surprise of the “world revolutionaries,” the poorly staffed and equipped Polish army not only was able to block the advancement of the Red troops but it also defeated and rolled them back.11 Humiliated, Lenin had to sign a peace treaty with the Poles in 1921, recognizing their ethnic territory and statehood. It was clear that, as committed Marxist internationalists, Bolsheviks underestimated the power of popular nationalism, which once again overrode class loyalties. Instead of revolting against their own bourgeoisie, Polish toiling masses joined it in a common fight against the Red Army, which the Poles viewed as Russian imperialists. As there was no Polish proletariat to turn to during the 1920 military campaign, the Red Army had to rely on allies among the local Jewish diaspora, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians that had their ethnic grudges against the Poles. Mikhail Tukhachesky (1893–1937), a military officer who embraced Bolshevism and who led the crusade into Poland, revealed a millenarian excitement he felt about the prospects of the coming global revolution. In his brochure War of Classes, which represented the rendition of Lenin and Trotsky utterances, the red commander salivated at the revolutionary conquest of the world and the projected global republic of the Soviets. Despite the debacle of the Bolshevik attempt to carry the world revolution on Red Army’s bayonets into Poland and further into Germany, the commander never questioned that utopia. Instead, Tukhachevsky ascribed the Soviet blunder in Poland to the lack of communication among Red Army units: “The revolution from outside was possible. Capitalist Europe was shaken to its core, and, if it had not been for our strategic mistakes and our military

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failures, the Polish campaign could have linked the October Revolution to the western European revolution.”12 At that time, Poland was headed by general Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), who too was a socialist. Yet, witnessing ethnic revival in his country during the last days of the Russian Empire, he was captivated by that “call of the wild” and wholeheartedly embraced his indigenous nationalism—a development that resembled very much the political evolution of Benito Mussolini and many other national liberation leaders later in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1918, addressing his old socialist friends, Piłsudski commented on this shift in a metaphorical manner: “Comrades, I took the red tram of socialism to the stop called Independence, and that’s where I got off.”13 This Polish “national socialist” general, commenting on the Tukhachevsky’s brochure, noted that, in contrast to the Red Army, which had to divert significant forces to fight against “white” anti-Bolshevik “class enemies,” in his native Poland Piłsudski never had to think about the safety of his backyard, counting both on Polish workers and peasants as his indigenous stronghold.14 As [see the reference] if to support Piłsudski’s utterance about the power of identitarian sentiments, many among former “white” Russian officers, whom the Bolsheviks had squashed a few months earlier during the civil war, turned around and joined the Red Army crusade against Poland because they came to view the Bolshevik ideological adventure as a Russian ethnic enterprise.15 By the sheer logic of events, still preaching the centrality of class and class warfare, the Bolsheviks were too being sucked into emerging nationalism. Thus, fighting against the “white,” a motley crowd of anti-Bolshevik interests from monarchists to socialists, the Red appealed to people of central Russia to get together to defend their “socialist fatherland.” Although phrased according to the classical Marxist class warfare blueprint, on the ground, this call acquired clear anti-foreign and anti-European notions. A half-hearted military support Western nation provided to the “white” allowed the Bolsheviks to position themselves as patriots who were fighting against the foreign invasion. Although the forces of nationalism crashed the Bolshevik cavalier attack on European capitalism, the Red did not give up on their revolutionary utopia. Instead, they blamed the failure of the socialist revolution in Europe on the treacherous behavior of their social-democratic colleagues whom they held responsible for catering to the interests of the bourgeoisie. To separate themselves from the revisionist left, who avoided revolutionary violence and who gambled on stealth socialism, in 1919, Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) to the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and simultaneously launched their own Communist International. This was the formal birth of communism as a movement and simultaneously the great schism in the world of socialism.

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FROM THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL TO SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY, 1919–1929 The apostolic commitment of the Bolsheviks to the world-wide class warfare did resonate with some disgruntled radical elements in Europe and beyond. Amid the war-induced destruction and impoverishment, Bolshevik call for the world-wide revolution appealed to those who were looking for scapegoats among social and class aliens rather than among ethnic “others.” Still, Moscow could not sway most of the world labor to their side. By 1928, in Europe, only 580,000 workers followed Bolshevik message of transnational liberation. In contrast, “revisionist” social democrats and socialists enjoyed the support of 6,630,000 workers.16 To boost the cause of the global revolution, Lenin and his comrades jump-started their own Communist or Third International (Comintern for short)—an alliance of radical socialists who expected to continue Marx’s First International radical project; the Second (social-democratic) International was denounced as a treacherous “socialfascist” force. To institutionalize a revolutionary activism, Bolsheviks developed 21 Comintern disciplinary rules of Comintern for communists in other countries to follow. The first and foremost among them was a blind loyalty to the Moscow center, the cradle of world revolution. Communist parties, which were set up in various countries were treated as cells of the Third International. Comintern functioned as a world-wide underground organization directed by the Bolsheviks who carried keys to “supreme” Marxist knowledge. In their organization and activities communist parties cloned totalitarian practices adopted by Bolsheviks within the Soviet Union.17 The task of these cells was to act as semi-legal community organizers (see Fig. 4.2) ready to perform acts of sabotage and lead mass protests in case of a social, economic, and political turmoil. Essentially, Comintern represented a secret order that worked to foment a revolutionary unrest in various parts of the globe and bring the Moscow-trained cadre to power.18 Acting as secular equivalents of Jesuits, Comintern agents were a cosmopolitan bunch recruited from diverse ethnic backgrounds. What united them was a blind commitment to “papal” orders issued from Moscow. Just as Jesuits, upon circumstances, these agents could play the roles of financiers, spies, propaganda workers, and judges. Inside the Soviet Union, Comintern agents lived in downtown Moscow in the hotel Lux that was heavily insulated from the rest of the Soviet population. Much of oral and written communication among these “Red Jesuits” was conducted in German—an international mode of socialist communication at that time. Once admitted into the ranks of Comintern’s agents, individuals could not simply leave that organization in case later they changed their minds. Working for that international communist “order” required a life-long

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Figure 4.2  Marxist-Leninist Young Pioneer Summer Camp in Wisconsin (1929) Sponsored by the Communist International. Source: Courtesy of Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo.

commitment. In a mafia-style fashion, a person invited for this job was at first vetted and screened by various communist bosses, spies, and informers. If admitted, he or she quit worldly life and received a new name—a symbolic change of identity. From then on, the major loyalty of the inducted was only to the Soviet Union, the hub of the communist faith. Again, the admission into the ranks of Comintern agents strongly resembled the induction into various Catholic orders. It is symbolic that for a long time the secretary of the Comintern’s central executive committee was one Jules Humbert-Droz, an apostate Catholic priest who converted to Bolshevism.19 The Third International functionaries in various countries (Lenin referred to them as professional revolutionaries) represented an apparatus that was financed from Moscow through cash currency and jewelry smuggled by special agents. To perform smuggling operations, agents and their bosses had to excel in various tricks. Thus, one of Moscow-based Comintern apparatchiks requested a large supply of leather: “We need this leather for shoe bottoms, in which we are going to hide valuables, mainly precious stones.”20 From a conventional viewpoint, it might appear bizarre that such a dirt-poor country as the Soviet Union wasted her financial resources to finance the communist faithful all over the world. To understand the rationale behind these activities one needs to approach the Bolshevik version of Marxism, which later became

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known as Marxism-Leninism, as a transnational political religion with a strong millenarian zeal. One might grasp this millenarian spirit, which was especially potent in the early years of Bolshevism, by reading letters written by rank and file communist militants or regular “Rorschach” men and women who were caught into the frenzy of the Bolshevik “great awakening.” For example, certain Benjamin Israel, a 24-year-old Russian Jew from a provincial town of Orel, wrote to Stalin in 1920, “The European bourgeoisie now goes through its mortal convulsions. Send me to London and give me a squadron of the Chechens. Give me a sword made of the Tula steel and inscribe on it ‘Communism or Death’. In London, I will be speaking with a rabbi in my ancient Hebrew language, and I will ask him if those Judas are ready to surrender their factories and industrial plants to workers. And if they are not, I will be doing what comrade Peters did in Leningrad, which is terror, the red terror.”21 A Bolshevik of a Russian extract, who too addressed his letter to Stalin, inquired, “I ask the party to give me permission to commit a terrorist act either in China or Bulgaria.” Another Bolshevik of the same ethnic background asked a permission to go to Germany to behead Karl Kautsky, a prominent social-democratic leader who denounced the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky regime as a reactionary dictatorship. Although these utterances were extreme manifestations of the millenarian communism, they do convey the general martial spirit that captivated the radical left who drew their inspiration from the 1917 coup and who lived in the expectation of the coming world-wide revolutionary Armageddon.22 The debacle in Poland and diminishing chances to stir a revolutionary turmoil in Germany forced Bolsheviks to correct their globalist plans. For a while, they turned their attention to the East in the hope to build up alliances with colonial peoples in Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist areas of Asia. Yet, in this part of the word, the “Red” did not make any advances whatsoever except Mongolia. Populated mostly by pre-literate Tibetan Buddhist nomads, that country was easy to take over but hard to fit into the framework of the Marxist class-based theology. Mongolia had neither proletarians nor even peasants for that matter. The way out was found in the following theoretical twist: nomads were recast by Moscow Marxists into the surrogate peasantry, whereas junior lama-priests, who provided an educated cadre for the Mongol People Revolutionary Party, were declared a proletariat-like class that was oppressed by senior lamas. For the premodern colonial periphery in Asia and beyond, Comintern theoreticians coined a concept of a transitional “bourgeois-democratic” stage. They assumed that during this transitional period, under the leadership of a socialism-friendly party guided by Comintern, premodern colonial countries would construct industrial base that would gradually “breed” the working

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class to serve as the future basis of a socialist regime. This was a creative twist Bolsheviks gave to traditional Marxism that had preached that it was to be the economic base (with fully developed capitalism and proletariat) that was expected to create economic prerequisites for socialism, not vice versa. Operating in semi-backward Russia populated by illiterate peasant majority, Bolsheviks came to argue that there was nothing wrong with the revolutionary “baby” to be born prematurely. This “socialist baby” could be nourished to its industrial maturity under the guidance of a vanguard party that would supervise the creation of industry and the proletariat to fill in the missing economic basis. The subsequent fixation of the Soviet regime on a rapid industrialization pursued simultaneously two important practical and ideological goals: the modernization of backward Soviet Union and the creation of economic basis for socialism. In fact, it was impossible to disentangle these two tasks. In the minds of Bolsheviks, socialism and modernization were equivalent to each other. Eventually, this evolved into a project of building Soviet Union as a mighty military-industrial power to serve as a future hub of the world revolution. After the debacle of Comintern efforts to ignite the world-wide revolutionary holocaust, this strategy appealed to the conservative element in the party, which became focused on defending the “socialist fatherland.” Bolsheviks did not give up on their original globalist dream. They simply put it on a backburner, hoping to return to this project when Soviet Union became powerful enough to squash Western countries. In the meantime, the first country of socialism was to be nourished, defended, and empowered to withstand surrounding capitalist nations. The Soviet Union was declared the “sacred space” for all working-class people of the world. The latter were expected to safeguard this sprout of the future egalitarian commonwealth.23 By the 1930s, Comintern cells, the spearheads of the world revolution, gradually came to serve the national interests of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, they began to provide cadre for the Soviet foreign intelligence. This explains why between the 1920s and the 1950s, many left-leaning Western idealists became entangled in the Soviet espionage network, catering to the interests of the utopia in power. With their global cosmopolitan dreams being muted, by the end of the 1920s, the Bolshevik project was acquiring nationalist features. After the death of Lenin in 1924, in an ensuing struggle for power, Stalin increasingly positioned himself as the advocate of interests of newly minted Russian and non-Russian indigenous communist bureaucrats. The European-educated cosmopolitan segment, which was represented by diaspora revolutionaries from Poland, Baltic areas, and the former Jewish Pale, was gradually marginalized and squeezed out from the party. The purge of Trotsky and “Trotskyites” that began in earnest in 1927 was the manifestation of

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this indigenization of the Bolshevik revolution. Attacking cosmopolitan Trotsky, who advocated world revolution, Stalin insisted that socialism could be built in one country without the support of the Western proletariat. Overall, with his socialism in one country message, Stalin sounded more realistic because backward Russia, which was devastated by World War I and the Civil War, did not have resources to embark on a communist crusade abroad. The slogan of socialism in one country also resonated well with the sentiments of communist apparatchiks who were upset about the debacle of the world revolution project but who at the same time wanted to believe that the cause was still alive and well. Stalin signaled party bureaucrats and activists that they should stay optimistic because the victory of socialism in the Soviet Union would be a prelude to its future world-wide triumph.24 The very logic of their locally grounded revolution pushed the Bolsheviks toward revolutionary nationalism. In the Soviet one-party state, the communist bureaucracy quickly became the major source of power. As the general secretary, Stalin, who was entrusted by Lenin to manage the party apparatus, helped consolidate this class of people into a monolithic oligarchy by introducing the so-called nomenklatura (nomenclature) system in 1923. The dictatorship singled out thousands of top ideological, military, state, and secret police positions to be filled by the members of the party who were entitled to special perks, privileges, and exemptions.25 The nomenklatura was not subjected to regular court proceedings. They had at their disposal a car with a personal driver, their families shopped in special stores, and their children went to special schools. George Orwell famously satirized the nomenklatura class in his classic Animal Farm (1944). In this fairy tale, the “vanguard” party of pigs leads the revolution of oppressed animals against oppressive humans. Then, after a successful takeover, the “vanguard” turns into elite custodians of the new animal justice regime, preaching a slogan that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”26 In 1937, referring to the party vanguard in martial terms, Stalin described its composition as follows, “Our party, in terms of its leadership strata, has about 3,000–4,000 top leaders. I would say that they are our party’s generals. Then there are about 30,000–40,000 middle-level leaders. They are our party’s officer corps. Then there are about 100,000–150,000 low-level party commanders. They are, so to speak, our party’s noncommissioned officers.”27 Having set the Bolshevik totalitarian machine in motion, Lenin later came to lament that this allegedly noble experiment in working class– based governance was turning into a bureaucratic nightmare. Yet, driven by Marxist theology, he surmised that through the further injection of the proletarian element into the top ranks of the communist party and government

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the Bolsheviks would be able to arrest the escalating bureaucratization of the Soviet regime. Lenin assumed that, by the sheer power of their inherent socialist spirit, the proletarian “noble savages” would somehow ennoble and revitalize the whole Bolshevik project. The efforts to instill the top echelons of the Bolsheviks with the fresh working-class “blood” in fact further increased the party bureaucracy. It certainly never dawned on Lenin and his comrades that the root of their problem was the one-party totalitarian state that they held in high esteem. “OUR OWN PEOPLE”: MAKING OF JEWISH SOCIALIST IDENTITY By the end of the 1920s, the abovementioned ideological conflict between the Trotsky faction and Stalinists over the possibility of building socialism in one country somewhat acquired ethno-ideological traits. The message of socialism in one country clearly did not appeal to those who linked their identity to the Bolshevik internationalism and world revolution—the slogan that had been originally professed by both Lenin, Trotsky, and the like. Eventually, an intellectual and cultural gap was widening between the cosmopolitan Bolsheviks, and new indigenous Slavic, Georgian, and Central Asian cadre cultivated by Stalin. By the sheer fact of their diaspora links to Europe and beyond, the “cosmopolitans” were keen to go on with the word revolution project. Isaac Deutscher, a minor left celebrity in the 1960s and the author of the classic three-volume biography of Trotsky, stressed that Jewish cadre played a large role in the opposition to Stalin. In contrast, there were fewer Jewish apparatchiks and activists among Stalin’s supporters. By 1929, with the ascent of the Stalin faction, the internationalist element (Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev) was gradually removed from top positions in the Politburo (seven to eleven top Bolsheviks who ruled the country). Since the late 1930s, Jews were never able to raise so high at the exception of one Stalin’s loyal executioner named Lazar Kaganovich who became a Politburo member. Karl Radek shared with Stalin’s secretary an anecdote: “Comrade Bazhanov, do you know the difference between Stalin and Moses? You don’t know? Moses got the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin got them out of the Politburo.”28 On the surface, the ideological clash between the proponents of the world revolution and those favoring socialism in one country did not reveal any ethnic notions. Moreover, at some point, Stalin had a special party statement issued that explained to the party cadre: “We fight against Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not because they are Jews but because they are oppositionists.”29 Trotsky and his supporters treated this disclaimer as a devious trick

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of the “Oriental despot” to indirectly point to the rest of the party bureaucracy that the Jews did dominate the internationalist opposition. The changes in the party leadership reflected the general social and ethnic shift among the Bolsheviks. Boris Bazhanov (1900–1982), who worked as Stalin’s secretary in the 1920s, stressed that, with the admission and promotion of indigenous worker and peasant activists primarily of a Slavic origin, the diaspora cosmopolitan element in top echelons and among mid-level apparatchiks shrank. Overseeing the selection of the party nomenklatura, Stalin steered this ethno-social process, gradually squeezing out internationalists. The sentiments of the new semi-educated party cadre, who came to replace “cosmopolitans” and who were provincial in their world view, resonated well with Stalin’s own mindset. Unlike Trotsky, Lenin, Radek and the like, Stalin was parochial, hardly traveled abroad, and did not know languages. The greater abroad appeared to him intimidating and alien. Unlike Bolsheviks-internationalists, who spent much of their lives as emigres in the West, Stalin did not view the Soviet Union exclusively as the base for world communism. In contrast, to Trotsky and the like, the very thought that the Soviet Union would be able on her own to build and maintain socialism was absurd. Deeply grounded in Marxist internationalism, Trotsky could not comprehend how the very idea of socialism in one country had emerged in the first place. As late as the 1930s, already in exile, he was still puzzled: “Where did these angry attacks on the Marxism idea of permanent revolution come from? What is a source of this national self-glorification come from that promises to build one’s own socialism? What groups of society are drawn to this gross reactionary vulgarity?”30 Since Trotsky was the first to openly challenge Stalin’s project of socialism in one country, officially the bureaucratic crusade against the diaspora Bolsheviks turned into an ideological campaign against the so-called Trotskyites.31 The executor of the 1917 October coup already sensed that this campaign acquired anti-Semitic undertones. It was coming not only from above but also from crude low-level newly minted communists. For example, certain Ivan Rusak, an aspiring village communist activist, explained to his comrades the “essence” of the debate between Stalin and his opponents as follows: “Trotsky began his sectarian policies long time ago. Trotsky cannot be a communist. His very nationality says that he has a taste for trade speculation. At one point, Zinoviev restrained Trotsky, but it looks like now they became buddies. They are mistaken about Russian spirit. Russian workers and peasants are not going to follow these nepmen (dealers and wheelers).”32 To Western communists and fellow travelers, who were not familiar with the subtext of this factional struggle, the whole Stalin-Trotsky debate appeared as an exclusively ideological clash.

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The visible presence of Jewish revolutionaries among socialism leaders and spokespeople especially in Russia, Germany, and the United States prompted the host of anecdotal and scholarly speculations.33 As early as 1913, Lenin himself stressed, “The great world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews among the population).”34 Conspiratorial minds of “white” émigré Russian writers and the European right in the interwar period came up with the theory of a world-wide Jewish communist cabal that hijacked Russia and aimed to subdue the rest of the world. In fact, several European events in the wake of the Bolshevik coup seemed to have proved their point. The 1919 short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, which was led by Jewish revolutionaries and the 1920 abortive Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was headed by a GermanJewish anarchist, and finally the 1920 Bolshevik campaign against Poland in an attempt to advance the world revolution fueled the existing fears. Later, in the 1980s, German historian Ernest Nolte suggested that Hitler’s national socialist movement had in fact sprung up as a self-defense against the international expansion of Bolshevism.35 The fears of the Russian “white” and the European right were a mirror reflection of the left-wing equally conspiratorial conviction that world’s social and political troubles originated from the machinations of capitalist moguls and banksters who totally controlled world economy and kept oppressed masses in bondage. Not infrequently, the class and ethnic animosity conflated with each other like in the case of interwar Germany. In that country, which had a strong socialist tradition, the Jewish conspiracy meme became a major building block for the national socialist ideology that crusaded against both “Jewish communism” and “Jewish capitalism.” The topic of Jews and socialism is heavily infested with ideological taboos, exaggerations, and omissions. As a veteran New Left sociologist of a JewishAmerican extract Harold Bershady noted, the very discussion of a possible link between the Jewish tradition and Jewish leftist activism was something that his fellow progressive co-ethnics always avoided talking about.36 Based on existing literature, one can single out two chief factors that might have prompted progressive Jews to embrace the left cause: their marginalized position in European society and their indigenous tradition that was loaded with strong aspiration for social justice and messianism. There is no need to expand on the marginalized position of the Jews, especially in the Russian Empire where they were confined to the administrative reservation called The Pale. Under these circumstances, socialism with its strong internationalist message (workers have no fatherland) clearly represented a way out—a convenient ethno-ideological survival and assimilation venue. Yet we step

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on a shaky ground when we begin to look for socialism’s prerequisites in Jewish culture since cultural tradition is notoriously hard thing to pin down. Although culture does condition human behavior, people nevertheless remain individuals who can make their personal choices that frequently transgress their cultural settings. Still, several authors who wrote on this topic stressed that the focus on social justice and messianism in traditional Judaism prompted a greater public activism. It appears that the presence of these two sentiments later drove many secularized Jews in the direction of socialism. In his classic To the Finland Station (1940), which was the first popular history of socialism, literary scholar and writer Edmund Wilson was among the first to portray Karl Marx as a modern version of an ancient Hebrew prophet.37 More recently, sociologist Adam Weisberger, who devoted the whole study to the topic of “Jewish ethics” and the “spirit of socialism,” stressed, “Socialism was a continuation of Jewish ethical conduct in a secular form.”38 The latter sounded almost as a literal rendition of an earlier utterance made by Leon Blume, a one-time socialist head of France in the 1930s. In 1919, he remarked that revolutionary socialism was a modern form of “the ancient spirit of the Jewish race.”39 In this secularized vision, the messiah became a socialist party and Jews, as the chosen people, turned into the proletariat. Present-day American sociologist Bershady, who completely agree with such assessments, elaborated by stressing that Marxism for modern Jews became the secular manifestation of their ancient prophecy. For secularized Jews, the salvation that was to be delivered by the materialist wheel of history represented a perfect exit from traditional Jewish messianism through the matrix of this very tradition. Psychoanalyzing himself and his comrades, Bershady, a baby boomer veteran of the American New Left, speculated on how it might have worked for him personally and his co-ethnics who fell for Marxism. The scholar stressed that from his parents and relatives he had absorbed the themes of Jews being both victims and simultaneously the redeemers of the world from oppression. Later, when he grew up, Bershady was able to link these two narratives to the role of the proletariat as both the victim and simultaneously the redeemer of the world from capitalism: “The Jews had a universal God; the proletariat was a universal class. The proletariat was, so to speak, the Jews writ large. Victimization became a much more inclusive category.”40 Another American sociologist, Will Herberg, himself a former communist, similarly pointed out that the secularization of Judaism’s messianic impulse made many modern Jews susceptible to socialism. Yet, Herberg added to it an important corrective. He noted that, rather than being an exclusively Jewish spiritual enterprise, prophetic messianism along with the concept of the “chosen people” was equally present in Judaism’s later offshoot—the Christian tradition. Accordingly, Herberg defined Marxism as secularized

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trait of Jewish-Christian messianism.41 Indeed, it would be more appropriate to discuss socialism in relation to the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole— the approach I have taken in this book. World War I phased out Russian, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman empires and led to the resurgence of local nationalisms. In the former Russian Empire, with the ascent of the Bolshevik regime, which in its early stage preached internationalism, the old segregation of the Jews in the Pale area was gone. Moreover, before Stalin cracked down on diaspora revolutionaries in the 1930s, many new opportunities were open for the Jews and other diaspora people within the new communist state apparatus. Thus, in 1919, Trotsky noted that the Latvians and Jews constituted a vast percentage of those employed in the secret police.42 Prior to 1917, such “cosmopolitans” were not allowed to enter any government positions because of their ethnic origin. On the contrary, after 1917, in the early Soviet Union, the regime considered the Jews “clean” and not compromised by the work for the tsarist regime. Hence, their influx into the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy.43 The Bolshevik revolution, which completely dislodged and wiped out the old Russian-German ruling elite and middle class, faced the lack of a skilled cadre. The diaspora segments, mostly of a Jewish, Latvian, and Polish origin were active in the 1917 revolution and also had a higher literacy level in contrast to surrounding Russian and Ukrainian illiterate peasant masses. For this reason, in the early Soviet Union, the mobilized diasporas of Jews, Latvians, and Poles44 originally served as an essential human resource from which the new regime drew cadre for its military, economic, ideological, diplomatic, and secret intelligence bureaucracy. Amid the chaos and anarchy of the civil war years, when “white” counterrevolutionary forces preached die-hard antiSemitism, it was natural for many Jews who remained in Russia to gravitate to the “Red” side, using opportunities the state opened for them. Later, Lenin himself recognized the role the educated Russian Jews played for the Bolshevik regime when it was struggling for its survival between 1918 and 1921: “We owe to this resource of literate and efficient officials our successful seizure and mastering of the state apparatus.” In addition to acknowledging the role of ethnic Latvian riflemen who helped to safeguard the infant revolution, Lenin stressed that, when the old imperial state apparatus was sabotaging the Bolshevik dictatorship, the “Jewish elements came to fill in.”45 In the early Soviet regime, many educated and highly motivated Jews, entered the communist elite. For example, at the end of the 1920s, four out of eight chiefs (the so-called collegium) of the Soviet secret police came from the former Jewish Pale, which is explained by the high educational requirements for such positions. Due to their numerous kinship connections, diaspora people could freely operate in Eastern and Central Europe. As such, they were in high demand in the Bolshevik diplomatic service and foreign

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intelligence. A former Jewish resident of Warsaw or Galicia could easily speak Polish, Russian, and German, in addition to his or her native Yiddish. Many of these early recruits into the Bolshevik secret police were educated in heder (Jewish elementary religious schools), or had some secondary school education, or received university training either in Europe or in Russia. In the early 1920s, many progressive Jews of Eastern and Central Europe idealized Soviet Russia as the cosmopolitan paradise. These sentiments were amplified when they had to face Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Austrian, and other local nationalisms that flourished in the wake of World War I. Moreover, the presence among the top early Bolshevik elite several prominent Jews inspired their left-leaning kin both in Europe and beyond, giving progressive Jews a sense of empowerment. For example, in 1923, German-Jewish communist Julian Gumperz, one of the founders and chief spearheads of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, happened to visit Soviet Russia, a pilgrimage that he treated as a sacred ideological enterprise. In Moscow, he witnessed a military parade headed by Leon Trotsky whose personality literally mesmerized him: “Hours and hours Trotzky stood there like an iron giant. Not anymore the little Jew, but an iron giant. That is what the revolution does to people, it elevates them even physically!”46 Hede Massing (see Fig. 4.3), a Soviet military intelligence agent of an Austrian-Jewish extract and his one-time wife, stressed that such emotional connection resonated with her better than the dry and clerical approach to socialism on the part of her former husband Gerhart Eisler, a top apparatchik in the German communist party who grew up in a JewishLutheran family. In Hungary, a contemporary progressive Jewish observer exclaimed, “The revolutionary flame which has burned beneath the surface of world history is now blazing up for the first time in a Jewish genius. Leo Trotsky! It is blazing with a high god-like force that shames every earlier revolutionary craving and consciousness.”47 Despite attempts of many Jews to anchor themselves in the newly shaped Eastern European nations, the latter offered little or no room for them. The Eastern European Jewish diaspora had a very hard time, trying to survive among local nationalisms that sought to identify themselves in biological and racial terms.48 Except immigration to North America and Argentina, there were a few options available: moving to the land of their ancestors (Jewish nationalism or Zionism), partaking of building international and egalitarian commonwealth (socialism and communism) or a combination of both (the so-called socialist Zionism). Haunted by lingering anti-Semitism and apprehensive of rising nationalisms of their neighbors, diaspora Jews became a powerful recruitment resource both for the early Bolshevik apparatus and socialist movement in general.49 To a large segment of well-rounded Jews, the cosmopolitan message of communism with its class solidarity and a

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Figure 4.3  Hede Massing (1900–1981), a German-Jewish Communist Bohemian, Participant of the Early Frankfurt School, and Agent of the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), 1920s. Source: Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

utopian vision of a “nationless” paradise without anti-Semitism appealed more that parochial Zionism. Alfred Sherman, a UK communist of a Russian-Jewish extract who later shifted gears and became one of the brains behind the Margaret Thatcher “neoliberal” revolution in the 1980s, remembered, “In the 1930s, the Jews of England were viewed as aliens. World proletariat offered us a safe heaven.”50 This was even more relevant for those diaspora people who resided in Eastern Europe where anti-Semitism was stronger than in refined England or France. Elizabeth Poretsky, a cosmopolitan Bolshevik foreign intelligence operative who in 1937 defected to the West along with her “Trotskyite” colleague and husband Ignass Reiss, wrote about Jews who joined the Polish communist

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movement, “Many young Jewish intellectuals were attracted to a [communist] party which, whatever its other goals, also fought anti-Semitism. It represented a heaven where they could, although in great danger, think freely and join a society which did not discriminate against them.”51 Party members of a Polish origin used to joke that they were the only true communists as they were not in need of a comradely heaven, but could, if they wished, get back to their indigenous society.52 Exploring the appeal of communism to progressive Jews in interwar Poland, historian Jaff Schatz later confirmed such anecdotal evidence, stressing that it was the rampant Polish anti-Semitism that helped shift many progressive Jews toward communism. Moreover, evolutionary psychologist Kevin McDonald took his thesis further, arguing that the widespread sympathy of the Jewish diaspora to socialism represented an unconscious biopolitical strategy of a group survival in the hostile environment.53 Simultaneously, for many Eastern European Jews who were less assimilated than their Western European kin, communism as well as socialism in general served as a countercultural rebellion against traditional Judaism and provided a way to get assimilated into wider society. A good example of such behavior is Arnold Deutsch (1903–1942), a Comintern agent of an Austrian extract who eventually entered the Soviet spy apparatus; he became famous for recruiting and running several young members of the British “limousine left” elite (the so-called Cambridge Five). Amid the slaughterhouse of Stalin’s Great Terror, in his 1938 autobiography that he formatted in a confessional mode for his Soviet secret police bosses, Deutsch wrote, “My father was a religious Jew who tried to mold me by force into the same type of person as himself. He wanted to accomplish this mostly by beating me. Divisive conflicts between me and my father emerged as a result of my political activities, which aroused my father’s anger and hatred. However, my mother defended and helped me in my pursuits. In the beginning of 1929, I left my parents, and since then, I maintained relations with them only because of my attachment to the mother.”54 In the early 1900s, in Germany and Russia, Poland, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, many secularized Jews experienced double marginalization. On the one hand, they completely disentangled themselves from Jewish communities. Yet, on the other hand, they remained alien to surrounding indigenous communities that refused to fully accept them. Deutscher metaphorically described this segment of people as “non-Jewish Jews.” Many of them built their entire identity around the expectation of international egalitarian commonwealth without borders and ethnic differences.55 The best example of such personality is Trotsky. Answering a question if he considered himself a Russian or a Jew, Trotsky famously replied, “Neither, I am a social democrat.”56 Another good example is Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), one of two leaders of the radical wing of German social democrats who died

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during an abortive communist revolt in 1919. She grew up in the Polish part of the former Russian Empire, absorbing Polish as her spoken language. At the same time, her intellectual background and education were German, whereas her political activism revolved at first around Russian-Polish issues and then shifted to Germany. Luxemburg and the like literally felt they were citizens of the world. Throughout her life, this cosmopolitan radical socialist not only avoided talking about Jewish issues but she also purposely ignored them, considering this a trivial matter in contrast to the great cause of a class struggle. In 1917, Luxemburg confronted her Jewish friend who came to solicit her help on some anti-Semitism issue. Furious Luxemburg dismissed her with the following words: “Why do you come to me with your special Jewish sorrows. I feel just as sorry for the wretched Indian victims of Putumayo, the negroes in South Africa. I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.”57 Writing about European Jewish diaspora, such scholars as Jeff Schatz, André Gerrits and Adam Weisberger pointed out that for those Eastern European Jews who chose to go socialist and communist, it was not only an act of assimilation but also very much an act of exchanging one form of identity for another.58 Despite the existence of such die-hard cosmopolitan radicals as Luxemburg and Trotsky, for many Jews social and ethnic concerns in fact intertwined, which not infrequently manifested itself in a simultaneous loyalty to both socialism and Zionism. That was the source of popularity of groups that blended nationalism and socialism in the Eastern European and North American diaspora as well as in Palestine in the 1910s–1940s. The largest among them were Jewish Bund (socialism and ethnic autonomy for diaspora Jews) and Poale Zion or Socialist Zionism (moving to Palestine and building there a socialist utopia for the Jews). Frequently, the level of Jewish involvement into a particular brand of the socialist movement depended on a degree of assimilation. Obviously, people of the Bernstein, Luxemburg, and Trotsky caliber, who were heavily assimilated, gravitated more toward social democracy or communism with their cosmopolitan message, whereas those who were still grounded in their communities and ethnic causes, partook of various brands of socialist Zionism. In the first five decades of the past century, for many Jews of the Eastern European extract, socialism and communism became an integral part of their secular identity that they carried into their UK, North America, and Argentinian diasporas. The afore-mentioned New Left sociologist Bershady, who grew up in a family with strong Marxist and pro-Soviet sympathies, wrote about his 1960s’ fellow comrades, “Almost the first thing many of the radicals themselves noted in their fleeting and often discounted self-reflections is that virtually every one of them was a first

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or just-barely-second-generation descent of immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe.”59 David Horowitz (1939–), currently one of the prominent conservative intellectuals in the United States, remembered how he had been literally indoctrinated by his Jewish immigrant parents in the political religion of Marxism-Leninism. This ethno-ideological niche represented an insulated subculture, whose members viewed themselves as the “chosen people,” for whom the rest of America was a hostile environment to be weary of. This ideologically loaded subculture replicated in a new secular garb much of the parochial Eastern European Yiddish tradition that had been weary of hostile outsiders. Horowitz described well the whole milieu in which he spent his early years (1940s–1950s), and which reeked of religious fundamentalism: “What my parents had done in joining the Communist Party and moving to Sunnyside [a New York neighborhood] was to return to the ghetto. There was the same shared private language, the same hermetically sealed universe, the same dual posture revealing one face to the outer world and another to the tribe. More importantly, there was the same conviction of being marked for persecution and specially ordained, the sense of superiority toward the stronger and more numerous goyim60 outside.”61 The famous case of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs, two Cold War Soviet spies, who martyred themselves for the communist cause and who were executed for atomic espionage (1953), is a sad example of the people who fully absorbed that parochial world of the “observant” radical left commonwealth and made it into their identity. In the first half of the past century, for a large segment of the 2-million Yiddish-speaking Eastern European diaspora in North America, socialism did become an integral part of their modern cultural baggage. This meant that a Jewish immigrant could go to synagogue, be a part of a mutual-aid socialist society, and read a popular newspaper in Yiddish that was simultaneously a socialist newspaper.62 Despite their ideological bickering, various East Coast and Chicago-based left groups such as communists, Trotskyites, Lovestenites, Marxists-Humanists, socialist Zionists and the like represented a community where people shared the same identity, which included socialism as part of their cultural baggage. In the 1910s–1950s, in New York and other large cities, radical left elements culturally dominated Jewish communities to such a great degree that one could not encounter in any other ethnic immigrant group of the United States. They considered such radicalism as part of their Jewishness.63 Before this subculture was diluted and washed away by further assimilation, it produced a plethora of left celebrities who still shine in U.S. politics, culture, and humanities. Such deceased or aged luminaries of the American left as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Todd Gitlin, and Eric Foner are the examples of that passing ethno-ideological milieu.

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NOTES 1. Mikhail Tukhachesky, Voina klassov [Class War]. Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1921 2. Ryan, “The Sacralization of Violence,” 808–831. 3. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 4. Baberowski, Scorched Earth, 33. 5. This was a generic label Bolsheviks used to refer to classes of people they singled out as alien and unfit to exist in future communist society—the most advanced stage of human evolution. Along with aristocrats, the bourgeoise (bankers, manufacturers, merchants), and clergy, the regime later lumped into this group well-to-do peasants (kulaks). 6. Baberowski, Scorched Earth, 46. 7. Jan Class Behrends, “A Laboratory of Modern Politics: The Russian Revolution and its International Legacy,” in Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and its Aftermath from a Global Perspective, ed. Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2017), 85. 8. Dmitrii Travin, Vladimir Gelman, and Andrei Zaostrovtsev, Rossiiski put’: idei, interesy, instituty, illuzii [The Russian Way: Ideas, Interests, Institutions, Illusions],” (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet, 2017), 79. 9. Vatlin, Komintern, 35–36. 10. Pons, The Global Revolution, 19–20. 11. Adam Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe (London: Harper, 2008). 12. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, “Pokhod za Vislu,” in Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Józef Piłsudski, Pokhod za Vislu (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 63. 13. Prit Buttar, The Splintered Empires: The Eastern Front 1917–1921 (Oxford, UK and New York: Osprey, 2017), 415. 14. Józef Piłsudski, “Voina 1920 goda,” in Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Jozef Piłsudski, Pokhod za Vislu (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 266–268. 15. M. Lechik, “Afterword,” in Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Jozef Piłsudski, Pokhod za Vislu (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 290–291. 16. Vatlin, Komintern, 199. 17. Andrew Sobanet, Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 9. 18. Vatlin, Komintern, 41. 19. Ibid., 326. 20. Ibid., 70. 21. Travin, Gelman, and Zaostrovtsev, Rossiiski put’, 82. 22. Ibid., 83. 23. Anatoly M. Khazanov, “Marxism-Leninism as a Secular Religion,” in The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics, ed. Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett, and John Tortorice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 123. 24. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1981), vol. 3: 24.

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25. For more about this system, see Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). 26. George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story [1945] (New York: Signet Classic, 1996), 126. 27. Joseph Stalin, “Iz rechi na fevral’sko-martovskom plenume TsKA VKP (b), March 3, 1937, [An Exrept from the Speech at the February-March Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks)],” Voprosy istorii, 1995, no. 3 (1995): 13–14, Stalin Digital Archive, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sta​​lindi​​gital​​archi​​ve​.co​​m​/fro​​ ntend​​/​node​​/1352​​44 28. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, ed. David W. Doyle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 146. 29. Quoted after Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​ xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/tr​​otsky​​/1937​​/02​​/t​​herm.​​htm 30. Yuri Emelianov, Trotsky: mif i lichnost [Trotsky: Myth and Personality] (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 424. 31. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, 145–146. 32. Emelianov, Trotsky: mif i lichnost, 425. 33. One of the most comprehensive writings on this topic is Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 34. Vladimir Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question [1913],” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), vol. 20, 26. 35. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987). 36. Harold J. Bershady, When Marx Mattered: An Intellectual Odyssey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014), xii. 37. Wilson, To the Finland Station. 38. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethics and the Spirit of Socialism, 15. Will Herberg noted that one should not forget that traditional Jewish messianic impulses, which underwent secularization, were later channeled themselves not only in socialism but also in Zionism. Will Herberg, “Socialism, Zionism and the Messianic Passion,” in From Marxism to Judaism: Collected Essays of Will Herberg, ed. David G. Dalin (New York: Markus Weiner, 1989), 110–128. 39. Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of Jews (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 426. 40. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 25. 41. Herberg, “Socialism, Zionism and the Messianic Passion,” 119. 42. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 444. 43. Alain Blum and Martine Mespoulet, L’Anarchie bureaucratique: statistique et pouvoir sous Staline (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 2003), 169. 44. The expression “mobilized diaspora” was introduced by political scientist John Armstrong for the description of the Baltic Germans who, prior to 1917, served the Russian Empire as her diplomatic and cultural intermediary abroad. John A. Armstrong, “Mobilized Diaspora in Tsarist Russia: The Case of the Baltic Germans,” in Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices, ed. Jeremy R. Azrael (New York: Praeger, 1978), 63–100.

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45. Quoted after N. Dimanshtein, Lenin o evreiskom voprose [Lenin on Jewish Question] (Kharkov: Proletarii, 1924), 17–18. For more about the participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and the Civil War, see Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 105–203; Oleg Budnitskii, ed., Evrei i russkaia revoliutsiia: materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow and Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1999); Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 423–455. 46. Hede Massing, This Deception (New York: Duel, Sloan, and Pearce, 1951), 45–46. 47. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 446. 48. Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of the Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 163. 49. Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 173–180. 50. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 63. 51. Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of Ignace Reiss and his Friends (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 35. 52. Ibid. 53. Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in TwentiethCentury Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 50–104. 54. Oleg Tsarev, “Krestnii otets Kembridzskoi piaterki [The Godfather of the Cambridge Five],” Krasnaya Zvezda, May 22, 2004, http:​/​/old​​.reds​​tar​.r​​u​/200​​4​/05/​​22​ _05​​​/5​_02​​.html​ 55. Isaac Deutscher, Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 56. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 446. 57. Weisberger, The Jewish Ethics and the Spirit of Socialism, 97. 58. Schatz, The Generation; André Gerrits, The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 39–40; Weisberger, The Jewish Ethics and the Spirit of Socialism. 59. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, ix. For example, by the late 1940s, much of membership the Communist Party USA depended on its Jewish base with 56% of its leaders being born either in Russia or Eastern Europe. Arthur Leibman, “The Ties That Bind: The Jewish Support for the Left in the United States,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 341. 60. A standard reference to non-Jews among traditional Jews. 61. Horowitz, Radical Son, 42. For another book of memoirs that explores the same ethno-ideological subculture, see Radosh, Commies. 62. Leibman, “The Ties That Bind,” 329. 63. Herberg, “Socialism, Zionism and the Messianic Passion,” 124.

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National Bolshevism Stalin’s Soviet Union (1929–1953)

For a brief while, Bolshevik communism revived the Marxian notion of the international oppressed workers’ brotherhood and gave a huge boost to the universalism of the socialist creed. This contrasted well with the “treacherous” behavior of European social democrats who supported their own national governments in World War I. Ronald Niebuhr, a famous progressive theologian and the proponent of evangelical social work (the so-called Social Gospel movement), even predicted that communism could eventually replace Christianity as the dominant universal religion of the industrial age.1 Indeed, in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Bolshevik message of universal salvation did appeal to radical workers and intellectuals who were discontent with Western civilization. In 1922, when the regime was inaugurated as the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), it was assumed that in the process of communism’s triumphant march across the globe, more countries would be joining the union as Soviet republics. Yet, that internationalism was short-lived. When, except Mongolia, the project of the world revolution did not move beyond the borders of the former Russian Empire, the regime began to ground itself within the remaining territory of the former Russian Empire. It all started with Stalin’s concept of building socialism in one country—a slogan that began to gradually chip away from Soviet internationalism. Quixotic cosmopolitan Trotskyites, who stubbornly insisted on the continuation of the original project of the world revolution, were doomed to lose to Stalinists who were more realistic in their expectations. Stalin sold the idea of socialism in one country as a tool of defending and empowering the Soviet Union—the first and only island of the “radiant future” on the globe. Moreover, the dictator reasonably suggested that the Bolsheviks simply did not have recourses to expand further the world 111

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revolution. This made a perfect sense to many party cadres who were more parochial and career oriented than their cosmopolitan and idealistic comrades. Despite the gradual nationalist mutation of the Stalinist regime, Bolshevism still carried on its sleeve the image of its original universalism. The radical left of the world and their sympathizers continued to consider the Soviet state as their spiritual Mecca—the center of the emerging utopia they all needed to defend as their own. Milking socialist internationalism allowed the Bolshevik dictatorship to harness moral and material resources of the global left and to use them to promote the national interests of the Soviet Union. Viewing itself as the first island of socialism in the sea of capitalism, the Soviet elite developed a paranoid fear of the surrounding countries that were treated as hostile forces. This was a large step toward nationalism that led in 1929 to the complete sealing of Soviet borders to insulate the utopia from the capitalist “infection.” The process of nationalization of the Bolshevik project was complete when in 1943 Stalin shut down the Communist International (Comintern) and began to massage patriotic ego of ethnic Russians. Ironically, this ideological drift proved a prediction issued by Hitler who, fully understanding the morbid power of national sentiments, stressed in 1934 that it would not be Germany going Bolshevik but Stalinist Russia going national socialist.2 To be fair, there was no way for Russo-centric nationalism to completely spread its wings within the Soviet Union because of the multiethnic nature of the Soviet empire (see Fig. 5.1). Hence, the lingering socialist internationalism in the official Soviet propaganda to the very end of the USSR in 1991. Despite the outbursts of medieval-like xenophobia in the late Stalin regime in 1949– 1952, for the Soviets “to go Hitler” was simply out of question. Overall, despite his socialism in one country project, Stalin remained a Marxist-Leninist ideologist who was committed to the project of the worldwide communist revolution. In fact, the signing of the notorious 1939 Nazi-Soviet neutrality pact, which led to the first wave of disillusionment in Stalinism among the cosmopolitan left, was motivated not only by the national interests of the Soviet Union but also by a long-term ideological goal to provoke conflicts among Western nations. Soviets assumed that, like during World War I, instigating the inter-capitalist warfare would weaken the world of capitalism and create a disarray, which would allow to railroad socialism beyond Soviet borders.3 Still, in the 1930s and the 1940s, the Soviet Union did gradually mutate from a country whose entire early identity had been tied to the world revolution to a state whose ideology represented a hybrid of traditional class-based Marxism and patriotic Soviet mythology peppered with traits of Russian nationalism. Following Mikhail Agursky and David Brandenberger, I call this schizophrenic mix that existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union National Bolshevism.4 This drift toward nationalism gradually grew out of the Bolshevik class warfare and paranoid concerns about security of the Soviet state.

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Figure 5.1  Stalin’s National Bolshevism: A Propaganda Poster Depicting the Soviet Multinational Empire Navigated by Stalin and Led by the Russian Core Ethnics, 1950. Source: Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

The first sparks of the Soviet identity politics were planted during the 1918–1921 Red Terror, when the regime sought to cleanse the country from the classes of the so-called former people (aristocrats, clergy, merchants, and imperial state officials). As a result, two million people escaped from Russia, thousands were executed, and those “former” ones who, along with their children, happened to remain were completely disenfranchised. Later, that policy was extended to kulaks (well-to-do peasants), who were too singled out as an enemy class at the turn of the 1930s. Targeting two million peasants as kulaks for forced exile, Bolshevik party activists piled children together with their parents on the assumption that class attributes were inherited and therefore must be completely rooted out.5 The class discrimination of kulak peasants and the suppression of the defeated members of alien classes were later, in the 1930s and the 1940s, supplemented by the exile and imprisonment of unreliable diaspora nationalities. In the 1930s–1940s, the Soviet Union saw the mass imprisonment, exile, and targeted executions of Finns, Germans, Greeks, Harbinians (Russian expats from China), Hungarians, Jews, Koreans, Poles, Trotskyites, and kulaks. A cursory look at these groups shows that originally it was not an ethnic animosity that drove this terror. It was rather a preventive suppression of the elements of whose loyalties the dictatorship was not certain. Still, this very same security concern notion opened a door to ethnic cleansing.

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Eventually, that ethno-ideological and class stigmatization became extended to the offspring of the “alien” groups. The offspring of “enemy” and “unreliable” lineages, from kulaks and priests to Poles, Germans, Jews, and Trotskyites, were doomed to remain at the bottom of a social and professional pyramid. Stalinist bureaucrats routinely used the abovementioned social and ethnic categories when they were making decisions about who should be hired, fired, promoted, and penalized. CANNIBALIZING THE COUNTRYSIDE: COLLECTIVIZATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION, 1929–1933 The first and foremost task of the Soviet regime was the industrialization of the country to turn it into a powerful modern state that would be able to withstand capitalist “predators.” Yet, there was also a long-term goal—to empower the first island of socialism to eventually rekindle the project of the world revolution that had been stalled in 1921. The question was where to get funds for industrialization. After 1917, the Bolsheviks confiscated gold reserves of the former Russian Empire (800 tons of gold) and looted valuable cultural objects (icons, pieces of art, and church relics) from major Russian museums. These were used to finance the import of factory and agricultural machinery, automobiles, and locomotives. But the amount of accumulated currency was still so meager that it was not enough to fund a full-fledged industrialization.6 By 1929, the Soviets almost depleted that reserve of hard currency. The only significant resource for export was grain. Yet, primitive subsistent peasant households could not deliver enough commercial produce. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks did give peasants limited economic incentives by terminating draconian grain confiscation. Under the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP) (1921–1929), peasants were permitted to sell part of their crops at an open market after delivering to the state a mandatory quota at a low price. This was a partial compromise with the elements of the hated private enterprise. At the same time, driven by an ideological fear that such ideological concession would eventually breed capitalism, the Bolsheviks crippled peasant households forbidding them to buy and sell land and hire more than three workers. The same NEP policies were applied to city areas, where private enterprise was limited to such small businesses as restaurants and workshops, which were heavily taxed. The commanding heights (foreign trade, banking, large industry, and entire political power) were in the hands of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Although NEP saved the Soviet Union from starvation, this

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state-controlled capitalism in the countryside and cities created an economic uncertainty and eventually led to stagnation.7 Steeped in the martial culture of the Civil War and accustomed to War Communism mobilization schemes, many hardened Bolsheviks never took the concession policy seriously. Nikolai Bukharin, one of a few Bolshevik leaders who did support NEP, viewed this policy as a gradual path toward communism. Yet, the greater part of party militants rejected this gradualist option.8 By 1928, because of the state restrictions that retarded the peasant subsistence agriculture, the Soviets faced a peculiar situation. Grain production increased, but its amount sold to the government for export decreased. As a result, Soviet grain exports fell from 2.18 million to 344,000 tons of grain (1926–1928).9 Peasants used all kinds of tricks and loopholes to avoid selling their produce to the government at artificially low prices, delivering instead their grain to open markets. In their rush to export all available grain, the Soviets ran out of supplies to feed cities. In an ironic twist, to somehow improve the food situation, the regime had to import 280,000 tons of grain from abroad. Bolsheviks began to feverishly look for an opportunity to extract more grain from peasants. Since, for ideological reasons, to further incentivize the countryside by expanding economic freedoms was out of question, the only venue was to extract the produce by force. This was the background for the infamous Stalin’s collectivization. Accustomed to look at the surrounding world through the eyes of a class warfare, Bolshevik militants needed a scapegoat to explain the declining exports. Instead of giving the peasants more economic incentives to produce grain, they started blaming kulaks for hiding the produce and sabotaging socialist modernization. Incidentally, enterprising kulaks (5% of the peasantry), who utilized the labor of family members, were responsible for producing 20% of the marketable grain. Stalin and the greater part of party activists saw a solution in the total collectivization of the countryside and issuing mandatory production quotas. The collectivization campaign, which was launched in 1929, locked peasants in their villages. Land strips worked by individual households, along with domestic animals, were socialized by the state, nominally becoming the property of collective farms. Communist party activists and secret police detachments were sent to peasant villages to ensure the extraction of assigned grain quotas. Stalin pointed out that the state was taking the agricultural wealth as a “tribute” to feed the Industrial Revolution in the Soviet Union. By forcing peasants into collective farms, the regime effectively turned them into state serfs, who were ascribed to their villages and forbidden to move around. In contrast to the population of cities and towns, from 1935 to 1974, Soviet peasants were not allowed to leave their collective farms and change their residency. Not many know that, until as late as 1974, they were denied a right to have internal passports,

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which were required for domestic traveling. The regime of the Stalinist collectivization became literally a second edition of serfdom that had been abolished in 1861. The Great Depression in the West (1929–1933) made things worse for the major agricultural areas of the USSR (southern Russia, southern Siberia, Ukraine, and North Caucasus) and indirectly contributed to the cannibalistic extractive methods of Stalinist collectivization. Declining prices of grain on international markets forced the Soviets to squeeze peasants harder to extract more produce to increase their grain exports to make up for the losses. In 1930, because of the Great Depression, plunging grain exports provided meager revenues that allowed to replenish only 60% of the projected amount of hard currency.10 To make up for these losses, the Soviets sought to squeeze more produce from the countryside, simultaneously collecting any marginal items to export. Thus, the state increased overseas sales of timber, flax, hemp, two, precious stones, caviar, lard, Siberian furs, vegetables and fruits, and, again, paintings from the Hermitage Museum. The Bolsheviks became so obsessed with locating additional salable goods that in the winter of the 1930s they resorted to killing stray dogs and cats to procure their furs for export. Unfortunately, fur prices too dropped during the depression. For example, the price of a Siberian ermine fell by 58%. This incentivized the government to extract more pelts from Siberian natives, hunters, and gathers, who were too rounded up into collective farms in 1936. During that time, the massacre of cats for their furs reached such grotesque proportions that authorities had to issue a stop order to regulate this slaughter to maintain the cat population.11 Boris Kagarlitsky, who examined in detail the link between the Bolshevik collectivization and the Great Depression, stressed that the Bolsheviks had not had any prearranged collectivization plan. In his view, the collectivization policy became a result of the chain of unfortunate events. The state at first introduced the emergency grain requisitions as a temporary test policy in the Ural area in 1928. A year later, the temporary martial solution became a permanent collectivization policy, which was later enshrined by the MarxistLeninist theology into a must policy on the way to the communist utopia. What Kagarlitsky, a Marxist sociologist, did not mention was the fact that, from the very beginning, Bolshevik ideology was predisposed to the centralized statist solution—the mainstream “progressive” conviction in the 1930s both in the East and the West. The collectivization campaign was not only about the desire of Bolsheviks to rapidly industrialize and modernize the country, but it was also about ideology. The collectivization scheme, as Stalin put it, was “to guarantee the socialist sector of the economy.”12 Typically, a secret policeman paired with an industrial worker went to a village to round up and force peasants into a collective farm. The secret police

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and military frequently cordoned all routes out of countryside so people could not escape with their grain supplies. The peasants were obligated to surrender their stock and primitive equipment to a collective farm, where they were required to work in exchange for meager in-kind payments in a form of produce. In each village, well-to-do peasants were singled out as kulaks to be stripped of their properties and exiled to special settlements in Arctic areas. Pitching poor villagers against their better-off neighbors (the divide and rule tactics) was the tool Bolsheviks used to ground themselves in the countryside where they had zero influence. On December 27, 1929, in his speech delivered to propaganda activists, Stalin announced his sinister policy of “eliminating the kulaks as a class.”13 In the agricultural areas of the Soviet Union, each region received a quota for kulaks to be expropriated and expelled. In a centralized planning manner, the regime also set up a kulak execution quota that reached 60,000 people. Party ideologists along with the secret police prepared guidelines about how to identify and detect a kulak—the Bolshevik equivalent of Maleuss Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches]. In those areas where peasants were poor and nobody could be qualified as a kulak, to deliver the required quota of the “oppressors” people had to draw a lot. Incidentally, it was the mass incarceration and exile of kulaks that gave rise to the notorious GULAG—the chain of labor concentration camps in remote Siberian and Central Asian areas of the Soviet Union. Overall, 1.8 million people who were classified as kulaks lost all their possessions and were confined to special settlements.14 Realizing that they would not be able to profit anymore from their labor and domestic animals, peasants responded by hiding their crops and killing their stock, which led to the overall decline in agricultural production and to a stock reduction. The state nevertheless was able to extract necessary grain quota to fund rapid industrialization. In 1930, when the countryside harvested 77.2 million tons of grain, the state exported 4.8 million tons. Next year, when, because of the collectivization turmoil, the production of grain dropped and when only 69.5 million tons were harvested, the exports increased to 5.2 million tons.15 The result of this extractive policy was a man-made famine that hit all agricultural areas of the Soviet Union. From 1929 to 1933, approximately six million people died from starvation in Ukraine, the Volga River area, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan.16 By 1932, the hunger drove 12 million people from the countryside to cities17—the first largest population movement in modern history since the Atlantic slave trade. At the same time, in 1934, facing the rapid decline of agricultural production, the Soviets made a small concession the peasants. Collective farms members were permitted to cultivate tiny garden plots next to their cabins. There they could plant whatever they wanted and sell it at peasant markets. These small gardens, which accounted for 3–4% of the cultivated land, yielded about 25% of the entire

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Soviet food production.18 This became the best litmus test regarding where peasants’ incentives really lay. In 1934, to dramatize his “success” story, Stalin declared that, between 1930 and 1933, the population of the Soviet Union increased from 160.5 million to 168 million. His estimate was based on the projected figures issued by Gosplan (the central planning bureau) that took into consideration the average population growth in the 1920s when the population was growing during the NEP limited economic liberalization.19 Yet, contrary to the optimistic predictions, the 1937 Soviet census showed a demographic drop in the amount of 8 million. This decline was a clear evidence of the lethal collectivization policy and the follow-up famine. Such killing statistics harmed the image of the regime. As a result, the entire group of statisticians was sentenced to long prison terms for spreading a “fascist lie” about deaths from hunger in the Soviet Union. A. Kraval, the chief of the statistical bureau, stood his ground, never admitted his guilt, and was executed.20 In 1939, authorities conducted a new census, which provided politically correct statistics that already showed a population growth. The intentional cannibalization of the countryside did allow the Bolsheviks to build up a powerful military-industrial complex in ten years. In 1931, the Soviet Union was the world’s largest importer of machinery: 50% of all world’s exports of machinery went to the Soviet Union.21 By 1940, because of industrialization, imports of machinery declined as the country began to produce its own. The Soviets now had its own aviation, automobile, and chemical industries. By the same year, the USSR possessed the largest army and military stockpile in the world, which, by the way, defied the later Stalinist myth that the Soviet Union was not well prepared for World War II. STALINIST SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND THE GREAT TERROR, 1934–1939 Prior to World War II, the “house” of communism was restricted to the Soviet Union. Promoting his regime as the sprout of socialism in need of international protection, Stalin effectively made socialist universalism to serve the national interests of the Soviet Union. In doing so, the Bolsheviks sucked much of the left oxygen worldwide, creating an impression that the Soviets worked to liberate the oppressed people of the world. In the meantime, by the 1930s, the Soviet ruling elite already developed a superiority complex, considering itself the trailblazer of the “future.” This attitude gradually evolved into socialist patriotism and later into xenophobia that was feeding on the popular conviction that Soviet Russia was endowed with a special worldwide mission to build the paradise on the earth. Soviet

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bureaucrats, low-level party activists, and part of the working class came to share this hubris. Stalin and his associates were paranoid about a potential subversion of their socialist project by foreign and domestic enemies. This fear drove the regime to close its borders, introduce internal passports system, and unleash attacks on the “Trotskyites”—cosmopolitan diaspora revolutionaries. Many propaganda workers were nevertheless confused by the regime’s ideological schizophrenia, when xenophobia toward selected ethnic groups coexisted with constant declarations of socialist internationalism and nationalities friendship. Historian Michael David-Fox, who explored cultural propaganda of Stalinism to abroad in 1930s, noted that the regime simultaneously milked both patriotic and cosmopolitan sentiments. A manifestation of this bizarre situation reached its peak with the Soviet involvement into the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). During that time, aggressive propaganda of socialist internationalism went hand in hand with the Soviet secret police crackdown on foreigners living in the country, the shutdown of cultural exchange organizations along with foreign travel. By the end of the 1930s, the greater part of foreign leftists, who arrived at the Soviet Union to partake of the building of the “radiant” communist future, were either executed or shipped to concentration camps. In the first eight months of 1937, when the paranoia about the “alien penetration” gained momentum, foreign tourist travel dropped by 65%.22 Soon ordinary citizens were afraid to approach or talk with foreigners on streets. Total spy mania reigned in the country. Even such minor events as a lecture of a British art historian had to be approved by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and by the secret police. Overall, the Bolshevik dictatorship was increasingly acquiring National Bolshevik features, resembling what in our days one can see in North Korea. In her memoirs (with a telling title Our Own People), Elizabeth Poretsky, a colleague and wife of a Soviet spy-defector Ignatius Reiss, vividly portrayed the 1937 suffocating animosity that was gradually growing around the multilingual foreign-born and diaspora elements in the Soviet military and secret police intelligence apparatus.23 Particularly, she referred to the tragic fate of a group of the leftist Jews who came from the same shtetl culture and who, driven by the internationalist message of early Bolshevism, joined the Soviet military intelligence apparatus. Poretsky also pointed to slowly rising provincial Slavic cadres who eventually replaced the purged and executed cosmopolitan element from all branches of Soviet intelligence. The appointment of semi-literal Russian Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 as Stalin’s new chief of the secret police to replace executed Genrikh Yagoda, a prerevolutionary Jewish socialist with an anarchist background, symbolized well that shift. Although a loyal Stalin’s

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henchmen and unscrupulous opportunist, Yagoda was not active enough to satisfy all paranoid fantasies of his boss regarding old Bolshevik cadres whom Stalin suddenly labeled as spies. By 1952, that xenophobic trend led to a strict requirement to hire neither the Jews nor foreign-born into the Soviet intelligence and high echelons of the officer corps. The class terror the regime unleashed earlier merged with ethnic terror against diaspora “aliens” in the communist and state bureaucracy. Stalin’s Politburo endorsed this hybrid practice during its 1937 February–March meeting, which signaled the beginning of the infamous Great Terror. International and diaspora links of both domestic Bolsheviks and foreign Comintern workers had been earlier treated as an asset. In the new paranoid environment, the same international links became a black mark that could serve as a “proof” of sinister foreign liaisons. Many participants of earlier clandestine Comintern schemes, who worked to fire up the world revolutionary holocaust, became sitting ducks.24 The greater part of this cosmopolitan community was literally wiped out by the secret police terror. At first, in the Soviet Union, nationality was a matter of a personal choice. Yet, since 1938, based either on a father’s or a mother’s ethnicity, it was to be written down into one’s internal passport. To be exact, the regime made a first step toward this ethno-political practice in 1934, when the secret police issued internal guidelines that classified diaspora ethnic groups by the level of their hostility toward the Soviet regime. The first, most dangerous category, included Germans, Koreans, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles. These elements were to be physically phased out from factories, army, secret police, government, and any leadership positions. The Jews, Armenians, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, and Ossetians represented a second group. They were simply a high alert category who were considered less dangerous. As such, they simply had to be watched out by the secret police apparatus.25 It is interesting to observe how the “socially dangerous” class and political categories such as kulaks and spies gradually acquired hereditary and ethnic features. At first, until the middle 1930s, the regime sorted the population into class and estate-like groups: workers, peasants, nobles, priests, merchants, civil servants. Yet, by 1939, these were complemented and diluted by ethnically “dangerous” categories. For example, when the secret police targeted Poles as a group for the first time, the formal goal was to weed out potential spies among them. Yet, in the process of the terror campaign, the spy stigma that attached to them was eventually extended to all ethnic Poles. Along with the Germans, Poles were the first ethnics to be executed or sent to concentration camps. In these cases, the Stalinist terror did not discriminate between communists and non-communists. During the “Polish operation” 140,000 Poles were arrested, of which 111,091 were executed. The “German operation” led to 41,898 being shot and about 13,000 being shipped to camps. In

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fact, local police could not meet issued German quotas. For this reason, they had to rearrest some Russian and Ukrainian peasants, who had been rounded up earlier as kulaks, and present them as Germans. National operations against Germans and Poles set a stage for an ethnic cleansing extended to other diaspora ethnics that included the Iranian Greeks, Koreans, Latvians, Finns, Estonians, and Chinese. During the national operations, almost 350,000 people were arrested and 247,157 of them were executed. Overall, the ethnic component of the Great Terror was responsible for one-third of all executions.26 The gradual shift of the Soviet regime toward ethnic xenophobia manifested itself in a school system and at workplace. On May 18, 1938, one M. Semenova, an ordinary female worker at a Moscow textile factory who came to share cosmopolitan ideas of early Bolshevism, wrote to Georgy Dimitrov, the head of Comintern, A week ago, my son came from school and said that all the boys are preparing a pogrom and will beat up all the other nations, the Poles, Latvians, Germans, because all their parents are spies. When I tried to find out who said this, one of the boys said that one boy’s brother was a Komsomol member and worked in the NKVD (secret police), and he added that soon all the foreign spies who lived in Moscow would be put on trial and their families and children at school would be beaten up as Yids were under the tsar. Today again I saw a group of women at our factory discussing the sign “Kill the Latvians, the Poles,” on the wall in the morning. It is a bad situation. I also wrote to com. Stalin, and other women suggested informing you too because one can hear this kind of talk every day.27

The xenophobic trend in Stalinism soon revealed its Russo-centric bent, which led to the rehabilitation of prerevolutionary heroes, some old cultural icons, and the Russian colonialism in eastern and western borderlands of the former empire.28 The regime began to peddle the Russians as the “senior brother” for all other nationalities in the Soviet Union. Official propaganda was also gradually abandoning the original goal of creating universal and nationless cosmopolitan “proletarian” culture. There was a return to Russian classics and Russo-centric vision of the country’s history.29 In contrast to the 1920s, when affirmative action measures were prevailing in the Soviet nationalities policy toward non-Russians, after 1937, such measures were partially curtailed. The regime simultaneously cracked down on local ethnic elites that had spread their wings. Instead, since 1938, it began to aggressively promote Russian language in both schools and colleges. The celebration of the 100-year birthday anniversary of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) was the peak of that Russian-Soviet nationalist trend. Pushkin, a romantic Russian poet, had been considered the major fountainhead of the

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Russian national literature. Although Stalin and the rest of the Bolshevik elite, which did remain cosmopolitan, never went full ahead in that Russocentric direction, on a popular level, the modest shift toward the Russian “soil” was met with a great enthusiasm among many Russians.30 Still, the multiethnic nature of the Soviet Union muted the movement in that direction. One of the ways to find a middle ground between socialist internationalism and local nationalism was the official cherry picking of ethnic folklores for their “progressive” sides that could be interpreted as proto-socialist. When such features were missing, they were invented and dressed in a local indigenous garb. Along with ethnic cleansing and cultural activities, the regime continued to profess a class-based approach. The Stalinist state developed an elaborate system of class classification, literally ascribing people to particular social estates.31 Officially, the regime claimed to be based on three progressive estatelike categories: the proletariat (industrial working class), peasants, and working intelligentsia. According to the Marxist-Leninist theology, on this grading scale, the first group occupied the privileged position with peasants being a junior partner. These two top groups served as the major human resource for the dictatorship’s cadre. Classes that were classified as former oppressors (merchants, nobles, priests, “white” officers, and kulaks) and their offspring were relegated to the category of the “former people” who were stripped of all rights. This Stalinist (worker-peasants-working intelligentsia) classification formally survived to the very end of the Soviet Union. With the proletariat being the “chosen people” who enjoyed various affirmative action perks, many among the Soviet populace sought to fake a working-class background and identity to get enrolled into colleges, receive job promotion, or secure membership in the communist party—the most lucrative career-booster niche. The overall result of the 1920s and the 1930s’ class affirmative action, which sought to accommodate “tailoring masses,” was the general decline of professional skills both in education, government services, and factories.32 A brutal proof that the class affirmative action policy remained the core approach of Stalin’s regime was the infamous Katyn massacre of the 14,765 Polish officers, nobles, and intellectuals in 1940. After Hitler and Stalin launched World War II in September of 1939 by invading and diving Poland, the Red Army captured about 230,000 Polish troops in the eastern part of the occupied country. Career Polish officers along with officers with priestly, noble, merchant, and government backgrounds were separated from the rest of the “common” masses of Polish soldiers with working class and farming backgrounds. While the latter were shipped to the Soviet Asia and Siberia to be later drafted into the Soviet-sponsored Polish people’s army, the officer elite was all massacred in the Katyn forest and surrounding areas. A Soviet

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officer who later defected to the West stressed that there was nothing special about that Katyn mass execution incident. Since by chance the Katyn massacre became the object of an international ploy was the reason this incident later became so widely known. German national socialists who invaded the Soviet Union stumbled upon that murder site and used it in their propaganda against the Soviets. Caught red-handed, the latter denied a responsibility until as later as 1990. In fact, what happened in Katyn was a routine operation of class cleansing that the Stalinist regime had practiced on a regular basis within the Soviet Union, where it was completed by the end of 1938. Since the eastern part of Poland was occupied by the Soviets in 1939, now it was the turn of the Polish “alien” classes to be cleansed and eradicated.33 Incidentally, Germany conducted the same massacre of the Polish administrative and intellectual elite. Yet, it was done from the vintage point of National Socialism: the eradication of the carriers of Polish culture and tradition. Much of the 1937–1938 paranoia that led to the Great Terror went back to the Spanish Civil War. Stalin was furious about rival anarchist and socialist groups that were either stealing his ideological thunder or refusing to bow down to the Soviet-controlled socialist government. Fearing the emergence of a similar “fifth column” inside the Soviet Union, the dictator sent a signal to all party members and ordinary people to report people who somehow directly or indirectly had been involved with dissident left activities. Hence, the obsession with real or imagined Trotskyites, which in fact was a miniscule group of idealistic cosmopolitans who hardly exercised any influence in the socialist movement. Yet, in a snowball manner, the terror against Trotskyites eventually acquired a life of its own and became extended to all diaspora “cosmopolitan” elements. Eventually, it began to hit indiscriminately everybody. The circle of “witches” and “heretics” widened, and soon the entire semiliterate Soviet society was caught in a hysterical fear of “foreign” intrusions and in the avalanche of mutual suspicions and accusations. To demonstrate their zeal and to gain rewards and promotion, secret police officers sought to overdo issued incarceration and execution quotas. Such bureaucratic behavior was a typical example of what Hannah Arendt famously labeled as the “banality of evil.”34 Several historians argued that the bloody purges were also the form of a cadre “mobility” under the communist dictatorship and the way to channel a social stress.35 Moreover, there was a “spiritual” aspect to the bloodbath organized by the Stalin regime. Just like medieval inquisition courts, before executing or incarcerating ideological heretics, secret officers sought to extract confessions from the accused, which was considered the highest form of evidence. Since all people deserved redemption, for the universalist church of communism, to leave the condemned unredeemed would be a mistake.36

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A person could be arrested for making a politically incorrect joke, sharing a political anecdote, using a piece of newspaper with portrait of Stalin as a toilet paper. People could be targeted for having a “wrong” occupation such as an interpreter or a tourist guide, who had to deal with foreigners, or for having a “wrong” hobby (stamp collectors who corresponded with other countries, fans of artificial international language Esperanto and the like). Moreover, people were afraid of making any contacts with arrested friends, colleagues, and relatives. Such communication with “counterrevolutionary” anti-Soviet heretics could be considered ideologically contagious.37 The supposedly benign socialist commonwealth was atomized to such an extent that spouses, parents, and children stopped trusting each other. Any form of individualism or attempts to somehow stick out immediately made a person a potential target for ideological accusations. The overall effect of the terror against kulak peasants, diaspora nationalities, “Trotskyites,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and other “alien” elements had a profound biosocial effect on Soviet society. In addition to 2 million people who escaped from the Bolshevik Russia after the 1917 revolution and millions of deaths during the 1918–1921 Civil War, from 1930 and 1938, over 3.8 million people were arrested for “counterrevolutionary crimes.” From 1937 to 1938, the peak of the Great Terror, 681,692 people were executed and 1.3 million were confined to concentration camps for political crimes.38 The terror “taught” people not to stick out and totally rely on governmental benevolence and welfare. It is essential to remember that this Stalinist natural selection was motivated not only by security concerns. It was also driven by the ideological goal of engineering a new type of the communist human being—a task that had been ingrained into the fabric of radical socialism from the beginning.39 As a result of that negative selection, with the most enterprising and creative elements being eradicated, confined to labor camps, or forced into exile, the regime was able to “breed” the new Soviet human being that was subservient and devoid of an initiative. Being Stalinized to its core, the ethos of submission and paternalism, which was cultivated in the Soviet society for three generations, survived to the present day. LATE STALINISM, 1940SC–1953SC World War II, which saw a natural rise of anti-German and patriotic feelings, became a huge boost for the Russian-Soviet nationalism.40 Russo-centric sentiments of the Soviet regime received further endorsement at the highest level. In May 1945, when Stalin was celebrating the Soviet victory over Germany, for the first time, he invited his court to drink to the health of the great Russian people. It is notable that by 1945, the dictator increasingly

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began to refer to his country as Russia rather than as the Soviet Union. Most important, the term “Soviet” lost much of its earlier internationalist meaning and, since the 1940s, it was increasingly used as a synonym for “Russian.” As a result, Soviet multiethnic experiences were cast as Russian ones.41 By 1949, the rise of patriotism escalated into a full-fledged xenophobia and anti-Western sentiments. Between 1949 and 1953, massaged by Stalin, these sentiments triggered another round of attacks against people with real or imagined internationalist links. This ideological crusade, which became known as a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” was focused on weeding out individuals with suspected pro-Western sympathies among intellectual and professional elite of the country. The campaign was relatively “vegetarian” if compared to the slaughterhouse of the 1930s’ Great Terror. Seeking to insulate the Soviet Union from Western cultural influences (“slavishness and servility to the West”) and simultaneously to celebrate all things Russian, the regime mostly resorted to the expulsion of “cosmopolitans” from their jobs. Showing an interest in Western culture, literature, cinema, music, and even science became an ideological liability. A symbolic act of this isolationism was the February 15, 1947, decree that made illegal marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners.42 Since all major cosmopolitan diaspora groups had been already phased out by the end of the 1940s, the only clear and present “danger” was the Jews. Soon the attacks against the “slavishness and servility to the West” acquired unspoken anti-Semitic features. In fact, Stalin was triggered by the spontaneous gathering of Moscow Jews who by thousands came to welcome Golda Meyerson, the first Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union. In 1947, Stalin spearheaded the creation of Israel, nourishing a wishful idea that with its anti-British sentiments and socialist tendencies, the Jewish community in Palestine would become a powerful Soviet-friendly counterbalance to Great Britain in the Middle East. The Red pharaoh and his secret police were utterly shocked to see the powerful manifestation of the ethnic solidarity of the Moscow Jews that was not endorsed by the government. This was a direct threat to the cultivated supranational Soviet identity.43 As “cosmopolitans” with potential diaspora links to their Western kin, many Jewish professionals were driven out of universities, research institutions, hospitals, and governmental bureaucracy, including those few who remained in the Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus. The orchestrated anticosmopolitan campaign involved the grassroots. A group of construction workers from the Leningrad city wrote to a popular nationwide newspaper, “We propose the removal of all Jews from work in the food industry, the trade network, and positions connected with supply, and that they all be sent to the coal mines. It is imperative to expropriate the dachas they have built and deport them from the big cities.”44

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In 1951, on Stalin’s orders, his secret police staged the sham “doctors plot.” It was a medieval-type “legal” case against a group of Jewish physicians who were blamed in conspiring to poison Soviet leaders.45 In December 1952, the dictator openly stated, “Every Jewish nationalist is an agent of the American intelligence. Jewish nationalists think that the U.S. (where you can become rich, bourgeois, and so on) saved their nation. They feel obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors are many Jewish-nationalists.”46 Fortunately, for the Soviet Jewry, eight months after the beginning of the campaign against “doctors-wreckers,” Stalin had a stroke and died. In his study of Stalin’s National Bolshevism, historian Brandenberger demonstrated that this “national socialist” line the regime injected into the body of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, came to resonate well with tribal instincts of the “common people.” He has quoted protest letters from “common people,” who wrote to Soviet newspapers, expressing their indignation that, after Stalin’s death, the campaign against the Jews was rolled back. One of these letters stressed, “You think that you will change our opinion about the Jews? No, it won’t work. In our eyes, the Jews were parasites and they remain that way. They push us Russians out of all cultural institutions.”47 Still, it would be wrong to assume that Stalin’s ethnic policies acquired Hitlerite features. Despite giving a green light to the attacks against “cosmopolitans,” the dictator was ambivalent about fully playing the anti-Jewish card. Again, the major stumbling block was the multiethnic nature of the Soviet empire and its elite. Despite its Russo-centric drift, the regime had to maintain internationalist features and placate somehow other nationalities by balancing ethnic attacks. This explains, for example, why, from 1945 to 1947, Soviet propaganda workers were ordered to mute their war-time fixation on Russia’s national past, including the celebration of selected imperial generals. Simultaneously, the regime unleashed a literal pogrom in national republics (especially in Ukraine and Kazakhstan), whose elites were accused for downplaying the leading role of the Russians in the Soviet Union.48 As a Marxist-Leninist ideologue, Stalin did not manifest ethnic preferences and, depending on circumstances, assaulted people of all nationalities, including his native Georgians. The schizophrenic desire to sit simultaneously on the chairs of international socialism and Russian nationalism explains another erratic step the regime attempted amid the 1949–1952 anti-Semitic campaign. In 1949–1950, Stalin prompted the secret police to manufacture the so-called Leningrad Case against Nikolai Voznesensky and Alexei Kuznetsov, highly placed Russian ethnic bureaucrats, and two thousand local party apparatchiks from their retinue. The first headed Gosplan, the central planning bureau of Soviet socialism, and the second was the secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The dictator incriminated them the fomenting of Russian

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chauvinism and contemplating a greater self-determination for the Russian Federation to undermine the Moscow center.49 Ordering to speed up the doctors’ case, Stalin simultaneously sought to slow down the tide of anti-Jewish sentiments that were quickly growing in media and the apparatus. At one point, the dictator even restrained zealous anti-cosmopolitans who were eager to recover and publicize the original Jewish names of various Soviet writers who had taken Russian-sounding last names: “It reeks of anti-Semitism.”50 POLITICAL RELIGION OF MARXISM-LENINISM By the 1950s, the ideology of the Soviet regime, which officially became known as Marxism-Leninism, represented a radical brand of socialism that was composed of the original Marxist creed that Lenin and Stalin assimilated to the Eurasian soil. Popularly known as communism, the Marxist-Leninist political religion penetrated all walks of Soviet life. Moreover, its memes and jargon later became internalized by millions not only inside the Soviet Union but also in China, Vietnam, France, and beyond.51 The demanding nature of communism put this brand of socialism into the same category of the creeds that required a total submission of their members. Scholars stressed that the original crusading zeal of communism very much resembled that of the mainstream Islam and medieval Christianity. Both aimed to reshape social life and establish world hegemony.52 Although the socialism in one country project indigenized Marxism, Bolsheviks and their descendants continued to view the spread of communism around the world as their ideological mission. As part of this communist “jihad,” as late as the 1980s, the Soviet Union continued to waste its scarce financial resources by sponsoring various communist groups and subcultures both in the West and the Third Word, although by that time, worldwide, Marxism-Leninism had already lost its former potency.53 From the 1930s to the 1980s, as a modern “scientific” faith, MarxismLeninism replaced or complemented formerly dominant Russian Orthodox Church and other denominations within the former Russian Empire.54 Media and art began to routinely produce Lenin’s images and statue with his arm stretched toward the future, which was a secular version of old biblical iconography that had depicted Moses in the same manner.55 Portraits of Lenin and Stalin in all public places effectivity replaced Orthodox icon screens that earlier had sampled the images of Christian saints. The portraits of the founders of the Soviet state and contemporary communist leaders were also treated as images of archangels that people carried around during the major ideological feasts (the First of May Day and the Bolshevik Revolution Day). In the 1920s, to speed up the transition of the peasant populace to the new political religion, Soviet propaganda workers argued that disposing of

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Orthodox icons resulted in miraculous cases of economic prosperity for local communities. The May Day and the Revolution Day were advertised as the perfect replacements for the Christmas and Easter. Although superimposed on society by the Bolsheviks, communist rites and iconography became assimilated by many people because, by 1917, Russian Orthodox Church, as an integral part of the hated imperial regime, had lost much of its former charisma. The center of the Marxist-Leninist religion was the Lenin Mausoleum on the Red Square with the embalmed corpus of Lenin on a public display to serve as the object of veneration for millions of Soviet and foreign devotees.56 Left pilgrims from various lands frequently recorded their extreme exaltation when they were facing the relics of the great communist saint. The project to make the mummified body of Lenin into the object of worship did not emerge out of the blue. It was done in response to demands from rank and file semiliterate party members who needed concrete Bolshevik objects as a replacement for Russian Orthodox, Catholic, and Buddhist relics of old. Stalin, who took an oath of loyalty to the Bolshevik cause in front of Lenin’s coffin, by this very act appropriated part of Lenin’s spiritual charisma. In contrast, Leon Trotsky, then the major contender to become St. Paul of the Marxist-Leninist church, lost much of his spiritual capital by going to a resort area to recuperate from illness during this important mortuary ritual. Lenin’s charisma was further transferred to Stalin and his Politburo, when they introduced a ritual of standing on the top of the marble-made mausoleum, welcoming masses on each important communist feast. The transfer of Lenin’s “medicine power” to Stalin was completed with the emergence of the Stalin’s cult. The first official biography of the “Red pope” was produced by French communist writer Henri Barbusse in 1935. The writer depicted Stalin as a superman who was endowed with magic powers and godlike characteristics: “If Stalin has faith in the masses, it is reciprocated. It is veritable religion that the New Russia holds for Stalin. He has saved. He will save.” Stalin, who was born of “thunder and lightning,” lived a life of a monk for the Marxist cause: “He had neither home, no family; he lived and thought exclusively for the Revolution.”57 That biography became the foundational text that triggered Stalin’s cult both in the Soviet Union and beyond. In fact, for Barbusse this project was a culmination of his “liberation” trilogy, where the first two volumes narrated the biography of Jesus Christ. The latter was portrayed as a carpenter-proletarian and a wholesome revolutionary. Barbusse’s Christ believed in radical redistribution of wealth: “After the revolution, everything would belong to everybody.”58 It is symbolic that in 1950, three years before the dictator died, several artists jointly produced a painting where Stalin was depicted with his twelve followers.59

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When, in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev came to demolish Stalin’s personal charisma, the spiritual power of the “Red pharaoh” became extended collectively to the Politburo and Central Committee of the Communist Party. From then on, the populace was expected to treat that oligarchy as the group of enlightened masters who knew the way by the sheer power of their collective mind that was armed by the “science” o Marxism-Leninism. This was a twentieth-century reincarnation of Saint-Simone’s “Council of Newton.” To effectively debunk Stalin’s power, Khrushchev needed to act as a typical religious reformer in a Luther-like manner. To save the creed, the new Soviet leader turned to the original “sacred books” of Lenin and Marx, whereas the “papal” writings of Stalin were shredded. Officially, Khrushchev’s iconoclasm was presented as the purification of the communist faith from its Stalinist distortions. In 1961, in the middle of this anti-Stalinist campaign, a fanatic communist devotee, Dora Lazurkina stirred Soviet ideological waters by claiming she had a vision in which Lenin appeared to her in a dream and requested that the body of Stalin be disentangled from Lenin’s; in 1953, the embalmed body of Stalin had been placed next to Lenin’s in the mausoleum.60 The party had to remove the dictator and confine his body to the Kremlin Wall—an honor reserved for regular communist saints and martyrs. Overall, in the 1960s, the Soviet communist party collectively claimed Lenin’s and Marx’s original teaching, thus removing Stalin as the middleman between the party and the sacred books of Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism linked the socialist creed to the goal of modernization of Russia. In the eyes of the Bolshevik cadres and among masses, socialism was associated with industrialization and general modernization of the country. Given this stance, it was natural that the regime as well its print media and cinema romanticized factories, factory chimneys, machines. In fact, early Bolshevik propaganda workers promoted factories as sites for communal gatherings and proper substitutes for churches.61 To be fair, this veneration of technology was the extreme manifestation of the common contemporary modernist mindset dominant both in the East and the West. Lev Kopelev, a communist activist in the 1930s, who was a participant of the collectivization campaign, and who later, in the 1970s, became a prominent Soviet dissident, stressed, “We were raised as the fanatical adepts of a new creed, the only true religion of scientific socialism. The party became our church militant, bequeathing to all mankind eternal salvation, eternal peace, and the bliss of earthly paradise. The works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were accepted as holy writ, and Stalin was the infallible high priest. Factories, mines, blast furnaces, locomotives, tractors, were transformed into sacramental objects.”62 Socialist Realism, a set of ideological prescriptions for Soviet arts and humanities introduced in 1934, reflected the utopian vision of the Marxist-Leninist

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religion. Soviet writers, poets, painters, and musicians were required to find in contemporary socialist life the sprouts of the radiant communist future and celebrate them. In other words, people of arts and letters, whom Stalin famously called the engineers of human souls, were to depict surrounding life and people in a bright, heroic, and happy mode. Along with the romantic “steam punk” imagery of Soviet industrial sites, walls of Soviet galleries, exhibits, and bookstores were filled with paintings, sculptures, and books that projected the images of happy collective farmers, muscular workers, and communist martyrs. The tremendous amount of efforts and resources that Stalin and his regime invested in the persecution of such marginal ideological heretics as Trotskyites (see Fig. 5.2) betrayed not only a religious nature of Marxism-Leninism but also its millenarian zeal during the early stage. Wayward agents of the Communist International were routinely summoned to Moscow to undergo interrogation and penance, and frequently to face execution. There was a great fear that a tiny group of Trotsky’s supporters might somehow undermine the unity of the creed. In the second half of the 1930s, the major portion of all Soviet secret police resources was diverted to spying on, chasing, and executing real and imagined Trotskyites at the expense of routine espionage operations in foreign countries.

Figure 5.2  A Quixotic Fight of Marxian Internationalists against the Goliath of Stalin’s National Bolshevism: Trotskyites’ Headquarters in Paris (1939). Source: Courtesy INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Like in early Christianity and current radical Islam, martyrdom was an essential feature of early communism. The major text that dramatized the message of this communist martyrdom was Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932). This autobiographical novel portrayed a communist militant who, despite his ill health and wounds, worked to sacrifice himself for the communist cause.63 It was certainly naïve to expect the entire population to share the martyrdom ethos, but in the early stages of communism there was indeed an ideologically motivated minority that was ready to sacrifice themselves for the cause just like recent zealots from the Iranian Islamic corps of revolutionary guards or ISIS fighters. If we disregard or downplay the moral and spiritual nature of communism and socialism for that matter, it will be hard for us to understand what motivated thousands of Soviet sympathizers voluntary assisted and spied for the Stalin’s regime in the 1930s and the 1940s. Some of these people occupied high power positions such as Alger Hiss, Dexter White, and Kim Philby; the first two worked for the Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and the third one for the foreign division of the Soviet secret police (KGB).64 Hiss belonged to top officials at the U.S. Department of State and also contributed to the formation of the United Nations. In his turn, White, as an adviser to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Treasury, was instrumental in creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Philby was a top intelligence officer in the UK responsible for counterintelligence. The greater part of Soviet fellow travelers was either idealist true believers or those who viewed the Soviet Union as the harbinger of the better future. Some current histories exploring biographies of progressive “useful idiots” who worked for the Soviets miss that important moral and ideological aspect. For example, Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, a sensational popular history of the Americans who worked for Stalin, has failed to explain what motivated those progressives. The book has unwarrantably portrayed these individuals as mean-spirited evil doers.65 In fact, most of them were people who happened to be trapped in the ideological bubble of the radical socialist prophecy that at that time many considered the short-cut to the radiant egalitarian future. For them, the underground communist or espionage activities in favor of the Soviets became part of their progressive identity. The activities of the Soviet fellow travelers serve as an illustration of the proverbial wisdom that a road to hell is frequently paved with good intentions. The characteristic feature of communism was its class-based morality. As applied to practical life, it meant that both legally and in the court of public opinion, it was taken for granted that people were judged not as individuals but according to their ascribed class affiliation.66 On the Bolshevik class scale, the voice of a communist bureaucrat, a communist activist, and an

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industrial worker weighed more than the voice of a peasant or a member of another group. The voices of the so-called former people (dispossessed aristocrats, middle-class people, clergy, merchants, and kulaks) were disregarded in court and other public hearings.67 In this hierarchy of classes, the “former people” were to be eventually phased out, whereas peasants were considered “incomplete” in their commitment to communism. As junior brothers and allies, the latter still had a way to go before they would be educated and indoctrinated enough to become full-fledged proletarians. Although in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was formally declared the state of all people, until the very end of communism in 1991, it nominally maintained the formal hierarchy of classes inherited from the early days of Bolshevism: the proletariatpeasantry-working intelligentsia. Since, by the end of the 1920s, the expected communist millennium did not materialize, during the reign of Stalin and under his successors, the MarxistLeninist doctrine was reformed. At first, in 1947, it was projected that communism would arrive within twenty or thirty years. Yet, realizing that there was still a long way to go to the utopia, Stalin muted the prophecy and postponed the coming of the communist paradise for an undefined future. Before the dictator died, he argued that the Soviet Union still had to linger on for a long time in the state of socialism—the transitory stage between capitalism and communism, when, according to Marxism-Leninism, the sprouts of collectivist ethos of communism would take root and outdated market relations would die out. After the brief iconoclastic enthusiasm of Nikita Khrushchev, who recklessly promised to build communism by the 1980s and who was quickly ousted by his comrades, Soviet ideological pundits returned to the conservative Stalin’s formula. They muted the speculations about the communist future, putting stress on the socialist present. Insisting that the transitional period of the socialist “purgatory” would last for a long time, by the 1970s, Soviet ideologists coined the concept of “advanced socialism” that was also called “actually existing socialism.”68 By that time, prophetic notions in Soviet Marxism-Leninism already evaporated, and the whole concept of communism as the final stage of human development lingered on simply as a worn-out ideological cliché. During his last years, Stalin was struggling to develop a “scientific” rational for the political economy of socialism to give his flock ideological prescriptions about “natural laws” under socialism and how this transitional stage was to evolve into communism. For this purpose, in 1950, the dictator gathered a team of top Marxists scholars. Putting himself in charge, Stalin embarked on an ambitious project of producing a textbook on how to run a socialist economy. 247 experts in Marxism-Leninism Studies contributed to this collective manuscript, which was submitted to Stalin, who then released

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his own lengthy notes. When the dictator was alive, the major catechism was History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) (known among communist true believers and propaganda workers as Short Course).69 The contemplated volume was expected to become the new communist bible to replace that earlier text. The finished manuscript was ready for a final approval in March 1953, when the chief theologian suddenly died. Although the book was printed next year, with the emerging attacks on the cult of personality, the long-awaited “sacred text” eclipsed into obscurity.70 Overall, after Stalin, the Marxist-Leninist theology was composed of three sets of scriptures: selected writings of Marx and Engels, selected Lenin writings, and doctrinal guidelines issued from time to time by the communist party. To properly interpret these works for masses, the regime trained a large army of scholar-bureaucrats.71 Eventually, out of these activities, the communist party apparatus developed special ideological disciplines that became mandatory for students of all majors: Scientific Communism, MarxistLeninist Philosophy, Marxist-Leninist Political Economy, and History of the Communist Party. Since the Soviet ideology was superimposed on three generations of people for more than seventy years, society assimilated the elements of pop Marxism-Leninism, which became part of the Soviet and later Russian identity. A good illustration of this is the lingering “red-brown” communist subculture of present-day Russia. In this fellowship, portraits of Lenin and Stalin, red flags and red stars coexist with Russian Orthodox icons and such martial nationalist artifacts as Saint George ribbons.

NOTES 1. Gentile, Politics as Religion, 83. 2. Timothy Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 47; Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 191. 3. Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 9–10. 4. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5. Timothy Snyder, who compared National Socialist and Soviet Socialist terror policies, has shown well how Bolshevik class cleansing intertwined with ethnic cleansing. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 59–118. 6. Martin Krach, “The Soviet Enterprise: What Have We Learned from the Archives?” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 2 (2013): 373–374.

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7. For more on the economic history of the NEP policies, see Peter Boettke, The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918–1928 (New York: Springer, 1990), 113–192. 8. Later, in the 1970s, when statist schemes of “really existing socialism” began to collapse, as an ideological exist strategy, left print media focused on socalled NEP “alternative,” portraying this temporary policy concession as a potent democratic path toward socialism. In social scholarship, the major proponent of this “missed alternative” approach was political scientist Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973). Incidentally, in the 1980s, in post-Mao era, Chinese communist reformers used the same NEP “Leninist” approach to justify their partial economic liberalization. 9. Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2008), 267. 10. Ibid., 278. 11. Ibid., 274. 12. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 24. 13. Ibid., 25. 14. Ibid., 26. For the comprehensive studies of Stalin’s GULAG system, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ann Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 15. Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery, 270. 16. Blum and Mespoulet, L’Anarchie bureaucratique, 116; Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin’s Archives,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 3 (2005): 736. 17. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 27. 18. Gur Ofer, “Soviet Economic Growth: 1928–1985,” Journal of Economic Literature 25, no. 4 (1987): 1804. 19. Blum and Mespoulet, L’Anarchie bureaucratique,130–131. 20. Ibid., 137–141. 21. Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery, 272. 22. Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 295–296, 303. 23. Poretsky, Our Own People, 165–207. 24. Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 400. 25. Ibid., 283. 26. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 41, 44. 27. Schlögel, Moscow, 1937, 399–400. 28. For more on this, see Kevin M.F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). 29. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 77–94. 30. Ibid., 111.

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31. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993): 745–770. 32. Halfin, From Darkness to Light, 332–336. 33. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 51. 34. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). 35. See, for example, Wendy Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 36. Pascal Bruckner, “The Communist Tragedy,” South Central Review 31, no. 2 (2014), 3. 37. Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991, 202. 38. Ibid., 42. 39. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 45. 40. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 115–180. 41. Ibid., 192, 196, 227. 42. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 218–220, 347–351. 43. Ibid., 348. 44. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 237. 45. L. Lux, “Pozdnii Stalinizm i evreiskii vopros (1941–1953) [Late Stalinism and the Jewish Question],” in Sovetskie natsii i natsioal’naia politika v 1920–1950-e gody (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014), 368; Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 369–375. 46. Ibid., 371. 47. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 241. 48. Ibid., 187. 49. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 123. 50. Lux, “Pozdnii Stalinizm i evreiskii vopros (1941–1953),” 367. 51. For more about Marxism-Leninism as a secular faith, see James Thrower, Marxism-Leninism as the Civil Religion of Soviet Society (Lewiston, ME: E. Mellen Press, 1992); Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Red Apocalypse: The Religious Evolution of Soviet Communism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996); Khazanov, “Marxism-Leninism as a Secular Religion,” 119–142. 52. Gentile, Politics as Religion, 38–44; Bruckner, “The Communist Tragedy,” 2. 53. Khazanov, “Marxism-Leninism as a Secular Religion,” 124. 54. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); Klinghofer, Red Apocalypse; Khazanov, “MarxismLeninism as a Secular Religion,” 119–142. 55. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 65. 56. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1997). 57. Sobanet, Generation Stalin, 74, 68. 58. Ibid., 30, 54–55. 59. Klinghofer, Red Apocalypse, 121. 60. Ibid., 131.

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61. Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 85–86. 62. Paul Hollander, The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 2006), 41. 63. Nikolay Ostrovsky, The Making of a Hero, trans. Alec Brown (New York, Dutton, 1937). See also, idem: How the Steel Was Tempered: A Novel (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952). 64. M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Threshold, 2012); Ben Macintyre, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York: Crown, 2014). For a classical life story of an idealist true believer who ended up spying for the Soviets in the 1930s, see Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952). 65. Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013). 66. Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class.” 67. For the fate of these outcasts of the Soviet class system, see Douglas Smith, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). 68. Khazanov, “Marxism-Leninism as a Secular Religion,” 135. 69. Joseph Stalin, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (New York: International Publishers, 1939). For the detailed analysis of this Bolshevik “scripture,” see David Brandenberger and Mikhail Zeleznov, eds., Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 70. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 367, 369. 71. Khazanov, “Marxism-Leninism as a Secular Religion,” 126.

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True Believers, Fellow Travelers, and Dissenters (1920s–1940s)

In March 1941, before departing on a bombing mission into Germany, Whitney Straight, a left-leaning pilot who was serving in the UK Royal Airforce, wrote a letter to his communist brother, who was simultaneously working as a spy for the Soviet secret police. Like many knowledgeable people at that time, Straight knew that the defeat of Germany was only a matter of time. In his letter, Straight shared an excitement about the “social potential” of the bombing campaign against Germany and, strange as it may sound, about opportunities created by German bombing of London: “We have beaten Germans in the air by day, and we will shortly do the same by night. The bombing has been bad, but it will be fun re-building. London will be the finest, most efficient, most beautiful city in the world-mark my words. You will also see a pretty good social system. War is a great equalizer, and people want peace to stay that way. We shall have a truly socialist state.”1 From 1914 onward, war-induced military propaganda, conscription, enforced collectivism, massive intervention in economic, social, and political life in various degree affected all countries. A large centralized state capable of mobilizing people for socially important tasks became the call of the day and the political blueprint worldwide. Even the United States where, by chance, people historically developed a tradition of radical individualism and self-government, was caught in the vortex of the “big is beautiful” mantra. Writing about the role of World War I for the American intellectual elite, economic historian Murray Rothbard stressed that for many progressives, who dominated the U.S. mainstream, the war became the fulfillment of their modern reform expectations, which he called the “therapy of discipline.”2 Although this line of thinking did not always mean sympathies toward the Soviet regime, the “seeing like a state” and “big is beautiful” approach represented the general zeitgeist of that time.3 The greater part of intellectual 137

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and ruling elites viewed centralized planning and the termination of the “anarchy” of economic, social, and political life as good, modern, productive, and benevolent. Individual freedom, economic liberty, local autonomy were considered retrograde and outdated. World War I, the 1929 Great Depression, and then World War II amplified those approaches, turning them into the common-sense mindset and marginalizing alternative visions. Besides the Soviet Union, which exemplified the abovementioned trend in its extreme, Germany too was heavily saturated with the mobilization ethos that manifested itself in the so-called War Socialism—a set of rationing measures that allowed that country to successfully fight on two fronts during World War I. This resources mobilization scheme was spearheaded by Walther Rathenau, who oversaw the Raw Material Section at the German war ministry. After the war, he became a finance minister. Observing how well his section was functioning in wartime, many in Germany became convinced that centralized planning and regulation were the way to go in the time of peace. Rathenau not only was a politician and industrialist but he was also an intellectual, who wrote a popular brochure, where he argued that the “insane” variety of goods under capitalism was the evidence of its wastefulness. The minister sincerely wanted to convince people that under centralized planning system economy would produce only goods that people truly needed, and the “wasteful capitalist” approach would be phased out.4 During World War II, the spirit of War Socialism was best of all articulated by Harold Laski (1893–1950), a prominent UK politician and socialist intellectual who was popular over the English-speaking world in the 1930s and the 1940s. He suggested that World War II opened a door for a fundamental revolution that in its significance matched the Protestant Reformation.5 Laski stressed that the British left should take advantage of the wartime martial sentiments: “War is a hateful thing, ugly, brutal, cruel; yet being all these, if it is the means to fulfilling a great end, its service, seen in the right perspective, can bring both dignity and exhilaration.”6 His rationale was very simple: as violent as it could be, the war crisis and overall mobilization spirit created a unique situation that allowed to make a great leap forward toward a wellordered centralized welfare society and move further to socialism. The two world wars and a general insecurity nourished such mobilization sentiments in society, which eased the promotion of state regulation and control. In fact, recent research has stressed that the whole concept of a welfare state grew out of martial war practices.7 Laski wondered why Britain should put herself in a mess dealing with demobilization and deregulation after the war. In his view, it would be more productive to continue to build upon existing martial programs. At the same time, his social democratic colleague from Sweden Gunnar Myrdal was warning Western politicians that after World War II they would face an

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economic apocalypse in case they dismantled the wartime industry. Myrdal predicted that, with the millions of soldiers returning back home, the 1929 Great Depression would pale when compared with what was coming after World War II.8 People like Laski and Myrdal were convinced that dismantling war-driven centralized institutions and policies would create anarchy in economy and breed a discontent in society. They reasoned that it would be better to continue regulation to maintain an orderly life; hence, the calls to keep mobilization schemes and their spirit alive in the peacetime. Indeed, if the way of the future was collectivism and centralized state control anyway, why shouldn’t progressive politicians take advantage of the war situation to speed up history? According to Laski, the war created a unique psychological atmosphere when it was easy to sway people to accept “great social reforms.” He speculated that, under normal circumstances, it would be very hard to convince English people, who got stuck in the “rotten individualistic tradition,” to accept bold, collectivist and statist reforms: “The atmosphere of war permits, and even compels, innovations and experiments that are not possible when peace returns.”9 The major stumbling block on the way to that “progressive” goal was a popular belief in Western Europe and North America that a heavy presence of a government was needed only in emergency circumstances. Laski stressed that officials and enlightened intellectuals must eradicate this mentality and convince a populace that the omnipotent presence of a benevolent state was needed forever.10 Moreover, he chastised the English officials for not doing enough to completely embrace and harness the martial ethos: “Even the collectivism which war-organization forces upon them, they pursue timidly and half-heartedly. They hardly dared to state the kind of world they want because, for them, the forces which are shaping a new world, produce in them only fear and doubt.”11 Wartime martial spirit, continued Laski, also provided an excellent chance to line up businesspeople, which was usually a hard task to accomplish in a peacetime. Thus, he called for a more aggressive use of the 1941 British Essential Work Order that gave the government the power to take over farms and factories that didn’t conform to wartime regulations. To Laski, the order could become a good tool to “educate” stubborn individualists to think in a new modern collectivist way. In 1941, Alva Myrdal, who, along with her husband Gunnar, was a patron saint of socialist engineering in Sweden, too spoke fondly about the war mobilization drive in Britain. In her view, warfare was the great school of citizenship that helped squash selfish individualism. War nourished solidarity and helped to glue people together into a community. People also had to participate in the state-run war economy, which in the time of peace they would usually reluctant to do. She also noted that, although after a war, many mobilization schemes usually went away, the habits and

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spirit of people underwent a fundamentally change. And this, in her view, was a positive thing. Overall, the great crisis created by warfare provided a great opportunity to empower a state. These sentiments were not an act of wishful thinking on the part of such enlightened scholar bureaucrats as Laski and the Myrdals. In the 1930s and the 1940s, this was a consensus opinion among Western elites from UK and the United States to Sweden and France. Mesmerized with martial mobilization methods, Laski went further, stressing that, if preserved, these methods would help introduce full employment and ease the introduction of higher taxes. Moreover, in his fascination with wartime mobilization schemes, he jumped to a bizarre conclusion that constant risks of German aerial bombardment cultivated in the English population new progressive habits, whose social value ruling elites were yet to appreciate.12 Victory over Hitler should not be the end in itself but an opportunity to build a new society that Laski described as a “positive state.”13 Gunnar Myrdal, who was put in charge of the Commission for the Postwar Economic Planning in Sweden was happy to state that “the interventionist spirit was rising.” He wrote, “After World War II we have all become accustomed to much bigger budgets and also to taking huge budget deficits less seriously. The expansionist theory of spending one’s way out a depression is now on the way to becoming orthodox, even in the most conservative section of the business world.”14 The interventionism became the new normal, which, in his view, helped strengthen people's “rational attitudes.” Furthermore, Myrdal stressed that the contemporary humankind was destined to move from the interventionism to a greater planning and beyond. Myrdal saw the growth of governmental programs and regulation as a manifestation of the natural evolutionary drive toward a greater centralization of economic and political life. According to the Swedish reformer, the increasing complexity of modern life begged for centralized planning. Another prominent example of a mainstream socialism-leaning mover and shaker was the celebrity economic John Keynes (1883–1946), who made it his signature approach to capture and ride dominant mainstream politico-economic trends. Like the abovementioned celebrities, he saw a great social potential in warfare. In fact, after the first German shots inaugurated World War II in 1939, Keynes already wrote, “If expenditure on armaments really does cure unemployment, a grand experiment has begun. We may learn a trick or two which come useful when the day of peace comes.”15 Economic prescriptions that he helped to jump-start later became known as the “third way” between capitalism and socialism—an approach that became the signature policy of democratic socialists after the 1940s. As early as 1924, sensing where the ideological tide of the time was moving, he made a case against free market by exclaiming, “I bring in the State; I abandon laissez faire.”16 Writing

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for then-popular American left magazine The Nation, Keynes was calling for large-scale governmental spending programs. He was inviting Western elites to boldly move forward and not to be afraid to spend taxpayers’ money to employ people in all kinds of public works, even if it involved wasting resources on flawed and unsustainable projects. It was not simply an arrogant desire to impose regulation for the sake of regulation that drove people like Rathenau, Laski, the Myrdals, and Keynes. The surrounding circumstances (two world wars and the economic depression) conditioned the mindsets and behavior of these celebrities and a large number of their contemporaries. In fact, Keynes explained that his driving motive was a compassion for the unemployed and an anger he felt that masses of people stayed idle; in England unemployment reached 11.4% in the 1920s. Out of this emotional attitude, a conviction grew that it was the duty of a benevolent government to employ people no matter where and how.17 Keynes plausibly concluded that, in the situation of continuing labor unrest and high unemployment, running large deficit and wasteful public works programs could be the only way to go, for cutting spending would simply produce a revolt of masses. Flowing with the dominant martial sentiments, Keynes stressed that the contemporary chain of events made economic liberty obsolete. As early as 1926, he spelled out this argument in his public memorial lecture “The End of Laissez-Faire” that Keynes delivered in the flagship Oxford University.18 The economist explained that, first of all, he wanted to educate people whom he called dogmatic socialists. Addressing this group of people, Keynes pointed out that the door they so desperately wanted to get through to leap into the socialist future was in fact already wide open. The scholar was convinced that the general evolution of capitalism was shifting entire economy toward socialism anyway without any revolutions. Second, Keynes stressed that contemporary economies became so complex that it was not shareholders but managers who were already making all decisions. Later, this line of thought was picked up and further developed by political scientist James Burnham, an American Trotskyite-turned neoconservative, who came up with his famous concept of the “managerial revolution.”19 According to the Keynesian vision, the job of a benevolent government was to simply coordinate and regulate economic life. Such government was to provide full employment and channel all savings and investments into the projects of a national importance. Third, reflecting then a popular notion of biopolitical engineering, Keynes stressed that a government must monitor the size of the population, not allowing people to freely breed and multiply without taking into consideration national goals. In the eyes of many contemporaries, the subsequent 1929 Great Depression and World War II vindicated not only the “middle way” suggested by Keynes

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but also invited people to move further toward socialism. This growing perception not only dominated policymaking, world of ideas, and social movements but it also sunk into a mass culture. From the 1920s to the 1950s, general debates in media and in public forums were usually revolved not for or against socialism and centralized planning but about how much socialism and centralized planning society should have. Moreover, until the 1950s, the mainstream social scholarship in the West was overly optimistic about the prospects of the Soviet economy, and it was preoccupied with a question when and how the Soviet Union caught up and overtook the United States.20 LUDWIG VON MISES AND “ECONOMIC CALCULATION IN THE SOCIALIST COMMONWEALTH” (1920) Among those few critics who did try to challenge the social engineering fever were two economists who matured within the German intellectual tradition: Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992). Both became the spearheads of the so-called Socialist Calculation Debate—a meaningful but an obscure discussion that in the 1920s and the 1930s never went beyond the field of economics. Ludwig von Mises was born in a family of a Jewish engineer in L’viv (then Lemberg), an Austria-Hungarian city, which is currently part of Ukraine. He studied at the University of Vienna and later taught there as a part-time instructor until 1934. When national socialists were about to take over Austria, Mises escaped at first to Switzerland and then to the United States, where he lived to the end of his life.21 Hayek originated from an Austrian nobility lineage that produced several brilliant scholars and scientists. Like Mises, he went to the University of Vienna. Later, he became a student of Mises, and, in the 1930s, he worked to popularize and develop his mentor’s ideas beyond the German-speaking world. In 1931, invited by free market economist Lionel Robinson, Hayek joined the London School of Economics. Robinson wanted to have the Austrian to challenge the growing popularity of Keynes. Then, Hayek too moved to the United States. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when many on the left were salivating about total nationalization of economy, Mises decided to seriously question this mainstream conviction and to show that socialism retarded economic life. At that time, many progressives, including those who were not necessarily fond of Bolshevik brutalities, were watching with a sympathy how the communist experiment was unfolding in Russia. One of them was Otto Neurath, an Austrian socialist economist who had come to appreciate the “beauty” of popular mobilization methods and whose book triggered Mises to write a rebuttal. In 1919, Neurath served in the central planning office of the

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Bavarian Soviet Republic—one of the abortive communist projects that were launched between 1918 and 1923 by radical left in Germany and beyond with the support of the Communist International. Before it was squashed by the social democratic government, the communist republic tried to replicate the Bolshevik methods by nationalizing the entire Bavarian economy. In a good tradition of Edward Bellamy and Karl Ballod (“practical utopians” described in chapter 3), Neurath speculated on how well the future socialist economy was going to function. Among other things, he noted that prices and money would go away because they were not good indicators of what people really needed. Neurath believed that statisticians and accountants, using scientific methods, would do a much better job of figuring out what services and goods were required. Based on their calculations, a government would produce exactly what people needed. In this system of total calculation, money would become obsolete; maintaining the “ridiculous” practice of pricing only cultivated “anarchy” and disrupted efficient work of central planners.22 In his essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920), Mises challenged Neurath by posing a general question: was socialism possible from an economic standpoint? Two years later, he expanded this essay into Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.23 In these two works, going against the contemporary intellectual mainstream, Mises sought to show that socialism was not only economically inefficient, but it was also economically unfeasible. In contrast to Neurath, he stressed that a full-fledged socialist system could not simply function because it lacked a true price system. Under socialism, where goods and services were not sold and bought at an open market, it was up to a state to arbitrarily set up all prices. In these circumstances, there was no way to figure how much things really cost. According to Mises, not only was socialism unable to create an efficient and well-functioning economy but it also led to tremendous waste, misallocation of resources, and stagnation. Without private property and free prices that acted as signals regarding how much things cost, any economy would eventually collapse. Later, Mises aptly called socialist-type systems “planned chaos.”24 One might ask a natural question: if socialism was economically impossible, how was it able to linger on in the Soviet Union for more than seventy years? The answer is very simple. The Soviet-type societies of Russia, China, and other countries were able to survive by plundering and cannibalizing their vast human and natural resources and simultaneously maintaining on their margins a few elements of sound economy (limited monetary system, black markets, foreign trade that had to take into consideration real market prices). The Bolsheviks, who introduced their War Communism and who tried to nationalize economy and shut down entire trade, quickly realized that they had to somehow compromise with the spirit of private enterprise to feed the

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population. That is why in 1921, they reluctantly switched to the so-called New Economic Policy, which permitted peasants to enjoy limited economic incentives in growing and selling their produce.25 However, in 1929, driven by their original Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Bolsheviks again cracked down hard on the entire country, reintroducing total nationalization. Still, in 1934, amid the bone-breaking collectivization of agriculture and famine, the Soviets again had to give peasants a small leeway—the right to grow produce in their tiny backyard gardens. One could not totally suffocate the “cow” that brought milk. Mises’ second major point was that, by its very nature, a state enterprise could not replicate a private enterprise simply because state managers appointed by government acted as bureaucrats who had no real incentives to work productively, make a profit, and introduce innovations. State bureaucrats, stressed Mises, would never treat state property as their own. Still, it was not his major point. He indicated that even if we assumed that socialist managers were pure angels who deeply cared about the productivity and performance of their enterprises, they would not be able to allocate their resources efficiently in the system where prices were set by a government. Indeed, how would they figure out the cost of resources? No matter how hard they tried, without a price mechanism provided by freely fluctuating market there was no way for them to become “economic angels.” The Soviet economy that masqueraded as a centrally planned society in fact represented a bureaucratic anarchy. Drowned in piles of papers, Stalin’s managers were acting as state bureaucrats, trying to fulfill production quotas issued from above. Driven by the pure strategy of survival, these managers routinely resorted to doctoring economic statistics to look good in the eyes of their superiors. The outcome of these grand manipulations and bogus statistics was that both the Soviet elite and managers frequently had only a vague idea about what was going in their economy. Trying to shift the burden of responsibility from themselves to their superiors, Stalinist economic enforcers kept flooding the central state and top communist party bosses with various memos and permission requests on all possible occasions. As a result, the work of Moscow central planners was routinely paralyzed by the avalanche of paperwork. Moreover, struggling to fulfill their quotas, managers stored and hoarded goods and materials, using them for a barter exchange with other factories. Trading them for needed materials or foods for their workers, these bureaucrats employed informal wheelers and dealers.26 Much of decision-making in the centralized Soviet economy was naturally concentrated in the hands of Stalin and his inner circle. Having a distorted picture of what was going on the ground, they made economic decisions that were driven by either their emotions or by ideological and political considerations. In his study of Stalin’s economy of the 1930s, economic historian

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Paul Gregory documented chaotic resource management practices driven by various bureaucratic impulses coming from the dictator. Scared to take any initiative and concerned about a personal survival, the Soviet bureaucracy delegated various matters, including trivial ones, up for Stalin’s approval. For example, the dictator had to decide such issues as the transfer of some tractors from the agriculture to timber ministry or the way Mongolia was to pay for two hundred Soviet trucks. Stalin also had to figure out whether to produce steel pipes inside the country or to buy them abroad.27 “PERFECT EQUILIBRIUM”: HOW OSCAR LANGE “DEFEATED” FRIEDRICH HAYEK, 1930S Mises’s writings attracted attention of Hayek, who was able to shed away his socialist idealism by 1920: “Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more just world. And then came [Mises’s Socialism]. Our hopes were dashed. Socialism told us that we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.”28 The role of Hayek was crucial: in the 1930s, he took the Calculation Debate into the English-speaking world. Now, during the second round of the debate, his and Mises’s opponents included not die-hard Marxists who preached total economic nationalization but also soft socialists who wanted to combine nationalization of the “commanding heights” in economy with free market in consumer industry. This line of the socialist creed, which by the 1970s became the signature approach for all reformed left or social democrats, became known as market socialism. Hayek’s most prominent opponent was Polish left economist Oscar Lange (1904–1965), who lived and worked in the United States in the 1930s and the early 1940s. Lange was born in the Polish city of Cracow. From his student years, he was active in a social democratic movement as an organizer, combining his work as an activist with scholarly pursuits. Lange decided to debate Mises and Hayek on their own ground. The Polish economist admitted that market and prices were indeed important factors that were vital for any vibrant economy. Lange suggested that in a future socialist economy, consumer goods and employment of people might be left for a free market to sort out. Yet, such commanding heights as capital goods and factories were to be managed by a state. Directed by the central planning board, socialist managers would make decisions about resources allocation and investments. To Mises’ earlier argument that under socialism there was no way to figure out real prices of resources and goods, Lange responded that the army of statisticians and accountants would be employed to calculate fluctuating market prices and identify best areas for investments. These human “calculators” would increase prices if there were shortages for particular items and

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lower them in case there was an abundance of those items.29 Essentially he suggested that socialist managers and their accountants simulate the work of free market. As an ideologue and true son of his time, Lange never posed a simple question: why did one need to maintain the whole army of accountants and statisticians to mimic market instead of allowing people on the ground to make decisions about what, how, and when to buy and sell and where to invest. Lange indicated that his whole scheme would make it easier to introduce progressive income taxation and to assist a state to better redistribute wealth in favor of the less fortunate. Hayek pointed out that Lange’s attempt to play free market was utterly naïve. Socialist managers along with the army of their accountants physically would not be able to calculate millions of prices and take into consideration the multitude of individual situations that were constantly changing. The Polish economist and those who shared his ideas assumed that socialist accountants could generate perfect and complete knowledge about the needs of society. As Lange put it, they would provide the “perfect equilibrium.” Hayek argued that, on the contrary, social and economic life was unpredictable, and it was constantly changing. It was only people “on the ground” through their situational (tacit) knowledge who were able to figure out what was actually needed and who faced the consequences of their choices. Moreover, Hayek criticized Lange and other marker socialists on philosophical grounds. The Austrian showed that the fundamental flaw of the socialists’ hubris was their inability to see that success or a failure of any society depended on how well this society was using knowledge. For example, socialists of various brands, from radical ones such as Bolsheviks to social democratic “revisionists” such as Gunnar Myrdal, viewed the central planning board as the embodiment of the ultimate knowledge capable to resolve the complexity of modern society. In contrast, Hayek argued that social systems that delegated the right to generate and disseminate knowledge to one center (a dictator or central planning board) invited stagnation and degeneration. On the contrary, those that cultivated competing centers of knowledge opened doors to creativity and prosperity.30 The Hayek argument contained a profound political message: in decentralized horizontal societies, local and individual initiatives were not penalized. People in such collectives were encouraged to stick out and spread their wings, which eventually benefited an entire society. Thus, Hayek had already challenged the “big is beautiful” positivist mantra far before, in the 1970s, it became fashionable in Western scholarship to privilege the unique, individual, and spontaneous. In contrast to the contemporary consensus that had insisted that increasingly complex modern societies required more command and control, Hayek had argued for a totally opposite approach. He had stressed that technologically advanced societies had been becoming so sophisticated

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that they could not be navigated and controlled from above by “enlightened” scholar bureaucrats. The Hayek argument about the decentralized nature of knowledge threatened to demolish the contemporary modernity narrative that went back to Saint Simon and his “Council of Newton” scheme. It was natural that in the martial age of the 1910s–1940s, his argument was falling on deaf ears. Neither Lange nor other participants of the debate (communist Morris Dobb and democratic socialist Abba Lerner) bothered to respond to Hayek’s knowledge argument. Instead, everybody assumed that Lange brilliantly defeated Hayek. Later, Mises added a more concrete economic refutation of the Lange’s market socialism. He was laughing at the very idea that socialist managers and accountants would be capable to replicate market; it was akin to children playing a war, railroad, or school. It was not only about socialist managers being unable to calculate real prices and gain a perfect knowledge about the major and minor needs of their societies. According to Mises, the problem was that Lange’s hypothetical socialist managers would never been able to go “native” by becoming actual shareholders, investors, stock market speculators, and real-life entrepreneurs who risked their own wealth on a regular basis. Mises argued that market socialists made an absurd assumption that under capitalism all individuals involved in monetary decision-making were acting as managers. During one of his seminars Mises taught at New York University in the 1950s, Rothbard, later himself a noted economics scholar, asked him what would be his general criteria for a society to be considered socialist or capitalist on a broad politico-economic scale that ranged from a “pure” free market economy to “pure” totalitarianism. To this Mises gave a very simple answer: “The key is whether the economy has a stock market.”31 Hayek and Mises generalizations were clearly out of place in the martial age of the 1930s and the 1940s. They were marginal scholars who literally went against the spirit of the time. The greater part of current scholarship that seeks to explain the ascent of the so-called neoliberalism in the 1970s–1980s (a worldwide movement toward individual liberty and market) ignores that interwar context. Neoliberalism Studies exaggerate the significance of “neoliberals” in the intellectual life in the 1930s and the 1940s and seek to debunk what they view as the myth of Mises and Hayek being lonely embattled intellectuals. Hence, an attempt to amplify their influence on Western financial and political elites.32 Yet, in reality, in the first five decades and especially during the interwar period, these two and a few individuals who shared their views were indeed a fringe group that was rejected by the intellectual and political mainstream. Not only the general educated public and elites but also scholars in their narrow field of economics hardly comprehended what those Austrians were trying to say.33

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One of the major contemporary accusations against such oddballs as Hayek was that they refused to think big in terms of large statistical aggregates. They were chastised for elevating changing subjective needs of an individual at the expense of the needs of a collective. As one of Lange’s supporters put it, the Austrians merely analyzed the relations between an individual and things and never sought to create a “complete theory of society.”34 This arrogant aspiration to find a “complete” grand theory or a scheme best of all describes the spirit of the first five decades of the past century.35 In a matter of fact manner, the 1960s bestselling economics writer Robert Heilbroner, a “Rorschach man” of his time who by now has been completely forgotten, announced that the “brilliant Polish economist” had effectively demolished all Hayek and Mises arguments: “Not only would a planned economy meet a criteria for rationality, but its superior performance would soon reveal the outmoded inadequacy of a free enterprise economy.”36 The “defeat” of Hayek by Lange without any actual defeat is a small episode that tells us more about that particular period and how its elites and intellectuals viewed the world. The consensus was not only that Lange intellectually crushed Mises and Hayek but also that Soviet Russia was both socialist and industrially successful despite its numerous mischiefs. There was no room in the intellectual mainstream either for the Hayek knowledge-based argument or for the critique of socialism. Moreover, in the 1930s–1940s, to many leftists both the Keynesian “third-way” interventionist prescriptions and Lange’s market socialism, which sought to marry capitalism and socialism, appeared as reactionary “bourgeoise” projects to be condemned and cast aside. Ironically, in our days, these very schemes became the left mainstream. In the 1930s–1950s, when centralized planning was the fetish, Lange’s suggestions to mimic free market and permit some free market in consumer industry sounded heretical not only to communists but also to many reformed socialists for whom socialism meant, first of all, an omnipotent state control and regulation. I want to stress again that in the first half of the past century, the mainstream debate was not for or against free market but about the degree of the centralized planning and the pace of its introduction in society. To the radical left, a compromise with free market appeared as malicious to the whole socialist cause. Such popular contemporary Marxists as American Paul Sweezy and British Maurice Dobb denounced Lange’s project as a naked heresy and concession to capitalism.37 From a “theological” viewpoint, these left “puritans” were absolutely correct: Lange’s market socialism project did not promise to eliminate income inequality but only to alleviate it. It was only later, in the 1960s, when the star of socialism began to eclipse, that many on the left gradually began to turn to such schemes as market socialism and then to Keynesianism in hope to refurbish and save the whole creed.38

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Overall, contrary to the current assertions of Neoliberalism Studies’ scholars, who ascribe to the Mises-Hayek “cabal” tremendous influence on their contemporaries, these Austrians and those few who agree with their views were effectively marginalized and scornfully labeled as “paleoconservatives” simply because there was no room for their ideas. Hayek nevertheless persisted in his Quixotic crusade. In 1938, along with the prominent American reporter Walter Lippmann, he organized a Paris Colloquium in hope to bring together prominent intellectuals to figure out the ways to arrest the advance of national socialist and communist totalitarianisms. This was the major goal of his small “cabal.” This also might explain why Hayek did not actively engage Keynes and his social democratic interventionism at that time, focusing all his efforts on the critique of full-fledged socialism. Neoliberalism Studies portray the seminar members as a sinister shadow group that that masterminded to cage the humankind in their free market, “globalist project.”39 In reality, their scholarship hardly made any dent in the contemporary intellectual mainstream. Any cursory look at the contemporary media and social scholarship literature will reveal that in the 1920s–1950s, the intellectual, political, and economic mainstream was dominated either by socialist and nationalist projects (Stalinism, Fascism, National Socialism) or by social democratic schemes (American New Deal, British Labour, Swedish Social Democracy). F. A. Hayek, George Orwell, and the Left Mainstream Naïve indifference to or open sympathy toward socialism upset Hayek so much that he decided to write a popular pamphlet to alert an educated public that attempts to plan and engineer economic and political life from above was a dangerous slippery slope that unavoidably led to a tyranny. The result of his efforts was famous The Road to Serfdom (1944),40 where, in a userfriendly format, he spelled out his concerns about the pitfalls of centralization and the danger of dragging the wartime mobilization schemes into a postwar economic and political life. It is notable that Hayek devoted his book to the socialists of all parties. Yet, exercising self-censorship, he dwelled mostly on German National Socialism experiences, rarely mentioning the Soviet Union that was shining in the eyes of the contemporary British public. Without openly mentioning it, Hayek also targeted the so-called Beveridge Report Social Insurance and Allied Services. Composed by Lord William Henry Beveridge right amid the war (1942), it represented the blueprint of a comprehensive welfare state in Britain and, for many on the left, a roadmap to democratic socialism. Public was enthusiastic about this plan, which, after gaining power in 1945, the Labour Party incorporated into its program. Building on wartime practices, the Beveridge Report recommended

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to nationalize all major industries in Britain, starting with coal mines, and provide a full employment. Beveridge aspired to stabilize the cost of living by “the bulk purchasing of supplies and their distribution at controlled prices which, if necessary, may be lowered by a subsidy. The same method can be applied to coal and to other necessities.”41After 1945, the Labour Party did fulfill part of his program except providing a full employment. For Hayek, this was a dangerous slippery slope toward the suffocating centralized state control. In the 1930s and the 1940s, Hayek’s public attacks on the contemporary passion for centralized planning and socialism turned him into an intellectual outcast. Keynes, who read The Road to Serfdom and who always tried to fit in the intellectual mainstream, wrote to Hayek a friendly letter, in which he hinted that it was not a good idea to go against the established consensus. Keynes did stress that he well understood the potential dangers of the slippery slope that Hayek referred to. Still, in a good Fabian tradition, the British economist went on educating Hayek that, if benevolent people, who (as Keynes metaphorically put it) were ready to serve God rather than the devil, were put at the helm of a modern welfare state, there was no reason to fear the totalitarian slippery slope: “Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue.”42 Later, in 1946, during his personal conversation with Hayek, Keynes went even further. He bragged to his Austrian friend that if he, Keynes, would detect dangerous totalitarian temptations in the British society, he would have single-handedly switched the public opinion in a correct direction. That was precisely what Hayek feared of and warned about: a naïve conviction that benevolent noble elites, who were armed with “scientific” planning, could safely navigate a state and society in a “correct” direction. He was worried about the hubris of people like Keynes. In contrast, Keynes played down the powerful influence of legal, educational, and political institutions and assumed that the presence or absence of totalitarian temptations ultimately depended on the moral compass of those individuals who belonged to ruling elites. As for Hayek, he passionately crusaded against “scientific” prophets that promised a perfect knowledge that would help construct an ideal human commonwealth. Incidentally, Hayek argued that not only socialism with its “perfect equilibrium” but also perfect and pure free markets were impossible. In English-speaking academia people started to avoid Hayek like a plague; Mises had been already a pariah when Hayek was trying to debate socialists after moving to Britain in 1931. When Hayek visited the United States in 1945, on a book tour to promote his The Road to Serfdom, he was stunned that some university academics refused to shake his hand. At that time, in the West and beyond, the popularity of socialism and Soviet Union was running especially high. Laski, who, like Keynes, exercised a large influence on

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contemporary intellectuals, severed all relations with Hayek after the publication of The Road to Serfdom. Reporter Ralph Harris observed the hysterical reaction to this book: “There was something of a religious war about it, that to criticize this noble idea of socialism, of fairness, of equality, was to desecrate something that was fine. It was a glint in the eye with many quite ordinary people who thought that socialism not merely was bound to come but was the ultimate fulfillment of a civilized society.”43 It was only in the United States, the country with a long tradition of individualism and economic liberty, that, outside of academia, The Road to Serfdom found an enthusiastic response. With the help of Max Eastman, a former Trotskyite who personally witnessed the emerging “beauty” of Stalinist modernity, Hayek was able to arrange the publication of a mass cartoon edition of the book. In 1945–1946, 1 million copies were already sold.44 Yet, the majority of learned public, which was feeding on the “progressive” ideas of centralized planning and social engineering, dismissed such characters as Hayek as reactionary dinosaurs. By the 1940s, many Western intellectuals came to conviction that the days of capitalism were over and that socialism or some centralized collectivist system was coming to replace it. It was Keynesianism that came to dominate the minds of intellectuals and politicians—the policy approach that lasted until the 1970s.45 Michael Straight, a trust baby who came to the UK and became part of the notorious Soviet Cambridge spy ring in the 1930s, remembered, “In Cambridge and throughout the free world, economic doctrine was dominated by the overpowering intellect of John Maynard Keynes. The largest lecture hall in Cambridge was crowded when Keynes, in a series of talks, set forth the principles of his general theory. It was as if we were listening to Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton. The audience sat in hushed silence as Keynes spoke.”46 In contrast, Mises and Hayek were treated as fossils and flat-earthers, whose views were labeled “paleo-conservative.” Hayek remarked in a melancholy tone, “It went so far as to completely discredit me professionally.”47 In fact, as early as the late 1930s, several close friends of Hayek already deserted him. Lionel Robbins, who in fact invited him to London to serve as an alternative to Keynes, eventually distanced himself from the “toxic” Austrian. So did Alvin Hansen and Gottfried Harberer. Being earlier close to Hayek and Mises, both later rebranded themselves as Keynesians.48 Several Hayek’s students too joined the winning Keynesian side and began to openly mock him during lectures.49 Moreover, Nicholas Kaldor, one of his former students who too dissed the teacher, went to coauthor the Beveridge Report. Another former student, Abba Lerner, joined Lange during the second round of the calculation debate. Reflecting on the prevailing mindset of the 1930s and the 1940s, prominent economist Joseph Schumpeter, not a friend of the left, predicted that market

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economy would be soon replaced by socialism. Whether we liked it or not, he pessimistically prophesized, this was the way of the future.50 H. G. Wells, a British writer and public intellectual popular in the interwar period, similarly took it for granted that socialism was the order of the day for all educated people. For such intellectuals as Wells the movement toward socialism had nothing to do with a class struggle. It was simply a natural step in the human evolution that was progressively moving from “primitive” capitalist anarchy toward higher forms of life such as a well-ordered and scientifically organized society.51 Describing the intellectual mainstream in Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s, George Orwell stressed that, except for a very brief period in 1939–1940 when Stalin temporarily lost his face by befriending Hitler, saying something bad about socialism or Stalinist Russia was akin to heresy. This was especially so when the Soviet Union joined the side of Spanish Republicans in their fight against the Franco fascist regime that was backed by German national socialists.52 Although a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Orwell too found in a hard way what it meant to go against the grain and feel like an intellectual outcast. This would be classic of British literature was ostracized in his lifetime for trying to speak the truth about the Soviet Union and communism. To some extent, Sovietophilia of those years reminds the present-day hysterical reaction of the left to those who question the global warming doomsday prophecy or who try to hold Third World “progressive” regimes and minority movements in the West accountable for their mischiefs and crimes. Orwell socialist colleagues stubbornly refused to accept and act on the information about Stalin’s crimes. The writer was utterly disgusted with a widespread politically correct conviction among the contemporary progressives that it was not only permissible but also mandatory to lie if it helped the Soviet cause.53 Particularly, Orwell was ostracized by the left establishment for refusing to stay silent about the 1937 Stalinist massacre of Spanish anarchists and Trotskyites, who refused to be subservient to the Moscow center. Very much like Hayek, the English writer came to an uncomfortable conclusion that German National Socialism and Soviet communism were evil twins. It was natural that Orwell became drawn to The Road to Serfdom and eventually wrote its review. Orwell stressed that there was a great deal of truth in what the Austrian had to say: “It is not being said nearly enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.”54 Still, being caught into the popular contemporary habit to always look up to a benevolent state to engineer egalitarianism, Orwell rebuked Hayek with a bizarre remark: “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.”55 Very much like Keynes, the English writer naively believed that if people would restore the principles of right and wrong in politics, somehow, by some miracle,

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politicians would be able to find the “third way” that would allow them to avoid the evils of both capitalism and socialism. Although Orwell continued to consider himself a man of the left, because of his uncompromising position as a truth-teller about the Soviet Union, no contemporary literary anthology or prominent memoirs ever mentioned his name. It is instructive to remember that when the writer finished his famous Animal Farm in 1944, he was literally stonewalled when trying to publish that book. This was the time when the British romance with the Soviet Union, a powerful ally in the fight against Nazi Germany, reached its peak. The book is a killing fairy tale that satirized a process of degeneration of a communist revolution into a totalitarian bureaucracy. Orwell essentially predicted the actual evolution of all twentieth-century regimes that claimed building socialism and communism, from the Soviet Union to present-day Venezuela.56 Animal Farm, which later became a classic, was originally rejected four times by publishers in UK and by five publishers in the United States. They rejected it as a politically incorrect text that was harmful to the progressive cause in general and to the Soviet Union in particular.57 Writing to a friend that he was going through a pure hell trying to place the manuscript with a publisher, Orwell was simultaneously shocked that his critical review of a book written by Laski, Britain’s Mr. Socialist, was thrown out by the very newspaper that he contributed to on a regular basis.58 By the end of the World War II, an entire anti-fascist rhetoric was infested with Sovietophilia, and any criticism of the Soviets was viewed as a concession to fascism. Cast against German National Socialism, the declared internationalism of the Soviets, although partially crippled by Stalinist purges, still maintained its cosmopolitan appeal. As such, it received an ideological pass from Western liberal audiences who thought about it as an imperfect but well-meant manifestation of democratic universalism.59 After the publication of Animal Farm and numerous threats from left-wing fundamentalists, Orwell feared that some communist nut might come and kill him. He bought a pistol for a self-defense. Those few friends he had laughed at his paranoia. Later, it was revealed that his paranoia was fully justified. Documents excavated from Soviet archives proved that he had been marked by Stalin’s secret police for an immediate execution.60 Similar experiences shared by less-known contemporary figures on the left only confirm the intellectual ostracism people like Orwell had to face. Boris Souvarine, a French-Russian Comintern activist of a Jewish extract, became frustrated about the purge of Trotsky and other cosmopolitan elements who preached the world revolution utopia. By 1935, Souvarine wrote Stalin, which represented the first comprehensive biography of the dictator and simultaneously the first serious account of the Soviet history.61 Like Orwell,

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he at first had a hard time finding a publisher for that text. When the book was finally published, nobody paid attention to it because the mainstream anti-fascist thought collective automatically ditched any negative information about the Soviets. There were already available the reports of eyewitnesses who escaped from the Soviet Union and its GULAG labor concentration camps. Yet this literature was similarly ignored or dismissed as reactionary fake tales. For example, in 1938, amid the Stalin’s Great Terror, which killed more than 600,000 people, Ante Ciliga, a Croatian communist militant, who spent some time GULAG, was able to escape to the West. Yet, his captivating description of that experience published in France was similarly dismissed.62 For the contemporary progressives, everything negative that was related to the Soviet Union was considered a taboo. Even a friendly criticism was viewed as harmful and hostile. As a peculiar illustration of the 1930s and the 1940s’ zeitgeist, Vladimir Nabokov, later a Russian-American literature classic, shared a peculiar story about how it was literally impossible for him to publish his novel The Gift both in Europe and the United States because the text contained a politically incorrect chapter with a mock biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, one of the major spearheads of the Russian socialist movement in the 1860s. The name of that person, which hardly anybody recognizes these days, used to be held in a high esteem both in the West and the East by many communist and anti-communist left. For this reason, publishers did not want to antagonize potential readers by printing a novel with such a controversial chapter. It was only in 1952, with the ascent of the Cold War, that the writer was able to finally publish his entire novel that he had finished fifteen years prior to this.63 Light from the East: Western Fellow Travelers During the interwar period, many among the left and their fellow travelers became seduced by the Soviet myth, which they considered either as the road map to socialism or as the ultimate fulfillment of modernity. In fact, for many, both carried a profound spiritual meaning. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, prominent Fabians and founders of the elite London School of Economics, wrote a whole volume about Soviet communism as a new type of civilization. The Webbs stressed that it was not the Soviet parks, hospitals, and factories they were concerned about. What they really marveled about was how these and other Soviet sites contributed to the construction of the moral foundation for a socialist commonwealth. In their view, the new rulers of Russia, who professed crude scientific materialism, did more to upgrade human souls than bodies.64 One Finnish immigrant who worked in the mines of Minnesota in

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the 1930s remembered how their labor meetings were lightened up when the name of Lenin was brought up: this “made the heart throb.”65 Just as some prominent Bolsheviks—Joseph Stalin (Russian Orthodoxy), Felix Dzerzhinsky (pious Catholicism), Moses Uritsky (Orthodox Judaism)— radical fellow travelers literally came to replace earlier commitments to their specific faiths with socialism as a new religion. Although never a Marxist, one Pierre Pascal, who was a Catholic true believer and who worked for a French diplomatic mission in Moscow in 1918, fell for Bolshevism for sheer spiritual and moral reasons in hope to help the “wretched of the earth.” Historian Francois Furet, who explored his case, stressed that this character had been in fact a “Bolshevik” prior to the 1917 communist revolution: when a student, Pascal had already devoted himself to the exploration of the universal Catholic spirit in its communitarian form. In fact, Pascal represented thousands of French, Italian, and Spanish Catholic fellow travelers who similarly fell for communism and socialism.66 In the 1930s–1940s, Catholic countries had the strongest and most numerous communist parties in Europe. Although a social democrat and atheist, aforementioned Laski was captivated by the grand spiritual élan of Stalinist communism. In 1943, he wrote that the Soviet Union “found a new way of life in which faith might play the part supernatural creeds had played elsewhere.” Laski compared the missionary “spirit of Bolshevism” to the radical and militant Puritanism of the 1600s: “The Bolshevik reliance upon their texts from Marx and Lenin and Stalin is identical with the Puritan dependence upon the citations from the Scriptures.” Like the Puritans, Bolsheviks felt they were the chosen people, which doubled their revolutionary fever. These statements are notable because Laski uttered them not as an attempt to troll the Soviet seekers but to endorse their project as a successful way to oppose capitalism.67 For left true believers, entering the Soviet Union and particularly crossing an international border that separated the “house of socialism” and the “house of capitalism” was a profound spiritual experience. German communist Max Bartel, who did such crossing and who later converted to Hitler’s national socialist movement, stressed, “Now I begin to understand the crusaders who kissed the land treaded by the Savior.” In her turn, Klara Zetkin, a friend of Lenin and later a committed Stalinist, suggested that all visitors to the land of the future take off their shoes when crossing the border, for the Bolshevik domain was the “holy land.”68 Waldo Frank, an American progressive writer who converted to communism, experienced similar emotions when visiting the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1930s. He particularly was fascinated with Soviet industrial sites that triggered mystical experience in his soul. When entering a Moscow factory and hearing pounding sounds of a loudspeaker marching workers on, Frank felt he was entering a new world populated by “whole men and women.” Interestingly, in the 1920s, when visiting Native American reservations back

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in the United States, he was singing the same holistic song to indigenous tribalism. Yet, Native American collectivism appeared to him as being deeply corrupted by the onslaught of rotten Western individualism. As such, Native Americana could not serve anymore as the blueprint of authentic and organic collectivism. That was how Frank discovered for himself the proletariat, a class of people that was both thoroughly modern and simultaneously “uncorrupted” by the capitalist order. To him, the Soviet Union was the fortress that guarded the wholistic proletarian lifestyle.69 When on their Moscow pilgrimages, committed Western leftists viewed their trips to Soviet Russia not simply as a trip abroad but a journey to the future. During such spiritual tours, they learned how to read in the present the signs of the radiant communist future.70 Writer Lincoln Stephens spelled out well this utopian attitude by uttering the often-quoted phrase, “I saw the future, and it works.” The fact that he had composed it prior to his crossing of the Soviet border revealed the spiritual nature of such ideological journeys. For educated public, socialism and communism clearly came to fill the void created by the decline of conventional religions. For example, writer André Gide (see Fig. 6.1), then a prominent intellectual celebrity in Europe, stressed that he had become attracted to communism when he had felt strongly ashamed of his privileged background and when he had become convinced that Christianity failed to fulfill its historical role.71 At the same time, Gide belonged to those few political pilgrims who found guts not to fall for the modernist charms of Stalinism. The writer was unique

Figure 6.1  André Gide (1869–1951) in the USSR, 1936. Criticizing Stalin’s terror, this Soviet fellow traveler blamed his hosts for not being egalitarian enough. Source: Courtesy of Album/Alamy Stock Photo. ‑

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among Western fellow travelers by issuing a devastating verdict to the Stalin regime after being wined and dined and taken to various Soviet Potemkin villages. When back in France, he disclosed that in no country of the world, including Hitler’s Germany, did he see the minds of people so terrorized and intimidated into submission as in the Soviet Union.72 Gide went even further by openly defending the victims of Stalin’s terror, which was stunning at the time of reigning Stalinophilia. For a left intellectual to say such politically incorrect thing in the 1930s was an act of courage akin to civil disobedience. Yet, I have purposely dwelt on Gide’s experiences to note that his devastating critique of Stalin’s regime was a critique coming from the mouth of a true believer. Strange as it may sound, the writer rebuked his Soviet hosts for not being “holy” enough in their communist faith. A careful reading of Gide’s 1936 published impressions of the Soviet Union reveals that his primary grudge against the Stalinist regime originated not from his concern about abusing individual right of people but out of his revulsion regarding the signs of “bourgeois morality” he detected during his trip. Thus, he lamented the lack of complete equality in the Soviet society. It was not only the sense of disillusionment that he felt when witnessing various perks enjoyed by the Bolshevik nomenklatura elite. Gide’s criticism was rooted in his general frustration that he, a committed egalitarian, felt about the Soviet people who appeared to him as still being too materialistic in their aspirations and therefore “incomplete.” Obviously, this communist seeker expected to find in the land of the “radian future” some ideal egalitarians who did not care about such household items as furniture and foods. When Gide lamented Stalin’s terror, he viewed its brutalities as an annoying stumbling block and an unfortunate detour on the way to that egalitarian utopia. It was no surprise that, despite his critique of Stalinism, Gide continued to sympathize with the Soviet experiment and considered himself a friend of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, like for many other true believers and fellow travelers to the Soviet land of the “future,” for Gide there was nothing worse in the world than capitalism. Driven by the same moral revulsion toward their own Western society, people of various classes were lured to the Soviet communism. Among them were workers, farmers, clergy, and parliamentarians. The most numerous segment of fellow travelers was represented by intellectuals. Not only socialists and communist true believers but also conventional progressives in the West, like American New Dealers and abovementioned Keynes, too had a soft spot for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Although many of them were critical of communism, they nevertheless maintained a friendly attitude toward Stalinism because, to them, it represented a true laboratory of modern life that they envisioned as a centrally planned factory. Western progressives believed that in the Soviet Union they found the society that was navigated by a group of enlightened planners who were capable of engineering a full-proof economy

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that was more efficient and less wasteful than the “anarchy” of Western society. The existing capitalism with its competition appeared to them as a disorderly mess that needed to be tamed for the benefit of all. Hence, the fascination with Stalin five-year plans that seemingly arrested spontaneous and “chaotic” inefficiency.73 Rex Tugwell, an economist and an important member of the American New Deal team in the 1930s, had no illusions about the Soviet Russia and never viewed it as a paradise. Nevertheless, he was fascinated with the very idea of managing the entire economy from above as an organized whole without allowing the destructive forces of market “anarchy” to ruin it. While visiting the Soviet Union in 1927, when communism was still at its infancy and when Stalinism did not yet completely cage the country, he already rushed to endorse random collectivization efforts that the Soviets experimented with. Correctly anticipating a total collectivization campaign, which hit the Soviet Union in 1929–1933, Tugwell noted with satisfaction that the Soviet countryside was turning into a gigantic communal field worked by tractors. Without stumbling upon any private fences like in the United States, Soviet agricultural machinery would be moving around freely in a modern manner and producing the unlimited amount of grain.74 In fact, this bias in favor of modern planning in agriculture not hindered by private fences, might explain the silence of Western elites and many mainstream intellectuals with regards to Stalin’s genocidal collectivization of the Soviet peasantry. To people like Tugwell, these peasants were backward elements, stumbling blocks on the way to modernity. As such, they had to either accept modern life or to be sacrificed for the sake of progress.75 The words of notorious Walter Duranty, who endorsed Stalin’s collectivization and even won the Pulitzer Prize for his “objective” reports from Stalin’s Soviet Union, is the best example of that sociopathic modernity attitude: “Future historians may well regard the Russian struggle for collectivization as a heroic period in human progress. The most backward section of the population would have the chance to obtain what it most needed, namely education. Women would have the chance for leisure and freedom as well. Whether the villages preferred their dirt and ignorance to Progress or not, Progress would be thrust upon them.”76 I have purposely provided this quote to stress that Duranty-like Western apologists for Stalinism were not necessarily evil individuals. Just as their national socialist contemporaries, who wanted to breed the better race of the Aryans by weeding out the “imperfect” specimen, the progressives were similarly inspired by “noble” dreams of “surgically” eradicating “backward” forms of life. The dominant narrative in the interwar West was that competition both in economy in other walks of life was wrong. These sentiments were amplified during the 1929 Great Depression. To the superficial view of sympathetic

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observers, who were ready to take for granted Stalin’s Potemkin’s villages, the Soviet Union was shining in contrast to the crisis-prone Western societies. Bolshevik Russia appeared as the vital crisis-proof commonwealth that was moving fast forward into the bright future. American writer Stuart Chase, who shared this mainstream conviction and who too made a pilgrimage to the Soviet land together with Tugwell, characteristically entitled his book about the flaws of the contemporary West as The Tragedy of Waste.77 Having arrived in the Soviet Union to learn how to eradicate this waste through centralized planning, Chase was very much impressed with the Stalinist experience. Instead of the suffocating Soviet bureaucracy, he saw what he wanted to see: “The attempt to do away with wastes and frictions that do such dreadful damage in Western countries.”78 What mesmerized him most was that, in contrast to the “rotten” West that was still speaking in multiple voices that competed with each other, in the Soviet Union a dozen of top Bolsheviks single-handedly “harmonized” and steered the largest country on the globe in the “correct” direction. Another important feature that both Chase and Tugwell also found dear to their hearts was that the Soviet Union was developing as a mobilized nation as if it was still in the state of war. This stirred their own warm memories of the World War I mobilization schemes they had partaken of. Observing the Soviet industrial landscape, Chase fondly remembered, “Its atmosphere reminded me strongly of the Food Administration Barracks in which I worked at Washington—the temporary partitions, the hurrying messengers, the calculating machines, the telephones, the cleared desks.”79 It was very symbolic that, after their apprenticeship in the Soviet Union in 1927, Tugwell, Chase, and the rest of their large groups of sympathetic pilgrims, were returning to the United States on a ship named Leviathan.80

NOTES 1. Michael Straight, After Long Silence (New York and London: Norton, 1983), 146. 2. Murray Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, ed. John V. Denson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 250–251. 3. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 4. Bruce Caldwell, “Introduction,” in Friedrich A. von Hayek, Socialism and War: Essays, Documents, Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10. 5. Harold J. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Viking, 1943), 33. 6. Ibid., 386.

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7. For the most comprehensive study of how warfare paved a way to welfare, see in Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen, and Peter Starke, Warfare and Welfare. Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 8. Gunnar Myrdal, “Is American Business Deluding Itself?” Atlantic Monthly, November (1944): 51–58. 9. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 185. 10. Ibid., 228. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. Ibid., 160. 13. Ibid., 165. 14. Gunnar Myrdal, “Beyond the Welfare State,” in Great Political Thinkers: Plato to the Present, ed. William Ebenstein (New York: Holt, 1969), 827. 15. Nicholas Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York and London: Norton, 2011), 190. 16. Ibid., 34. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. John Maynard Keynes, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” in Allan Bullock and Maurice Shock, eds., The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1956), 254–258. 19. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941). 20. Ofer, “Soviet Economic Growth,” 1768. 21. For more about Mises and his views, see Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2007). 22. For an English translation of his book, see Otto Neurath, “Through War Economy to Economy in Kind,” in Empiricism and Sociology, ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 123–157. 23. Ludwig von Mises, “Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 47 (1920). For an English translation, see Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1990), https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/li​​brary​​/econ​​omic-​​calcu​​latio​​ n​-soc​​ialis​​t​​-com​​monwe​​alth;​ idem: Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus (Jena: Fischer, 1922). For an English translation, see Mises, Socialism. 24. Ibid., 525–592. 25. A comprehensive analysis of the Bolshevik economic policies can be found in Boettke, The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism. 26. For the best firsthand account of how the interwar Stalinist economy was functioning on a local level, see the lively memoirs of Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, who worked both as a socialist accountant and an informal wheeler and dealer: Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin’s Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). 27. Paul Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58, 67, 69.

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28. Wapshott, Keynes Hayek, 29. 29. Oscar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism,” Review of Economic Studies 4, no. 1 (1936): 53–71; 4, no. 2 (1937): 123–142. 30. F. A. von Hayek, “Economics and Knowledge,” Economica 4, no. 13 (1937): 33–54, https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/li​​brary​​/econ​​omics​​-and-​​​knowl​​edge;​ idem: “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–530, https://www​.kysq​.org​/docs​/Hayek​_45​.pdf 31. Murray Rothbard, “The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited,” in Murray Rothbard, Economic Controversies (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2011), 837. 32. For the examples of such Neoliberalism Studies scholarship, see Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 2018). 33. Caldwell, “Introduction,” 29. 34. Quoted after Oscar Lange, Political Economy (Oxford, UK and New York: Pergamon Press, 1963), vol. 1, 299–300. 35. Jumping ahead, I want to stress that later, in the 1960s and the 1970s, left social scholarship itself began to revolt against this type of grand totalitarian thinking, which eventually led to the emergence of postmodernism. 36. Robert Heilbroner, Between Capitalism and Socialism: Essays in Political Economy (New York: Vintage, 1970), 89. 37. Steele, From Marx to Mises, 156. 38. In the first five decades of the past century, there was only one odd real-life example of market socialism. It took place in Yugoslavia, where in the late 1940s diehard Stalinist dictator Joseph Bros Tito fell out of favor with the Moscow “communist pope.” To save himself and his regime, Tito had to come up with some ideological alternative to Stalin’s statist communism. Browsing the sacred books of Marxism and using Bolshevik 1920s NEP conciliatory policies, his advisers came up with an idea of the so-called socialist self-government. Still, as true believers, who wanted to stay on the “right side” of history, Yugoslavian communists did not wish to lose their ideological “virginity” by endorsing private property—the ultimate evil to any committed socialist. As a compromise solution, they found a way out in empowering local factory collectives under the tutelage of the Yugoslavia Communist League (the name was to invoke the memory of the Marx-Engels Communist League). Local collectives received a right to set up their own wages and prices and compete with each other. Later, this Tito heresy developed into a full-fledged Yugoslavian model of socialism, in which the communist bureaucracy still controlled economic and political commanding heights. Milica Uvalić, The Rise and Fall of Market Socialism in Yugoslavia (Berlin: Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute, 2018), https​:/​/do​​ c​-res​​earch​​.org/​​wp​-co​​ntent​​/uplo​​ads​/2​​019​/0​​1​/The​​-rise​​-and-​​fall-​​of​-ma​​rket-​​socia​​lism-​​in​ -Yu​​gosla​​​via​_D​​ownlo​​ad​-fi​​le​.pd​​f; Sergej Flere and Rudi Klanjšek, The Rise and Fall of Socialist Yugoslavia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 100–105. 39. Slobodian, Globalists, 76–85.

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40. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944); idem: The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom with The Intellectuals and Socialism (London, The Institute of Economic Affairs: 2005), https://mises​.org​/library​/road​-serfdom-0 41. Sir William Beveridge, “Full Employment in a Free Society [1944],” in The Liberal Tradition: From Fox to Keynes, ed. Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 265. 42. Wapshott, Keynes Hayek, 198. 43. Ibid., 209. 44. Ibid., 202. 45. For one of the most passionate panegyrics to Keynes, see Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes (New York: Random House, 1966). 46. Straight, After Long Silence, 57. 47. Wapshott, Keynes Hayek, 205. 48. Steele, From Marx to Mises, 119. 49. Wapshott, Keynes Hayek, 181–182. 50. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942). 51. Quoted after Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 151. 52. Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2017), 71. 53. Ibid., 76. 54. George Orwell, “Review of The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1968), vol. 3: 118. 55. Ibid. 56. Orwell, Animal Farm. 57. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell, 181. 58. George Orwell to Phillip Rahv, May 1, 1994, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3: 141. 59. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 222, 384. 60. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell, 183. 61. Boris Souvarine, Staline, aperçu historique du bolchévisme (Paris, Plon, 1935). For an English translation, see Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Alliance Book and Longmans, 1939). 62. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 299. 63. Yuri Leving, Keys to the Gift: A Guide to Nabokov’s Novel (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 33–38, 44. 64. Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transactions, 2009), 123. 65. Gentile, Politics as Religion, 43. 66. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 99–101. 67. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 43–44, 81.

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68. Mikhail Ryklin, Komminizm kak religiia: intellektualy i Oktiabr’skaia revolutsiia [Communism as Religion: Intellectuals and the October Revolution] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 40. 69. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 89, 91–92, 100. 70. For more about Western pilgrimages to Stalinist Russia, see Hollander, Political Pilgrims; David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment. 71. Ryklin, Komminizm kak religiia, 89. 72. André Gide, Back from the USSR (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1936), 63. 73. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 287. 74. Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper, 2007), 72. 75. For more on this contemporary attitude, see David C. Engerman, “Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development,” American Historical Review, 105, no. 2 (2000): 383–416. 76. Quoted after Paul Hollander, From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship (Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 2016), 124. 77. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Worker’s Education Bureau of America, 1926). The book saw numerous reprints in the 1930s. 78. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 73. 79. Ibid., 73. 80. Ibid., 78.

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Creating Community National Socialist Biopolitics in Germany, 1933–1945

For me German Socialism signifies nothing less than Socialism for Germany, that is, a Socialism which alone and exclusively applies to Germany. —Werner Sombart, a prominent theoretician of Marxism who converted to National Socialism (1934)1

In 1983, historian Eve Rosenhaft published a book entitled Beating the Fascists at prestigious Cambridge University Press. Her book explores fistfights between Hitler’s storm troopers and Red paramilitary units, who were equally brutal and ruthless. The title and the text clearly showed that she sympathized with the communist street fighters. She omitted the fact that the major target of the Communists was not Hitler’s movement but the German democratic state, which the communists wanted to destroy and replace with their own dictatorship of proletariat. To her, the communists were carriers of noble goals, and therefore their violence was valid and redemptive. Conversely, the violence of the national socialists was bad. When Rosenhaft described how communist paramilitary units looted stores, she put the word “plundering” in quotation marks. In her view, these actions were “sporadic impulses towards direct collective actions for the immediate relief of material hardship.” In contrast, she pictured similar actions of the Nazi as predatory and criminal. Until recently, the approach shared by Rosenhaft has been rather typical among historians. Incidentally, the reason I chose to sample this book is simply that in 2008, Cambridge University Press decided to reprint Rosenhaft’s book without any changes.2 Yet, many contemporaries, who were witnessing such fights, did not share such a view. In 1931, S. McClatchie, an ideologically disengaged American reporter who lived in Germany through the Great Depression, pointed out in 165

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a matter-of-fact manner, “Bloody street fighting between the two is a daily occurrence in Germany. Yet the aims of both these radical parties are much the same. Both march under the red banner of Socialism. Both would destroy the power of capitalism. Both are for the communization of land and industry. Both are militaristic. Certainly, Communism would go much further in the socialization than would Hitler, but the difference is one degree.”3 Another contemporary, economist Ludwig von Mises, writing amid World War II when people were forced to take sides, nevertheless stressed that the fact that the Soviets and the Nazi were fighting each other did not prove that they differed in their philosophy and principles: “They have been always wars between people who adhered to the same creeds and philosophies.”4 Still, the perception that, despite their helter-skelter violent tactics, the communists were still better than the Nazi has been the dominant viewpoint since the 1940s onward. In any case, Hitler appeared to the mainstream Western imagination as the ultimate evil, whereas Stalin was a secondary evil.5 The most uncomfortable fact was that the Hitlerites, being naked nationalists fixated on racial identity politics, nevertheless widely used popular socialist rhetoric and policies. National socialists sought to implement various populist welfare and regulatory reforms that earlier had been promoted by social democrats and communists. Incidentally, to the present day, the left prefer to use the abbreviation the “Nazi” because the expression “National Socialism” unavoidably creates mental links between “noble” international socialism and “evil” National Socialism. In their turn, to discredit the left, conservative and libertarian authors dwell on the socialist elements of the Nazi movement by showing that there is no fundamental difference between the class-based egalitarianism of the internationalist left and the race-based egalitarianism of national socialists. The assumption here is that all socialists are potential Hitlerities. Rebuking such assumption, the left try to argue that Hitler’s policies had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever and, in their turn, seek to link conservative and libertarian agenda to the Nazi. In this ideological debate, where each side seeks to tie another to the Nazi, which had been arbitrarily chosen as the icon of the ultimate evil, history naturally turns into politics. In this chapter, using recent scholarship on this subject, I will place the socialist rhetoric and policies of the Hitler regime in the context of its time. EMERGENCE OF GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM Like Stalin’s national Bolshevism, National Socialism was a political religion driven by extreme statism and collectivism. Yet, there was a major difference (although not always consistent) between the two regimes. Although it did

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practice terror against “suspicious” ethnics (e.g., Poles and Germans), the Bolshevik state was based on the Marxist doctrine of class warfare, formally privileging toiling classes and suppressing alien classes and groups (e.g., the bourgeoisie, landowners, priests, kulaks) that were classified as oppressors. The state wanted to phase them out in favor of protected classes of people (workers and poor peasants). In contrast, to Hitlerites, socialism meant exactly what was contained in the name of their movement: National Socialism. In other words, it was socialism for Germans only. National socialists sought to purge socialism of its Marxist and internationalist elements and turn it into a doctrine of national or people’s community of equals (Volksgemeinschaft). Very much like later Third World national liberation leaders, Hitlerites injected their nationalism with the popular socialist rhetoric and reforms, reframing the Marxian doctrine of class struggle along racial lines. In the case of Germany, it was a rhetoric of the suffering nation of toilers that was to unite itself into a people’s community and withstand alien “bloodsuckers” represented by Jews and Western financiers-capitalists. Moreover, national socialists did not reduce their activities to a simple rhetoric. After coming to power in 1933, they did bring to life part of what social democrats and communists wanted to accomplish in terms of labor legislation, welfare, and empowering the people of labor. Yet, in contrast to the internationalist Marxian left, national socialists sought to empower Germans of all classes by seizing resources of racial and ethnic aliens. Hitler perfected nationalization and indigenization of socialism, challenging its Marxian internationalism that preached the transnational brotherhood of all toiling people whose only enemy was property owners. In contrast, the proponents of nationalist socialism insisted that, instead of tearing society apart through class warfare, true socialism “aimed at unifying the nation and increasing its strength by creating a new system of social relationships. Thus, nationalist socialism opposed the exploitation of the worker and advocated solidarity and mutual responsibility. Thus, the real socialism, the true socialism, the living, existential socialism, had to be national.”6 What empowered German National Socialism was a marriage between wounded national feelings of Germans in the wake of World War I and popular socialist sentiments; after all, Germany was the center of the organized socialism movement. National Socialism emerged amid the revolutionary turmoil of the 1918–1923. Besides strong anticapitalistic sentiments, masses of Germans longed to roll back the conditions of the 1919 Peace Treaty forced on them by the UK, France, and the United States. In addition to blaming Germany for initiating the war and chipping away chunks of her land, those countries forced Germans to pay $23 billion as a compensation for war damages. Current historians agree that such treatment was unfair and humiliating because Germany was not the only responsible part.7 In combination

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with severe economic conditions, the 1929 Great Depression, the wounded national feelings produced a fertile environment in which socialism and nationalism merged into an explosive political brew. It was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) party set up in 1920 that was poised to marry those two powerful traditions. The nationalization of German socialism was greatly affected by mass deaths from starvation during World War I as a result of a food blockade organized by France and Britain. At least, 424,000 Germans perished from hunger during the war.8 This made all country’s population aware of their extreme vulnerability due to the lack of agricultural soil. Such geopolitical liability literally haunted Hitler and his associates, many of whom were war veterans. Hence, his infamous doctrine of Lebensraum—an obsessive desire to expand eastward to seize rich soils of Ukraine and Russia to secure Germany’s resource independence. As early as 1922, Hitler stressed that the food self-sufficiency of Germany was impossible to reach within her existing borders. With a sense of envy, Hitler kept stressing that the might and high living standards of the United State arose from the colonization of her vast Western territories blessed with fertile soils and mineral resources. Besides, between 1918 and 1923, the internationalist left attempted in Germany the whole series of abortive armed revolts, seeking to replicate the Bolshevik experiment. These insurrections were backed up by the Moscowbased Comintern activists, many of whom were diaspora revolutionaries represented by people of Hungarian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian backgrounds. The early Bolsheviks were convinced that without a fast revolution in Germany, the motherland of the organized socialist movement, their own revolution was doomed. Lenin and Trotsky, who were sending arms and instructors to foment the revolutionary holocaust in Germany, antagonized large segments of Germans. The Moscow-backed revolts did not enjoy mass support. Not only bankers, manufactories, and the middle class but also many working-class people, who supported mainstream social democrats, were against these insurrections. In fact, in 1918, it was social democrats who called veteran troops to come and to quash their radical left brethren who wanted to replay in Germany the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In the meantime, Germany became flooded with thousands of Baltic German refugees who were escaping from the Soviet War Communism. As part of the former Russian imperial elite, this diaspora had staffed Russian military, diplomatic, and civil service. After 1917, a new revolutionary elite of mostly urban-based Russian, Ukrainian, Russian-Jewish, Latvian, and Caucasian revolutionaries took over, literally phasing out that Russian and Baltic German aristocracy and professionals. People like Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), a Baltic German graduate of Moscow Polytechnic Institute who later became one of the chief ideologists of National Socialism, were

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disempowered and squeezed out. They moved to Germany, spreading the word about the heavy presence of Jewish revolutionaries in the new Russian communist regime. This Baltic German diaspora had a large influence on the political culture of Weimer Germany. Particularly, it amplified the rising antiSemitic feelings among indigenous Germans and Austrians, including Hitler, who had not been personally fixated on Jews prior to 1919.9 Baltic German refugees were feeding to the German public stories about Jewish Bolshevism. Hitler and his circle eagerly absorbed such tales. Although he was aware of the Russocentric drive of the Stalinist regime, as late as 1941, Hitler was still convinced that Russia was a backward semi-savage country that was taken over and controlled by the Jews: “The Bolsheviks rooted out the entire German element and replaced it with Jews. Russians themselves are not capable to get rid of the Jewish yoke. They will not be able to run their own state. The end of the Jewish domination in Russia will be the end of Russia as a state.”10 During the same year, on another occasion, Hitler stressed that Stalin was “nothing else but an instrument in the hands of an all-powerful Jewry” behind whom stood Kaganovich “and all other those Jews who are leading that powerful state.”11 To Hitler and his ideologues, invading the Soviet Union was to strike a death blow at the heard of “Jewish Communism.” The irony of the situation was that the regime national socialists encountered in 1941 was not anymore the cosmopolitan Lenin-Trotsky “dictatorship of the proletariat.” By 1941, the Bolshevik state already mutated into the Russian-Soviet empire, adapting itself to the indigenous soil and simultaneously wiping out the large portion of the diaspora communists, including the Jews, from the Red Army, secret police, and Soviet bureaucracy. German national socialists took over in 1933 in the wake of the Great Depression, riding strong anti-capitalist sentiments that were widespread anyway, considering the powerful presence of socialism in German political culture. The subdued postwar status of the country fueled the discontent against foreign and domestic “bloodsuckers.” Part of the traditional left electorate, which gave up on the class-based rhetoric, shifted toward such nationalist agenda. By 1933, with their popularity on the rise, Hitler and the Nazi elite increasingly positioned themselves as the political force reflecting the interests of all German people. Assimilated into Hitler’s nationalist agenda and purged of its internationalist features, socialism was transformed into racial egalitarianism. Again, this task was not hard to accomplish, considering the national humiliation Germany experienced in the hands of victorious powers. Moreover, the severe conflict within the ranks of the class-based left, who were split into social democrats and communists, eased the job of national socialists in winning the country; at one point, communists even sided with the Nazi, voting against social democrats in the local parliament of Prussia.

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Social democrats carried a stigma of the movement that was responsible for the humiliating peace treaty of 1919. In their turn, being a section of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, German communists could not play the role of the nation’s defenders.12 In contrast, originally having only 3% of the popular support, by the turn of the 1930s, national socialists managed to quickly fill in the patriotic niche, merging popular socialist tradition with potent nationalism. Moreover, since the early 1920s, there was already an influential social justice trend in the national socialist party that aspired to go beyond the expropriation of the Jewish assets toward the confiscation of large property owners. Such popular Hitler’s associates as Gregor Strasser and Ernst Rohm were informal leaders of that trend. The latter, a close friend of Hitler, presided over hundreds of thousands of brown shirts—the Nazi paramilitary units that were involved into street fights with communists. Since Hitler and his circle feared to trigger class warfare in German society, after 1933, the Nazi regime muted the Strasser-Rohm trend and channeled the social justice agenda into identity politics and further to ethno-racial warfare. This motion helped placate the middle class, business, and the army, who were afraid that Hitler’s “people’s militia” might get out of control. In the 1920s, within the German Communist Party and among its fellow travelers, there was also an influential national Bolshevik trend that sought to tone down the Comintern class-based approach and massage German nationalism instead.13 This segment of the radical left, which competed with national socialists for masses, glorified the German military and explained to the populace that it should work to revive Germany by building an alliance with the Soviet Union against the “evil” West; both Stalin’s socialism and Hitler’s National Socialism shared strong anti-Western sentiments.14 At one point, German national Bolsheviks formed the splinter Communist Workers Party. Like their Nazi colleagues, they condemned parliamentary democracy, praised martial values, denounced Jewish capitalists, and even developed a peculiar theory that the German working class could effectively set up the dictatorship of proletariat by relying exclusively on the revived national military as its major tool. German national Bolsheviks were able to sway to their side some officers and war veterans, who found such an ideological brew of nationalism and anti-capitalism very appealing. Moreover, nationalism-oriented communists occasionally invited Nazi speakers to address communist crowds and even printed posters that flashed both the red star and swastika.15 Historian Timothy Brown, who explored the left and right radical culture of the 1920s’ Weimar Germany, wrote about the existence of the whole segment of street fighters nicknamed as “beefsteaks” (brown on the surface and red inside). Members of this large fluid red-brown collective shared the same cultural space and frequently shifted sides, drifting between communist and national

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socialist radicalism.16 In fact, Hitler himself alluded to this common radical tradition when he uttered, “There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism, above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former Communists to the party immediately.”17 At the turn of the 1930s, in a last desperate effort to win over the masses, the German Communist Party too tried to gamble on the national Bolshevik sentiments. Yet, it was already too late: the political playing field of militant nationalism mixed with anti-capitalism and anti-Western feelings was already taken over by National Socialism. There was no way for the internationalist left, who carried class warfare slogans on their sleeves, to beat the Nazi on the German soil. Instead of communists and social democrats assimilating nationalism into their programs, it was the Nazi who successfully integrated socialist rhetoric into their own agenda. In 1933–1934, thousands of communists who did hold firm ideological convictions quit their party and opted for the Nazi. It is notable that the very notion of Hitler’s ideology as “socialism of the race” came from the German National Bolshevik outlook of the 1920s.18 Overall, in Germany, the historical circumstances transformed the original message of socialism—a doctrine of the universal liberation of the poor—into a nationalist project of German empowerment. HITLER’S WILLING BENEFICIARIES Despite their socialist rhetoric, the Nazi never rejected private enterprise. In fact, after coming to power, Hitler presided over several privatization projects, which included the railroad industry. Based on such facts, left writers and scholars argued that Hitler was the puppet of business interests—the perception that still dominates part of scholarship and popular literature. In fact, it was vice versa—German businesses, including large companies, were the puppets of Hitler and hostages of his ideological agenda. Just like the labor, middle class, and the rest of the population, business was to demonstrate its servility in exchange for welfare. The Nazi state heavily regulated and interfered into economy for the sake of its racial and geopolitical agenda that was focused on securing the collective well-being of Germans as a nation at the expense of alien “others.” Hitler’s regime preferred to patronize a carefully chosen group of large loyal industrialists who were, in his view, more effective and easier to control than small and medium-sized businesses.19 In fact, under the Nazi, all entrepreneurial activities were so heavily regulated that nominal owners of enterprises turned into shop managers (Betriebsführer) who were expected to

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work toward national goals and in fulfillment of plans set up by the government.20 Moreover, mimicking their Stalinist opponents, in 1936, the Nazi regime introduced a four-year plan of economic development, simultaneously appointing governmental commissioners who supervised all major branches of economy from the chemical industry to agriculture. These commissioners controlled prices, investments, and the distribution of labor force.21 As for society in general, Hitler came to embrace welfare state policies by practicing massive deficit spending and inflation as a natural remedy that all Western countries adopted in the interwar period to ease social and economic tensions. In other words, national socialists introduced a German version of Keynesianism—a policy approach that represented a middle ground between capitalism and socialism. It was hardly surprising that in an introduction to a 1936 German translation of his famous The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes stressed that Germany represented a perfect setting for the full-fledged fulfillment of his economic prescriptions in contrast to Britain and the United States that, as he lamented, inherited a greater degree of free-market tradition. Keynes wrote, “The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.”22 To be exact, well before in 1936 Keynes “scientifically” endorsed massive governmental debt, inflation, and wide-scale public spending—policies that elites and a large part of society expected at that time—Hitler had already experimented with them for three years.23 After taking over, national socialists were expected to resolve number one problem—horrendous unemployment. Without fulfilling this promise, it was impossible for the Hitler regime to maintain power.24 Hitlerites were able to live up to that task. How they were able to do it is another question. The problem was resolved through the massive expansion of military industry, the introduction of the military draft, and a wide use of manual labor in various public works projects. Among the latter, the most ambitious was the construction of famous German autobahns. In the eyes of the general public, Hitler’s labor policies were a success story. By the time the Nazi came to power, 4.5 millions of Germans were unemployed. A year later, they reduced this number to 2.7 million. Eventually, by 1937, to the general joy of the populace, the regime completely erased unemployment. In fact, in 1939, there was a shortage of more than 500,000 jobs.25 The public swallowed the fact that, like in Stalin’s Russia, the regime severely restricted the geographical mobility of workers by binding them to their factories through the so-called workbooks. Neither did public opinion

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wanted to notice that, because of the military buildup, actual wages of workers dropped. It was only in 1942, during the peak of the Nazi’s looting of European assets and resources, that real wages of the labor reached the level of 1929. After 1942, they began to drop again.26 To compensate for the stagnating wage rates, the regime sought to buy the loyalty of workers through various welfare perks that had a large propaganda effect. These benefits included free meals at factory dineries, sports facilities, and regular twelveday vocations, which included tourism to other countries.27 Coupled with a crackdown on political dissent, the welfare measures and the elimination of unemployment paralyzed any noticeable resistance to the regime. In contrast to Stalin’s Soviet Union, where a large part of society was subdued and disempowered as class enemies, in Germany, most people were lured into the national socialist welfare state by the prospect of building a united and inclusive German commonwealth. The stunning success of the Nazi in seizing resources of neighboring nations and using them to boost the prosperity of the “Aryan community” further muted opposing voices.28 Trying to keep the working class happy, the regime eliminated taxes on overtime pay, forced landlords to maintain fixed rents, and introduced a nationwide health care that also included retired people.29 An additional welfare tool Hitlerites used to woo the populace was the Socialist Service of People Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt). Started as a grassroot Nazi volunteer organization that conducted mass campaign of in-kind donations to poor and sick Germans, it grew into 17 million-strong government-backed association that accumulated and distributed huge amounts of food and household items. The activities of the Socialist Service had a large propaganda effect on the population: needy people spread a word that the national socialist system was providing gifts and feeding them for free. The ideological goal of the whole project was to dramatize the effects of “socialism of action” (Sozialismus der Tat) both to Germans and to the rest of the world.30 Regarding this and similar policies, German historian Götz Aly, who specially studied socialist elements in Hitler’s regime, posed a question: if national socialist policies were based on liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left, then why have we been taught that Nazis are far-right?31 A symbolic gesture that was to demonstrate the regime’s sensitivity to the people of labor was a decision to celebrate May the First, the traditional working-class solidarity day (see Fig. 7.1). This proletarian feast was not simply appropriated and added to the regime’s rituals. Renamed into the National Labor Day, it was declared an official holiday that was to celebrate the contribution of all laboring Germans as a people’s community. Inaugurating this proletarian feast in front of tens of thousands of people, Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, spelled out his

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Figure 7.1  German National Socialists Celebrate the First of May, a Working-Class Holiday (1934). Source: Courtesy of Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

ideological expectations: “This evening, transcending classes, rank and confessional differences, the whole German Volk finds itself united to destroy finally the ideology of class struggle and to clear the path for the new ideas of solidarity and national community.”32 The 1934 Nazi labor legislation aspired to balance the interests of the employers and employees for the sake of the nation. Like the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Germany regime encouraged competition among factories, grading them by productivity and labor conditions. Those that performed well were awarded an honor title of a “national socialist model enterprise” and a transferrable banner.33 By the 1990s, many historians came to an agreement that the Hitler regime did secure the overwhelming support of the German working-class people.34 Welfare and social policies, grand public works schemes, and booming military expansion were funded through the depletion of the country’s financial reserves and massive deficit spending (primarily by borrowing from the German population). By 1938, the German treasury was empty, and the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The largest drain was the militarization of German economy, which, on the one hand, provided mass employment and, on the other, resulted in a drastic shift of economic priorities. In 1928, in the Weimer Germany, 66% of investments went into the consumer industry. By 1939, this ratio reversed: 82% of all investments

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went into heavy industry, mostly military buildup, at the expense of consumer needs.35 At the same time, the Nazi had to live up to their welfare promises. Hitler’s associates were constantly worried about losing a popular support, which they had to purchase through the distribution of various benefits and goods. It is notable that in 1938, when it became clear that Germany had no resources to continue her spending spree, Hitler refused to raise food prices, fearing to upset the population.36 The number one question was how to cover the huge financial hole created by the above-mentioned run-away budget deficit and how to satisfy the consumer needs of the populace. There were two ways out of this conundrum: to print money and boost an inflation or to unleash a war against Germany’s neighbors and seize their resources. The very nature of the national socialist doctrine pointed to the second option. Going after money and resources of “unworthy” domestic and foreign aliens to feed German industry, army, and the population became the essence of the Nazi biopolitics. Outlining his priorities, which were focused on the preservation and enriching the ethnic Germans at the expense of racial and ethnic aliens, Hitler stated in 1939: We need grain and wood. To grow more grain, I need living space in the east. Yes, we are vital. In fact, our crops in 1938 and this year were excellent. Yet, once soil becomes exhausted and will refuse to function, just like a human body that stops working after the effect of an energy booster evaporates, what shall we do in this case? I cannot relegate my people to sufferings from hunger. It will better leave two million of Germans dead on a battlefield than to lose more from hunger. We know what it means to die from hunger.37

By expropriating and plundering occupied nations’ raw materials, industries, and food supplies, and manipulating their currencies, Germany was able to sustain herself. Between 1939 and 1945, she became a classical example of a county with an extractive economy.38 How important the resources of the occupied countries were for German economy shows the example of Belgium, which, incidentally, never experienced brutal confiscation policies suffered by Eastern European countries. Still, even in this country with a mild occupational regime, various direct and in-kind payments extracted by Germany in her favor reached 67% of Belgium’s entire state budget.39 This was pure and naked predatory behavior or, in other words, national socialism in action. In Russia, to conserve food resources, the 3.5 million German occupation army was ordered to feed off the land.40 As a result, German soldiers frequently foraged for food and seized local livestock. Incidentally, this explains mass die-outs of Soviet POWs in the beginning of the war. German

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military authorities had neither resources nor desire to feed millions of Red Army soldiers and officers who were either taken as prisoners or voluntarily surrounded to the Germans. In total, 2.6 million of these people eventually died from hunger during transit or in makeshift concentration camps.41 The same goal of resources’ extraction explains why the German occupational regime decided to maintain hated Stalin’s collective farms. Some Russian and Ukrainian peasants initially welcomed Germans as liberators hoping that the Nazi would disband the Stalinist system of state serfdom. Yet, contrary to their expectations, national socialists found it convenient as a tool of control and extraction of food supplies. Renaming them into “communal households,” the Nazi kept the collectives farms intact.42 Herbert Backe, who was the national minister of food and the one who developed the infamous “Hunger Plan” of eliminating 30 millions of “useless eaters” in Soviet cities to conserve food resources for German soldiers and civilians, stated, “If the Bolsheviks had not created collective and state farms, we would have had to create them.”43 To the very end of World War II, when its cause was already doomed, the Nazi regime continued to take care of the well-being of Germans, distributing plundered loot and apartments to the victims of allies’ bombing and rationing food, making sure that the people of the “Aryan stock” would never go hungry. A remark found in the memoirs of Albert Speer, the Minister of War Production in Hitler’s Germany, is very revealing: “It remains one of the oddities of this war that Hitler demanded far less from his people than Churchill and Roosevelt did from their respective nations. The German leaders were not disposed to make sacrifices themselves or to ask sacrifices of the people. They tried to keep the moral of the people in best possible state by concessions.”44 According to Aly, the reason national socialists enjoyed a popular support literary to the very end of World War II was “concern for the people’s welfare—at any cost.”45 The seemingly bizarre attempts of the Hitler regime at the very end of the war to eliminate the Jews by diverting needed trains and trucks to deliver them to concentration camps originated not only from some irrational hatred of the Jews but also from an obvious economic “rationale”—a desire to expropriate and annihilate the Jewry to conserve limited food resources to the benefit of the Germans. In this case, the reasoning was very simple: the Germans were to be sustained through the elimination of “parasites” and “useless eaters.” The “existential” anti-Semitic sentiments, which always lingered on the margins of European society, served here as a convenient excuse for an economic expropriation of the Jews, whose number in Germany never exceeded half a million people (0.8% of the entire population of the country). Before going after resources of other countries both in the East and the West, national socialists targeted the Jews as domestic aliens who

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“conveniently” stood as the first in line to be expropriated. At first, being stripped of their assets and valuables, many Jews were driven into emigration. Those who remained were eventually confined to concentration camps. Their properties and apartments were seized and distributed among Germans and Austrians. Thus, in Germany, by 1938, needy people received 44,000 apartments that earlier belonged to Jews. In 1940, to resolve a housing problem of the Germanic residents of Vienna, the city found the “final solution”: all Vienna Jews were moved to concentration camps in Poland, where they were murdered.46 Aly estimated that the expropriated assets and properties of German Jews composed 9% of German annual budget in the 1930s.47 This number might appear minuscule but in actual figures and distributed as welfare among the “Aryan” populace, this was not a small thing. By 1938, up to 70% of Jewish business were confiscated and transferred or sold to German owners as part of the so-called Aryanization—the Nazi affirmative action program in economy. The first four-year economic plan, which the Nazi jump-started prior to looting other countries’ resources, too benefited from the confiscations of Jewish properties.48 Incidentally, the most notorious case of World War II’s Holocaust, the 1942 killing of 1.2 million Polish Jews unfit for work, originated from the same biopolitical goal—the Nazi plan to reserve local food supplies for Germans’ use. In his bestselling Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder has reminded us that this 1942 war-driven genocide was part of the same rational that led to the killing of the Soviet POWs by starvation. Again, the same logic of conserving food for the Germans resulted in the annihilation of three million Poles during the same year.49 In the 1990s, in his Hitler’s Willing Executioners political scientist Daniel Goldhagen unfairly labeled all war-time Germans in being the nation of “willing executioners” fixated on the elimination of the Jews. Twisting a bit his silly assumption—a mirror image of Hitler’s propaganda— it seems a more appropriate way to describe the German populace, which was caught into the 1930s–1940s Nazi welfare state, as “Hitler’s willing beneficiaries.” A desire to keep ethnic Germans content explains such strange acts as, for example, Hitler’s decision in 1933 to provide state financial assistance to Jewish-owned enterprises that suffered from the crisis. Not yet having all economic power in his hands, the newly minted head of the Nazi regime was concerned not about those enterprises but about the security of the German workers employed at them.50 Between 1934 and 1936, when the country experienced shortages of food supplies, Hitler nevertheless refused to introduce ration cards, preferring instead to postpone the import of several important items for military industry. In 1939, on the eve of the war, the regime did introduce a full-fledged rationing for all essential items, including foods, clothing and fuel.51

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At the same time, despite tightening their belts, during World War II, German civilian population did not experience many of those economic deprivations faced by populations in other warring countries. The fear to antagonize his “Aryan” base led to various back and forth measures such as the elimination of vocations for German workers in 1939, after the beginning of the war, and then, a few months later, to the waving of that measure.52 The Nazi regime sought to minimize the amount of war-time sufferings and shortages. Overall, the war hardly produced any changes in welfare policies and Germans’ living conditions. The eight-hour workday remained intact. The regime did encourage the labor to work extra hours but for an additional payment. When a few of his associates suggested that German women be recruited to join factory labor on a mass scale, Hitler immediately turned it down. This rejected proposal went against national socialist biopolitics, which was focused on the cultivation of motherhood and family—the health of the nation. The problem of the labor shortage was resolved through the enforced draft of racial and ethnic aliens from occupied countries to perform slave labor on German factories. Despite the idealization of the German peasantry and its volk culture, the regime heavily regulated agriculture in an attempt to keep food prices as low as possible. Fixed prices for produce and numerous state regulations over land use stagnated agriculture. Many farmers lost interest in staying on the land that did not bring them much profit. Between 1933 and 1939, lured by higher wages in the military industry, 1.4 million people moved from the countryside to cities. To fill the labor shortage, the Nazi regime resorted to various “labor battle” campaigns. Thus, national socialist youth organization Hitler-Jugend routinely drafted its members and sent them to the countryside to gather produce. Incidentally, in the 1970s and the 1980s, the late Soviet Union used the same practices to deal with the inefficiency of socialist agriculture by sending each fall college students to pick up produce. Eventually, German work battalions were replaced by slave labor from the occupied countries. By 1944, German industry and agriculture absorbed about 7.6 million drafted alien workers. Half of them were ascribed to farms. In the military industry, one-third of all labor force were aliens from occupied territories.53 By 1942, heavily regulated and militarized Germany economy began to remind the totalitarian Soviet system of “planned chaos.” Had it not been for the extraction of occupied countries’ resources, Germany would not be able to sustain herself. The exploitation of slave labor and plundering resources of occupied territories were so “effective” that ordinary German were able to maintain satisfactory living standards during the war. Unlike the rest of wartorn Europe, Germans never starved until February of 1945, when for the first time they began to experience severe food shortages.54

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“SOCIALISM OF THE RACE”: NAZI IDEOLOGY When Hitler and his movement labeled their ideology National Socialism, they really meant it: the goal was to empower all people of the “Aryan stock” at the expense of non-Germans. Concern for the people’s welfare at any cost defined the face of the regime. German historian Norbert Frei explains, “One cannot explain the development of NSDAP into a mass movement by only shrewd propaganda and world economic crisis. Most important, this movement and then the regime it established was able to convincingly express and partially satisfy the needs and concerns of wide circles of society. That was what allowed Hitler’s state to mobilize masses and secure their loyalty. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, and civil servants in 1933 felt for the first time in their life that the government understands and takes them seriously.”55 In that respect, Hitler’s regime drastically differed from Stalin’s empire that cannibalized its own population, at first alien classes of the “former people” (aristocracy, middle class, merchants, priesthood) and then the peasantry. Stalin was expropriating and phasing out “alien” classes inside the country, whereas Hitler acted as a “benign” dictator, plundering ethnic and racial aliens. The Nazi elite aspired to build an inclusive people’s community of Germans. Nothing comparable to Stalin’s collectivization or Great Terror, which took millions of lives, ever took place in Germany. Many socialists and communists confined to concertation camps after Hitler came to power were released within six months after undergoing “reeducation.” In contrast to class-based policies of the Soviet regime, national socialists sought to safeguard their own population, terrorizing and murdering ethnic and racial aliens and foreign nationals. This explains why Hitler was far more popular among his own people than Stalin. This also explains why the Stalin regime had to maintain a huge secret police apparatus of 366,000 officers to monitor and penalize the 183-million Soviet population. In contrast, with a population of the 83.7 million people, Hitler’s Germany maintained only 20,000 secret police force (including clerks and typists).56 At the same time, the message of National Nocialism was not radically different from other forms of egalitarianism and contemporary socialism: strong anti-bourgeois sentiments and a radical empowerment of a selected group of people at the expense of other groups. For Lenin and Stalin, it meant phasing out the bourgeoisie, kulaks, and the like whose properties had to be confiscated and collectivized. For Hitler, it was the Jews and then other nationalities, whose assets had to be taken over to benefit Germans.57 In the former Russian Empire, which was revived by the Bolsheviks as the Soviet Union, egalitarianism was poised to develop along Marxist lines because of the multiethnic nature of the country. In contrast, in such ethnically

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homogeneous country as Germany socialist class warfare was steered toward racial and ethnic warfare. The first in line was the “Jewish bourgeoisie.” As Francois Furet, a French Marxist historian who later walked away from communism, wrote, “The Jew, that incarnation of the bourgeois, that essence of the bourgeois, that racial bourgeois, provided the ideal scapegoat for the nationalist exclusionists and the resentful poor. Alone, the Jew would incur democratic contempt, ranging from those nostalgic for the lost community to those anticipating a new national and/or socialist society.”58 Ultimately, the goals of national and international socialisms were the same: the engineering of a classless society.59 Although the Nazi regime never sought to level its own population to some average common denominator, the cultivation of social equality among people represented an important part in its ideology.60 As early as 1925, during one of the party meetings, Hitler stated, “If we aspire to create a true people’s community, we should realize that it can be built only on the basis of social justice.”61 What made National Socialism novel and different from earlier forms of socialism was an attempt to blend the idea of social justice and revolutionary nationalism. The deep psychological trauma and humiliation Germans experienced at the end of World War I ensured that their vibrant socialist tradition became injected with a heavy dose of nationalism. It was not difficult for Hitler and his associates to channel powerful anti-capitalist sentiments into an ethnic and cultural warfare against the Jews, internationalist left, and “Western capitalist oligarchy.” The notions of socialism and nationalism resonated very well with the great majority of the contemporary Germans. Jumping ahead, one needs to stress that this novel idea pioneered by National Socialists survived and flourished well after 1945. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, it reemerged among Third World national liberation movements, which similarly used the ideological brew of socialist rhetoric, racial justice, and romantic vision of their folk tradition of collectivism to empower their own “tribes” at the expense of ethnic and racial “others.” Incidentally, at the very end of the war, Hitler prophesized that, if Germany was doomed, its national socialist ideology would nevertheless reemerge in non-European societies.62 The personal evolution of Werner Sombart, a prominent Marxist philosopher and economist, whom Marx himself considered a leading theoretician of his movement shows how, by way of anti-Semitism, an intellectual could easily switch from preaching class warfare to propagating ethnic and racial warfare. Sombart explained that the term “National Socialism” meant a national union based on the conviction that socialism and nationalism depended on each other. This prominent Hitler’s fellow traveler, also elaborated by adding, “This viewpoint of National Socialism is based upon the thought that there is not social order having general validity, but that every order must be suited to the needs of a particular people.”63 Hitler was more succinct in explaining the

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ideological goal of his movement defining it as “the socialism of the race.”64 This message symbolically manifested itself in the regime’s flag, where red color stood for socialism, white for nationalism, and swastika, which national socialists associated with vitality and invincibility.65 According to American reporter S. McClatchie, who witnessed how the Hitlerite movement was unfolding, “There is common bond between the Nationalist swastika and the Socialist red, for both symbols express the inborn German hatred of capitalism.”66 In 1920, when a group of disgruntled war veterans and drifters gathered in Munich and constituted itself as the National Socialist German Workers Party, it was not simply a rhetorical trick. It was a radical attempt to “cleanse” powerful German socialist tradition from its “harmful” class-based cosmopolitan “Jewish” Marxist traits and make it serve the interests of the classless people’s community (see Fig. 7.2). Hitler made what he called “attack on Marxism” his major slogan during the crucial 1933 parliamentary elections that brought him 43.9% of all votes and led him to power.67 It is notable that on June 16, 1941, on the eve of the Germany invasion of Soviet Russia, Goebbels remarked in his diary: “There will be no restoration of Czarism in Russia, but a true socialism will replace Jewish Bolshevism. Every old Nazi will be deeply gratified to see this hour. We shall now destroy what we have fought against for our entire lives.”68 The reference to the old Nazi was not accidental here; the original anti-Bolshevik ideological message of the party resonated very much with the old cadre of national socialists. In terms of its class composition, the National Socialist party included 51% middle-class people, 35% workers, 7% peasants, and 7% the upper classes.69 Occupationally, the largest percentage of committed national socialists originated from the ranks of elementary school teachers who wholeheartedly embraced Hitler’s identity politics. Two other major groups that supplied most activists for the Nazi movement were college students and the unemployed. The greater part of the so-called capitalists and upper classes despised Hitler and viewed him as a right-wing version of Bolshevism. Although national socialist leadership harbored anti-Christian sentiments, it did not seek to completely erase religion in contrast to the scorched earth spiritual policy of Stalin’s regime. To be exact, Hitler did despise Christianity. Yet, the dictator believed that religion was an outdated phenomenon that would die out naturally with the expansion of scientific worldview. There is a mistaken impression, which was created by coffee table books and popular literature, that the Nazi totally embraced Germanic paganism. There were a few national socialists headed by Heinrich Himmler who took efforts to “resurrect” Nordic paganism in an attempt to turn this in the regime’s spirituality. The pagan pursuits of several Nazi ideologists and activists were usually intertwined with the idealization of the land and peasant folk tradition.70

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Figure 7.2  “Struggle Against Marxism and Capitalism”: A 1936 Editorial from National Socialist Newspaper Volksgemeinschaft Beobachter (People’s Community Observer). Source: Courtesy of the author’s personal collection.

At the same time, many other leading Nazi never took pagan pursuits of Himmler seriously. In fact, Hitler made fun of Himmler’s occult quest. What defined the mindset of the Nazi elite, including Himmler, was the “worship” of science and the application of pop science to the resolution of social and political problems. As such, Hitler and his circle were true representatives of radical modernism who were obsessed with an idea of “scientifically” breeding the better type of society. Hitler stressed that National Socialism was not a “cultic religion” but “a popular movement focused on the exact science.”71 National socialist regime policies were famously fixated

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on the “medical” and “biological” approach to society: social “disinfection” measures, racial hygiene, weeding out mentally ill people from society, and such exotic biopolitical projects as Lebensborn (breeding the stock of “pure Aryans”). In their pursuits, national socialists either replicated or took to an extreme “scientific” sentiment popular in all Western countries in the 1920s and the 1930s. A large part of public and intellectual elites in Western counties were convinced that their countries were threatened by alcoholics, criminals, and hereditary idiots who can biologically infect their societies. Hence, an assumption that societies should be sanitized to become healthy. In 1920s and 1930s, such views were considered normal and “scientific” both in the East and the West. Before 1933, German and non-German physicians, including those who shared progressive and social democratic outlooks, took it for granted that physically and mentally unfit people should be eliminated.72 Just as Stalin’s secret police existed to “socially” cleanse Soviet society from class enemies and enemies of the people, German Gestapo secret police similarly was set up to “sanitize” nation from “harmful” elements. In 1936, articulating Gestapo tasks, one of its chiefs defined it as “an institution that carefully monitors the state of health of the German body, detecting any symptoms of illness as well as identifying and eliminating by all available means destructive microbes that emerge due to internal degradation or a purposely external infection.”73 POLITICS OF NAZI STUDIES: FROM NATIONAL SOCIALISTS TO NAZI The first thing one notices browsing English language literature about the 1930s–1940s’ Germany is the routine use of the word “Nazi.” Thus, in English we have books and articles about Nazi economy, Nazi labor policy, Nazi geopolitics, Nazi genetics, and so forth. In contrast, when Germans refer to the same turbulent years, they usually say “National Socialism” (Nationalsozialismus). If they need to shorten it, they occasionally write NS or NSDP; the latter is an abbreviation of the long and all-embracing name for Hitler’s party: National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). In fact, Hitler and his associates never used the word “Nazi.” They always called themselves “National Socialists.” Incidentally, before 1932, when the UK and American media could not yet make up their minds in which camp to place Hitler’s followers, they too usually referred to them as National Socialists or sometimes simply as Hitlerites. In English language, the word “Nazi” acquired a very broad meaning. Just as the term “fascist” or, most recently, “racism,” its linguistic twin, it moved

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away from its historical context, lost its original meaning, and entered our mainstream as a political slur. Now it stays there as a loaded political smear label, which people on both the left and on the right use when they need to put down their opponents. Since in the West the crimes of Hitler’s regime were exposed wider and deeper than equivalent or more monstrous perpetrations committed by other modern villains such as Mao and Stalin, in popular perception, Nazi Germany became the symbol of the ultimate evil. If in a heated political debate people apply this sinister sticker to political opponents, it means that they want to drive them outside of a civilized discourse and turn them into moral outcasts. Talking about the origin of this expression, Richard Overy, a prominent UK historian of National Socialism, wondered why we still continue using “Nazi” in reference to Hitler’s regime when “historians who write about the Soviet Union under Stalin do not usually describe its features as ‘Commie this’ or ‘Commie that.’” He explains to us, The term originated in the 1920s when contemporaries searched for some way of getting around the long-winded title of the party—the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). It was used chiefly by the enemies of the party and never by the regime itself. The term “Nazi” or “the Nazis” had strongly negative associations; it was employed as a quick way of describing a movement popularly associated in the mind of left-wing critics outside Germany with authoritarian rule, state terror, concentration camps and an assault on the cultural values of the West. The term then, and now, was loaded.74

Prior to the 1990s, because of the dominant Marxist paradigm, the widespread perception was that Hitler’s regime was a capitalist oligarchy, which allegedly imposed itself on the innocent “virgin” German populace and which oppressed most of their fellow citizens. It still resonates with many writers of popular literature both on the left and on the right, whereas in reality the regime relied more on enthusiasm and silent consent of the greater part of the German population. Well into the 1980s, many humanities and social science scholars who studied modern dictatorships routinely assumed that there was nothing socialist about the Nazi. It was a “common sense” approach. This narrative went back to the time of the anti-fascist Popular Front ideology in the 1930s, which viewed Hitler’s and Mussolini’s dictatorships as a capitalist rule in its extreme; Marxian socialists viewed those regimes as capitalism’s last stand before passing away.75 Or as a contemporary communist writer Samuel Schmalhausen metaphorically put it, “Fascism is the social hysteria of an economic system that is screaming to be saved while drowning.”76 Such assessment of German National Socialism, Italian fascism (and Labor Zionism too) was written down into official Communist International

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documents. In the 1930s, the internationalist left made a great effort to play down pockets of socialism in the Hitler dictatorship. With the defeat of National Socialism and with the ascent of Soviet Union, as one of the winners of World War II, internationalist socialism became an influential part of the mainstream discourse after 1945. Consequently, the perception of Hitler as a puppet of large industrial monopolies became the established truth. This view of Hitler’s dictatorship was repeated thousands of times by communists and social democrats and eventually became part of the mainstream history narrative. Many students of Hitler’s Germany, including such influential 1960s non-socialist writers as Alan Bullock (1971), began taking it for granted.77 This approach later found reflection in textbook and popular literature. The left felt uncomfortable about egalitarian socialist elements in Hitler’s policies and sought to play them down and disentangle them from socialist tradition. They called it a fake revolution and stressed that the Nazi attempt to combine the private profit motive and mass welfare was a pure insanity— a “unicorn policy.” The above-mentioned Marxist author Schmalhausen summarized, “This strange state that maintains that fiction of rising impartially above classes is thoroughly capitalistic in one half of its brain and mock-socialistic in the other half of its brain” was practically impossible.78 However, recent history scholarship showed that the view about monopolies as the spearheads of National Socialism was untrue. In fact, it was revealed that Hitler’s movement enjoyed a substantial support among workers (see exact figures above), who composed more than one-third of the national socialist party members.79 In SS units, the number of manual workers similarly reached one-third.80 There was also another popular perception of the Nazi, which too emerged in the 1930s. It was an attempt to psychologize the national socialist movement. This literature painted Hitler as a demonic charismatic dictator who took advantage of the sadomasochistic and authoritarian nature of the German people. It was argued that, building on the desperation caused by the Great Depression, he singlehandedly captivated the entire nation. Later scholarly trends blurred the picture even more. In the 1950s, for many Western progressives the Cold War confrontation ended their romance with Stalinist Russia, and now Stalin often was relegated into the same company with Hitler. The Cold War years inspired totalitarian studies,81 which both the left and the right found appealing to their tastes. The “totalitarian school” viewed Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes as alien impositions that exercised a total control over innocent populace that was waiting to be liberated. In the 1960s and the 1970s, with the ascent of the New Left in academia and the increasing popularity of the so-called Frankfurt School, there emerged scholarship on fascism and National Socialism that merged Marx,

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Freud, and the totalitarian approach. This literature came to treat the national socialist regime as a form of collective pathology that was exploited by capitalist monopolies. Today, this view is usually propagated through coffee table books and TV shows. The most recent example is “The Dark Charisma of Adolph Hitler,” a BBC documentary.82 It was only in the 1980s that scholars began to seriously explore the sources of a mass social support for the Hitler dictatorship and look into economic, emotional, and cultural motives that drove people to gravitate toward National Socialism.83 By now, many scholars agree that class-based analysis and pathologizing the Nazi regime do not explain the ascent of national socialists to power.84 If one puts Nazi Germany in the historical context, it will be clear that, just like Stalinist Russia and Mussolini’s Italy, 1930s’ Germany was one of the extreme manifestations of interwar militant populism and “high modernism” that hinged on three pillars: collectivism, activist state and social engineering. The popular origin of expression “Nazi” goes back to the attempts on the left to disentangle national socialists from socialist tradition. In the 1940s, left-leaning writers and policy experts in the West began embracing this term because it sounded conveniently short and also because it did well the job of getting around socialist elements in Hitler’s dictatorship. There was an additional reason why that term caught on, at least in English. It was the reluctance of the UK and American media, politicians, and propaganda workers to offend the Soviet Union, their war-time ally. These propaganda efforts boosted the view that the Hitler’s regime had nothing to do with socialism.85 Interestingly, it was precisely after 1942, when the Soviet Union became a full-fledged Anglo-American ally, that the use of “Nazi” was becoming increasingly popular, almost totally phasing out the term “National Socialism” in English. This turnaround was especially visible in the writings of a famous member of the Frankfurt School Herbert Marcuse. At the end of 1942, this philosopher-turned intelligence expert wrote a propaganda memo for the U.S. Office of War Information, where he came up with a set of guidelines on how to successfully mobilize the American population against the enemy by utilizing loaded words that should be hammered into people’s minds.86 Marcuse stressed that such expressions as “totalitarianism” were not good enough for propaganda purposes because they were too abstract for the common folk to swallow. “Dictatorship,” in references to Germany, was not good either because this word blurred the difference between Germany and the Soviets, which could offend the powerful Soviet ally. What was a good and acceptable term for him? Marcuse pointedly stressed, “‘Nazis’ and ‘Nazism’ (not National Socialism) still seem to be the most adequate symbols. They contain in their very sound and structure something of that barbaric hate and horror that characterize both references. Moreover,

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they are free from the national and socialist illusions which their unabridged form still might convey.”87 Marcuse also regretted that this useful loaded term was still confined to the German regime only. To correct the situation, he suggested that American radio and print propaganda not only mainstream the expression “Nazi” but also expand it to fascist Italy and Vichy France. As if following his own advice, in his texts written after 1942, Marcuse switched from “National Socialism” to “Nazi.”88 There was yet another way to talk about Hitler-type regimes, while simultaneously allowed to “bypass” socialism. From the 1930s to the present, both in the West and in former communist countries, writers have been frequently using the generic expression “fascism” to refer collectively to Mussolini’s Italy, Vichy France, and Hitler’s Germany. In fact, “fascism” became the favorite word of choice both for Stalinist propaganda workers and for the communist left outside of the Soviet Union. This was an easy solution that communist ideologists instinctively found in the early 1930s when trying to avoid any uncomfortable questions that could arise regarding such expressions as “Nazi” and especially “National Socialism.” For this reason, for the Soviets and their fellow travelers “fascism” remained the favorite word of choice. Eventually, both communist and anti-communist left began mainstreaming expression “fascism” as a synonym of “Nazi” to refer to all regimes movements that they defined as their enemies. Thus, Comintern ideologists routinely called their social democrat rivals “social fascists.” In the course of time, expression “fascism” became a metaphor for something evil, sinister, and hated. Just like “Nazi,” “fascism” lost its original meaning and came, as Orwell reminded to us, to simply describe something politically not likable.89

NOTES 1. Werner Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus (Charlottenburg: Buchholz & Weisswange, 1934). 2. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge, MS: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3. S. McClatchie, “Germany Awake!” Forum April (1931): 223. 4. von Mises, Omnipotent Government. 5. For more on this intellectual aberration, see Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Vintage, 2003). 6. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 111. 7. Catherine Epstein, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015), 13. 8. Walter G. Moss, An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2008), 10.

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9. Oleg Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha: rai dlia nemtsev [Secrets of the Third Reich: Paradise for Germans (Moscow: Olma Press, 2011), 201; Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10. Quoted after Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 135. 11. John Lukacs, Hitler of History (New York: Vintage, 1997), 164. 12. Mises, Omnipotent Government, 201. 13. Abraham Ascher and Guenther Lewy, “National Bolshevism in Weimar Germany: Alliance of Political Extremes against Democracy,” Social Research 23, no. 4 (1956): 450–480. 14. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 250–251. 15. Herbert Marcuse, “The German Communist Party,” in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, ed. Raffaele Laudani (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 179–180. 16. Timothy Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 4, 79. 17. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism, 173. 18. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. 19. For more about the fate of a small businessman in Nazi Germany, see the book of memoirs: Guenter Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1939). 20. Mises, Omnipotent Government, 56; Bruce F. Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century (Chichester, West Sussex, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 95. 21. Norbert Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany: The Fuhrer State, 1933– 1945 (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MS: Blackwell, 1993), 76; Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, 99. 22. Quoted after Daniel Kuehn, “Keynes’s Foreword to the German Edition of the General Theory (2010),” https​:/​/fa​​ctsan​​dothe​​rstub​​bornt​​hings​​.blog​​spot.​​com​/2​​010​/0​​7​/ key​​ness-​​forew​​ord​-t​​o​-ger​​m​an​-e​​ditio​​n​-of.​​html.​ 23. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 71. 24. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 83. 25. Ibid., 48; Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, 96. 26. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 78. 27. Ibid., 81; Epstein, Nazi Germany, 103–104. 28. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 107–108. 29. Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, 96. 30. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 121–124. 31. Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), 16. 32. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 52. 33. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 103. 34. Lukacs, Hitler of History, 219. 35. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 51. 36. Ibid., 30–31.

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37. Ibid., 202–203. 38. On extractive economic systems in world history and how they retarded the development of societies, see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012). 39. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 173. 40. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe, 170. 41. Ibid., 184. 42. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 142. 43. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 213. 44. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1970), 214. 45. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 4. 46. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 105–106. 47. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 48. 48. Hans Mommsen, Das NS-Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2014), 67–86. 49. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 193, 279, 285–286; Snyder, Bloodlands, 169–170. 50. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 30. 51. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 101. 52. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 115–116. 53. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 77, 139. 54. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 142; Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 179. 55. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 152. 56. Pauley, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, 172. 57. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 204. 58. Ibid., 46. 59. Overy, The Dictators, 230. 60. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 82. 61. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 78. 62. Karlheinz Weissmann, “The Epoch of National Socialism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 2 (1996): 291. 63. Werner Sombart, A New Social Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1937), 113. 64. Overy, The Dictators, 232. 65. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 28. 66. McClatchie, “Germany Awake!”, 222. 67. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 46. 68. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 1939–1941, trans. Fred Taylor (New York: Putnam, 1983), 415. 69. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism, 177. 70. Hermann Bausinger, “Nazi Folk Ideology and Folk Research,” in The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, ed. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 21. 71. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism, 170.

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72. Plenkov, Tainy tretiego reikha, 241. 73. Frei, National Socialist Rule in Germany, 103. 74. Richard Overy, “Goodbye to the ‘Nazi’s’,” History Today 63, no. 5 (2013), https​:/​/ww​​w​.his​​toryt​​oday.​​com​/g​​oodby​​​e​-naz​​is. 75. Brown, Weimar Radicals, 2009, 7–8. 76. Samuel D. Schmalhausen, “Communism Versus Fascism,” in Recovery Through Revolution, ed. Samuel D. Schmalhausen (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1933), 453. 77. Alan Bullock, Hitler: А Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 78. Schmalhausen, “Communism Versus Fascism,” 454. 79. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15; Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2004), 157–158; Overy, The Dictators, 233. 80. Ibid., 241. 81. Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 72–88, 108–142. 82. For a book based on this documentary, see Lawrence Rees, Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss (New York: Pantheon Books, 2013). The early example of the psychological interpretation of Hitler’s dictatorship is classical Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon, 1941). 83. See, for example, Michael Geyer, Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133–344; Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 84. Epstein, Nazi Germany, 22. 85. Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2012), 141. 86. Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London: Roudedge, 1998), 179–186. 87. Ibid., 180. 88. For more about the etymology of the expression “Nazi,” see Andrei Znamenski, “From ‘National Socialists’ to “Nazi”: History, Politics, and the English Language,” The Independent Review, 9, no 4 (2015): 537–561. 89. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), vol. 4, 132. It is notable that, in his otherwise wellresearched book Jonah Goldberg, a popular conservative writer, has resorted to the same “fascist” usage to dramatize his case about historical links of national socialists and Italian fascists with progressive and socialist tradition: Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change (New York: Broadway Books, 2009).

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“Regime of Goodness” Social Democracy and the Swedish Model, 1920s–1990s

In the middle 1930s, a left-leaning American writer Marquis Childs went to Sweden to observe social and political system of that country. The result of his journey was The Middle Way, in which he argued that Sweden found the good benign way of development that represented a middle ground between Russian communism and American capitalism.1 To him, this small state was able to tame capitalism by democratic means through a state intervention. European social democrats and American New Dealers welcomed this model, which they came to view as the ultimate key to social and political salvation. For Childs, Sweden was the fulfillment of the New Deal state interventionism that was under construction in the 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally endorsed that bestselling book, which in fact became the most popular nonfiction text in the United States in the second half of the 1930s. Almost forty years later, at the turn of the 1970s, British author Roland Huntford also went to Sweden and produced a totally different account he titled The New Totalitarians (1971). In contrast to Childs, Huntford defined this Scandinavian country as the embodiment of a new type of a totalitarian state. He argued that Sweden was run by a technocratic oligarchy that locked the Swedish populace within the “golden cage” of benevolent paternalism that hardly left any room for an individual initiative and the spirit of enterprise.2 The writer portrayed Sweden as the fulfillment of the grim dystopian prophecy of Aldous Huxley’s The Brave New World, where obedient populace self-policed and censored itself, looking up to a big government “brother” for all kinds of social solutions, and shutting down those who wanted to stick out. Huntford was especially stunned by the fact that talking about personal freedom in Sweden was considered pathological. With a sad 191

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irony, he concluded that the Swedes would have made a perfect human material for Stalin and Mussolini. While for Childs Sweden was the radiant future America should aspire to, for Huntford she was the symbol of the dangerous slippery slope path outlined by F. A. Hayek in his famous The Road to Serfdom (1944). The Childs’ version was popular in the Western mainstream between the 1930s and the 1960s. Huntford’s version, which too became popular, catered to the changed mood of the public in the 1970s and the 1980s. Both Child’s and Huntford’s version were valid, working well for their historical contexts. This chapter sketches the history of the Swedish reformed socialism by placing it in the context of the evolution of the European social democracy. Although present-day Swedish social democrats deleted socialism from their agenda, in the 1960s and the 1970s, they were seriously toying with the idea to rejuvenate that creed. Those reformed left, who, by the 1960s, were frustrated about constant slips of existing socialist societies into totalitarianism, came to believe that the Swedes finally were able to strike a fine balance between the benevolent governmental control and individual freedom. This appeared to them the way to the radiant egalitarian future. BETWEEN MARX AND KEYNES: EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SEARCH FOR THE “THIRD WAY” Those Marxist socialists who chose to follow reform prescriptions of Eduard Bernstein (see chapter 3) muted their revolutionary aspirations and embraced the idea of a benevolent state that was expected to redistribute wealth without completely suffocating the “capitalist goose.” I want to remind that, after the death of Marx and Engels, along with Karl Kautsky, Bernstein was considered the major apostle of the Marxist creed. Those who agreed with Bernstein and who were gradually shedding Marxist garb became known as social democrats. Social democrats also sought to disentangle themselves from the Soviets and their sympathizers, who aimed to move fast forward toward total centralization of economy and political life. Being convinced that socialism could be established in a stealth way by ballot box, the revisionists rejected the Bolshevik idea of a one-party dictatorial rule—the hallmark of the communist political system. Social democrats assumed that, in the process of capitalism’s enlargement and monopolization, more people would be joining the ranks of the hired labor. Eventually, the greater part of population would turn into “proletarians” and vote the “rotten bourgeoise” out of power and usher in socialism.3 In the 1920s, the radical pro-Bolshevik left denounced this tactic as social fascism - the betrayal of Marx’s noble revolutionary tradition. Since the 1919

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great schism between communism and social democracy, the two camps of the left became mortal opponents. It was only for a brief while in the middle of the 1930s that the two camps tried to work together within the so-called Popular Front coalitions in Europe and the United States against Hitler and Mussolini. This unstable alliance fell apart when in 1939 Hitler and Stalin concluded a non-aggression pact, signed a treaty about friendship and borderland, and divided Eastern Europe. Yet, after the Hitler sudden invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, both factions were again in the same bed, temporarily putting aside their rivalry when fighting the common enemy. It was soon forgotten that, along with the Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had invaded Poland in September of 1939, effectively launching World War II. Moreover, after 1945, the established narrative was the following: with all its imperfections, the Soviet Union was the country that liberated Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe.4 In 1949, prominent UK Labour Party politician Lord Linsay, defined the nature of social democracy as a movement that catered to the aspirations of all working people without falling for the extremes of communism. He did not miss to remind to his reformed comrades that it had been Protestant nonconformist congregations in England rather than Marxism that had stood at the foundation of the UK socialist movement.5 The attitude toward private property, the major “evil” for socialists, became the litmus test that separated the two factions of the same creed. By the 1950s, social democrats came to the conclusion that private property was not to be nationalized arbitrarily but selectively. Reformed socialists still shared the idea that the expropriation of private property was permissible but only in the framework of a due legal process and after a proper compensation. While communists believed that without confiscations and total nationalization there would be no true socialism, social democrats aspired to nationalize only “commanding heights”— strategic branches of industry that were too important to be left in private hands.6 For their practical policy, social democrats began advocating a so-called third or Keynesian way, which was associated with the interventionist prescriptions of the celebrity economist John Maynard Keynes. This was an attempt to simultaneously sit on capitalist and socialist chairs (see, for example, Fig. 8.1). In a nutshell, this policy was based on the rejection of the Marxist class struggle and the state ownership of economy. Instead, it aimed at the heavy state regulation of private enterprise, a reliance on deficit spending to fund various public works projects, progressive taxation, and governmental welfare. By the 1950s, a consensus was growing among reformed socialists that, by using those measures, one could reach the same socialist goals without any expropriation and nationalization. By the 1970s,

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Figure 8.1  W. H. Beveridge (1879–1963), Influential English Politician whose Work was the Foundation for the British Welfare State and Socialism in the Wake of World War II. Source: Courtesy of Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo.

this “third way” became the signature approach for the mainstream Western left.7 Although Keynes never formally associated himself with the British Labour and European social democrats, recent research has shown that he did harbor deep-seated sympathies for socialism and, like many progressive intellectuals in the 1930s and the 1940s, cultivated benign attitudes to the Soviets.8 After 1945, thinking about how to better reform the mainstream socialist creed to save it from the Soviets, Norman Thomas, the leader of American democratic socialists, stressed that for the true left it was essential to assimilate Keynes’s ideas on the role of government in society. To Thomas, the value of the Keynesian way for the dissemination of socialism was twofold. First, without completely banishing the market system, Keynes showed how to make a decisive break with laissez-faire capitalism. Second, the celebrated economist rationally explained why a state must be the primary force to

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regulate economy as well as to guide investments and spending.9 Since the 1950s onward, the welfare state based on Keynesian prescriptions became the dominant policy approach for social democracy. The 1960s and the 1970s were the golden years of the “third way.”10 During those decades, the welfare state in the West reached its peak and the political mainstream embraced the idea of blending socialism with capitalism. In the middle of the 1950s, the British Labour Party set out to delete from its program a 1918 stipulation about “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” Yet to formally get rid of this major pillar of socialism was not easy. As late as 1956, prominent Fabian Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963), who briefly worked as the minister of fuel and power in the Clement Atlee’s Labour government (1947–1950), had a hard time trying to convince his fellow laborites that nationalization was inappropriate.11 Gaitskell argued that taking over entire economy was out of question because this was the communist way. At the same time, as he pointed out, businessfriendly nationalization through a fair compensation to company owners was not a good solution either. The latter would simply perpetuate the economic inequality because the bourgeoisie would still be able to live of their investments into shares and stocks. The real equality, stressed the former minister, would arrive through a heavy regulation, progressive taxation, the massive expansion of public spending, welfare. He especially stressed the need of credit manipulation in the interests of the general public. Gaitskell calmed the “slippery slope” skeptics that, unlike communism that squashed the creativity of individuals, in the social-democratic welfare scheme there would always be some room for an occasional “odd man out”—a die-hard individualist who might come up with an innovation. Again, the social-democratic strategy was to squeeze the “entrepreneurial goose” as much as possible without suffocating it. In the meantime, as Gaitskell noted, by further expanding a welfare state, a government was to gradually buy shares in private companies, increasing step by step its presence in economy.12 In a stealth manner, it was to lead to socialism. Other reform socialists followed the suite. In 1959, the German Social Democratic party dropped its formal allegiance to Marxism from its “Basic Program. The new so-called Godesberg program stated that the “economic power, rather than ownership” was the central issue and that any concentration of property, whether in private hands or in the hands of a state, was dangerous. Moreover, the party airbrushed its history, insisting that German socialism had sprouted not from Marxism but from Christian ethics, humanism, and classical philosophy.13 Despite their reformed approach, social democrats were still driven by the same fear of the free market and economic fluctuations, which, in their view, led to “anarchy” and the disintegration of society. Hence, the lingering desire

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to somehow arrest any contingency factor. and guarantee the “perfect equilibrium” in society.14 With the ascent of cybernetics in the 1960s and with the first signs of computer revolution, some social democrats became galvanized by this new “philosophical stone” that, as they thought, would finally allow them to provide the complete full-proof socialist calculation in society and get rid of market uncertainties. Oscar Lange, a Polish socialist economist who had “won” over Hayek in the 1930s, became so excited that he even dropped for a while his idea of market socialism, suggesting that, if armed with computers, socialist economy did not need any markets whatsoever. He speculated that computers would become the ultimate device that not only would help run the economic commanding heights but also calculate all consumer prices automatically. At this new stage of human evolution, allowing free market to search for prices spontaneously through try and error appeared to Lange as an obscene and retrograde practice.15 Lange was convinced that finally socialists found the “theory of control engineering” that would allow them not only to calculate prices but also to program and plan entire economic life down to miniscule details. His Soviet colleague Aksel Johan Berg was equally excited about the miraculous potential of cybernetics for the communist cause. This engineering scientist with an “incorrect” German diaspora background was at first thrown into Stalin’s GULAG in 1937 and then, upon release, became the leading proponent of cybernetics in the Soviet Union. In his 1961 program paper “Make Cybernetics Serve Communism,” Berg wrote that automatic “cyber” allocations of resources and the total calculation of consumer needs would further empower communism’s centrally planned economy in its competition with the Western “anarchic” capitalism.16 Equally enthusiastic about the ideological prospects of the forthcoming computer innovations, the head of American democratic socialists Thomas prophesized in the 1950s that soon the electronic “cybernetic” robots would forecast and plan, calculate all prices, phasing out any need for free market. His only fear was that these robots might displace human beings who would be relegated to the ranks of the unemployed. Thomas concluded that, in the light of this looming “robotic threat,” society more than ever needed socialists to take control of a government to act as enlightened regulators. Or else, “under the amoral sanctions and the anarchy of the private profit system,” it would be hard to police and restrain robots who might dislodge human beings from the world.17 To be fair, Lange had to tame a bit his own scientific hubris, admitting that real life was too complex for even a sophisticated computer to handle. With a tone of regret, he added that, amid the computer revolution, society still had to rely on the power of what the economist called the “old fashioned market servo-machines.”18 In the late 1970s, when the whole positivist theology of

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socialism with its arrogant claim to explain, predict, and calculate its way into the radiant future began to collapse, social-democratic planners silently dropped the talk about the total planning scheme through computers. Still, that “computer hubris” has recently resurfaced in a form as a man-made global warming prophecy, which too heavily relies on ideal computer models as the way to predict and control the future. Building “People’s Home” in Sweden The first country to engineer society based on the full-fledged social-democratic ideas was Sweden. Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1897), one of the spearheads of Swedish socialism, explained that economic planning would not spring from an instant grand master plan. Governmental intervention and “socialization” were to develop in a gradual pace as a set of steps and reactive measures attempted by a government and “many other collective bodies” in response to crises, wars, and various conflicts. Myrdal, who by the 1970s came to view himself as the spokesperson for the entire progressive West, argued that the world was moving anyway from individualism to “socialistic capitalism,” and government planners needed to assist this natural movement to make it smoother. As a scholar bureaucrat, he did not care much about popular participation in existing institutions. Continuing the Fabian and Saint-Simonian tradition, Myrdal believed that it was up to the group of enlightened expertsintellectuals to socially engineer society for the benefit of an entire nation. Unlike Marxist true believers, who at least rhetorically paid tribute to proletarians and masses in general, Myrdal and many other social democrats romanticized experts-engineers. Progressive writers ascribe the high living standards, which Sweden and other Scandinavian countries reached by the 1980s, to the favorable influence of the Scandinavian model based on the expanded welfare state. Those who disagree with this view have drawn attention to the fact that much of the wealth, which was so widely redistributed in Scandinavia between the 1960s and the 1990s, had been created prior to the 1960s.19 Social scholars have also pointed to important cultural, political, and economic prerequisites that made possible for Nordic societies to reach high living standards.20 Thus, unlike the rest of Europe and the world, in the Middle Ages, serfdom had never been part of political tradition in Scandinavia. Peasants were independent farmers who not only worked their land plots but in fact owned them, which nourished a strong respect for private property. Moreover, by the 1700s, these farmers owned 50% of the entire land in the country.21 From below, they created local governments that enjoyed a high level of trust. The fact that until the end of the last millennium Sweden and her neighbors were small ethnically homogenous states made it easier to

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develop such trust in governmental institutions that were accountable to masses. Equally important was the fact that economic success of Scandinavian countries had been built upon a strong tradition of Protestant ethic of Lutheranism. It is very appropriate here to bring up the famous argument made by German sociologist Max Weber about the Protestant tradition that indirectly fomented the spirit of enterprise and work ethic in modern Europe.22 The major currents of Protestantism dominant in northern Europe (e.g., Lutheranism and Calvinism) committed the faithful to the rigorous collective and individual Bible readings, regular prayers, and hard work. In this spiritual paradigm, all earthly occupations were valid and sound if performed diligently and honestly. According to the Protestant creed, such efforts did not guarantee salvation but they nevertheless were a necessary prerequisite to be admitted in the ranks of the “elect” with a possibility of salvation. Thus, in Sweden and neighboring Scandinavian counties, the domination of local communities by the enlightened Lutheran ministry (the so-called pastoral Enlightenment tradition), who simultaneously promoted science, the Bible reading, and “clean profit,” heavily contributed to the economic and intellectual advancement of the country. As Weber pointed out, later the religious strings attached to this spiritual mindset were secularized and mutated into the habit of the heart—the famous northern European work ethic. Throughout the nineteenth century, in the spirit of the Protestant ethic, Sweden and her close neighbors followed the tradition of delayed gratification. The expansion of universal literacy among the Swedes in the nineteenth century was another important follow up to the Protestant fixation on the Bible reading. Historically, this was the greatest investment into human capital of the country. Many have tried to debunk the Weber thesis. Still, it is obvious that in modern times northern Europe was more literate and economically advanced than southern, southwestern, and eastern Europe that remained Catholic and Orthodox. A most recent study of 150,000 individuals from Nordic Protestant countries provided another fascinating confirmation of the Weber argument. Andre van Hoorn and Robbert Maseland showed that, despite the recent erosion of work ethics in Nordic societies, people with Protestant backgrounds felt more guilt about being unemployed than communities without such spiritual tradition. Moreover, those who did not belong to the Protestant tradition tended to blame their misfortunes on surrounding circumstances.23 Another direct proof that Nordic economic accomplishments had much to do with their cultural background is the stunning success of Scandinavian immigrants in North America. Blessed with a good social capital, by the end of the past century, these immigrants enjoyed 50% higher incomes than their kin who remained in mother countries. In the 2010s, all groups of Scandinavian immigrants (Finland, Denmark, Sweden,

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and Norway) had an average family income higher than $65,000 per year in contrast to the average American income of $52,000.24 What also helped Scandinavian countries to accumulate wealth was a highlevel economic freedom they had come to enjoy as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. Between the 1850s and the 1860s, Sweden happened to be run by classical liberals who heavily democratized her politics by involving its populace into governance. They also lifted stifling regulations over markets and entrepreneurial activities. At that time, Sweden truly became one of the major beacons of liberty in Europe. As a result, the major bulk of wealth in Sweden was produced between the 1870s and the 1930s, prior to social democrats’ coming to power. In fact, by 1920s, Sweden already had the lowest level of inequality in the West. By that decade, Scandinavia in general was the most egalitarian area of the world. Nana Sanknjai, an Iranianborn scholar from Sweden who is incidentally sympathetic to the welfare state model, stressed that income equality in Sweden had already become the permanent part of life prior to the 1960s, when the country still had smaller public sector and low taxes.25 The father of Swedish social democracy was Hjalmar Branting (1860– 1925), a follower of famous Eduard Bernstein, the one who had muted the radical message of Marxism. Despite being one of the major guardians of the creed, Bernstein invited socialists to work within the existing capitalist system to improve living standards of the labor instead of luring them to barricades. To be exact, Swedish social democrats did not commit themselves outright to revisionism. They danced for a while between orthodox Marxism and Bernstein’s reformed socialism. Branting liked the revolutionary eschatology of Marx and Engels. Yet, at the same time, he was trying to be a realist. Eventually, like the greater part of Western European socialists, the Swedish left chose the way of gradual reforms. By the end of the 1920s, they quit their revolutionary rhetoric and began to drift toward Fabian, Bernstein’s, and lord Keynes’ prescriptions. As early as 1917, Branting joined the so-called center-left coalition government as a minister of finances. Formally remaining the party of the working class, social democrats toned down traditional Marxist obsession with class warfare. Simultaneously, they started searching for a good ideological metaphor that would allow them to appeal to all segments of Swedish society: workers, farmers, middle class, and the well-to-do people. They found it in the emerging rhetoric about organic “people’s home” (Folkheim). Those who shared this notion were convinced that the interests of a national community superseded any class interests.26 An important intellectual fountainhead of the “people’s home” doctrine was Swedish political geographer and public intellectual Rudolf Kjellen, who coined the expression “biopolitics” in 1906 and who glorified the benevolent government as the ultimate fulfillment of

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a collective will in any society; he simultaneously played down the significance of constitutional law. Kjellen argued that the job of a state was not to serve the interests of an individual but to cater to the well-being of an organic community.27 He romanticized a benevolent state, seeing it as an entity with its own spirit, soul, body, character, and feelings. Another powerful source of Folkheim was the abovementioned Nordic pastoral spiritual tradition that cherished the farming family household and local governance—an attitude that was later transferred to the Swedish state that became the “greater family.”28 Since 1928, under Per Hansson, a social-democratic prime minister, Sweden began constructing the “people’s home” community in earnest. In the spirit Kjellen’s teaching, the state included only two branches of power: the parliament (Riksdag) and the executive. The assumption was that these two were enough to manifest the will of the majority. To the present day, Sweden does not have an independent constitutional court like, for example, the United States. This means that there is no high legal check on political decisions made by the government. It is up to the parliament to decide the constitutionality of governmental acts. In fact, social democrats always resisted any initiatives aimed at setting up an independent constitutional court. They feared that such institution, which was not subjected to a popular will, might undermine governmental interventionism.29 Folkheim was a benign Swedish replica of the national socialist “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) of Germany. In both cases, government fused nationalism and socialism to build welfare states. Yet, there was a crucial difference between the two. From the very beginning, Swedish national socialism was an inward-looking movement that relied on indigenous resources and focused on self-improvement in the spirit of the potent Lutheran tradition. In contrast to Hitler’s regime, which presided over a demoralized society infested with virulent secular nationalism, Swedish “people’s home” was not seeking a historical revenge and was not preying on other countries’ resources. In fact, Sweden had done away with warfare altogether as early as the turn of the 1800s. Although, to expand their welfare state, both Swedish social democrats and German national socialists relied on massive spending, they went by separate ways in accumulating their revenues to fund their welfare programs. While the Swedes generated profits by expanding their exports to other countries and increasing income taxes, German national socialists extracted the material wealth of other countries. Between the 1910s and the 1940s, international circumstances were extremely favorable to Sweden. Unlike the other European countries and North America, she was able to stay away from two world wars, benefited from a trade with all warring countries, and dramatically increased her wealth.30 Incidentally, massive exports of iron ore

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and machinery to national socialist Germany during World War II still haunt the reputation Swedish “people’s state” to the present day. Sharing power with the Peasant Party, social democrats jump-started generous pension programs and unemployment benefits in the mid-1930s. In 1938, the government brought business and unions together and forced them to sign a mandatory agreement that specified universal rules of the game regarding employment and wages. Along with the revolutionary rhetoric, social democrats discarded the traditional left mantra about nationalization. Instead, the government turned to regulating prices, wages, trade, and capital accumulation. By choosing regulation over nationalization, social democrats were able to placate their industrialists, who were poorly organized anyway.31 While in many Western countries the 1929 Great Depression polarized society, in Sweden, on the contrary, it brought a consensus that all people, both rich and poor, should act together to shield themselves against the crises and economic misfortunes. The greater part of the Swedish society also became convinced that, if allowed freedom of choice, people would be insecure and lost, or, worse, would be engaged into wasteful and useless activities.32 The social democrats, who ruled the country until the 1970s, took advantage of these sentiments. They were able to convince society that only their government was capable to become the guardian of the country’s security. In exchange, the populace was encouraged to renounce its traditional ties to local communities and families, and to link themselves instead to their new “family”—the benevolent state. In the 1930s and the 1940s, various political forces, from communists to Lutheran pastors (who drew their salaries from the government) agreed to contribute to the building of the “people’s state.” At that time, many in Sweden defined such state as a “socialist national community.” The role of scientific experts was crucial in this project. They prescribed “correct policies” for the “average” uninformed majority, simultaneously marginalizing any other schemes that went against the consensus scientific opinion. Gunnar Myrdal, a prominent ideologist of the Swedish model of socialism, stressed that through education and peer pressure “common” people were expected to learn “normal” and “rational” ways of behavior and simultaneously to suppress “false” needs. He did not talk about coercion. The point was to teach people to exercise self-censorship.33 In the 1930s, with the decline of a birth rate in Sweden, media and public began to panic about the degeneration of the national community. The network of governmental daycare centers was launched to help mothers to join workforce and simultaneously have more children; in the 1930s, the Swedes talked about the need “to Myrdal.” This meme, which referred to the need to produce more babies, became popular after abovementioned Gunnar Myrdal and his spouse Alva, a famous education reformer, published a bestselling alarmist

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book on this topic. Because of this biopolitical drive, in addition to planners and engineers, local physicians came into the limelight as the spearheads of modern life. Like in national socialist Germany and Stalinist Russia, martialoriented gymnastics became a national obsession. Popular public performances and marches symbolized the health of the nation and its well-ordered state. Another important part of the contemporary Swedish biopolitics was the propaganda of a proper diet. In the 1930s, Swedish media, physicians, and officials made much buzz about eradicating the “harmful” habit of coffee drinking that too was associated with a degeneration and rot. Experts published numerous “scientific” reports on how daily coffee drinking costs the nation millions in financial loses. “Black” coffee was contrasted with “white” milk— a substance that enhanced nutrition and social hygiene. To challenge the “harmful” biopolitical effects of coffee, the government initiated special milk campaigns. The government produced tons of propaganda flyers and posters, held milk and cheese weeks. Health experts informed the populace about how the production of milk was scientifically monitored, how milk was processed into cheese, and why these were the products that made a body healthy.34 The strong faith in the power of social engineering based on science carried obvious spiritual notions. For example, both Alva and Gunnar Myrdals viewed the surrounding world as a Manichean struggle between the powers of goodness and darkness, or, as they put it, between rational and irrational people. As an educator who was expected to set national standards, Alva instructed her readers, “The expert’s task is to expose false elements of knowledge in popular political thought. This is an objective task of cleansing, which actually encompasses every objective of popular education and enlightenment.”35 Children became the primary target of the Swedish social engineering state. Elevating the state to the position of the new family, Alva sought to terminate excessive bonding between children and their parents. The goal was to cleanse the young minds from “ultra-individualism” and turn them into the “enthusiasts for freedom” by teaching them a desirable behavior accepted by the national community. In Myrdals’ creative hands, the “people’s home” project evolved into an obligation to intervene in Swedish citizens’ private sphere, overriding family, and individual concerns. Historian Terje Tvedt, who explored similar reforms popular in neighboring Norway, ironically labelled such moral politics as the “regime of goodness” (godhetsregimet).36 “SWEDISH SOCIALISM” AND ITS FATE Appealing to the traditional Protestant values of individual dignity and autonomy, a leading Swedish politician Gustav Möller tried unsuccessfully to

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challenge Myrdal’s social engineering approach. Yet, the country’s sociopolitical space was firmly occupied by social democrats. From the 1970s to the very end of the 1980s, the amount of public spending was doubled. Moreover, during that time, Swedish social democrats decided to move beyond the existing consensus on the welfare state to make a step toward actual socialism. Inspired by the brief renaissance of the left in the 1960s, radical elements committed to nationalization for a while gained influence in Swedish social democracy.37 That was the time when Western progressive media began talking about the Swedish model of socialism as an alternative to the Soviet-style societies that tainted the image of the creed for so long. Progressives around the world came to view that Nordic country as a social laboratory that showed the path toward universal social justice.38 In 1984, as a first step into the “radiant future,” the social-democratic government introduced the so-called Employee Funds Project. The portions of companies’ profits were to be confiscated and used to purchase shares in these companies; the shares were to be handed to labor unions that would control them as a public property. The goal was to gradually buy out the remaining shares and completely socialize private companies.39 The government assumed that this scheme would make workers into co-owners of companies. There was a strong possibility that Sweden would turn into a second Yugoslavia that already practiced group property and market socialism. In Yugoslavia, the Joseph Bros Tito communist government partially empowered workers by making them collective owners of their enterprises, allowing them to set up their wages, and simultaneously bailing them out when they failed. As a result of this “workerism,” employees arbitrarily boosted their salaries, practiced a closed shop policy, and enjoyed governmental bail outs, which led to a sky-rocketing inflation, huge unemployment, and economic stagnation. In Sweden, the shares reform prompted all major companies to flee the country. After the 1980s, not a single large successful company was set up in the country. In fact, all major brand names such as Ikea and Volvo had been established prior to the socialist tide emerged in the end of the 1960s. In 1991, the Swedish government had to abandon the gradual socialization plan because more than one hundred thousand people went to streets, protesting this stealth socialism. This was the largest mass demonstration in the entire Swedish history. With the Soviet and Chinese socialisms in a free fall and with the public opinion in the West turning against the left, it became hard for socialism sympathizers in Sweden to continue making their case during the 1990s. Along with the regime uncertainty created by the socialization plan, the overstretched welfare model, which was based on the robust redistribution of wealth through high taxes, suffocated economic activities in Sweden.

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This naturally led to economic decline. Since the very existence of a welfare state depended on continuing economic prosperity, the downturn put a large pressure on generous unemployment compensation and pension systems; at that time, Swedish unemployment benefits had no time limitations. Eventually, to fund these and other benefits, the government had to double down on extractive taxation and again resorted to deficit spending, which worsened the whole situation.40 Overall, social democrats’ policy between 1970s and 1991, when they tried to shift the entire economy toward socialism, led to economic stagnation. Since the 1990s, unemployment in Sweden has been routinely fluctuating between 14% and 18%.41 This became the new normal. Like other Scandinavian countries, Sweden came to enjoy universal health care, free day care, and free education from the first grade to a PhD level. Pensions and welfare benefits were provided without any conditions. Political scientists Eric Einhorn and John Logue stressed, “Most Scandinavian welfare measures were universal; means testing was a rarity.”42 This approach slowly but surely nourished a sense of an entitlement and invited to milk welfare benefits with little regret. Such attitude became especially popular among generations that were born after the 1960s. The utopian expectation of social democrats that people in ethnically homogenous Sweden would exercise selfrestraint when using benefits collided with the reality of life, when people began to fall for the negative incentives offered by the welfare state.43 When invited to abuse the loopholes in the welfare system, many Swedes of an older generation did resist such temptation. Yet, those who were born after the 1960s already did not feel any moral remorse about this. Negative incentives began to gradually undermine the famous Protestant work ethic.44 For example, by the 1990s, the practice of taking paid sick leaves on demand reached epidemic proportions in the country that had one of the healthiest populations in the world. Prior to the 1980s, 80–90% of the Swedes agreed that claiming social benefits for no reason was wrong. Yet, by 2008, only 61% of the Swedes agreed with this. Worse still, by 2014, the number of people who did not want to abuse benefits dropped to 55%.45 The economic stagnation coexisted with an extractive taxation burden, which, by the 1990s, came to penalize hard work and entrepreneurship. Although since that time, the government did slightly trim its aggressive tax system, on average, as late as 2011, the Swedes spent 73% of their salaries to cover direct and indirect taxes.46 On top of this, like many European countries, Sweden had to deal with a declining birth rate that reduced a productive workforce whose contributions maintained the existing welfare state. The Swedes were finally hit by hard economic reality. Very sympathetic to the Swedish welfare model, political scientists Einhorn and Logue nevertheless wrote, “There were clear warnings that the fundamental model, which

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distributes income and social services across generations as much as between income groups, could not be sustained without reform.”47 It was during the 1970s and the 1980s when Sweden was experimenting with socialism that the country began to stagnate; from being the fourth richest country in the world in 1970 she fell down to the seventeenth place in 2001.48 Sweden was literally eating up her incredible wealth she had created during the previous 100 years. Friedrich Heinemann and Per Bylund have explored how a constant expansion of a welfare state eventually undermines the foundations of this very state. They showed how, being exposed for decades to the welfare system, Swedish society eventually reached a no-return point, when temporary programs with no strings attached become so embedded into the matrix of society that people began to treat them as permanent and as the new normal. With declining revenues to fund existing benefits commitments, society quickly was eating away its wealth. With no revenues to fund generous benefits commitments, the entire pyramid of the welfare state was collapsing. The “enlightened experts” who presided over such society found themselves in the Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, they were running out of money to maintain a generous welfare state. Yet, on the other hand, they could not roll it back. Heinemann and Bylund have concluded that in its very fabric the welfare state contains a self-destructive mechanism simply because such state breeds negative incentives. When government delivers handouts with no string attached, more people naturally want to use and abuse them, which eventually ruins economy and drains a country’s wealth. Essentially, the welfare state destroys the ethic which sustains this very state.49 In fact, it was not only Sweden that faced this situation. In all Scandinavian countries, social democratic governments had to face the sharp economic downturn in the 1990s. Even those scholars who ideologically sympathized with “Scandinavian socialism” had to admit that Nordic economic problems were related to the overextended welfare system.50 As a result, the left themselves had to turn to free-market tools to trim the omnipotent system they themselves had created in the past. Between 1990s and the early 2000s, in Sweden, not only were markets deregulated but also, for the first time in history, the country’s universal welfare system was deeply restructured. The whole segments of state-controlled economy such as housing, health care, schooling, utilities, transportation were liberalized. Private sector received permission to step into these spheres and compete with state enterprises.51 School vouchers and private schools cracked the state monopoly on education, pension system was privatized, and corporate taxes were slashed. Welfare benefits became limited, restricted, and were not provided anymore automatically. The creation of those “dangerous” pockets of neoliberalism helped to stabilize economy.

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Incidentally, these free-market liberalization policies explain why, unlike other Western states, Sweden was able to smoothly sail through the 2007– 2008 crisis with hardly any economic harm: by trying to get out of the selfinflicted crisis of the 1980s, by 2007, the country had already restructured her economy by greatly reducing expenditures, limiting welfare, and putting public expenditures under control. From 1995 to 2009, Sweden reduced the GDP share of the national debt from 80% to less than 40%. On top of this, in 2007–2009, she privatized government-owned corporations to have funds to pay the remaining debt.52 Still, the liberalization measures did not save social democrats. By 2016, in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, they were ousted from power. Until 1985, Swedish social democrats always received majority of votes in all elections. At the end of the past century, to rule the country, they already had to rely on shaky coalitions with other parties. By 2016, only one-third of votes supported them.53 Moreover, in the 2010s, one could observe a peculiar situation. While in the United States, such proponents of democratic socialism as Bernie Sanders glorified the Scandinavian model of the welfare state, in Scandinavian countries this very model was being criticized. In fact, current Swedish social democrats, who became fiscal conservatives and who dropped the slogan of socialism, would not welcome people like Sanders into their ranks. Both left and right governments in the country introduced stricter control over welfare programs and cracked down on those who abused, for example, sick leaves.54 Ironically, by the early 2010s, because of market reforms, Sweden, a country with a strong socialist tradition, had the lowest corporate tax in the world, whereas in the United States, a country with a long tradition of individualism, the equivalent tax was among the highest prior to 2017. The sound financial policy allowed Sweden to reverse unfavorable economic situation and keep money inside the country. In the early 2010s, the United States, the richest 10% of the population paid 50% of all taxes, whereas in the “socialist” Sweden top 10% paid only 25% of taxes. Again, in an ironic twist, it is the middle-class and low-income people that carry the major tax burden in that Nordic country. Another large resource that still helps sustain the welfare state in Sweden has been the 25% sales tax on all goods and foods.55 Commenting on the changes that took place in his home country since the 1990s, economic historian Johan Norberg summarized its lessons as follows, “You can have a big government, or you can squeeze the rich, and give it to the poor. You can’t do both because in that case, you simply ruin the economy.”56 The most recent serious challenge to Swedish “people’s home” has been the mass migration from Muslim countries.57 In 2015, during the peak of that unsustainable migration, 162,877 newcomers applied for asylum, which made 2% of the total population of small Sweden.58 Many of these economic immigrants masqueraded as refugees, exploiting the country’s benign

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immigration laws and generous welfare system. The original drive to allow the immigrants into the country was dictated by economic considerations. In the 1990s, Swedish intellectuals and bureaucrats were convinced that the newly arrived would revive economy and help sustain the welfare state by supplementing the shrinking labor force. Yet, the opposite happened. Catering to the interests of unions, the government established high entry barriers for all occupations, which blocked the integration of immigrants into the Scandinavian labor force. Instead of allowing immigrants to freely enter the labor market, until about 2018, the state drained its finances to support the increasing flow of immigrants: newly arrived were entitled to automatic welfare benefits. In fact, scholars who were ideologically sympathetic to the Scandinavian model warned about the coming disaster.59 After ten years of their arrival at Sweden, at least four out of ten refugees still existed on welfare.60 This situation naturally led to religious and racial segregation. Prior to the tide of the mass migration, Sweden boasted about the lack of any ghetto-type neighborhoods in her major cities. Yet, by 2004, the number of such ghettos populated mostly by Muslim immigrants reached 155.61 Many of them have been ruled by violent gangs, and police does not dare to show up there. Nordic political and social culture based on mutual trust, mutual help, and toleration hardly knew any crime. Now major cities in Sweden are plagued by violent crime. By now, the Swedish welfare state again found itself in a double bind. Many immigrants who came from the culture of scarcity have no problems in milking the welfare system that is based on an expected mutual trust and responsibility. Having loyalty only to their extended families and with little or no trust into existing institutions and laws, such newcomers congregate into insulated communities, creating pockets of alternative culture that defy the Western tradition of individualism, toleration, and legality. At the same time, bound by the multiculturalism ideology (a blind toleration of other cultures), which currently dominates the Western mainstream, Swedish bureaucrats, media, and police are scared to challenge the cultures that openly preach misogyny, anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance. Moreover, a portion of the cultural left advocates a dangerous agenda that the needs of Swedish citizens should be secondary to those of people who claimed a refugee status.62 In their comprehensive study of Nordic social democracy, a group of Scandinavian scholars wrote how the Swedish model disarms itself when facing this new challenge: “Rather than promoting integration through its excessive focus on tolerance, multiculturalism has opened the way for the emergence of parallel communities of different minority groups with their own institutions and norms. What may at a glance appear as liberal tolerance towards a diversity of creeds and cultures might often on closer inspection just as well be a different form of racism: a worldview in which human beings

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and their access to human rights are being ranked in a hierarchy according to their ethnic or cultural background.”63 The masochistic ideology of official multiculturalism has backfired and led to the rise of indigenous ethno-nationalism. This backlash movement has been turning into a powerful mobilization tool for those Swedes who feel debased and neglected by their own government. Although it is hard to predict the fate of the Swedish “people’s home,” it is clear that social democrats, who routinely enjoyed support of 45% of society, do not control anymore the political mainstream. In 2018, during parliamentary elections, they received only 28.4% of all votes, which is the lowest level since 1908.

NOTES 1. Marquis Childs, The Middle Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936); the book grew out of his brochure Sweden: Where Capitalism is Controlled (New York: John Day, 1934). Forty years later, he released a sequel to his book, in which he tamed a bit his earlier optimistic vision of the Swedish model: Sweden, the Middle Way on Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 2. Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). 3. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Social Democracy (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018), 4, https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/li​​brary​​/soci​​al​-de​​​mocra​​cy. 4. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 367. 5. Lord Lindsay, “The Philosophy of the British Labour Government,” in Great Political Thinkers: Plato to the Present, ed. William Ebenstein (New York: Holt, 1969), 799, 800, 805. 6. Ebenstein, “Democratic Socialism and the Welfare State” 764. 7. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 84. 8. Rod O’Donnell, “Keynes’s Socialism: Conception, Strategy and Espousal,” in Keynes, Post-Keynesianism and Political Economy, ed. Peter Kriesler and Claudio Sardoni(London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 149–175; Edward Fuller, “Was Keynes a socialist?” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 43, no. 6 (2019): 1653–1682. 9. Thomas, A Socialist Faith, 117. 10. Smaldone, European Socialism, 248. 11. Hugh Geitskell, “Socialism and Nationalization,” in Great Political Thinkers: Plato to the Present, ed. William Ebenstein (New York: Holt, 1969), 811–823. 12. Ebenstein, “Democratic Socialism and the Welfare State,” 775. 13. “Godesberg Program (1959),” in Readings in Western Civilization, ed. John W. Boyer and Julius Kirshner (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), vol. 9: 419–425, http:​/​/ger​​manhi​​story​​docs.​​ghi​-d​​c​.org​​/pdf/​​eng​​/P​​artie​​s. 14. Thomas Etzemüller, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: Social Engineering in the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 325. 15. Oscar Lange, Introduction to Economic Cybernetics (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1970), 16; Idem: “The Computer and the Market,” in Socialist

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Economics, ed. Alec Nove and D. Nuti (London: Penguin Books, 1972), http:​/​/www​​ .calc​​ulemu​​s​.org​​/lect​​/L​-I-​​MNS​/1​​2​/eko​​n​-i​-m​​odele​​/lang​​e​​-com​​p​-mar​​ket​.h​​tm 16. Aksel Berg, “Kibernetiku na sluzhbu kommunizmu [Make Cybernetics Serve Communism],” in Kibernetiku na sluzhbu kommunizmu, ed. Aksel Berg (Moscow and Leningrad: Energiia, 1961), 20–21. 17. Thomas, A Socialist Faith, 207. 18. Lange, “The Computer and the Market.” 19. See, for example, Per Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State: Leading the Way on the Road to Serfdom,” in Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism, ed. Thomas S. Woods (Wilmington, DW: ISI Books, 2010), 35–53; Nima Sananajai, Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2016); Paul and Paul, The Case Against Socialism (New York: Broadside Books, 2019), 84–92. 20. Nina Witoszek and Atle Midtun, “Sustainable Modernity and the Architecture of the ‘Well-being Society’,” in Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond, ed. Nina Witoszek and Atle Midtun (Abington, UK and New York: Routledge, 2018), 12. 21. Lars Trägårdh, “Scaling up Solidarity from the National to the Global: Sweden as Welfare State and Moral Superpower,” in Ibid., 84. 22. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, ed. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books, [1905] 2002). 23. Andre van Hoorn and Robbert Maseland, “Does a Protestant Work Ethic Exist? Evidence from the Well-being Effect of Unemployment,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 91 (2013): 1–12. 24. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 97–98, 104; Paul and Paul, The Case Against Socialism, 117–123. 25. Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 38–39; Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 62–64, 23. 26. Etzemüller, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, 321. 27. Rudolf Kjellen, Staten som lifvsform [Gosudarstvo kak forma zhizni] (Moscow: Posspen, [1916] 2008), 285–286. For more on Rudolf Kjellen as an intellectual inspiration for the Swedish welfare state and social engineering, see Markus Gunneflo, “Rudolf Kjellén Nordic Biopolitics Before the Welfare State,” Retfærd: Nordisk juridisk tidsskrift, 38, no. 3 (2015): 35–39, http:​/​/wor​​ks​.be​​press​​.com/​​marku​​s​_gun​​​ neflo​​/8/. 28. Nina Witoszek and Øystein Sørensen, “Nordic Humanism as a Driver of the Welfare Society,” in Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond, ed. Nina Witoszek and Atle Midtun (Abington, UK and New York: Routledge, 2018), 44–45. 29. Etzemüller, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, 94. 30. Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 41–43. 31. Etzemüller, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, 91. 32. Ibid., 322 33. Ibid., 324. 34. Ibid., 83.

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35. Ibid., 133. 36. Witoszek and Sørensen, “Nordic Humanism as a Driver of the Welfare Society,” 36. 37. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 20, 134. 38. George Lakey, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right-and How We Can Too (New York and London: Melville House, 2016); Anu Partanen, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life (New York: Harper, 2016); Clare Foran, “Making America More Like Scandinavia,” The Atlantic Magazine, July 12, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/po​​litic​​s​/arc​​hive/​​2016/​​07​/no​​rdic-​​count​​ ries-​​unite​​​d​-sta​​tes​/4​​90847​/. 39. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 138. 40. Einhorn and Logue, “Can Welfare States Be Sustained in a Global Economy?” 9. 41. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 157. 42. Einhorn and Logue, “Can Welfare States Be Sustained in a Global Economy,” 12. 43. For a detailed step-by-step analysis of how it happened in Sweden, see Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 47–52. 44. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 152. 45. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 195–196. 46. Ibid., 112. 47. Einhorn and Logue, “Can Welfare States Be Sustained in a Global Economy,” 14. 48. Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 45. 49. Friedrich Heinemann, “Is the Welfare State Self-Destructive? A Study of Government Benefit Morale,” ZEW—Centre for European Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 07-029 (2007): 1–32, https​:/​/pa​​pers.​​ssrn.​​com​/s​​ol3​/p​​apers​​.cfm?​​ abstr​​act​​_i​​d​=988​​647; Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 52. 50. Einhorn and Logue, “Can Welfare States Be Sustained in a Global Economy,” 3. 51. Ibid., 15. 52. Bylund, “The Modern Welfare State,” 45–47. 53. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 19. 54. Ibid., 16. 55. Frank Camp, “Interview with Swedish Author Johan Norberg,” Daily Wire, March 13, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.dai​​lywir​​e​.com​​/news​​/2815​​9​/exc​​lusiv​​e​-int​​ervie​​w​-swe​​ dish-​​autho​​r​-joh​​an​-​no​​rberg​​-fran​​k​-cam​​p. 56. Ibid. 57. Einhorn and Logue, “Can Welfare States Be Sustained in a Global Economy,” 24. 58. Trägårdh, “Scaling up Solidarity from the National to the Global,” 81. 59. Ibid. 60. Sananajai, Debunking Utopia, 257. 61. Ibid., 259. 62. Trägårdh, “Scaling up Solidarity from the National to the Global,” 81. 63. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 164.

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Blood and Soil in the Palestine Desert Kibbutz Socialism, 1920s–1970s

As it happens, our national aspirations cannot be realized without a dash of socialism. —Isaac Elazari-Volcani, The Communistic Settlements in the Jewish Colonization in Palestine (1927)

In the first four decades of the past century, emerging Eastern European nationalisms were preoccupied with a search for ethnic “purity.” As a result, in such new national states as Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and the like, there was little room for those who did not fit in, especially the Jews. Facing rampant anti-Semitism and being traditionally isolated from outsiders, many of them naturally came to sympathize with Zionism. Yet, Zionism rarely existed in a form of naked Jewish nationalism. On an individual level, Zionism often merged with various brands of socialism. It is not to say that there were no leftist Jews who despised and dismissed Zionism or, on the contrary, no Jews who totally embraced Zionism. What I want to stress is that, in the first four decades of the past century, both in diaspora and Palestine there was a powerful mainstream trend that conflated socialism with Jewish nationalism. In fact, on a personal level, many secularized and left-leaning Jews either assimilated both trends or were ready to simultaneously accept both Zionism and socialism. In the 1930s and the 1940s, when facing the common threat of German national socialism, many among the Jewish left muted their hostility to Zionism. Moreover, some of them moved to Palestine to contribute to the construction of Israel—the state that was launched as a socialist Zionism project.1

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The movement of the diaspora Jews from the European diaspora to Palestine had started as early as the 1880s. It had been mostly triggered by the Jews residing in the Russian Empire in the wake of pogroms (mob attacks against the Jews in southern Russia and Ukraine). From early on, many of these settlers pursued two goals. First, they were animated by a desire to get to the Promised Land to find a safe space for themselves. Second, they nourished a utopian dream to launch an egalitarian Jewish commonwealth based on socialist ideals. Specific interpretation of these ideals varied and depended on sectarian loyalties of individuals. What united all these people was a conviction that without their own land and without collectively toiling on this land the Jews would not be complete as a “normal” nation. At the turn of the twentieth century, the romantic myth of a traditional rural collective as the carrier of a national and egalitarian spirit became a common utopian meme for all modern nationalist movements from Russia and China to Germany and Romania. Preaching a return to indigenous land as the way of ethnic and social regeneration was an essential part of this myth. The Jews were not an exception in this case. The rhetoric about the redemptive nature of heroic agricultural labor in the Promised Land occupied a prominent place in left Zionism and Zionism in general. For Jews, such rhetoric was especially important. For them, it was not simply the veneration of folk peasant traditions like in the case of Russian populists and German national socialists who felt secure in their own indigenous settings. Collective labor on the Palestinian land symbolized the heroic rebirth of the Jews from scratch as a modern people with their own soil.2 Furthermore, learning how to perform hard labor on the reclaimed indigenous land was to prove that the Jews could have “soul” and be “organic” and “natural” like the rest of the world’s nations. FROM EASTERN EUROPE TO PALESTINE: POPULISTS, FOLK COMMUNITY, AND SOCIALIST ZIONISM Prior to shifting their attention to the land of the ancestors, many left-leaning Jewish intellectuals in the Russian Empire sympathized with or took part in the Populism movement that propagated the utopian socialist project of going “native” in the 1870s and the 1880s (see chapter 2). Joining their Russian comrades, some of these secularized Jews temporarily moved to Russian and Ukrainian villages, trying to act as peasants, wearing peasant garb, attempting physical labor and folk crafts, and simultaneously trying to explain basics of socialism to peasants. Russian Populism, which promoted that “going to the people” campaign, was a movement that brought together a tiny but determined group of revolutionaries. Vera Zasulich, a populist terrorist-turned

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Marxist, who pestered Karl Marx about how to fit the Russian peasant commune in his “scientific” theology, was a prominent member of the movement. Populists romanticized peasant communes as the roadmap to socialism. Those progressive Jewish intellectuals who joined this woke movement too idealized and worshiped Russian peasants as noble savages and harbingers of future socialism. Many Jews who partook of this countercultural experiment were raised in traditional shtetl Jewish communities and left their Pale “reservation” seeking assimilation into the Russian society. Liberal reforms of tsar Alexander II in the 1860s and the 1870s partially opened the doors of imperial universities to those Jews who volunteered to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. For example, populist Aron Zundelevich, one of the first to join the “going to the people” campaign grew up in a traditional observant Jewish family. His original intention was to become a rabbi. Yet, like many young Jews of his time, he decided to leave the parochial world of Judaism and get assimilated into Russian society. While doing this, he faced discrimination and then was exposed to socialism, which naturally brought him into a new welcoming fellowship of populists, where he acquired a new identity. That was how, instead of a rabbi, Zundelevich became a socialist missionary among Russian peasants.3 Peter Lavrov, professor of mathematics and one of the major deans of populist socialism, instructed those who wanted to go “native”: “Vigorous, fanatical men are needed who will risk everything and are prepared to sacrifice everything. Martyrs are needed, whose legend will far outgrow their worth and their actual service.”4 While Russian populists, who were the offspring of middle-class and aristocratic lineages, joined the cause because they were ashamed of their privileged origin, Jewish participants of the “going to people” campaign felt guilty about “parasitic” Jewish occupations that “corrupted” the soul of the “chosen people.” They lamented the lack of peasant and land-based labor tradition among the Jews. Populism with its idealization of the peasant laborer became a good answer to their ethnic torments. Yet, soon some Jewish populists began to feel uncomfortable when their Russian and Jewish comrades showed little or no compassion for dead and maimed Jewish victims of pogroms perpetrated by the “common people” whose inherent wisdom they were expected to worship; since peasants and urban workers were classified as oppressed ones, as the victims of the tsarist regime and capitalism, they could not be at fault. To those Jewish comrades who felt disturbed about pogroms, some committed populists explained that these anti-Semitic attacks in fact were the righteous riots of the oppressed ones who targeted “bloodsuckers”—Jewish store and workshop owners.5 Not all Jewish leftists were so masochistic to accept such twisted ideological reasoning. In 1882, Pavel Axelrod (1850–1928), a Jewish populist and later

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one of the first Marxists in Russia, invited his comrades to publicly support the victims of the pogroms. He was shocked to learn that Lev Deich, another Jewish member of the populist fellowship, wanted to sweep the whole inconvenient issue under the rug, saying that the selfish solidarity of the Jews with their own “tribe” would be politically incorrect. Moreover, Deich was afraid that the public denouncement of pogroms by populists could alienate peasants—the carriers of high socialist “wisdom.” That was when desperate Axelrod began toying with an idea of mass migration of Jews to Palestine. Deich, who originally opposed Axelrod’s going public with his concerns, eventually agreed that the emigration might be the only option in that situation. Yet, trying to somehow water down what reeked of Jewish nationalism, Deich insisted that, instead of Palestine, the escape place should be ethnically neutral such as the United States.6 Interestingly, Axelrod, who felt sick about the lack of compassion for this fellow ethnics who had been murdered by peasant and urban “noble savages,” originated from a poor Jewish family that resided in the Pale. In contrast, Deich, who wanted to stay silent about those crimes, was a “limousine” left, an offspring of a rich assimilated family that was fortunate to live in Kiev, which was outside of the Pale “reservation.”7 Later, there were many similar incidents and exchanges, which gradually alienated some Jewish socialists and sympathizers from their Russian brethren. For example, in 1904, the Socialist Bund, an alliance of Jewish socialists who sought self-government for Jews in diaspora instead of moving to Palestine, asked Russian socialist revolutionaries (the successors of populists) for an armed support against expected pogroms. The “comrades” answered in a politically correct manner: “How can we do so? After all, the main mass of pogrom-makers will consist of those same destitute toilers whose interests socialists pledged to defend. Is it really to be expected that we, the socialists, should go forth and beat our admittedly blinded brothers, but brothers all the same, hand in hand with the police? Or, at best, hand in hand with the Jewish bourgeoisie armed in defense of its property?”8 There were two ways for the progressive Jews, who were suspicious of capitalism, to get out of this conundrum. The first was to drop the whole Russian peasant commune utopia and embrace Marxism with its cosmopolitan mantra about industrial workers as the “chosen people” who had no fatherland because they were equally oppressed. Axelrod, who later converted to Marxism, followed this route: “There is only one question: the liberation of the working masses of all nations, including the Jewish. Together with the approaching triumph of socialism, the so-called Jewish question will be resolved as well.”9 The lure of Marxism as an escape identity route for many Pale’s people created an ethnic anomaly. By 1905, the entire Marxist movement in Russia proper numbered about 8,400 people, whereas

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the membership of the Jewish Socialist Bund, which too adopted Marxism as their ideology, reached 23,000 Jewish workers,10 although the Jews composed only 8.5% of the Russian Empire’s population. The second escape route was to simply move to Palestine and to try to build there a Jewish socialist utopia with its own peasant-like collectivist villages. This notion later triggered the formation of socialist or Labor Zionism. Some of its missionaries insisted that Jews needed to return to Palestine and set up there a normal modern state with its own bourgeoisie and working class. Once this was done, according to the Marxist prophecy, Jewish working class was to lead a “normal” class struggle against its indigenous bourgeoisie and then, being the people chosen by history to usher in the radiant future, they would take over.11 Out of this desire to plant the Marxist utopia in the biblical land and also out of the romance of agricultural labor as an inherently socialist folk activity there grew the kibbutz movement; translated from Hebrew, the word means “gathering” or “clustering” (plural is kibbutzim). This spontaneous movement included the groups of Jews who moved to Palestine, where they set up hundreds of agricultural collectives that preached various brands of socialism, including socialist Zionism and communism. Although some kibbutzim were established by traditional religious Jews, the dominant ideological trend was socialism peppered with Zionism. These settlements were usually located in rugged borderland desert areas, which were sparsely populated by the Arabs. From the beginning, the latter were hostile of that settlement movement. World War I and the tides of nationalism and anti-Semitism it raised in Eastern and Central Europe escalated the Jewish migration to Palestine; by 1922, Palestine numbered 165,000 Jews, of which 85,000 moved there in the wake of the war.12 In the 1920s and the 1930s, the greater part of newly established socialist settlements came to rely on external support of rich Jewish philanthropists. American sociologist Malford Spiro, who in 1952 examined a socialist agricultural settlement (the scholar called it Kityat Yedidim to preserve its anonymity), stressed that it enjoyed an external support of rich fellow ethnics. Even though Kityat Yedidim formally committed itself to the Soviet-type Marxism-Leninism, its residents maintained many elements of their Jewish tradition, which were woven into the political religion of communism. Most of Kityat Yedidim members arrived at Palestine in the 1930s from Poland, which rejected them as an alien element that did not fit the new Polish nationalism. In fact, some of the kibbutzniks complained that they were ostracized despite their persistent efforts to get assimilated into the Polish society.13 People who chose to settle in agricultural settlements in Palestine concluded “covenants”—volunteer mutual agreements about common rules of work and life in the new land. From the very beginning, because of the

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predominantly left-wing ideological orientation of settlers and the hostility of the local Arabs, individual capitalistic farming in scattered homesteads was out of question. The collective socialist living was a necessary defensive strategy of ethnic survival and mobilization. In fact, capitalist sponsors of kibbutzim encouraged precisely this type of a lifestyle, considering it the best way to safeguard the interests of the entire Jewish community of Palestine. I already stressed in chapter 2 that the fountainhead of socialist colonization of Palestine had been Moses Hess, a radical intellectual who had heavily contributed to the intellectual formation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s. The potent power of surrounding German nationalism and rampant anti-Jewish sentiments Hess had to deal with partially cured him from communist internationalism. Without completely quitting on communism, Hess silently put on hold the cosmopolitan dream of liberating the proletariat of all countries. Instead, he became focused on the liberation of his own “tribe” that he expected to eventually migrate to Palestine. Hess contemplated a socialist commonwealth in the Promised Land that would set an example for the rest of the humankind—a secular rendition of the old Judeo-Christian notion of the “chosen people.” While Marx and Engels focused in their teaching on class warfare, Hess drifted away from his comrades and came to view class loyalties as secondary. Very much like the current mainstream left in the West, who are fixated on identity issues, “Red Moses” began to consider class an artificial construct that went against the diversity of natural cultural and racial feelings, which, as he stressed, enriched the humankind.14 His general approach was that social liberation was impossible without national liberation. Hess assumed that the whole socialism talk was meaningless without Jews establishing their nationhood in Palestine and without them becoming a fullfledged nation in the commonwealth of other nations. He also insisted that blond Europeans, including Germans, harbored hostility toward dark-haired Jews not for religious reasons but out of their racial animosity. As a result, the safe revival of the Jews would be possible not in the diaspora but only in their Palestinian homeland. Hess was the first modern Jewish spokesman who campaigned for the mass agricultural colonization of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. His Rome and Jerusalem (1862)15 was the first book written by a Jewish author where the so-called Jewish question was phrased in secular terms. It was natural that Hess’s original grave, which had carried an inscription “the Father of German Social Democracy,” was later moved to Israel where it was included into the secular pantheon of Zionism. It is symbolic that his new grave and a statute that topped it were erected on the site of the first kibbutz settlement.16 A Russian-Jewish activist Dov Ber Borochov (1881–1917), a Marxist and the founder of Labor Zionism, was one of those who picked up where

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Hess stopped. Borochov insisted that, because of lingering anti-Semitism, the diaspora Jews would not be able to fully participate in the class struggle of the countries of their residency. They needed to move to Palestine and pursue their socialist cause on their native land, picking “normal” fights with their own ethnic bourgeoisie. He too argued that agricultural settlements should be socialistic.17 His Labor Zionism became popular in the Jewish diaspora because it was able to link egalitarian ideas of socialism with Jewish nationalism. Borochov’s Palestinian utopia did not take into consideration the local Arab population. To be fair, some of his followers did originally nourish a naïve hope that the Arab and Jewish proletariat would somehow make a common cause and peacefully coexist in a future communist state. Yet, when planted into the Palestinian soil amid the hostile Arab population, Borochov’s socialist prophecy tainted with nationalism began to shed off its socialistic garb. It was gradually complemented or replaced by practical national socialist rhetoric of such left Zionists as David Ben-Gurion (1886– 1973) (a future prime minister of Israel), Aaron David Gordon (1856–1922) (the major ideologist of applied Zionism), and Haim Arlosoroff (1899–1933). The latter, a Ukrainian born and German-educated economist, preached the so-called Jewish People’s Socialism (Der Jüdische Volkssozialismus) that he cast against class-based Marxism. Arlosoroff aspired not only to create an organic Jewish community of equals grounded in their historical soil but he also sought to fit the Jews into the framework of then-popular Marxist discourse. Arlosoroff explained that, because of anti-Semitism, all Jewry by default were “proletarians” because they were collectively oppressed by the surrounding society.18 The Bolshevik-style internationalist left went insane over such attempt to reformat the class collectivism into racial collectivism. To be exact, Arlosoroff already had a predecessor within the ranks of Bolsheviks. In the early 1920s, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (1892–1940), a national communist from Tatarstan (a Muslim autonomy within the Soviet Union) too had come up with a similar identiarian theory. He insisted that, since all people of the colonial periphery were collectively exploited by the West (which included both the bourgeoisie and workers), by default they all represented surrogate revolutionary proletarians.19 Sultan-Galiev would have perfectly fit the ranks of Maoists of the 1960s or the current woke “cultural Marxists” in Western countries, who have been bashing collectively the “white race” along with “evil” West and who have been venerating the “oppressed” Third World. In the 1920s, during the reigning ideology of class warfare, Sultan-Galiev was clearly out of place in the Soviet Union, and the Bolsheviks quickly shut him down by canceling and imprisoning him. In a similar manner, in the 1930s, the Communist International condemned socialist Zionism as a Jewish version of national socialism, correctly fearing that,

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if smuggled into socialism, the race and identity theory would dilute classbased Marxism.20 Both in the Jewish diaspora and Palestine, early Zionism always intertwined with socialism. It was only somewhere in the 1960s–1970s, when Israel firmly established itself as a nation, that socialism was gradually disentangled from Zionism in favor of nationalism. Between the 1890s and 1940s, many left acolytes and sympathizers of Zionism viewed it as a form of a collective socialist “therapy” that existed to “heal” the Jewish diaspora culture from its “parasitic” commercial and urban habits. Performing a productive labor on the native soil and living in an egalitarian manner were to cure the diaspora from those traits.21 Although devoid of socialist and communist commitments, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of Zionism, too paid tribute to the popular socialist sentiments. His famous program manifesto Jewish State (1896) is widely known. Yet, few are aware of his another book Ancient New Land (Altneuland) (1902), where he talked about “mutualism” of a new Jewish society that he envisioned in Palestine by 1923.22 Herzl portrayed this utopian society as a giant cooperative that overcame social inequalities of capitalism, while avoiding extremes of socialist egalitarianism. That utopian nationwide coop collectively owned all land, factories, and capital assets, and it was run by the council of experts-managers. As early as 1897, Herzl and his colleagues from the Zionist congress, which met that year to launch the settlement project in earnest, stressed that the Palestinian land purchased for settlement should not be partitioned into individual homesteads and owned as a private property. It must belong collectively to the Jewish community. The congress decided that individual owners could rent land for their own use, but they were not allowed to sell it. The whole scheme was a biopolitical project that aimed at the preservation of the ethnic land domain. The 1897 guidelines later became the cornerstone of the Jewish settlement policies in Palestine. KIBBUTZ SETTLEMENTS AND THE RELIGION OF LABOR The agricultural migration to Palestine proceeded in two forms. Western sponsors issued grants and credits to new arrivals who were setting up either cooperative moshav settlements or socialist and communist kibbutzim. In both types of the settlements, residents were forbidden to sell land and to use hired labor. In moshav (that literally means a “village” or “settlement”), settlers could formally rent and work family land strips. At the same time, they owned agricultural equipment and sold their produce collectively. In contrast to moshav, a kibbutz was a truly collectivist village. The degrees of

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socialism varied from settlement to settlement; each village specified it in its bylaws. Based on this, one can say that the kibbutzim movement was a grassroot socialism funded by Jewish capitalists. At first, in the 1920s, the World Zionist Congress and organizations that sponsored the Jewish agricultural colonization chose to support both moshav and militarized kibbutz-type settlements. However, in the 1930s, the sponsors decided to prioritize the kibbutz model as the best fit for the hostile frontier conditions. Therefore, by the 1940s, the number of moshav settlements decreased. Interestingly, after 1950, when the organized Israeli army stepped in to protect the border of new state, it was the moshav model that became more popular than kibbutzim.23 The land that was allocated for kibbutz and moshav settlements was always purchased at an open market largely from absentee Arab landlords. Yet, as soon as the land was acquired, it stopped being a commodity. Since then on, it was to be managed by the Jewish National Fund, which handled it as a collective Jewish asset. Therefore, Jewish settlement of Palestine was a collective enterprise that pursued nationalist goals. By 1962, as a result of such nationalization of newly purchased areas, 75% of all Israeli land belonged to the state.24 Overall, between the 1910s and the 1948, 291 agricultural settlements (kibbutzim and moshav) were set up on that public land. Moreover, since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948–1964, 432 additional state-sponsored agricultural settlements were added to that number. Many of these collectives were purposely set up in borderline areas next to Arab settlements.25 With the escalating violence of the Arabs against the Jews, some of these villages had to be surrounded by walls. The influx of settlers, especially with the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Romania, rapidly changed the demographics of Palestine. In 1929, Jews were only 17% of Palestine’s population. By 1936, they already composed 31% of her population.26 An average kibbutz accommodated no more than 100 families.27 Such communities collectively owned all equipment and buildings. They also practiced collective working, dining, and raising children; housing and dining were provided free of charge at the expense of a community. An excellent example of that socialist lifestyle was proverbial kibbutz laundromats where clothing was washed unmarked as a public property. Each time, when an individual came to receive washed items, he or she was handed random articles of clothing that lay on the top of a common pile. In the Marxist-Leninist kibbutz explored by Spiro in the 1950s, only small items such as toothbrushes and combs were allowed as personal property. This obsession with collectivism created comical situations when tall people received pants of small size and vice versa or when slender people received oversized shirts that they had to wear like robes or dresses. Women were the first to protest this communist dress code.28

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Kibbutzim varied in their ideological preferences from die-hard communist and Stalinist settlements to moderate socialist Zionist and Zionist collectives. Together, they represented the most ambitious project of volunteer socialism with a nationalist spin. This grassroot national socialism was far more potent than, for example, the idealistic utopian communities that had been established by Owenites in the early nineteenth century. The source of kibbutz socialism’s vitality was a spoken or unspoken determination of its participants to build, develop, and defend the Jewish ethnic territory. Since early on, arriving Jewish settlers faced hostility and direct attacks from the local Arabic populace that was not happy about the massive influx of the alien culture. The new arrivals did not exactly like their neighbors either. Although some kibbutz collectives formally declared their socialist solidarity with the Arabs, these voices were soon muted because the whole kibbutzim project was poised to evolve in the direction of Jewish nationalism. With frustration, left-leaning political scientist Zeev Sternhell admitted that for many socialist Zionist settlers, who originally had not excluded a possibility of coexisting with Arab “proletarians” in the same socialist commonwealth, Zionism ultimately overrode socialism. Searching for a better phrasing to describe this ideological drift and simultaneously fearing to draw dangerous analogies, the scholar politely labeled this trend as “nationalist socialism.”29 Spiro, who explored kibbutz Kityat Yedidim that was built according to Marxist-Leninist blueprints, stressed that even this self-proclaimed internationalist village was infested with numerous ethno-racial stereotypes.30 This manifested itself not only in the total and understandable alienation from neighboring Arabs but also in the reluctance of villagers to accept as equals non-Jewish spouses of kibbutz members who belonged to other ethnic groups. Both Spiro and American-born left celebrity Noam Chomsky (who in 1953 too briefly lived in a Kityat Yedidim-type Stalinist community), witnessed how these Marxist-Leninist “egalitarians” tried to distance themselves from the Oriental Jews whom they casually referred to with contempt as “dark ones” and “unproductive” types. Spiro also recorded how the notions of romantic European nationalism about “blond” Ashkenazi Jews penetrated the minds of the inhabitants of that small communist community.31 Generalizing about such self-declared communist and socialist settlements that formally claimed internationalism, Spiro stressed that socialism was usually only one of the twin principles on which their culture rested. The other unspoken principle was Zionism. These Jewish Marxist-Leninists, who constantly chanted the “proletarians of all countries unite” mantra, had to admit that their biological survival as Jews was under a constant threat if they remained a minority in Palestine. Hence, a natural desire to fill in the desert Palestinian lands with as many fellow ethnics as possible. That is why, formally preaching cosmopolitanism, the socialist frontiersmen and women

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from Kityat Yedidim worked to make Israel into an ethnically homogenous nationhood.32 Although all residents of that kibbutz were highly sophisticated people who spoke freely several languages, including their indigenous Yiddish, they consciously chose to use the “ancient” Hebrew tongue as their daily language that better cemented them as a nation. Most of the people who came to live in kibbutzim originated from Yiddishspeaking Eastern European culture of shtetl (a traditional Jewish settlement) that looked down upon manual labor. At the turn of the 1900s, a typical shtetl community in the Pale area considered those who performed hard physical labor as rude, crude and vulgar. The preferred occupation was a salesman or at least an artisan. For a typical man from a traditional shtetl family to get involved in manual labor even under extreme circumstances of need was shameful simply because it contradicted the shared opinion about an ideal life, which was to be devoted to study.33 The kibbutz agenda in Palestine moved exactly in the opposite direction toward demolishing that “parasitic” cultural trait. As a result, for many settlers an involvement into hard physical work became an ultimate countercultural experience. For the most committed seekers who wanted to revive “organic” peoplehood of the Jews, work became a compulsive and religious-like habit. The absence from work for a kibbutz devotee, even for a good cause, instilled in his or her soul a feeling of guilt.34 Many kibbutz residents were convinced that capitalism had corrupted the Jews, driving them away from productive manual occupations; that was how they said the “chosen people” had lost their roots. The agricultural labor under harsh conditions was expected to revive the ethic of “true” labor. The residents of kibbutzim generalized about their economic, educational and other activities as hakkara, which can be rendered into English as consciousness. This generic expression was used to describe people’s moral responsibility to spread socialist and Zionist agenda of kibbutzim among the Jews. Those who committed themselves to the hakkara way, became chaver kibbutz (comrades of kibbutz) ready for a sacrificial labor in the rugged frontier area. Spiro explained that the expression chaver also meant an organized ethnically homogenous community of equals that functioned as a big extended family. The scholar also added that the best synonym for chaver would be German Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). Kibbutz residents usually used the word chaver when they described themselves as a collective.35 When sponsoring organizations and groups of settlers planned to set up a kibbutz, they were often were driven by ideological and strategic considerations. Economic concerns were the last thing on their agenda. For example, radical socialists who set up the abovementioned Marxist-Leninist collective deliberately chose a remote, rugged, and swampy area. One of the members of that kibbutz stressed, “Our ideal was to live like Spartans.”36 Such “taming

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the desert” projects were initiated from below by people who wanted to root themselves in the soil they considered native and who wished to turn themselves into “common people” by becoming productive laborers on desert lands.37 In fact, when Kityat Yedidim’s founders were originally offered a piece of land in a fertile area with a mild climate, they rejected this offer. The radical socialists insisted instead on being settled on a poor soil to be exposed to intensive heat and possible Arab attacks. Jewish-American writer Maurice Samuel, who lived in Palestine at the end of the 1920s, remembered that those groups who wanted to lay the foundation of the “authentic Jewish peasantry” were “stationed where the danger is greatest. Some chose their posts deliberately; all accept them in the consciousness of danger.”38 Strategically, such grassroot initiatives were fulfilling an important biopolitical task. Draining swamplands through hard labor allowed to raise the acreage of cultivated land and to extend the frontiers of the ethnic Jewish territory.39 Those first trailblazers who had volunteered to sacrifice themselves for the ethnic cause became martyrs enshrined in modern Zionist pantheon. One of such individuals was Joseph Trumpeldor (1880–1920), a prominent spearhead of the kibbutz movement and simultaneously an ardent socialist. Trumpeldor served in the Russian imperial army, and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, he nourished an ambitious plan of organizing a Red Jewish battalion that was to march through southern Europe to the Middle East and bring socialism to Palestine. Yet, later, he downsized his dream to organizing a group of people to travel to the Promised Land to set up a socialist settlement. In 1920, he and five of his comrades died in an uneven fight with local Arab hostiles—one of the first military clashes between Muslims and Jewish settlers in the holy land. His name was later enshrined into the hall of Zionism’s martyrs. Ideologically, between the 1920s and the 1950s, mainstream socialist Zionism was focused on propagating the so-called religion of labor (datha-avoda). This ethno-ideological project carried obvious traits of a secular religion. This religion of labor secularized the concept of the holy land and replaced God with the figure of a “common” egalitarian Zionist settler who was to become the true creator.40 The quintessential manifestation of this national socialist mindset was Jewish cinema: the first sound movie in Hebrew was called This is the Land (Zot Hi Ha'aretz) (1935), whereas the second one carried a simple title Labor (Avoda) (1935). The secular ritual of collective planting trees by the members of a kibbutz and moshav came to occupy an important place in this religion of labor. This ritual symbolized the unity of the merging nation with its soil. Trees planted collectively by a community also served as symbolic poles marking the borders of Jewish settlements. During their first major round of attacks on expanding Jewish settlements between 1936 and 1939, the Arabs purposely

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targeted these small groves that served as the symbols of Jewish land claims.41 In fact, in the 1920s–1940s, the religion of labor evolved into a set of ideological prescriptions that became part of mandatory schooling for the children of kibbutzim. “Learning about land” lessons included not only the exploration of local nature and planting trees to rekindle the link with the indigenous soil. They also involved excursions to biblical and archaeological sites. The goal was to instill in children geographical, historical, and moral links with the Palestinian soil. Eventually, these local educational practices evolved into a state-mandated ideological school discipline called Homeland.42 European romantic soil nationalism clearly affected the mindset of kibbutz inhabitants. Thus, Kityat Yedidim residents, who were formally committed to communism, were mostly people with Polish and Austrian backgrounds who were grounded in Germanic intellectual culture. These kibbutzniks mentioned that, in addition to Marx and Lenin, they had been also inspired by volk Germanic nationalism. Thus, before moving to Palestine, Kityat Yedidim residents had mimicked sports and nature activities of Wandervogel, then a popular mass Germanic youth organization. Particularly, they were attracted to Wandervogel’s love of nature, their veneration of a nation with its mystique of volk fellowship, and their rebellion against traditional religion. According to a Kityat Yedidim settler, “The bright and modern images of the German youth were like magic.”43 When still in Europe, like their “Aryan” counterparts from Wandervogel, some of these kibbutzniks had begun preaching return to nature and the virtue of a simple ascetic life. Many members of that communist settlement stressed with a disgust how diaspora Jews had been ruined by living in cement jungles of cities: “Jews don't know what nature is, what a tree is.”44 Spiro noted the hysteric and almost erotic attachment of the first generation of these kibbutz residents to their Palestine soil where they hoped to shape themselves into an organic and egalitarian commonwealth.45 Between the 1920s and the 1950s, committed socialists and Zionists who settled in kibbutzim viewed city life as the source of evil, simultaneously praising healthy village collective life. In fact, during that very period, there emerged a large ideological gap between the “progressive” left-oriented agricultural sector of the country (kibbutzim and moshav) and towns, where, according to the dominant Labor Zionist ideology, people clung to right-wing “reactionary” commercial activities and bourgeois lifestyles. This conflict between the urbanites and villagers was clearly a divide between those who favored collectivism, governmental paternalism, mobilization ethics, and those who preferred spontaneous play of market forces, cherished the spirit of individual enterprise, and self-reliance. For biopolitical purposes, the leaders and sponsors of kibbutzim cultivated the collectivist land-based ethos as the best strategy of safeguarding the frontiers of the emerging nation. In fact, they deliberately tried to prevent

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Jewish immigrants from settling in towns and cities. Despite these efforts, by the 1940s, only 29% of the Palestinian Jews (both in kibbutzim and beyond) resided in the countryside. In the 1960s, this number dropped down to 18%.46 This shows that the ideologists and sponsors of socialist Zionism were not exactly successful in going against the powerful tradition of urban living. Still, the minority of people who volunteered to perform “good works” on the desert frontier were indeed committed true believers. THE CULTURE OF NATIONALIST SOCIALISM Although demographically, by the 1930s, 17,000 kibbutzim residents composed only 5% of the Jewish population of Palestine, their ethno-political role was cardinal. Socialist collectives gradually evolved into a network of military-agricultural settlements. Together, they formed “borderland socialism” that performed the important biopolitical role of creating, safeguarding, and expanding the Jewish community in Palestine. Kibbutzim not only widened and protected the borders of the emerging Jewish state, but it also provided cadres for the Israeli elite during the first two decades of the state’s existence. In fact, all prominent leaders of the country, including its first prime ministers, came from the ranks of the kibbutzim “desert warriors.”47 The marriage between socialism and Jewish nationalism was reflected not only in the religion of labor with its communal tree planting but also in other kibbutzim ethno-ideological feasts. In the abovementioned Stalinist collective people celebrated many traditional Jewish holidays, including Sabbath, Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah, Pesach, and Purim. At the same time, they secularized these holidays and adjusted them to the socialist creed. For example, Rosh Hashanah became a secular New Year Day. Purim, which celebrated the salvation of the Jews from the wrath of the infamous biblical character named Haman the evil (who set out to destroy all Jews in his empire), began to symbolize the fight against anti-Semitism. Pesach stood for freedom in general. Shavuot or Pentecost, an agricultural holiday, became the festival of agricultural labor. During the latter feats, in a form of a public parade, kibbutzniks symbolically offered their fine fruits to the Jewish National Fund; in ancient times, the fruits were offered to the temple.48 On the International Labor Day (May Day), Kityat Yedidim’s dining room was decorated with the portraits of Herzl, Lenin, and Stalin. On November 7, the residents of the settlement celebrated both the foundation of their kibbutz and the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. During the latter feast, the communal dinery was decorated with Zionist flags, portraits of Lenin and Stalin along with communist propaganda posters.49 The head mast of Al Hamishmar, a popular newspaper that was distributed among socialist kibbutzim in early

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Israel, captured well that ideological marriage: “For Zionism, Socialism and the Brotherhood Amongst Nations.” In her memoirs, Yael Neeman, who quoted that slogan and who herself grew up in a kibbutz in the 1960s, stressed that despite the professed internationalism, in daily life, kibbutz ethnic tribalism always kicked in and overrode international brotherhood. The rampant hostility of local Arabs to the settlers only enhanced ethnic mobilization of kibbutzniks. To be fair, originally there were some idealistic Jewish socialists who dreamed about assimilating Arab “proletarians” into a common class struggle. Moreover, there were left Zionist activists who wanted to assimilate Jews and Arabs into a united commonwealth, gambling on their common Middle Eastern origin.50 This naïve plan simply did not work, and it could not work because Arabs deeply resented the new arrivals. Jewish settlers responded in the same manner. After all, the driving motive for the creation of Jewish collectivist settlements was a desire to segregate the Jews from the hostile Arabic population by setting up autonomous Jewish system with its own economic, political, and cultural networks, which did not depend on neighboring Arabic people.51 At the turn of the 1900s, in several kibbutzim, settlers did at first employ Arabs. Yet, after 1909, aiming to create ethnically homogenous settlements, sponsors of the agricultural colonization of Palestine banned the use of Arab labor.52 Left Zionists openly or silently accepted this strategy, for the major common goal was to ensure that newly purchased lands would be a collective Jewish asset and that the Jews would not be demographically displaced by the surrounding Arabs majority. The late Tony Judt, a prominent public intellectual who sympathized with socialist Zionism and who himself partook of kibbutz living in the 1960s, stressed in a matter-of-fact manner, “Left-wing kibbutz movement avoided employing Arab labor.”53 In fact, the ethnic and religious divide was so great that there was no way to find a common ground. Claiming Israel as their ancient territory, many Jews did not view the Arabic nomads and peasants as indigenous to Palestine. They also considered Arabs childlike “savages” who needed to be civilized.54 All this fueled mutual resentment. When in 1936 Arabs openly attacked expanding Jewish settlements, all brands of left Zionists and naked Zionists called to struggle against the common enemy. During the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, even die-hard Jewish communists chose to join the common cause of defending the Jewish ethnic territory. As a result, those who came to Palestine dreaming about international socialism had to mute their expectations and confine them to kibbutz areas. It was to become socialism for the Jews or, in other words, nationalist or national socialism. Socialism brought by Jewish settlers to Palestine served to stake their ethnic domain and, as such, it could not be internationalist. It was doomed to be ethnically bound. Spiro, who collected multiple oral stories

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of Kityat Yedidim residents, noted that their socialist testimonies always contained an implicit or explicit nationalist component—an assumption that in Palestine they were fighting not only a class but also a national battle. One of his interlocutors, explained that collective settlements like his own were “the most important vanguard tool of the Jewish working class in its struggle for the realization of maximal Zionism, the dissolution of the existing system, and the construction of the socialist society.”55 Describing her years of growing up in a socialist kibbutz, Neeman stressed that she and her fellowkibbutzniks never even thought about extending the slogan of the socialist brotherhood to the Muslim Arabs, who were hostiles anyway. Neither did they seek to engage a local Christian Druze community that resided next to their settlement. In fact, relations of her kibbutz with these Christianized Arabs reminded those of two foreign countries when both sides rarely mingled with each other.56 In a hindsight, as Neeman remarked with sadness, in the process of building militarized borderland socialism, “we forgot who we were bringing equality to, who we were forging peace with and who deserved justice. We drank our sweat and helped no one.”57 The gradual phasing out of international socialism in favor of ethnic nationalism was already obvious from early on in language policies of socialist Zionists who called the shots among the interwar Palestinian Jewry and in early Israel. Establishing a new “ancient” Hebrew in Israel as the state language, Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion officially discarded Yiddish—the folk tongue of the Eastern European Jewry. Being based on German grammar and vocabulary, Yiddish was widely used by Jewish diaspora socialists. Appealing to and restoring “ancient” traditions, spirituality, and language are major pillars of any nationalist agenda. Intending to root the Jews in the Palestinian land, socialist Zionists forbade using the diasporic tongue during the conferences of the Socialist Labor Party—the major political force in early Israel. A vivid example shows how exactly the “ancient” national language was overriding Yiddish. A Jewish guerilla fighter from Wilno (Lithuania) miraculously made it to Palestine in 1944. At a conference of Jewish workers, she spoke emotionally in Yiddish about the mass genocide of Jews back in Eastern Europe. The first reaction of the Zionist chair of the conference to her speech was to reprimand her for using the “crude” bastardized and politically incorrect language. Although they continued to use Yiddish, all kibbutzniks took special efforts to learn Hebrew, which became the mandatory item on their educational agenda. In Israel, socialism clearly played an applied role as the tool of ethnic mobilization and self-defense during the crucial period of the 1920s–1950s. As a resident of Kityat Yedidim put it, if it had not been for their socialist ideology, the emerging country would not be able to survive. Another socialist resident of the same kibbutz, who in fact was dissatisfied with some

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Marxist dogmas of his collective, nevertheless stressed, “I value Marxism very highly. In times like ours when there is no faith and there is no God, Marxism does provide you with a weltanschuung; it does fit every theory and every science into a scheme and, thus, it brings order out of chaos.”58 When they were in doubt about a political or philosophical issue, many Kityat Yedidim residents always turned to the sacred texts of Marx and Lenin. They also asked each other what Stalin wrote or said about it. In fact, these Marxist kibbutzniks viewed Stalin as a “scientific” miracle maker, the carrier of the ultimate knowledge about the laws of history. Despite the medieval-type xenophobic campaign unleashed against “cosmopolitans” in Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1949–1952, Kityat Yedidim residents continued to believe in the absurd Soviet utopia, brushing aside all negative information about the “Soviet paradise” as Western imperialist propaganda. In their minds, everything that was related to the Soviet Union and communism was superior. For the kibbutz members, Marxist writings served the same role as Talmud and other sacred texts of Judaism for their fathers and mothers in former Eastern European shtetls.59 In a sense, for these people Marxism replaced Judaism. The members of the Kityat Yedidim Stalinist collective thought about themselves as superior to surrounding people. To Kityat Yedidim residents, kibbutzim were “socialist islands in the midst of a capitalist sea.”60 As such, they were convinced that they belonged to a small group of the elect who enjoyed the “grace” and who were predestined for salvation in the radiant future after a socialist revolution. The village collective viewed the surrounding non-socialist world as a wicked alien force that was constantly conspiring to destroy the world of kibbutzim. Like the rest of radical socialists in other countries, they divided the world into the “house” of capitalism and the “house” of proletariat. Abstract proletarians, with whom they associated themselves, were inherently noble simply because they were workers.61 Kityat Yedidim residents expected that the bright golden future would arrive as a result of a large Armageddon-like revolutionary battle between the worlds of capitalism and socialism. They were convinced that, during this global battle, many nations would perish from the face of the earth, and socialism would eventually arise after the humankind would pass through a horrible suffering. In this apocalyptic picture of world history, the Marxist kibbutzniks thought about themselves as part of the vanguard army of the advancing socialist movement. They also took it for granted that the core of this vanguard was Red Russia that was destined to advance beyond her borders, defeat the “house” of capitalism, and deliver Israel, along with the rest of the humankind, from oppression.62 Both the radical kibbutzim and the rest of socialist collectives clearly represented a religious commonwealth in a secular garb.

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POLITICAL ECONOMY OF KIBBUTZIM AND THE DECLINE OF THE “FRONTIER SOCIALISM,” 1960S–1980S Although some kibbutzim were able to support themselves through subsistence agriculture and even generate modest profits, many of them were far from being self-sustaining and economically viable communities. At first, they owed their very existence to rich Western philanthropists. After 1948, the philanthropists were replaced by the Israeli government that still needed these rugged and committed settlers to safeguard the borders of the new state. The Jewish Agency, the major governmental sponsor of the kibbutzim, centralized the distribution of private donations for that frontier socialism. By 1963, the agency had to take over 122 failing kibbutzim (out of 228) to prevent their financial collapse.63 The Israeli government singled out kibbutzim for a preferential treatment, providing them generous 30-year-long credits with only 3.5% interest, which no other Israel business or group ever enjoyed. This in fact was an equivalent of a direct subsidy. In contrast, during the same decade, for the rest of the Israeli society, to secure a 10% credit was considered the best option.64 One need to be clear about the nature of kibbutzim. Unlike contemporary totalitarian experiments in the Soviet Union, China, and even in authoritarian Yugoslavia, Jewish frontier socialism was a diverse and grassroot enterprise. Each kibbutz was free to preach its own brand of socialism. Organized from below, kibbutzim sampled the variety of Zionist, Labor Zionist, Bundist, socialist, and communist doctrines, including Marxist-Leninist collectives that preached “scientific socialism.” At the same time, they had nothing to do with Soviet collective farms and especially Chinese communes, where peasants were ascribed to their villages as state serfs who were obligated to deliver mandatory production quotas. Although they were the wards of the Israeli state, kibbutz communities could decide on their own how to use state-owned land they rented and what crops to plant there. Neeman, who matured in one of such settlements, has stressed, “On the kibbutz we lived by free choice, voluntarily, not by coercion, like in the totalitarian Communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, or Hungary.”65 Kibbutz socialism was a volunteer enterprise driven by a personal commitment. No children of settlers who grew up in these settlements were held there as hostages. In fact, this free admission and exit policy eventually became the major cause of kibbutzim undoing. Moreover, since the 1960s, within kibbutz communities, residents always had a choice to either continue living as part of a socialist fellowship, sharing everything and receiving no salary, or to live as partial dropouts and perform paid work, for example, at a workshop affiliated with a kibbutz. The third option, which became especially

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attractive to children of kibbutzniks, was to completely leave a socialist collective to study and work in the wider world. In the 1960s, with the rise of a new generation of kibbutzniks and with the Israeli army gradually taking over as the guardians of borders, the Spartan egalitarian spirit began to evaporate from the kibbutzim life.66 Spiro, who examined one of the socialist collectives in 1952, found out during his subsequent trip in 1962 that the spirit of asceticism began to disappear, whereas demands for privacy were recognized as legitimate. As one Marxian writer later wrote with regret, the kibbutzim fell victim “to the pursuit of individual fulfillment.”67 As many other socialist and communist experiments in the past century, the kibbutzim project was the child of the emergency war-like situation when circumstances required mobilization, sacrifices, and collective efforts. As soon as emergency circumstances were gone, the socialism model immediately began falling apart, losing its appeal and relevance. When, after the victory of Israel in the 1967 Seven-Day War, life in the country became relatively safe, the martial subculture of kibbutzim began to disintegrate. In fact, the first large wave of defectors from this “frontier socialism” emerged during the first years after of Israel’s existence. Simultaneously, since the 1950s, the number of moshav cooperatives, which offered a greater degree of an individual freedom and initiative, increased. This totally reversed the earlier trend when the number of kibbutz settlements was on the rise. After all, a moshav family farm was 35% more productive than an average kibbutz household.68 Despite all their enthusiasm and readiness to perform back-breaking work, economic waste, lack of concern about profits, and the stubborn ideological commitment to manual labor at the expense of machinery, retarded kibbutzim economic performance. It was estimated that an average kibbutz worker was 16% less productive that his or her colleague in the rest of Israeli economy.69 In 1950, the minister of Labor Golda Meyerson was able to reiterate still popular mantra about “socialism in our time.” Yet, ten years later, fewer people were ready to accept it. The young generation did not want to put up with rigorous discipline and the ideologically motivated asceticism of their fathers and mothers. In addition to the poor economic performance, this generational shift was the chief reason why the whole project gradually disappeared. In 1970s, only 3.3% of the Israelis lived in kibbutz villages.70 During that decade, the government already viewed the kibbutzim as a financial albatross on its neck. A few kibbutz settlements continued to persist in their socialist faith, stubbornly maintaining their communal dining and sleeping quarters until they were finally disbanded in the 1990s.71 Not only was the frontier socialism declining but it was also changing its left “skin,” drifting away from socialism toward Jewish nationalism and traditionalism. The aggressive refusal of the surrounding Muslim societies to

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recognize the Jewish state naturally amplified nationalism and muted international socialist temptations of those few left-wing Jews who still resided in the countryside.72 The formal eclipse of socialist Zionism took place in 1977, when Menachem Begin, a conservative Zionist, won elections and became a prime minister, defeating the Socialist Labor Party that dominated the country’s mainstream politics since the 1940s. Begin ended lavish tax breaks and subsidies that the previous government had so generously provided to kibbutzniks. After government assistance was phased out, an audit revealed that, in the 1950s and the 1960s when many young people began to leave kibbutzim, their local leaders wasted long-term loans and subsidies on monetary handouts. Trying to somehow incentivize people to stay in the “socialist countryside,” these kibbutzim leaders were eager to boost the welfare of their communities instead of investing funds into long-term job-creating projects.73 In other words, it became obvious that the whole project of militarized socialist settlements was able to linger on at the expense of the rest of Israeli society that more or less practiced capitalism. NOTES 1. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 323; Philp Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 269–271. 2. S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 17. 3. Ana Siljak, Angel of Vengeance: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 144. 4. Ibid., 138. 5. Leonard Shapiro, “The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 306–307. 6. Jonathan Frankel, “The Roots of ‘Jewish Socialism’ (1881–1892),” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, 64. 7. Shapiro, “The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” 307. 8. Ibid. 9. Siljak, Angel of Vengeance, 146. 10. Shapiro, “The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement,” 313. 11. Ben Halperin and Jehuda Reinharz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 207. 12. Jean-Christophe Attias and Esther Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 162. 13. Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (New York: Schocken, 1963), 39.

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14. Berlin, “Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” 230. 15. For an English translation, see Hess, Rome and Jerusalem. 16. Shlomo Avineri, “Introduction, in Moses Hess, Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ix. 17. Matityahu Mintz, “Ber Borokhov,” in Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, 122–144. 18. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 24. 19. Matthieu Renault, “The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev,” Viewpoint Magazine, March 23 (2015), https​:/​/ww​​w​.vie​​wpoin​​tmag.​​ com​/2​​015​/0​​3​/23/​​the​-i​​dea​-o​​f​-mus​​lim​-n​​ation​​al​-co​​mmuni​​sm​-on​​-​mirs​​aid​-s​​ultan​​-gali​​ev/. 20. Jacob Hen-Tov, Communism and Zionism in Palestine During the British Mandate (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 83. 21. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 141, 149. 22. Theodore Herzl, Old-New Land: Novel, trans. Paula Arnold (Haifa: Haifa Publ. co, 1961). 23. Ibid., 37, 41. 24. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 220. 25. Ibid., 156. 26. Ibid., 51. 27. Eliyahu Kanovsky, The Economy of the Israeli Kibbutz (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1966), 108. 28. Spiro, Kibbutz, 19–21. 29. Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel. Sternhell holds the founding fathers of socialist Zionism responsible for committing the original “sin” by being more nationalist than socialist. In hindsight, their evolution toward greater Zionism was natural. The historical experience of other countries showed a similar ideological drift of socialist and national socialist movements toward nationalism. 30. Spiro, Kibbutz, xv; Noam Chomsky, “Interview,” in The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987, e-book), 32. 31. Spiro, Kibbutz, 41, 108. 32. Ibid., 32–33. 33. Ibid., 13–14. 34. Ibid., 17. 35. Ibid., xxi, 31, 90. 36. Ibid., 67. 37. Kanovsky, The Economy of the Israeli Kibbutz, 107. 38. Maurice Samuel, What Happened in Palestine (Boston: Stratford, 1929), 28–29. 39. Spiro, Kibbutz, 177, 35. 40. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 161–162. 41. Ibid., 164–165. 42. Ibid., 175–176. 43. Spiro, Kibbutz, 44.

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44. Ibid., 46. 45. Ibid., 54–55. 46. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 196. 47. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 328. 48. Spiro, Kibbutz, 146–147. 49. Ibid., 150–151. 50. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 168. 51. Ibid., 221. 52. Ibid., 220–221. 53. Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 107. 54. Attias and Benbassa, Israel, the Impossible Land, 168–169. 55. Spiro, Kibbutz, 183. 56. Yael Neeman, We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz (New York and London: Overlook, 2016), 15. 57. Ibid., 16. 58. Spiro, Kibbutz, 179. 59. Ibid., 183. See also Chomsky, “Interview,” 33. 60. Ibid., 182. 61. Ibid., 192. 62. Ibid., 186. 63. Kanovsky, The Economy of the Israeli Kibbutz, 138. 64. Ibid., 139. 65. Neeman, We Were the Future, 232. 66. Spiro, Kibbutz, x, xiii. 67. Jason Schulman, “The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism,” New Politics, 9, no. 3 (new series) 2003. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​subje​​ct​/je​​wish/​​schul​​man​-s​​ocial​​is​t​ -z​​ionis​​m​.pdf​ 68. Kanovsky, The Economy of the Israeli Kibbutz, 135. 69. Ibid., 132. 70. Neeman, We Were the Future, 11. 71. Ibid., 234. 72. Ibid., 217–218. 73. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 327.

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The East is Red Communism in China, North Korea, and Cambodia

Before unfolding the story of communism in China, Korea, and Cambodia, one needs to explore political and spiritual traditions dominant in this part of the world. We need to see how socialist ideas brought from the West and Soviet Russia in the first half of the twentieth century became domesticated in those areas. In China and Korea, the dominant ideology was Confucianism. Moreover, in China, it coexisted and merged with popular grassroots’ Taoist and Buddhist traditions. Among these three, Confucianism reigned supreme because ruling elites used it to maintain their hegemony over the populace. The major message of Confucianism was to create an orderly well-functioning society where everybody would know his or her place in the established family and state hierarchy. Subjects were expected to be obedient to elites, whereas the elites with the emperor on the top were to take care of the subjects. Confucianism affirmed that human nature was essentially benign, and, if properly molded, people can be good. There was also not much concern in this tradition about otherworldly things. According to a legend, when Confucius was asked to provide details about the “other world,” he reminded his students that he had much work do in this world and little time to think about heavenly spheres. Traditionally, it was up to mandarins (scholar-bureaucrats), who ran the state, to uphold the pillars of Confucianism and legitimize imperial administration in the eyes of people.1 Throughout centuries and well into modern times, that ruling class cultivated disdain for commercial activities. They looked down upon international trade and merchant activities in general. A true Confucian scribe who wanted to succeed within the system would never think about selling something to somebody.2 Proclaimed faith in the improvement of the surrounding world, sense of duty, respect for authority, stress on education, indoctrination through the rote learning of ancient texts, ideological drills, mutual help, focus on performing established rituals—all 233

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these moral pillars of Confucianism later came to resonate well with imported brands of state socialism, especially communism. Communism, which was assimilated into the northern Asian tradition in a form of Maoism, provided an ideological tool to modernize China, North Korea, and several other Asian societies. Just like in the former Russian Empire, where communism in a form of Marxism-Leninism replaced the dominant state religion of the Russian Orthodox Church by simultaneously maintaining its spirit, Maoism assaulted Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions, while preserving their modes in a new guise. In northern Asia ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin fell on a fertile ground and served as a spiritual bridge into the modern world. Moreover, I want to suggest that in China and northern Asia in general existing spiritual traditions made the area even better positioned to assimilate MarxismLeninism than Russia, where, prior to 1917, the population had been steeped in other world notions of Christianity. Unlike Russia, in China earthly Confucian (world-improvement) and Buddhist and Taoist (world-rejecting) traditions helped communism to smoothly sail through the very fabric of society: the conflation of the three traditions set the popular mind to expect an immediate improvement of the world and simultaneously its violent rejection. No wonder that communism, which became deeply embedded into an indigenous tradition, still linger on in the political culture of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos (see Fig. 10.1), and, to some extent, Nepal.

Figure 10.1  Blend of Communism with Buddhism: Red Flag With Hammer and Sickle Outside a Temple in Luang Prabang, the Former Capital of Laos. Source: © carstenbrandt/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

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In contrast to their Stalinist predecessors in Russia, who had to work very hard and spill the rivers of blood to impose Marxist-Leninist ideological blueprints on the nonurban Orthodox population, in the Chinese countryside it took Maoists only a decade to substitute earthly Confucianism and world-rejecting Buddhism and Taoism with equally earthly MarxismLeninism. As one American observer cleverly remarked: Chinese communists found their way from the past in the Marx theory of the future.3 North Korea, which too developed within the Confucian tradition followed a similar trajectory of development. Cambodia, a third country, which I am going to explore in this chapter, belongs to the Buddhist tradition with its ascetic rejection of the world; her peculiar experience with communism involved amplified Maoism, virulent nationalism, and Buddhist monastic tradition—an ideological mix that turned out to be the most lethal compared to other communist projects. STALINISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS, THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD, AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1949–1976) On May 4, 1919, a group of three thousand angry Chinese students gathered at the central square of Beijing to protest the mistreatment of their country by Western powers. In the wake of World War I, it was the so-called Entente alliance (the United States, Britain, and France) that called the shots. The alliance refused to secure the independence of China and literally left her open for Japan to plunder. As in the nineteenth century, Chinese coastal cities were still under total control of both Western powers and Japan that enjoyed there all kinds of financial and commercial privileges. Weak Chinese officials silently swallowed this humiliation. The angry students called for the punishment of these anti-patriotic weaklings. This was the birth of the powerful May the Fourth movement, which gave rise to Chinese nationalism and simultaneously to communism. The refusal of the Western powers to recognize China’s sovereignty radicalized her intellectuals and scholar-bureaucrats and eventually turned them away from classical Western liberalism that earlier had been quite popular. After 1919, many of them ditched it for various brands of socialism. A lot of May the Fourth student radicals became hooked on the militant message of Russian Bolsheviks. The latter, after their failure to railroad a socialist revolution in the West, turned their attention to the East, promising the colonial periphery national and social liberation. In 1921, Chinese radicals, who were hooked on the Bolshevik message, got together to jump-start their own communist party. Like a good-fitting glove, imported Marxism-Leninism

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sprouted well on indigenous Chinese soil, resonating with traditional Confucianism. Reading, memorizing, and internalizing Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin texts, which were thought to contain high moral wisdom, perfectly mirrored the traditional reverence of classical texts that similarly were expected to instill high morality and teach aspiring scholar-bureaucrats how to become good administrators.4 Moreover, the very example of the Soviet Union, which brought together masses of people to build a powerful industrial state that openly challenged the West, looked appealing to those who wanted to do the same in China. That was not the first robust attempt to bring Western ideas to the Chinese soil for liberation purposes. In 1850, one Hong Xiuquan, a charismatic man who failed a rigorous Chinese examination system to be qualified to serve as a scholar-bureaucrat, declared himself a younger brother of Jesus Christ. As such, he soon found himself in charge of a mass spiritual revolt against the government. Hundreds of thousands in the southern part of the country followed his prophecy about a coming heaven of earth. This was the famous Taiping rebellion against the ethnically alien Manchu dynasty that had ruled China and that had been humiliated by its double defeat during the so-called Opium Wars (1830s–1860s) against Britain and France. Anti-foreign sentiments against all kinds of alien “barbarians” were traditionally very strong in China. From the 1600s to 1911, the county had been ruled by the Manchu, who had treated China’s majority population as the second-rate people and who now were unable to protect the country from another set of foreigners. The Taiping not only wanted to get rid of the nonChinese dynasty, but they also socialized wealth and crusaded against private property. Most important, the rebels assaulted traditional Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, turning their temples into slaughterhouses and toilets. These “degenerate” creeds were to be replaced with a Chinese version of prophetic Christianity that drew on bits and pieces of Protestant theology. Hong Xiuquan and his followers were convinced that the powerful spiritual “medicine” that allowed Europeans to defeat the Manchu now could serve their cause. Members of the Taiping movement were obligated to renounce all traditional beliefs and pledge allegiance to the new revolutionary creed. Yet, when the first millenarian zeal subsided, the Taiping began assimilating their “liberation theology” with Confucianism. In fact, Hong Xiuquan set up the hierarchy of enlightened bureaucrats who were to establish the Taiping peasant communism.5 In a similar manner, in the early twentieth century, the rebellious students and scribes who became interested in the socialist creed, thought about it as a powerful ideological “medicine” that too could be planted on the Chinese soil to serve as an ideological vehicle of national and social liberation. The cosmetic 1911–1912 revolution, which finally toppled down the impotent

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Manchu dynasty, did not make China powerful. In fact, plunged in the long period of chaos, anarchy, and civil war, the country became even more vulnerable to foreign intrusions. Power shifted to local warlords, who constantly competed with and battled each other. The most influential among them was Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the Kuomintang movement that too aspired to make China a sovereign nation. Educated in the West and Japan, Chiang was a member of the Methodist Church. These alien traits later became his liability when people had to choose between his regime and communists who deeply rooted themselves in the indigenous countryside. The Kuomintang professed nationalism with some elements of socialism but without any traits of class-based Marxism. A small group of 300 students and minor bureaucrats, who constituted themselves in 1919 as the Communist Party of China, too shared nationalist goals. Yet, they were adamant to include into the list of the enemies not only Japanese and Western aliens but also feudal lords and well-to-do people in general. The daring poverty of Chinese peasant masses made them very much susceptible to the egalitarian message of communism. The successful blend of nationalism and socialism eventually brought the communists to power in 1949. Mao Zedong (1893–1976), one of the members of the May the Fourth group, eventually took over as the leader of the Chinese communists. A son of a well-to-do farmer, Mao got college education and later became a village teacher. His upbringing and mindset embodied the mainstream cultural expectations reigning in the country. Unlike, for example, Deng Xiaoping, another important communist leader who studied in France and the Soviet Union, Mao was a provincial intellectual whose life was devoid of any cosmopolitan experiences. Deeply grounded in the Chinese countryside, he always valorized the street-smart simplicity and credulity of a “typical” Chinese peasant. He idealized their traditional collectivism, contrasting it with “rotten” and “corrupt” city life that was full of Western “bourgeois” influences. In short, on a personal level, Mao could relate well to the peasantry that he later turned into the major revolutionary class. Still, ideologically, Chinese communism was the continuation of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. After taking over, Mao mimicked the Stalinist model in economics, political system, and ideology. Mao liked to draw specific ideological guidelines from the 1938 Stalin’s Short Course.6 Soviet MarxismLeninism was amplified and customized to the indigenous soil to channel nationalistic expectations of the populace. Deborah Kaple, a Chinese expert, labeled this approach as “Soviet Socialism in Translation.”7 Like the Soviets, Mao placed stress on five-year plans and heavy industry. In agriculture, he aspired to replicate and even outdo Stalin’s collectivization. His economically backward country was lacking industry along with the industrial

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proletariat—the class-redeemer in the classical Marxist eschatology. Yet, China had plenty of impoverished and illiterate peasants who craved for land and hated their landlords. Given these circumstances, Mao creatively adjusted the Marxist prophesy to the Chinese soil, giving rise to what eventually became known as Maoism. In fact, Lenin, who had adjusted classical Marxism to the Russian soil, had already opened a door for Mao’s ideological experiment.8 The Bolsheviks intended to rationalize their 1917 takeover in the semi-backward peasant Russia that did not fit the classical Marxist paradigm of a country pregnant with a revolution and that had had only a tiny proletarian segment. Creatively adjusting Marxist theology to the Russian soil, Lenin and his followers insisted that such a revolution could start in a country where capitalism was weakest, including the colonial periphery. Lenin stressed that the ultimate success of socialism in Russia depended on a disciplined and committed vanguard party that led masses (proletarians along with their peasant allies) against the landlords and bourgeoisie. In his scheme, under the tutelage of the party and class-conscious working-class minority, the peasant majority would act as a powerful ally. With this creative spin, Lenin opened a door to later anti-colonial movements to assimilate Marxism into their ideological agendas.9 Mao took that Leninist argument further, maintaining that the proletariat was not exactly needed for a successful revolution provided peasant masses were navigated by a committed communist party. By the sheer power of their Marxist-Leninist knowledge, the vanguard would carry the metaphysical spirit of the proletariat. After taking over, as Mao explained to their cadre, the party was to assemble the missing economic base (advanced modern industry) that would later breed the industrial working class. In this manner, despite the premature “socialist birth” and the vanguard “steam engine” puffing ahead without any “proletarian train,” the theological requirements of Marxism could be fulfilled. Yet, there was an important difference between the Bolsheviks and Maoists. Lenin and Stalin never trusted peasants, considering them an unreliable petty-bourgeoisie element, and never elevated them higher than allies of the proletarian “noble savages.” Although rhetorically Mao did acknowledge the role of the working class, he had to operate in a country that hardly had any industry and industrial labor. For this reason, with a stretch of an imagination, Mao pushed further the Bolshevik dictum about the worker-peasant alliance and came to consider Chinese peasants as the surrogate proletariat. This ideological twist made a perfect sense because, by the 1910s, China was still a peasant country through and through and practiced medieval subsistence agriculture. What was novel in this whole Lenin-Stalin-Mao scheme was that the communist party strictly speaking did not need any proletariat. Recruited from

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highly progressive people of any background who mastered the superior Marxists knowledge and who knew the way, the vanguard party acted on behalf of the would-be proletariat. Thus, substituting peasants for proletarians, by the early 1960s, Mao established an ideological blueprint of a Third World Marxism: without the “noble savages” of classical Marxism, a determined vanguard party, animated by socialism, could guide unlettered peasants into a socialist revolution and further into the “radiant future.” Essentially, the Lenin-Stalin-Mao scheme represented the project of a rapid modernization for underdeveloped countries dressed in the Marxian garb. In a comical and grotesque manner, the 1966 Soviet movie The Chief of Chukotka expressed well that filling in blanks scheme played on the vast spaces of northern Asia.10 The movie featured one Alexei Bychkov, a 1920s’ aspiring young Bolshevik commissar, who found himself cast away into a remote Arctic area in the northeastern-most part of Siberia populated by tribal Chukchi people, hunters, and reindeer breeders. The Bolshevik, singlehandedly adopting the role of the benevolent government and savior, nationalized a local lucrative fur trade that the Chukchi conducted with a visiting American merchant. Having accumulated a large amount of hard currency, Bychkov, who picked up the basics of the Marxist speak and theology, began to daydream about building in that remote area giant industrial plants that were to reshape local subsistence hunters into “Chukchi proletarians” who would then provide a solid class “basis” for the Marxist utopia. Throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party were cultivating their peasant base. Occupying inlands areas of China, they experimented with a land reform, confiscating landlords’ domains and distributing them among peasants. On top of this, in the communistcontrolled enclaves, Mao’s militants for the first time in Chinese history allowed women to own property and freely leave abusive marriages. All that made Maoists popular among the peasantry. After the defeat of Japan in 1945 and with the Soviet Army flocking into northeastern China, the communists emerged as the major political force in the country. Although they did enjoy a Soviet back up, Chinese communism was an indigenous force. In 1949, after Mao and his party took over with the overwhelming support from below, they chased away not only the pro-Western Chiang forces but also expelled all foreigners—a symbolic gesture of cleansing the country from the hated Western imperialists. Even those Chinese who had little sympathy for communists, originally fell for the Maoists’ patriotic agenda. In the countryside, to the joy of the rural populace, large land estates were confiscated and distributed among peasants, whereas former landlords were publicly ostracized, chased away, and killed. By 1952, between one and two million landlords lost their lives.11 Imitating their Bolshevik predecessors, the Chinese communists threw this tactical bone to the peasants. In

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fact, as early as 1949, prior to the general land reform, about 60% of adult Chinese had already received their land plots from Maoists.12 Like earlier in the Soviet Union, feasting on the graves of feudal lords, happy peasants temporarily were able to cultivate their own land strips in a naïve expectation that this situation would last forever. Yet, this peasant paradise did not last long. Following Stalin’s blueprints, Mao intended to collectivize Chinese agriculture. China’s involvement into the Korean War (1950–1953) sped up that process. Kim Il-sung, a Soviet-sponsored North Korean dictator, made an unsuccessful attempt to take over the U.S.-controlled southern part of the Korean peninsula. This led to a prolonged war with the United States that involved millions of Chinese troops who came to assist their anti-Western brethren. The war put a huge burden on the Chinese economy, which had been already devastated by the earlier prolonged war with Japan. Warfare and war-time anti-American propaganda radicalized the newborn communist regime. Society was mobilized and incentivized to search for the enemies of people. This led to the terror against the remaining “bourgeoisie,” including well-to-do peasants, who were linked to “evil” Americans and Japanese. Like Stalin, Mao hoped to raise grain exports to pay for the industrialization of his country and also to cover war expenses. By 1953, the Chinese government imposed a mandatory delivery quota on all peasants. Like in the 1930s Soviet Union, the goal was to squeeze as much export grain from the countryside as possible. The follow-up events were essentially a rerun of the Stalinist collectivization with Chinese characteristics. Just like the Bolsheviks, Chinese communists were not exactly happy about the small-scale subsistence non-mechanized agriculture. Mao and his comrades envisioned Stalinesque factory-like large agricultural farms equipped with machines and worked by armies of workers-proletarians. In fact, nor sooner had his communists taken over than Mao began complaining that small landholders were breeding hated capitalism and that “middle peasants” were now turning themselves into rich farmers, which threatened social justice in the countryside.13 In the 1950s, the government set up about 485,000 collective farms with each farm numbering from 100 to 300 families. What set China apart from the Soviet Union was that Mao’s collectivization did not provoke so much violence in the countryside. In contrast, Stalin’s peasant policies triggered a literal civil war. Unlike their Bolshevik tutors, urban radicals who hardly had any base in the countryside, Mao and his vanguard were indigenous to the peasant China. By the end of the 1950s, in 90% of Chinese villages, the communist party had its cells.14 Another crucial difference was that Maoists did not unleash the Soviet-style war against well-to-do peasants (kulaks). Instead of exiling them away, the dispossessed well-to-do peasants in China were forced to join collective farms, where they were policed by local social justice warriors. Still, there were more similarities than differences. Very much like their Soviet

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counterparts, Chinese peasants lost their land strips and were forced onto collective farms, where they were effectively turned into state serfs. They were similarly issued mandatory production quotas and were paid in reward points. Extracting resources for industrialization, Mao’s state forced peasants to sell 25% of their produce at low fixed prices to the government. In the meantime, the government never invested into the countryside more than 7.8% of its budget.15 The death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent attempt of Soviet top bureaucrats to chip away at Stalin’s legacy that was considered sacred shocked Mao and his loyal associates. The Soviets denounced Stalin’s terror and his cannibalistic methods, including bone-breaking industrialization. The new Soviet leaders also began advocating a peaceful coexistence with the West, rejecting Stalin’s prophecy that a war between the “house” of communism and the “house” of capitalism was inevitable. All this revisionism went against the expectations of many Chinese militants, who like new kids on the block, were just beginning to feel the taste of radical Stalinesque communism. Attacks on Stalin’s cult of personality by new Soviet leaders not only undermined the radical left creed and led to numerous cases of apostasy, but it also threatened to kill the revolutionary zeal of recent converts to the cause and the emerging charisma of Mao. Mao and his allies claimed that they were obligated to save the purity of the revolutionary creed. Just like Lenin, who in 1900 revolted against Bernstein revisionism to preserve the revolutionary spirit of the Marxian prophecy, Mao threw a rallying cry, “De-Stalinization is revisionism.”16 The head of the Chinese communists felt that he was destined to carry the communist torch (See Fig. 10.2). Instead of obediently following Soviet chess masters, Mao and

Figure 10.2  Stalinism with Chinese Characteristics: A 1971 Propaganda Poster Stressing the Link between Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Communism. Source: Courtesy of the author’s personal collection.

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several other communist dictatorships (Albania, Romania, and North Korea) dug their heels and continued Stalinist social engineering. Insisting that the Soviets deviated from the “true” path of Marxism-Leninism, Maoists began to preach the “ascetic” brand of communism in contrast to what Mao scornfully labeled as Soviet “goulash communism.”17 Disentangling himself from the Soviet Union, Mao developed his concept of the peasant revolution, linking Chinese communism to the national liberation movements of the Third World. In 1969, Maoists explained that the revolutionary center was shifting from the West and Russia to the Third World and that the major enemies were American and Soviet imperialisms.18 Mao’s calls for national self-reliance, self-sufficiently, and egalitarianism resonated too with nationalist expectations of many anti-colonial leaders, who just removed the colonial burden from their shoulders and who tried to shape their multi-tribal countries into nations. Mao’s vision of the global fight between the Western/European core and the Third World periphery appealed not only to national liberation leaders of Africa, Asia, and Latin America but also to many Western New Left who hated their own Western civilization and who were equally upset about the Soviet communism that lost its revolutionary vitality. In fact, in the 1960s, many Western radicals stopped looking up to Moscow as their “Rome,” moving to such new pastures as Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba as new sources of inspiration and cutting-edge progressive theory. To stress his loyalty to the radical version of the creed, Mao stopped referring to his belief system as Marxism, preferring to talk about MarxismLeninism. Moreover, to teach the Soviet “traitors” a lesson, Mao radicalized the whole project of Chinese communism, unleashing the so-called Great Leap Forward in 1958. This was an ambitious scheme of fast-tracking communism to outperform his former Soviet masters and simultaneously overtake Western countries economically.19 The goal was to further socialize the countryside by forcing peasants into communes of about 25,000 each. In the communes, people were to dine, sleep, and be together, and wear the same clothing. Cooking family meals was strictly forbidden. Adult members were to work 48 hours a week and sleep 6 hours a day. Mao’s utopian plan, which was intended to outdo Stalin’s collectivization in its radicalism, promised to build up in a few years the nation of self-governing communes where communism would reign and an individual ego would be extinguished. That utopian plan was also expected to fulfill the earlier economic goal of generating large commercial crops for sale abroad. Mao instructed his planners to force switch many grain producers to such cash crops as cotton. Moreover, in a bizarre attempt to increase productivity to a maxim, communist militants launched a campaign to exterminate sparrows who fed on

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grain crops. This resulted in a man-made disaster. Fanatical gangs of militants depleted the population of sparrows that consumed not only grain but also insects. As a result, the population of insects that were lethal to grain dramatically multiplied, which brought a greater damage to crops. Unfortunately to the social engineers, nature tamed their arrogance. The Great Leap Forward escalated into a national tragedy with deadly results. Gambling on enthusiasm and killing all incentives for any productive work in the countryside, the governmental communization led to a sharp drop in grain production from 215 millions of tons in 1958 to 143.3 million tons in 1960. In the meantime, the steel output increased from 8.8 million tons in 1958 to 18.6 million in 1960. The production of rice dropped from 81 million tons in 1958 to 60 million tons in 1960. Just like in the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1930s, China soon faced a mass famine that killed between 20 and 30 million people (1959–1962).20 Yet, the most recent data generated by historian Frank Dikötter, who was able to examine newly opened provincial communist party archives, has given us a much higher number—45 million deaths; about 2.5 millions of these victims were in fact tortured to death or summarily executed for violating the guidelines of communal labor and living. Minor violations during the Great Leap Forward were punished by mutilation.21 The adventurous leap into the bright future created a total administrative chaos and disrupted the entire life of the nation. Mao’s grotesque attempt to fulfill Marxism-Leninist prophecy in one shot was miserably failing. Fearing for their positions, local communist bureaucrats fed the ruling elite doctored data and reported fake successes. Eventually, Mao realized that he had a disaster on his hands and decided to back off. By the time he changed the gears in 1962, in many communes people were already eating the bark of trees. Although collective farms and quotas were maintained, the government had to open peasant markets and give up on such hideous experiments as communal dining halls. Like Stalin, Mao blamed local officials and saboteurs for the famine. Unfortunately for China, the 1958–1962 disaster opened doors to another one. The debacle of the Great Leap Forward seriously tarnished the reputation of Chairman Mao. Several moderate leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping started to question his actions. Mao began to seriously fear that a potential opposition within his party might somehow join forces with the Soviet Union and dislodge him.22 To ward off this danger, he unleashed another campaign that became known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).23 This was a euphemism for a nationwide purge of old party and state bureaucracy which were blamed for betraying the revolutionary cause, sliding into Soviet revisionism, and leading a bourgeois life style. To do the work of purging, Mao

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mobilized school and college youth. Known as Red Guards, groups of these woke fanatics roamed around, vandalizing buildings, smashing historical monuments, beating and humiliating bureaucrats, educators, factory administrators. About 70% of central and regional party apparatus were denounced and purged.24 Overall, about 16 millions of “heretics” were denounced, ostracized, purged, fired from their jobs, or beaten. At the same time, only a small fraction of them was found guilty. The point was to intimidate the party and society into submission and cancel a potential opposition. The tactics of the regime was focused on “prophylactic” measures such as the extraction of public confessions in thought crimes and an exile to the countryside for reeducation.25 Moreover, the Cultural Revolution mostly concerned cities and spared the countryside. Not as lethal as the Great Leap Forward, it nevertheless took its toll on China. According to scholarly estimates, a “modest” number between 400,000 and 1.6 million party cadres and regular people were killed during the turmoil of the 1960s.26 Besides purging communist and state cadre, the “revolution” aimed to root out ideas, artifacts, and personalities that were declared pro-Western and bourgeois. Many regular people, including non-party intellectuals, teachers, and managers were classified as “diehard capitalists,” “reactionary capitalists,” “spies,” “traitors,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “reactionary intellectuals.”27 Millions of people who were randomly accused in harboring those vices were beaten, mocked, spat on, abused in every other way, and exiled into remote countryside areas to undergo a conversion to communism by learning the “wisdom” of peasants. Thousands were simply beaten by mobs of the Red Guards for no reason in the rage of their revolutionary ecstasy during street pogroms.28 For example, a group of self-proclaimed Red Guard schoolgirls between fifteen and sixteen dragged from his house Lao She, then one of the most celebrated Chinese writers. He was forced to his knees and beaten with buckled belts to death simply because they found in his apartment some cash in dollars—the symbol of the hated capitalist Americana. Like early Soviet Russia, China became divided into “bad” (landlords, merchants bourgeoise, middle peasants, intellectuals) and “good” (workers, peasants) classes. Moreover, the anthem of the Red Guards already hinted that children might inherit these class characteristics: The old man a true man, the son is a hero, The old man a reactionary, the son is an asshole. If you are revolutionary, then step forward and come along. If you are not, damn you to hell. Damn you to hell! Depose you from your fucking post! Kill! Kill! Kill!29

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The red stormtroopers boosted the cult of Mao’s personality. They also promoted his major “sacred text”—so-called Little Red Book (the exact translation is Red Treasure Book). Printed in more than one billion copies, it consisted of short and catchy phrases Mao uttered or wrote on various occasions.30 Regular people frequently carried it as a sacred talisman or simply, fearing ostracism, displayed the text as a protective shield.31 Such format perfectly fit the Chinese tradition of the so-called “records of utterances” when collected sayings of prominent sages had been printed for moral purposes; the best historical analogy would be famous Confucian Analects. Incidentally, among various Marxist-Leninist texts, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism32 became especially popular among Chinese communist “scholar-bureaucrats” and militants because it resonated well with the “utterances” tradition. Thus, Deng Xiaoping claimed that this Bolshevik volume was instrumental in his conversion to communism.33 By the turn of the 1970s, in the eyes of people, Mao became “the Great Teacher,” “the Great Leader,” “the Great Commander,” “the Great Helmsman,” and “the Messiah of the Working People.” Out of opportunism or conviction, millions were caught in this religious frenzy, craving to get a glimpse of his appearance. In the 1960s, during the peak of that cult, in their ecstasy, many who were lucky to see Mao frequently were reduced to tears by the whole experience. Just like the emperors in old China, he was treated as a semi-deity. People visited sacred sites associated with his presence and started their days with morning prayers to Comrade Mao. In fact, in the 1960s and the 1970s, it became common for many families before a breakfast to stand in front of Mao’s portrait asking him for instructions for their day.34 Traditional kin and familial loyalties were partially eroded and transferred to the communist party with communist “scholar-bureaucrats” effectively replacing old imperial mandarins. Eventually, millions of people assimilated and internalized communism that became part of traditional culture.35 Still, Mao had to deal with the fact that the purge campaign he unleashed was getting out of control. The economic life and municipal administrations in all major cities were paralyzed. Like Stalin who had to abruptly roll back the Great Terror in 1939, Mao realized that the expanding chaos of purges might affect the national security of the country. This prompted him to call in the army to restore the order. Soldiers cleared streets from hordes of the Red Guards, who were unceremoniously loaded into trucks and shipped to the countryside to follow their “bourgeois enemies” to learn collectivist wisdom from the “real people.” In 1975, trying somehow to revitalize stagnant economic life, Mao called from exile several despised “revisionists” who had earlier suggested to instill in the communist project a few modest economic incentives. By the time of Mao’s death in 1976, Cultural Revolution ran out of steam. Den Xiaoping,

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one of party leaders penalized by exile for sharing those ideas, was able to outmaneuver the fanatics of the Cultural Revolution and had their leaders arrested. That was the beginning of the sliding into “bourgeoisie revisionism” when slowly but surely, since 1978, the Maoists began injecting market incentives into the country’s economy. While formally remaining within the Marxist-Leninist ideological matrix, Den Xiaoping and his allies permitted peasants to work again their individual plots and sell produce, which finally made it possible to feed the country. NORTH KOREA: THE DYNASTY OF REDBROWN PHARAOHS (1945–PRESENT) In North Korea, not far from the capital city of Pyongyang there is a site that now serves as a sacred shrine and the object of a popular pilgrimage. Here, in a family of a practitioner of herbal medicine and a Christian lay leader, there was born Kim Il-sung, the first dictator of that small totalitarian hermit state. A propaganda legend also stresses that later, when he matured, the great leader with a group of his comrades singlehandedly liberated the country from Japanese invaders; all traces of Soviet and Chinese assistance that ensured the North Korean independence were carefully purged from North Korea history records. The second major shrine and the pilgrimage site is Mount Paektu, where, according to the legend, in 1941, on a grim cloudy day, in a secret guerilla camp of comrade Kim Il-sung’s son was born. Named Kim Jong-il, he later succeeded the father as the head of the state. Moreover, the legend stressed that in a miraculous way, on the day of his birth, the menacing grey clouds disappeared, and the bright sun suddenly lightened the environs: the nature itself celebrated the arrival of the heir.36 These two major legends vividly illuminate two signature features of the Korean communist mythology. First, it is a literal deification of the dynasty of the North Korean communist leaders—a practice that went far beyond the routine cult of personality of such communist notables as Stalin or Mao. Second, it is a virulent nationalism of the regime that has reached xenophobic proportions for the past decade. Like many other regimes that originally claimed socialism or communism, the North Korean dictatorship evolved into a national socialist state. By now, the regime shed off all the vestiges of the formerly popular class rhetoric. Instead, it preaches the idea of organic volksgemeinschaft-type community of the Korean race that is superior to other ethnic groups. The most guarded secret of North Korea is the fact that the founder of this red-brown dynasty Kim Il-sung was Stalin’s puppet and a Soviet middle-level officer. Trained on a Soviet military base in Siberia and awarded the rank of a

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Red Army captain, Kim was brought to North Korea in 1945 by the advancing Soviet troops and planted as the communist dictator. Another guarded secret is that he belonged to an educated Christian family. When Kim I was seventeen, he joined the Chinese Communist Party in Manchuria to fight against Japanese invaders who occupied both Korea and northeastern China. In 1941, escaping the Japanese, he sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The Soviet secret police caught him crossing the border. Instead of shooting him to fill their killing quotas, they decided to train him to use later as an asset in the coming war with Japan. In a Soviet training camp, he met and married his fellow communist with whom he had the son. This means that Kim II was born not on the slopes of Mouth Paektu but in Soviet Siberia.37 Under the Soviet tutelage, Kim I and group of Korean communist expats set up the Workers’ Party of Korea modeled after the Stalin’s Communist

Figure 10.3  Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) Delivers a Speech (1950). This Soviet middlelevel officer, who was planted by Stalin to head the North Korean communist dictatorship, became the founder of “red-brown” Kim dynasty. Source: Courtesy of SPCOLLECTION/ Alamy Stock Photo.

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Party. In fact, Kim’s very first speech, which inaugurated the creation of the North Korean dictatorship, was written for him by Soviet advisers and delivered from a podium filled with Soviet military officers. Later, North Korean propaganda experts had to work hard to retouch alien officers into Korean guerilla fighters on all available photographs. The would-be great leader finally received a chance to empower himself during the Korean War; in 1950, Kim made a reckless attempt to seize the entire peninsular by suddenly invading the southern part that was occupied by the Americans. This was an open violation of the Soviet-American agreement about the division of the peninsula in two parts. After a brief deliberation, Stalin backed up his Korean puppet. Yet, Moscow refused to be directly involved, insisting that Mao step in instead. Although economically devastating, for Chinese communists this adventure was a good opportunity to energize their regime by playing a nationalist card and cracking down on domestic “bourgeoisie.” The assistance to the “little brother” Kim was also a way to elevate the role of China in international communism.38 Mao sent to Korea a large army to beef up the Korean communists who were losing to the Americans. Despite all these efforts, ChineseKorean troops were stopped and kicked out from the southern part. Korea was divided again—the status that was officially confirmed by warring sides with a border drawn along the notorious thirty-eight parallel. After the death of Stain, when his Soviet successors demolished the charisma of the Moscow “pope,” many members of the communist commonwealth as well as its numerous fellow travelers began searching for ways to humanize the totalitarian creed. Yet, just like China, Romania, and Albania, North Korea opposed this revisionism. Not only did the country remain committed to Stalinism but she also doubled down on it. Particularly, Kim feared that a group of his fellow comrades sponsored by Moscow could use Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” that denounced Stalin to undermine his own emerging cult of personality.39 Soviet-born and educated ethnic Korean Pak Ch’ang-ok directly attacked Kim, simultaneously denouncing the Stalinist practice of cannibalizing agriculture for the sake of rapid industrialization. To safeguard his power, Kim had all pro-Soviet elements murdered. As a double precaution, he also wiped out the so-called Yanan faction, a group of pro-Chinese communists who were hanging with Mao during his stay in inland caves in the 1930s. With China being eager to replace the Soviet Union as the leader of the communist world, Kim and his acolytes did not want one ideological master to be replaced by another. As early as 1955, while maintaining a communist rhetoric, Kim delivered a program speech in which he directly appealed to the feelings of Korean tradition.40 For the first time, while mentioning communism and socialism, he skipped the names of Marx, Lenin, or Engels and even Stalin.

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Instead, he encouraged party propaganda workers to promote patriotism, study national culture, and history. The indirect message of the speech was simple: Korean communist ideology was superior to the Russian/European and Chinese communist ideologies. In the 1960s, being concerned about Soviet de-Stalinization and liberalization, Kim nevertheless dismissed Chinese Cultural Revolution practices as a “massive idiocy.” Eventually, this “stay aside” tactics mutated into the North Korean signature strategy of constantly balancing between two hostile socialist sponsors.41 It was in the 1960s that the country turned to self-isolation. Shredding into pulp all foreign (mostly Soviet and Japanese) books and terminating close relations with all countries, both capitalist and socialist, North Korea effectively transformed herself into a sealed fortress. Ideologically, all this was phrased as the adjustment of Marxism-Leninism to the Korean indigenous soil. Later, this evolved into the famous juche (selfreliance) policy that became the cornerstone of Korean communism. The juche self-affirmation was written into a new 1972 North Korean constitution. Alzo David-West, a Marxist psychology professor, who has been upset about juche gradually shedding off the traits of socialist internationalism, has called this ideology a political religion based on faith, authority, iron clad dogma, and miraculous thinking.42 Although juche is usually translated as independent stand or self-reliance, Andrei Lankov, one of a few world experts on North Korea, has stressed that the best way to render this in English will be “self-significance.” Essentially, the juche policy has been about the celebration of national character rather than simply self-reliance.43 Since culturally the first generation of communist bureaucrats was steeped in Confucianism, Kim’s call for the appreciation of indigenous tradition led to the revival of an interest in “splendid works” of Tasan (1762–1836). It was not an accidental choice. This Korean intellectual and governmental official, whom Kim’s propaganda declared progressive, criticized contemporary Chinese Confucianism, seeking to recover its “true” ancient roots. Tasan also had an ambitious goal of reforming Confucianism in the light of Christianity and Western science aiming to create Korea’s own political philosophy. In fact, Tasan converted to Catholicism and became a fan of Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci who argued that Catholicism and Confucianism were very much compatible. In short, Tasan scholarship provided a convenient cultural “glove” to work with imported ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Tasan had also insisted that mines, land, bans, industries had to be nationalized—another good match with socialism. Equally attractive was Tasan’s security project: peasants were to be turned into militarized collectives who would be working together and organizing themselves for the defense of the Korean state. Not a small thing was the fact that old feudal regime persecuted Tasan. Most important, this sage argued that Koreans were not the offshoot

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of the ancient Chinese migration to the Korean peninsula but rather the indigenous to the area. In other words, Tasan appeared to the Korean communist elite as a convenient intellectual resource that was traditional, modern, nationalist, and egalitarian.44 Yet, ten year later, Kim noticed that Tasan’s writings acquired such popularity that they overshadowed the juche communist ideology, particularly his own ideological speeches and brochures. To correct the situation, he issued a second call. Now, referring to Tasan as a reactionary philosopher, Kim asked the propaganda workers to stop their obsession with the philosopher. Still, the dictator did not completely shut the door to the ideological syncretism. Stressing that Tasan was only partially progressive, Kim instructed propaganda workers not to cross the fine line between juche communism and reformed Confucianism. He explained that Tasan was great but not greater than Karl Marx. After printing postal stamp with a Tasan image in 1962, to level the ideological paying field, the state printed follow-up stamps with the faces of Marx (1963) and Engels (1965). Stamps with Lenin were released four times (1960, 1964, 1965, 1967).45 Eventually, Kin Jong-il, the dictator’s son who had a bachelor’s degree in Stalinist political economy from a Soviet University, took over the job of developing juche ideology. In his essay “On Preserving of the Juche Character and National Character of the Revolution and Construction” (1997)46 Kim II resorted to mysticism and nationalism. He spoke about blood, soul, and destiny of the Korean people that overcame class divisions and evolved into a unified entity. At the same time, in a Stalinesque manner, he stressed that the juche ideas guided masses in constructing “socialism in one country.” Stressing that juche was “closely connected” to the Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism, Kim II explained that it developed further the Soviet ideology. As such, juche became the highest form of Marxist knowledge in the contemporary age. By the 1980s, juche ideology evolved into a full-fledged secular religion. The rapid disintegration and then the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe only empowered the isolationist and nationalist trends of the North Korean regime. The sudden death of Kim II in 1994, the termination of food shipments from the former Soviet Union, and the horrible 1996–1999 famine were the most serious challenges. It is estimated that between 200,000 and 3.5 million people47 (correct data is impossible to calculate because of the lack of statistics) perished from that famine. With socialism eclipsing at that time and petrified with the footage of the communist dictator of Romania being executed in 1989 by a rebellious mob, the North Korean elite decided to gamble on full-fledged nationalism. In the 1990s, references to socialism and communism were gradually disappearing from the program documents of the regime. In fact, Kim II and his associates, who still peppered their speeches with such standard metaphor from the

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Marxist jargon as the “working class,” in a curious verbal twist, used it not in its actual meaning but as a reference to the Korean race.48 Finally, in 2009, the regime completely dropped the expression “communism” from its revised constitution.49 The last portrait of Karl Marx was removed in 2012, when the country was preparing to celebrate the ascension to the throne Kim Jong Un, the son of Kim II.50 The ideological void was now again filled with Tasan ideas of reformed Confucianism, the escalating worship of Kim III, and preaching the superiority of the Korean race. Such national socialist evolution of the regime eventually reached grotesque proportions. In a complete switch from class to racial identity, the Korean propaganda now insists that the Korean peninsula was the cradle of the humankind. Furthermore, the army has been elevated to the top of the ideological pyramid. It has become the new salt of the earth, effectively replacing the proletariat that, on the official ideological scale, now occupies a second place after the army. Politically, by the 1990s, the regime evolved into a full-fledged totalitarian dictatorship that outdid both Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Thus, unlike Stalinist Soviet Union, where at least urban populace could travel within the country and change their residencies, the North Korean dictatorship could not tolerate any population mobility. All people were turned into state slaves and ascribed to state-run enterprises and farms. Changing jobs was possible but only with an approval of authorities. After graduating from a high school, all able-bodied people were assigned specific jobs. Those who were academically successful received permission to take college exams. Neither were people allowed to change their residence and move to another place or a city without a state permission. On top of this, for all short-term and longterm travels within the country, people had to secure travel permission from the police. Although there was no room for a private imitative, and money hardly played any role, like others communist dictatorships, North Korea had to allow farmers markets. The whole country became divided into residential groups that were obligated to keep an eye on each other. Several times a year, police did a random night checks on families to verify that households accommodated only registered residents. The police also inspected each radio set to ensure that it had a special seal that blocked foreign radio stations.51 In contrast to the Stalinist judicial system with its show trials and formal legality, the North Korean incarceration of suspected dissenters is still done without any formalities; a person is simply arrested by the secret police, thrown into a concertation camp without any trial and fixed prison sentence. Formal trials and sentences are reserved only for common criminals, who are kept in separate camps away from political prisoners.52 At the same time, it would be a mistake to view present-day North Korea as a traditional communist dictatorship. Since the 1990s, the country saw many

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changes. This concerns not only the current ideology of the regime but also a modest shift toward monetary economy in the wake of the 1990s, when the country saw first cracks within its totalitarian system. Ideologically, with its cult of the army, unified race, and organic community, North Korea now resembles more National Socialist Germany than Stalin’s Soviet Union. In fact, the recent xenophobic mutation of North Korea prompted left-leaning social scholarship to project the current ideology of the regime to its original state to argue that, from the very beginning, the North Korean project had nothing to do with “true” socialism whatsoever. For example, to exonerate the good name of the socialist creed, R. B. Myers has dismissed the role of Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism as the ideological fountainhead of the regime. Instead, he has explained away the militaristic and xenophobic traits of North Korean ideology by the influences of imperialist Japan prior to the 1940s.53 To be fair, another left scholar psychologist David-West, who has an intimate knowledge of the North Korean politics and culture, specially debunked that wishful theory, pointing out that “North Korea is a left-nationalist formation with a transitional national state-socialist system in the tradition of nationalStalinism.”54 Most important, in the wake of the 1990s’ famine and with no Soviet and Chinese aid to letch on, the regime started closing its eyes on the gradual development of the underground market economy. By now, there are already large economic holes in the monolithic dictatorship. North Korea has a vibrant black market that has been responsible for generating 78% of all North Korean personal incomes between 1998 and 2008.55 For the past ten years, the country saw the emergence of the whole class of underground new rich people, and bribe-taking practices became a norm. Peasants are turning to cultivating their personal gardens, although land still remains a state property. It is interesting that it has been mostly women that came to fill emerging market niches. In the totalitarian system of North Korea, those women who take care of little children, have been the only segment of population that the state did not ascribe to specific jobs. Using this loophole in the system, females became the first entrepreneurs, being involved in various black-market schemes.56 For example, the state dining industry that collapsed during the famine, now is totally in private hands and run by women, although formally dineries too remain a state property. The regime continues to exist on steroids, but it is not anymore the same ideologically driven Stalinist juche dictatorship. MAOISM GOES WILD: KHMER ROUGE IN CAMBODIA (1975–1979) When in the late 1970s the Chinese Cultural Revolution was running out of steam and the appeal of socialism around the world was waning out, in

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Cambodia, a group of die-hard devotees of Chairman Mao doubled downed, moving in the opposite direction. Known around the world under the name of Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers),57 they briefly staged a communist experiment that made people shutter in horror. Driven by a desire to outdo their radical chaperons from China, who in their turn had worked to outperform their Soviet tutors, Cambodian communists built a cannibalistic utopian dictatorship that resembled a dark reality show straight from the 1921 Eugene Zamyatin’s We (1921)—the first dystopian novel that had outlined the direction communist regimes would move to.58 The Khmer Rouge was a “nice” closure to the twentieth century radical socialist projects by harvesting a plentiful genocide crop of about 1.7 million people or 20% of the Cambodian 7.9 million population—the deadliest nationwide egalitarian experiment in the world history.59 To be exact, the Khmer Rouge was a byproduct of Cambodia’s turbulent modern history that was saturated with wars—another example of how warfare opened doors to radical forms of socialism. Prior to the 1970s, the country had already been the site of bloody conflicts between the Cambodians and Vietnamese. The latter were later had been replaced by French colonizers, who, in their turn, were replaced by the Americans. Particularly, the Khmer Rouge experiment became a spillover of the Indochina war between the United States and Vietnam in the 1960s and the early 1970s. This prolonged conflict normalized brutality and violence in this area. Had not it been a massive economic disruption in this area caused by the U.S. bombardment, there had been little opportunity for the Maoist regime the Khmer Rouge to come to power.60 In 1970, Sianuk, the prince of Cambodia who tried to keep neutrality during the U.S.-Vietnamese War, was dislodged by a military coup headed by General Lon Nol. The latter was sponsored by the American military that wanted to turn the country in its base against the Vietnamese communists backed up by the Soviet Union. The puppet Lon Nol regime was opposed by the Khmer Rouge, determined guerillas who were hiding in jungles. In 1975, the humiliated United States left Vietnam, losing the war that turned into a national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese against the Americans. Simultaneously, the unpopular pro-American dictatorship in Cambodia fell down. Facing no resistance, in the Fidel Castro manner, the Khmer Rouge emerged from their jungle hideouts as celebrated winners and picked up power. The communist guerillas were led by Pol Pot, an obscure figure who purposely avoided all publicity. It was only known that he had been born to a wealthy family and educated in France to become a teacher.61 In fact, the leadership of the party was the offspring of wealthy and middle-class families who were indoctrinated with the ideas of radical socialism when studying in France in the late 1940s. Pol Pot ideological baggage consisted

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of Marxism-Leninism, which he learned while mingling with French communists, and Mao’s indigenized Stalinism. Particularly, he was fascinated with stories about French Jacobin revolutionaries. Like Mao, he fell for Stalin’s Short Course that detailed how to expose and eradicate ideological heretics within a communist party.62 Pol Pot and his comrades were among the last active true believers into the “scientific” prophecy of Marxism-Leninism. He was convinced that the flow of history was predestined and moved according to history laws, which inevitably led society toward a revolution and then to the total egalitarianism. Pol Pot thought about himself as the one who knew how to read the signs of time and how to clear the ground for these history laws to materialize. One of his favorite utterances was “Don’t touch the wheel of history, it might rip off your hands.”63 Khmer Rouge were headed by Angka (which means “organization”), a highly disciplined party-like vanguard sect that preached radical Maoism. Like many other national liberation leaders who picked up the MarxistLeninist prophecy from Chinese hands, the Khmer Rouge became hooked on Mao’s theory of poor peasantry as the surrogate proletariat—the embodiment of healthy collectivism and national spirit. Mao assumed that peasant “noble savages” were to teach the rest of society how to live a simple egalitarian life. As all good students, the Khmer Rouge aspired to outperform their Chinese teachers in their zeal. For them, Mao’s 1950s’ and the 1960s’experiments were not radical enough. Pol Pot boasted, “With one giant leap forward we can reach the goal of communism.”64 He and his comrades were shooting for the “Super Great Leap Forward,” stressing that they wanted to imitate and at the same time to surpass the Chinese communal experiment of 1958–1962. In fact, in 1975, ailing Mao, who was upset that his ideological crusade in the Chinese countryside was stalled, personally blessed the Cambodian communist elite to launch their radical experiment: “What we wanted to do but did not manage, you are achieving.”65 A few months later, Mao’s messenger arrived into Cambodia and delivered the program of purges and collectivization. The Cambodian leaders soon began speaking the violent language of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In fact, it was easy to switch to this language because since the late 1950s, Maoists set up in Cambodia an excellent network of spy and educational Chinese cadre that successfully spread around Stalinist faith with Chinese characteristics. In the 1960s, in many Chinese-run schools in the Cambodian capital red flags were openly displayed and the Little Red Book already became the major “catechism.”66 At the same time, the Khmer Rouge was not simply a carbon copy of Maoism. It was an ideological brew of French Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao that they heavily peppered with indigenous elements.67 Being raised in the Buddhist tradition, Khmer Rouge leaders and activists propagated extreme revolutionary aestheticism. Like Buddhist monks of old, these

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French-educated revolutionaries aspired to extinguish personal desires for the sake of the sacred revolutionary cause of liberation their country at first from the French colonizers and then from the American-backed regime. Ieng Sary, the chief lieutenant of Pol Pot, argued that to be completely devoted to a revolution, communist militants should practice regular masturbation to extinguish their sexual drive.68 In fact, many Khmer Rouge militants came from the ranks of former monks. Thus, one of the chief founders of the Cambodian communist party was one Nuon Chea, a former Buddhist monk. Before going to France to get his college training, Pol Pot himself spent six years apprenticing in a Buddhist monastery. Except the French-educated party elite, regular rank and file militants had only a few years of Buddhist monastery education. They knew little of Marxism-Leninism, but they were all well familiar with strict Buddhist discipline and asceticism. Their spiritual tradition publicly professed self-denial, rejection of private property, and the strict obedience of commands issued by senior spiritual teachers. Although the Khmer Rouge made persistent efforts to wipe out Buddhism, it was natural that the Cambodian brand of communism was dressed in the “Buddhist garb.” In many respects, the veneration of the Angka political vanguard replaced Buddha, whereas collective dineries became new ideological centers, effectively replacing 3,000 monasteries that were shut down and turned into concentration camps and prisons.69 In a Buddhist manner, maintaining complete anonymity, top Khmer Rouge leaders promoted the power of the omnipotent and secret Angka organization: “The Organization is the master of water and the earth.”70 Since the days of their underground jungle warfare against the French colonizers, the Khmer Rouge cultivated secrecy and anonymity. Pol Pot and his comrades literally strived to live egalitarianism, staying away from the public display of their personalities. The members of the party vanguard acted literally as shadows without names. Just like characters from the above-mentioned Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the Khmer Rouge elite preferred to refer to each other as “brother number one” or “brother number two” and so forth, with Pol Pot being the brother number one. Although such figures as Mao and Stalin served for him as an inspiration, Pol Pot purposefully did not want to personalize his revolution. In contrast to other communist dictators, “common people” of Cambodia did not have to sing songs about him, and nobody shared stories about his glorious revolutionary deeds. Moreover, there were hardly any photographs of his face in newspapers. It was hard to find important political manifestos and statements that he signed personally. This peculiar cult of non-personally was the Khmer Rouge political novelty they brought to the world communist movement. In the spirit of Maoism, which idealized peasant “wisdom,” in 1975, the Khmer Rouge’s the first step was to deport all residents from the capital city

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of Phnom Penh and other major cities into the countryside to perform productive agricultural labor. This was to become a learning experience to help mold “rotten” and “corrupt” urban residents into peasants. The population removal plan was kept in a total secrecy. When the deportation started, people were told that the Americans were about to bomb the city and that people were evacuated for their own safety. To many who had to suffer American aerial bombardment, it did look as a plausible explanation. To those who continued to pester Khmer Rouge soldiers with a question “Where do we go, comrade soldier?” jungle guerrillas simply replied, “Just go, comrade. The Organization will show the way.”71 The deportation was strictly an ideological decision. Urban life scared Maoist jungle warriors and contradicted their egalitarian peasant utopia. In their eyes, cities were the dens of hated commerce, profit, loose morals, and corruption. The Khmer Rouge never trusted city dwellers. Even after being resettled into the countryside, former city dwellers always received lower food rations than the ones issued to peasants.72 On the quest for a pure peasant communist utopia, in one of its first public addresses to the Cambodians in 1975, the Khmer Rouge radio announced, “When our brothers and sisters from the revolutionary army, sons and daughters of our workers and peasants captured the capital city and other cities, they were horrified, finding men with long hair and dressed in a strange garb. It was hard to differentiate them from women. Our national characteristics, traditional life ways, customs, literature, art and culture were all destroyed by American imperialism and its puppets. Leisure activities and music were all built according to imperialist blueprints. Pure, traditional, healthy traits of our people were all eradicated and replaced with imperialist, pornographic, shameful, and perverted mores.”73 The country devastated by the civil war did experience severe food shortages. The Khmer Rouge approached the populace with a very simple equity doctrine: “We have little food, but we are many. Yet, instead of letting some people overeat and other to fall asleep hungry, we share everything equally. All people shall receive equal portions. Nobody will receive more than another. This is fair. Water will be shared in the same way. This is fair. We share everything equally. Nobody will receive more than others. Everybody will receive a little bit. Everything will be in common use like the sky and oceans. We must make sure that everything will belong to everybody like air and fruits from trees This is fair.” To accomplish this extreme egalitarianism, the Khmer Rouge destroyed all vestiges of private ownership and private life ways, including religion and family loyalties. Everything in the country was to be controlled by the Angka vanguard: land, tools, stock, houses, and people of Cambodia.

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Money was abolished, and the country was sealed from the outside world. Local newspapers and television were shut down, while telephone and mail communication among regular people was forbidden.74 Like in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, in the new state controlled by Angka, neither the elite nor low-level officers, nor prisoners nor laborers felt safe. Anybody could be instantly arrested, purged, or executed. Political correctness was running amok. In 1977, not sure about the ideological loyalty of bureaucrats in the northwest part of the country, the regime eliminated up to 70% of the communist elite in that area. By 1978, in the central committee of the Cambodian party half of its members lost their lives.75 Again, just like in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the regime incentivized people to spy on each other, which led to the avalanche of mutual accusations and escalating arrests. The secret police became so overwhelmed with the workload that they had to reduce the number of “enemies” by issuing a requirement to have five witnesses for a person to be arrested instead of three. Family ties were to be broken because a family loyalty threatened the structure of the totalitarian state. Children were encouraged to police their parents. Moreover, the state wanted to penetrate the thought process. According to Pol Pot and his associates, just like the evil of private property, private thoughts were politically incorrect because they led to egotism and capitalism. Since Marxism-Leninism instructed that private properties be nationalized, why should the Khmer Rouge leave out such important domain as private people’s thoughts?76 The Pol Pot regime insisted that the sense of self was the last bastion of capitalism. To make collectivization complete an omnipotent, the essence of self was to be totally extinguished. An accusation phrased as “Comrade, you are a free-thinking person” automatically led to an arrest and imprisonment.77 While explaining to “corrupted” Cambodians, who had formerly lived and studied in Europe and the United States why they must quit city life, Khieu Samphan, one of the top Khmer Rouge leaders, stressed, Evacuation of cities is a sure way to destroy private property. However nonmaterial property is more dangerous. It consists of everything what you consider your own: your parents, your family, your wives. All you call “my own” is nonmaterial property. Now it is forbidden to talk in terms “I” or “my own.” To say “my wife” is not allowed. You need to say “our family.” The Cambodian nation is our big family. That is why in our country under the wing of the Organization men work with men, women with women, and children with children. Each of you is a part of the nation. We are all children of the Organization, husbands of the Organization, and the wives of the Organization. You, intellectuals,

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who came from abroad, brought European thoughts with you. Let’s call these thoughts the extension of colonialism. That is why, to take part in the communist revolution, the first thing you need to do is to bring yourself down to the level of an ordinary Cambodian peasant and cleanse your corrupt thoughts and feelings.78

What popular literature about the Khmer Rouge has frequently downplayed is the fact that, from the very beginning, Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and other leaders of the regime were not poster internationalists from Marxist sacred books. Like their contemporary Third World brethren, they heavily peppered socialist egalitarianism with nationalist aspirations and phobias. It is notable that at the turn of the 1950s, during his French years, Pol Pot chose the ethnic-sounding pen name “Original Khmer [Cambodian].”79 Since socialism was the mainstream political language of liberation in the wake of World War II, they too assimilated Marxist-Leninist rhetoric into their liberation speak. In fact, the same passion the regime used to cultivate class warfare, it employed to foment ethnic and racial hatred. The latter was directed against ethnic minorities within the country and foreign enemies. Peter Idling, a Swedish author who wrote an oral history of the Khmer Rouge and whose book I have extensively used in this section, found out that it was only in the context of Cambodian nationalism that one could grasp much of the regime politics. He summarized this as follows, “Pol Pot was first of all a Cambodian, and only then a communist.”80 Essentially, Cambodian communism drew its inspiration from two sources: indigenous nationalism and Marxism-Leninism in a Maoist guise. Through centuries, various Cambodian leaders repeated a mantra of the Cambodian civilization’s uniqueness and of evil foreigners who posed a permanent threat to it. With France and then the United States being gone, in the late 1970s, Vietnam, the historical enemy of Cambodia, became the major object of suspicion and demonization. In fact, there was already enough bad blood between the two countries. Since the demise of the Angkor kingdom in the 1400s, the Cambodia territory was constantly shrinking. Not only did Cambodia lose much of her territory to the Vietnamese but she was also completely occupied by them in the early 1800s. By the 1960s, the country maintained only one-third of the original territory that she had held in the early modern time. Since the early 1800s, preservation of the nation and lamentations about her former glory were recurring themes in the programs of all Cambodian leaders. Folk memory maintained frightening tales about the Vietnamese brutal rule and atrocities. Parents routinely scared their disobedient children by telling them the yuon (savages) (the derogatory nickname for the Vietnamese) would steal them.81 In short, Cambodian tradition was infested with a fear of their eastern neighbor that became the “hereditary

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enemy.”82 When in 1976 Pol Pot decided to turn Vietnam in the major enemy, his message fell on the fertile ground. The Cambodian communist party originally existed as an affiliate of the Vietnam Communist Party, which upset Khmer revolutionaries and eventually prompted them to set up a separate party in 1960. Pol Pot was convinced that the Vietnamese “comrades” were plotting to create the Indochina “Soviet Union” that would strip Cambodian communists of their autonomy. For him, the removal of the Vietnamese control became an essential task on the way to the national independence of the country. As early as the 1960s, Pol Pot and his associates began to physically eliminate those comrades who were closely tied to the eastern neighbor. Overall, they murdered more than 900 Vietnamtrained communists, who did not fit Khmer national communism, which was the half of the membership of their entire party.83 Pol Pot also stressed that it did not matter if Vietnam was communist, capitalist, or a colony. To him and his comrades, this was a greedy and aggressive country. Throughout the years of a common struggle against the French and American occupation, he and his comrades were reticent to trust the Vietnamese. In fact, it was not only a class hatred of urban residents that prompted the Khmer Rouge to erase cities. Not a small factor was also virulent xenophobia and despise for other nationalities. In contrast to the indigenous Khmer, who mostly resided in the countryside, educated and enterprising Vietnamese and Chinese tended to congregate in Cambodian cities. The indigenous peasantry naturally viewed urban sites as alien enclaves infested with greed and corruption.84 Eventually, considered a dangerous diaspora population, the greater part of the Vietnamese minority was exterminated. The pathological fear of the Vietnamese reached grotesque proportions in the behavior of Khieu Ponnari, Pol Pot’s first wife and a fellow guerilla fighter. This “mother of the revolution” tended to wake up “the brother number one” in the middle of the night, being convinced that Vietnamese soldiers surrounded their compound ready to execute them. From time to time, she threw away glasses of water, screaming that the Vietnamese had poisoned the drinks.85 By 1978, this paranoia escalated to such an extreme that Khieu Ponnari was caught siting for hours and cursing all things Vietnamese. Eventually, Angka secretly shipped her away to China to be placed in a mental hospital. The same year when the “mother of the revolution” lost her mind, border clashes between China-backed Cambodia and Soviet-backed Vietnam evolved into a full-fledged warfare. Better trained and equipped, in 1979, the Vietnamese army quickly overpowered the Maoist jungle militants. Although the Vietnamese looted whatever remained in Khmer Rouge storages, many Cambodians welcomed the socialist aggressor as their liberator. The Vietnamese also set up a communist dictatorship in the country. Yet

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it was mild if compared to its cannibalistic predecessor. The successful invasion of Cambodia angered China and triggered her to unleash a brief aggression against Vietnam. This in turn prompted the Soviet Union to give Vietnam, her client state, a strong back up. Soon, all four countries, which claimed to have or build socialism, became involved into nationalistic quarrels. Despite their atrocities, the Khmer Rouge did not evaporate and did not surrender right away: the anti-Vietnam sentiments did resonate with some Cambodians. With a large group of his supporters, Pol Pot retreated into a jungle area on the border with Thailand and turned back to his familiar occupation—guerilla warfare that lasted ten more years. The regime seemed to have had enough “human material” to linger on. For example, Leng Bit, a Buddhist monk-turned communist, whom the jungle revolutionaries threw into a labor camp, remembered the brief Khmer Rouge experiment with some nostalgia: “What was good under Red Khmers was that we did not have to be responsible for anything, Also, there were neither fist fights nor crime. If they could have given us enough food supplies, health care, and education, the life would not have been so bad. If they had not killed so many people, it would have been all right.”86 Suong Sikin, who at first lived in France for thirteen years and whom the Pol Pot regime later made into a lower-level bureaucrat, remembered that he had joined the communist party being attracted to the Khmer Rouge antiAmerican message of national liberation. The quick victory in 1975 and successful takeover of the capital city energized him. Like the generations of left true believers before and after him, Sikin sought to rationalize his enthusiasm for the regime: “You have to understand that we had no doubts because we were totally committed to the revolution. We never questioned anything. We trusted our leaders very much and believed that the party never made any mistakes. Read Nikolai Bukharin’s letter to Stalin.87 We felt the same way. I felt the way Bukharin felt. Even if the party had said that I had been a traitor, I would have been ready to say, ‘If the party considered me a traitor, it means I am a traitor. I am not perceptive enough to expose my own treachery.’ That is how it was. Fanaticism. Just like the soldiers of the Ayatollah Khomeini88 who throw themselves under Iraqi tanks in order to speed up their access to heaven!”89 Fighting his guerilla war against Vietnam, the historical enemy of his country, Pol Pot eventually shed off the remaining traits of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. What remained was the skeleton of naked nationalism. He and his comrades disbanded the communist party and stated that they did not need an ideology anymore. The Khmer Rouge began to openly talk about an ethnic war against the Vietnamese. At the end of the 1980s, in one of his jungle interviews, Pol Pot revealed that nationalism actually stood behind the whole

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business of Cambodian communism rhetoric: “We chose communism in order to liberate our poor country. We helped Vietnamese because they were communists. But now communists are fighting against us. That is why we have to seek help among western powers and take their side.”90 The latter was a reference to the Khmer Rouge attempts to solicit international help to stop Vietnam’s invasion. Ironically, the genocidal regime, which cannibalized a quarter of its own population and which was toppled down by another communist country, from a legal standpoint was the victim of the aggression. This prompted the Vietnam-hating United States and other Western powers to formally recognize the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate power and deny such recognition to the regime imposed by Vietnam. Thus, backed up by the civilized world, the jungle national socialists bought for themselves ten more years. The fight ended in 1998, when aged and sick Pol Pot finally died. His body was cremated being placed on the pile of garbage and automobile tires. The invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam heavily upset the New Left and various fellow travelers in the West who had held the Vietnamese in a high esteem as the ultimate heroes and front fighters against American imperialism. The left had to swallow a hard pill that their beloved Vietnam also could be an aggressor, pursuing her national interests. The additional irony was that the communist aggressor spared the Cambodians from further annihilation by their indigenous communist regime. Moreover, communist China, which for many 1960s’ New Left became a new revolutionary Mecca, attacked Vietnam as a revenge for Cambodia, which further confused the Western left. The whole bloody mess within the Eurasian “communist family” destroyed the neatly carved progressive narrative in which the united front of the Third World revolutionary brotherhood was expected to march together against predatory Western imperialism. Noam Chomsky, one of the deans of the academic left in the United States, added his five cents, trying to exonerate the Khmer Rouge. In a special essay, he dismissed as gross distortions eyewitnesses’ reports about massacres of civilians and concentration camps in Cambodia.91 Later, Slavoj Žižek, a famous “philosopher clown” and self-proclaimed Leninist, confronted this left patriarch about that uncomfortable fact. Chomsky resorted to various excuses, insisting that he had no reliable information on the Cambodian situation; at the same time, he did not explain why he needed to do all the public posturing defending the Khmer Rouge in the first place. Birgitta Dahl, a parliamentarian from the Swedish Social Democratic Party, too praised the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and endorsed the deportation of city people. This did not prevent her to publicly state in 2003, “It is not true that we supported Pol Pot.”92 Daniel Burstein, now one of the world’s major venture investors who, on the side, also cracks out how-to and esotericism books, toyed in the 1970s with Maoism—a popular political fad among the New York radical

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bohemians at that time. As one of the leaders of the Maoist Communist Party USA, Burstein toured Cambodia in 1978 and praised her “accomplishments.” Today he does not feel any remorse about this forgotten episode. Yet, his fellow Maoist companion David Kline, who produced a coffee table book glorifying the Khmer Rouge,93 later came to regret his actions: “I struggled with myself to write about ‘revolutionary peasants’ building a ‘new Kampuchea’. But then one day, I knew-No, it’s not human. And the whole socialist mirage just fell away. No more Potemkin Villages for me.”94 For Gunnar Bergstrom, a Swedish left activist, it took more than twenty years to finally feel ashamed about backing up the most ruthless regime in modern history. He confessed to a writer who was compiling an oral history of the Cambodian dark times: “I cannot turn the time back. I understand that I ended up on the wrong side. And I participated, very indirectly, but participated in the genocide. How can I correct it now?” Despite his remorse, Bergstrom remains a true believer into the Marxist theology. His spiritual torments remind those of a religious acolyte who aspires to lead a godly life but who feels that he cannot avoid slipping in earthly sins: “The problem is not the [communist] idea but the prescription. The prescription turned out to be wrong. Since then, I have been breaking my head on how to reach that ideal and to avoid those consequences. Somewhere out there between Marx and Lenin, somewhere in between, there existed mistaken assumptions because I did not see any country that did not slip from the [true communist] path. Not all of them went to such extremes as Cambodia but all of them slipped. I remain on the left side, but how can one remain a leftist without slipping into that abyss?”95

NOTES 1. Jiping Zuo, “Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China,” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 1 (1991): 100. 2. Guy Sorman, Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 101. 3. John Bryan Starr, Understanding China: A Guide to China’s Economy, History, and Political Culture (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 55. 4. Perry Link, “What it Means to Be Chinese: Nationalism and Identity in Xi’s China,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 3 (2015): 25. 5. A. James Gregor, Marxism and the Making of China: A Doctrinal History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 72; V. P. Il’ushechkin, “Taipiny i khristianstvo [The Taipings and Christianity],” in Konfutsianstvo v Kitae: problemy teorii i praktiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 236–241. For more on the links between the Taiping egalitarian millenarianism and communism, see Slezkine, The House of Government, 102–103. 6. Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2019, eBook), 54.

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7. Deborah A. Kaple, Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41–57. 8. Gregor, Marxism and the Making of China, 144. 9. Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, 1950–1976 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 222. 10. Vitaly Melnikov, The Chief of Chukotka (1967), https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​ atch?​​v​=8Ik​​​Yl5Xs​​2u0 11. Strayer, The Communist Experiment, 87. 12. Ibid., 88. 13. Ibid., 91. 14. Ibid., 92. 15. Ibid., 95. 16. Lovell, Maoism, 107. 17. Klinghoffer, Red Apocalypse, 133. 18. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 252. 19. Lovell, Maoism, 109. 20. Strayer, The Communist Experiment, 102, Gregor, Marxism and the Making of China, 143–144. 21. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010 e-book), 716. 22. Gregor, Marxism and the Making of China, 158. 23. For the most comprehensive study of the Cultural Revolution, see Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016, e-book). 24. Strayer, The Communist Experiment, 109. 25. Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 565–566. 26. Ji Fengyuan, “Language and Violence During the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” American Journal of Chinese Studies, 11, no. 2 (2004): 93. 27. Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 60. 28. Zuo, “Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China,” 102–103. 29. Fengyuan, “Language and Violence During the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” 111. 30. Daniel Leese, “A Single Spark: Origins and Spread of the Little Red Book in China,” Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander Cook (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 23–36. 31. Zuo, “Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China,” 103. 32. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, ABC of Communism. 33. Leese, “A Single Spark,” 26. 34. Ibid., 101. 35. Ibid., 107. 36. Ibid., 53. 37. Blaine Harden, Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: A True Story about the Birth of Tyranny in North Korea (New York: Penguin, 2015), 17–19, 31–33. 38. Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 338, 341.

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39. Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18. 40. Kim Il-sung, “On eliminating dogmatism and formalism and establishing Juche in ideological work,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/ki​​m​-il-​​sung/​​195​5/​​12​ /28​​.htm 41. Lankov, The Real North Korea, 19. 42. Alzo David-West, “Between Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism: Juche and the Case of Chŏng Tasan,” Korean Studies 35 (2011): 93–121, 104. 43. Ibid., 67. 44. David-West, “Between Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism,” 98, 108–109. 45. Ibid, 103. 46. Kim Jong-il, “On Preserving of the Juche Character and National Character of the Revolution and Construction,” http://www​.korea​-dpr​.info​/lib​/111​.pdf 47. David-West, “Between Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism,” 112. 48. Ibid., 113. 49. Ibid. 50. Lankov, The Real North Korea, 51. 51. Ibid., 38–39. 52. Ibid., 45–46. 53. B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Melville House, 2010). 54. Alzo David-West, “North Korea and the Opinion of Fascism: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” North Korean Review 8, no. 1 (2012): 105–116; idem: “North Korea, Fascism and Stalinism: On B. R. Myers’ The Cleanest Race,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41, no. 1 (2011): 146–156. 55. Lankov, The Real North Korea, 82. 56. Ibid., 82. 57. The nickname proponents of the old regime gave to the Cambodian communist movement. 58. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (Modern Library Classics), trans. Natasha S. Randall (New York: Random House, 2006). 59. To be specific, out of her rural population of 4.5 million, Cambodia lost 15% and 25% of the 2 million urban residents. Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide 1975–1979,” in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 84, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nio​​d​.nl/​​sites​​/niod​​.nl​/f​​i les/​​Cambo​​dian%​​20g​en​​ocide​​.pdf.​ 60. Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide 1975–1979,” 75. 61. For more on Pol Pot, see David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 62. Lovell, Maoism, 181. 63. Peter Froberg Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln: eine Schwedische reise durch das Kambodscha der Roten Khmer (Frankfurt am Main: Buchergilde Gutenberg, 2013), 181. 64. Lovell, Maoism, 190. 65. Ibid., 179. 66. Ibid., 183.

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67. Ben Kiernan, “External and Indigenous Sources of Khmer Rouge Ideology,” in The Third Indochina War, ed. Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (New Haven CT: Yale University Genocide Studies Program, 2006), 16, 26–27. https​:/​/gs​​p​ .yal​​e​.edu​​/site​​s​/def​​ault/​​files​​/ideo​​logy_​​s​ourc​​es​_1.​​doc 68. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 49. 69. Ibid., 150–151. 70. Ibid., 251. 71. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 118. 72. Ibid., 128. 73. Ibid., 169–170. 74. Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide 1975–1979,” 77. 75. Ibid., 76. 76. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 166. 77. Ibid., 156. 78. Ibid., 167–168. 79. Lovel, Maoism, 79, 181. 80. Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide 1975–1979,” 140. 81. Lovell, Maoism, 192. 82. Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide 1975–1979,” 77. 83. Ibid., 75. 84. Ibid., 74. 85. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 225. 86. Ibid., 289. 87. A reference to a 1938 masochistic letter Bukharin wrote to Stalin who had ordered his execution. In this letter, Bukharin pledged his allegiance to the communist cause and pleaded that the dictator spare his life that could be useful to the communist party. 88. A reference to the 1980–1988 deadliest war in the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Iraq, when young Muslim fanatics tied grenades to their bodies to use them to blow up enemy tanks. 89. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 254–255. 90. Ibid., 214. 91. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” The Nation, June 25, (1977): 789–794; Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), e-book, 113–115. 92. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 246. 93. David Kline and Robert Brown, The New Face of Kampuchea: A PhotoRecord of the First American Visit to Cambodia Since the End of the War (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1979). 94. George Wright, “Forbidden Thoughts,” Cambodia Daily, April 17, 2016, https​ :/​/ww​​w​.cam​​bodia​​daily​​.com/​​featu​​res​/f​​orbid​​den​-t​​hou​gh​​ts​-11​​1383/​ 95. Idling, Pol Pots Lacheln, 223–224.

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African Socialism Tanzanian “Village Socialism” and Zimbabwe Ethno-Racial State

In 1856, a teenage girl Nongqawuse (1841–1898) had a prophetic vision that spread like a fire among the Xhosa nation that resided in South Africa and that had to deal with the advancement of the British on their lands. Her vision, which was delivered to people and interpreted by her uncle who was a Christian convert, proclaimed that ancestors had ordered people to destroy all their cattle, corn, tools, and other items and foods that they said had been contaminated; at that time some Xhosa stock suffered from lung sickness that might have come from the European cattle. In return, the ancestors would bring the dead back to life, drive away the hated British, and launch the paradise on the earth, which meant the limitless supply of food, stock, and household items. The ancestors also “informed” the Xhosa that the “new people” known as “Russians” would help them to sweep the British into sea. It was rumored that the Cape governor George Cathcart had been killed in the Crimean War, and the Xhosa assumed that the people who had shot him had been strong, black, and endowed with medicine power by ancestors. The greater part of the Xhosa became agitated and followed the prophecy by slaughtering between 300,000 and 400,000 cattle. As a result, 75% of the Xhosa starved to death.1 In an ironic twist of history, one hundred years later, the mythological “new people” (Russians along with the Chinese) did arrive in Africa, now armed with a secular prophecy of socialism that too became customized to the traditions of ancestors. In the wake of World War II, with the Soviet Union emerging as a victorious power and China going communist, socialism became an attractive alternative in formerly colonial countries. Moreover, during the same time, Great Britain, one of the former citadels of capitalism and colonialism, herself somewhat stepped on the socialist path at the turn of the 1950s. In France, which had been also an important colonial power, left parties too became 267

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embedded into her political system. There was a general impression around the world that socialism was rocking. Following the popular political mainstream, Third World leaders began to replicate and appropriate socialist rhetoric in its various manifestations. For many national liberation spokespeople, socialism was synonymous not only with egalitarianism but also with a rapid modernization that was to be accomplished by an aggressive state intervention into economic and social life. For African leaders and intellectuals, who fell for socialism and communism, these two things were usually associated with increasing nationalization of basic industries, centralized planning, and social engineering for a greater good.2 Between the 1940s and the 1970s, anti-Western sentiments were also running high in the Third World. The entire Western civilization and its values were frequently associated with colonialism. There was a strong desire to throw away a baby of constitutionalism, free press, and the rule of law with the bathwater of colonialism. Many Third World national liberation leaders and spokespeople acted according to a then-popular prescription issued by their intellectual dean Frantz Fanon: “In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them and vomit them up.”3 Cast against this mindset, Soviet and Chinese experiences looked especially appealing to former colonies. It was not only about the popularity of Marxism-Leninism, which was claimed by a few third nations. It was about the general world-wide appeal of socialism. Although in the 1950s, “socialism industry” (left media, parties, bureaucracy, and the whole left thought collective) entered the period of a deep crisis, it continued to expand, as if on steroids, until as late as the 1970s. The fact that a large Western intellectual establishment was very critical toward its own Western civilization, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, too contributed to the popularity of socialism in the Third World. In fact, many intellectual contacts between the West and underdeveloped countries were mediated by indigenous and Western intellectuals and civil servants who opposed market systems.4 In the 1950s and the 1960s, left print media and socials scholarship were filled with speculations about a socialist orientation of third world countries. By the early 2000s, when most of these countries gradually quit on it, media and social scholarship began to play down the socialist narrative that informed the development of these countries until the 1980s. Moreover, some left authors have chosen to completely omit socialism from their histories of postcolonial development of African and Asian countries. The most blatant example is the comprehensive history of decolonization coauthored by Jürgen Osterhammel. This prominent German historian, whose books are widely used in world history courses both in Europe and North America, managed to

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write the history of Third World in the 1950s–1980s without even mentioning socialism.5 He literally dropped the whole thing into the proverbial “memory hole.” Other authors, who do not want to smear the image of the creed, have simply insisted that socialist and communist rhetoric of the Third World spokespeople carried little genuine commitment and simply served power-hungry leaders in newly liberated countries to legitimate their corrupt authoritarian practices in the eyes of European socialist-leaning elites, Moscow ideologues, and their Chinese rivals.6 Even if one accepts this dubious argument about the unscrupulous use and abuse of the “noble” socialism creed by “mean” third world elites, it points precisely to what I argue here: the political religion of socialism, which was tied to aggressive social engineering and collective mobilization, did exercise a world-wide appeal in the wake of World War II both in the East and the West. From the 1950s to the 1970s, there existed fifty-eight nationalist dictatorships in the Third World that claimed socialism. Of them, thirty-five were in Africa. Socialist models and rhetoric that African regimes appropriated from Europe, Soviet Union, and China were not imposed from outside. During the Cold War contest between Western “capitalism” and Eastern “communism,” when both sides sought to woo the newly emerging countries, this was a conscious ideological choice made by European-educated nationalist elites who matured on the socialist speak and ideas. In many formerly colonial countries, including Africa, socialist rhetoric and practices were assimilated into local nationalisms, giving rise to various forms of national socialism. There was a common expectation in all African countries in the postcolonial period that their resources would be nationalized, indigenized, and Africanized.7 It was assumed that this would be done at the expense of other groups who occupied a leading position in economic life. Socialist rhetoric about equality, collectivism, and unity often encompassed people of the same group that spoke a common tongue and excluded various groups of “aliens.” When leaders of newly liberated countries claimed socialism or communism, political actors on the ground frequently interpreted this in ethnic and racial terms as a call to dislodge ethnical and racial aliens who for them symbolized capitalism and oppression. These aliens were not necessarily people of European background. They also could be Asian merchants, who controlled cotton and coffee processing and marketing, and ethnic African rivals, who wanted their share of political and economic power. A choice of a specific socialism model depended on international alliances and potential sponsors. Sometimes the ideology of expatriate advisers who assisted in centralized planning schemes played its role. For example, both Guinea and Mali toyed with radical socialism in the 1960s, whereas Kenya

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experimented with a moderate socialism in a Fabian style. Contemporary observers explained these differences by the fact the first two relied on French Marxist technocrats, whereas Kenya used British experts.8 Angola and Ethiopia, which took advantage of the Soviet “expertise” and military help, claimed Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, whereas Zimbabwe drew on militant communism of Maoist and North Korean brands. Most important, the abovementioned ideological preferences were never fixated, constantly shifting depending on changing circumstances. A good example of such “non-binary” ideological approach is Tanzania, which I have explored in this chapter. In that country, a charismatic dictator Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) (see Fig. 11.1) tried to prepare his socialist brew from various sources that ranged from the romantic version of local tribalism and British Fabianism to Yugoslavia socialism of self-management, Israeli kibbutz socialism, and Maoism. In contrast, in Zimbabwe, which too claimed socialism in the 1980s, the regime of Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) assimilated Maoism along with its brutal authoritarian practices. In both countries, earlier colonial experiences clearly affected their later political trajectories of development and the way their “socialist orientation” proceeded. In Tanzania, which was indirectly ruled by Britain, a tiny group of Europeans never grounded itself to form a solid racial bastion to pose a serious economic or

Figure 11.1  President Julius Nyerere (1922–1999), who Spearheaded African Socialism, is Depicted here during a Celebration Ceremony for his Ruling TANU Party, July 7, 1974. Source: Courtesy of Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo.

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political threat. In contrast, Zimbabwe, which had a large segment of white farmers who had come to occupy the best lands and think about themselves as indigenous to that country, was poised to become a political minefield under any circumstances. In the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the partial curtailment of communism in China, African countries dropped the socialist narrative and practices, which revolved around state social engineering, and introduced limited economic freedoms and market reforms. At the same time, politically, these regimes have maintained the large part of authoritarian methods. Although that shift clearly represents a slow and painful exit from colonial and socialist practices inherited from the past century, left social scholarship frowns upon that hybrid system, portraying it as the ascent of a sinister neoliberal counterrevolution. Interestingly, between the 1960s and the 1980s, the same scholarship downplayed disastrous effects of socialist practices in Africa, ascribing the poor economic performance, corruption, skyrocketing bureaucracy, along with virulent ethno-nationalism, exclusively to the legacy of colonialism. Priya Lal, the author of a comprehensive study of the Tanzanian socialist experiment, admitted that many of her earlier colleagues had intentionally disseminated this distorted view to maintain and bolster the progressive narrative about heroic anti-colonial movements that were not capable of wrongdoing.9 JULIUS NYERERE: NATION BUILDING AND UJAMAA SOCIALISM, 1960S Tanzania was a former German colony of Tanganyika that Britain took over after World War I. The new British masters were a tiny elite group that hardly interacted with Tanzanians, preferring to deal with the indigenous populace through traditional chiefs. The colony’s population was mostly represented by indigenous peasants and the Asian immigrant minority that ran local trade networks. Incidentally, a local national liberation movement, which led to the formation of the Tanganyika African Association in 1920, originally aimed to challenge the Asian ethnic monopoly rather than the political power of the Europeans. Eventually, the association evolved into the Tanzanian African National Union (TANU), the political party that took over the country when Britain abruptly in 1961. Nyerere, a charismatic local intellectual who graduated from Edinburgh University in the UK, was elected the chairman of the association in 1953. Nyerere was an offspring of a 61-year-old tribal chief Nyerere Burito and his fifteen-year-old wife Mugaya, who was a fifth wife of that esteemed

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headman. His childhood represented a traditional tribal upbringing that included taking goats out to pastures, accompanying men in hunting trips, and witnessing intertribal warfare. The introduction of Nyerere to Western “spiritual medicine” and his eventual exposure to British intellectual culture happened by chance. He was chosen to accompany an adopted son of Burito to a Catholic missionary school to make sure that his brother would not feel lonely in the alien environment.10 Undergoing Catholic schooling, young Nyerere eventually embraced Christianity. He considered his later conversion to socialism as a natural continuation of his Catholicism. Nyerere turned out to be an outstanding student, and grateful missionaries sent him to a college in Uganda, from where the youth emerged as a biology and history teacher taking a job in a Catholic school; later, when he became the first president of Tanzania, Nyerere insisted on being called Mwalimu Nyerere (Teacher Nyerere)—the way students used to address him at school. Helped again by the Catholic Church, which secured for him a financial assistance, Nyerere continued his studies in the UK, where in 1949 he enrolled into Edinburg University. Like the rest of contemporary British elite universities, the intellectual culture of Edinburg was saturated with left ideas. Although he became familiar with radical versions of socialism, Nyerere was more drawn to Fabianism—a “vegetarian” brand of the creed that dominated the British mainstream. Mingling with Fabians, Nyerere was acquiring his own voice and identity. Very much like his nineteenth-century Russian populist predecessors, who had romanticized the primitive peasant commune as the cradle of socialism, the African expat too began to argue that, in his native Tanzania, socialism should be based on the collectivist ethics of the tribal community. Nyerere’s intellectual evolution was a typical case of a Third World intellectual who frequently recast premodern life and economic underdevelopment of his or her area into a moral virtue.11 From Britain Nyerere returned as a convinced socialist. The blend of Fabian ideas and romanticized African tribalism became an ideology he offered to his base. Besides, he toyed with then-popular Pan-African racialism: in the 1950s and the 1960s, there emerged a sense of racial comradeship among national liberation movements of Africa that were fighting against European colonialism. Thus, in his 1948 essay “The Race Problem in East Africa,” Nyerere wrote, “Africa is for the Africans, and the other races cannot be more than respected minorities. Should it come to a bitter choice between being perpetually dominated by a white or an Indian minority and driving that minority out of East Africa, no thinking African would hesitate to make the latter choice.”12 After his return from England, Nyerere soon became a charismatic politician active in fostering local national conscience. In 1961, he was elected

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as the first president of independent Tanzania. Like in many other British possessions, a transition from a colonial rule to independence took place peacefully. Nyerere announced that Tanzania was going to build democratic socialism. At the same time, he stressed that it was going to be an African brand of socialism. The instruments to accomplish this goal came from the standard toolkit of the contemporary socialism: Nyerere had the country’s economy nationalized and introduced a centralized planning. To most of his supporters, this meant the building of the unified Tanzanian nation. In the 1960s, there were two major hubs of socialist thought in Tanzania. The first one was a large group of TANU black activists to whom socialism simply meant socialism of the race: forging the new nation and forcing out whites and Asians from economic life and empowering the black segment. There was nothing unique about it. Not only rank and file activists but also many Third World national liberation leaders and intellectuals viewed socialism in this manner. The alienation that European Marxism attributed to class exploitation, they frequently reinterpreted as a racial oppression.13 Incidentally, since the 1960s, this racialized “third world” line of thought was fed back to Europe and North America, contributing to the cultural turn among the Western left. At that time, the latter started searching for new classes of the oppressed to replace the “corrupted” proletariat in their own countries.14 The second group of Tanzanian socialists was represented by traditional bookish Marxist academics who congregated around the University at Dar es Salaam, the capital of the country. These scholars understood socialism in the classical Marxist manner as an egalitarian commonwealth that transgressed ethnic and racial borders and united all toiling people who worked toward the expropriation of the well-to-do people. This line of thought resonated better with ethno-ideological concerns of local European and Indian activists and scholars, who were heavily represented in this group. For them, African nationalism was an alien thing.15 Nyerere was trying to somehow bring these two groups to work together. Although a new civil service was totally Africanized, in contrast to his black comrades, Nyerere was reluctant to fully play a racial card, stressing that the ruling TANU vanguard was open to all, including the non-black. Moreover, he pointed out that replacing white colonial masters with black ones would not change anything. Moreover, Nyerere reminded them that such attitude would be no different from what Hitler had practiced in Germany or from what the apartheid regime was doing in contemporary South Africa.16 He also stressed that “racialism is itself an aggression against the human spirit.”17 Yet, many of his associates played down such calls, being inclined to follow the affirmative action policy and wishing to restrict the country’s citizenship to blacks only.

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Still, despite the abovementioned rhetoric, for Nyerere himself building socialism meant cementing the national unity of Tanzania as an egalitarian fellowship of its black majority. The very name of the TANU party’s English language newspaper, The Nationalist, conveyed the spirit of Tanzanian socialism. Nyerere treated Tanzania as a homogenous black community of equals, dismissing the very idea of a class conflict in his homeland: “Traditionally the African knows no class.” Nyerere warned that instigating class warfare might destabilize Tanzanian society. The president wanted to see his country as a united volksgemeinschaft-type community that pursued same national goals. For this reason, Nyerere flatly rejected the classical Marxian notion that a society needed at first to mature into advanced capitalism and then to go through a class war to be able to enter socialism: “This glorification of capitalism by the doctrinaire European socialists, I repeat, I find intolerable.”18 In other words, it was the Tanzanian brand of national socialism. Nyerere noted that Tanzanian socialism would not be a copy of Western or Soviet models. It was to be based on an indigenous collectivist tradition. In his speeches, the president was selling Tanzanian socialism to masses as both a recovery of preexisting tribal ethic and as the way of modernization. On the one hand, Nyerere appealed to the romantic notion of tribal egalitarianism that, as he argued, had been polluted by Western capitalism and that needed to be recovered. Yet, on the other hand, he used socialist rhetoric to mobilize people to railroad modern reforms such as mechanized agriculture and the construction of large industrial factories. Nyerere linked personal wealth possession to the legacy of “harmful” Western civilization that had injected capitalism into the body of his innocent homeland. Moreover, the president insisted that the very notion of selfishness had not existed in Tanzania, and he attributed its emergence European colonization, which corrupted the collectivist morality of the African tribal society.19 Particularly, Nyerere and his associates talked about the need to prevent the emergence of the well-to-do peasant kulak class in Tanzanian countryside before it was too late; this Russian expression became very popular with TANU activists.20 Appealing to all newly liberated African countries, he invited them to work to prevent the “capitalist cancer” from spreading, “We must to regain our former attitude of mind—our traditional African Socialism—and apply it to the new societies we are building today.”21 As applied to the Tanzanian setting, it was a rhetorical call to return to the tradition of ujamaa but on the basis of advanced modern technology and planning; in the local tradition ujamaa meant tribal collectivism or “family hood.” Eventually, his calls evolved into a policy of railroading modernity through the rhetoric of traditionalism. Originally, that policy sprang up from a governmental project of agricultural cooperatives that emerged in the early 1960s. The cooperatives were part of a campaign of drafting young unemployed

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Tanzanians for one-year military and civic training. Instead of military drills, some of these draftees could choose to go to work for pilot cooperative farms. The very first project of this kind was launched in 1963 under the supervision of socialist advisers from Yugoslavia and Israel; in the 1950s and the 1960s, these two countries experimented with the decentralized forms of socialism as an alternative to omnipotent statist model of the Soviet Union. In February 1967, Nyerere formally announced the ujamaa plan in his historic “Arusha Declaration of Socialism and Self-Reliance.” Interestingly, later, in the 1980s and the 1990s, social scholarship on Africa developed a habit of referring to this document simply as the Arusha Declaration, downplaying the second half of this important title that is focused on two important notions: socialism and nationalism. The declaration was followed by two follow-up official documents “Education for Self-Reliance” and “Socialism and Rural Development.”22 In the wake of these declarations, the entire land domain of the country was nationalized, and people were invited to voluntarily move to government-sponsored ujamaa villages. Despite his romancing of the traditional tribal community, the president imagined these new collectives as modern agricultural factories with a disciplined labor.23 Nyerere expected that people would move to these new villages voluntarily. He wanted to see these first socialist communities as role models for the rest of the peasantry. Eventually, the whole country was expected to turn into the mosaic of self-sufficient and self-governing socialist villages. This rhetoric about voluntary socialist collectives in the African countryside attracted attention not only Yugoslavian and Israeli ideological experts but also European social democrats who too came to view the Nyerere regime as a humane alternative to the Soviet-style communism. This was the chief reason why originally UK Labourites and Scandinavian social democrats showered Tanzania with generous monetary assistance. People from the Swedish left-wing government headed by Olaf Palme were so fascinated with Nyerere that they talked about him as their kindred spirit; in the 1960s, Tanzania became the major recipient of Swedish foreign aid.24 Moreover, during the same decade, the country became the largest recipient of foreign aid in the Third World. There was a great irony here. The Nyerere project of national socialism focused on self-sufficiency existed mostly at the expense of foreign financial donors. Even “capitalist” World Bank under the infamous Robert McNamara, stretched out its helping hand. Among other projects, the bank subsidized the construction of a government-owned shoe factory that Nyerere the modernist wished to turn into the largest shoe factory in the world. Essentially, the World Bank funded the transition of Tanzania to socialist economy. Such an approach should not surprise us. In the 1960s, both in East and the West, elites still believed that government top-to-bottom interventionism was the best policy of choice.

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“OPERATION PLANNED VILLAGES” IN TANZANIA, 1970S To the frustration of Nyerere and his associates, by the 1970s, it was clear that peasants were not eager to enter the radiant ujamaa future, preferring to stay on their traditional sites. Upset about the peasantry, which, as he thought, were unable to understand the benevolent essence of the project, Nyerere began losing his patience. His Fabian gradualism evaporated, being replaced by radical policies. The president’s team started shopping around the world for a quicker way to deliver the paradise. Natural choices were either the Soviet Union or China. The first one could not arouse Nyerere’s enthusiasm. The Soviets seemed to have lost their revolutionary zeal. Furthermore, as a semi-European country, Soviet Russia was not third world enough to serve as an inspiration. In contrast, peasant and a truly third worldish China appeared vital. In the 1960s, she was going through the fever of the Cultural Revolution that radiated around the world a revolutionary enthusiasm. In the wake of the Soviet debacle, many Western and non-Western left were ready to uncritically jump on the new revolutionary fad. China appeared to them as the great new hope that came to replace the Soviet Union as the progressive beacon. Nyerere was one of those who was blinded by the Mao’s “antibureaucratic” revolution. In the 1960s, Maoists cultivated revolutionary asceticism and equality that appealed to Nyerere’s moral aspirations. Particularly, Mao’s valorization of simple peasant ways and his anti-Western rhetoric drew attention of Tanzanian revolutionaries. The Chinese leader kept stressing that the Third World was the “countryside of the world” that was oppressed by the Western “cities of the world.”25 Nyerere publicly announced that he was fond of idealism, discipline, and single-mindedness of Maoists.26 He also appreciated Chinese communists’ fixation on self-sufficiency and their suspicion of alien coastal city bourgeoisie. The latter perfectly fit the Tanzanian environment where inland peasant people too viewed with suspicious coastal cities populated by Arabs, Indians, and Europeans who in their eyes were unproductive “parasites” and “bloodsuckers” who did not work on the land.27 Nyerere personally traveled to China and soon began praising Mao’s fanatical Red Guards—gangs of urban youth who were encouraged to harass and beat old communist party bureaucrats and purge cities of “bourgeois” decadence. In the second half of the 1960s, for a while, the Chinese became the major economic and political sponsors of Tanzania, providing generous loans and training the Tanzanian army, among other things. Imitating heavily centralized Stalinist economy of China, the Nyerere regime replaced productive agricultural cooperatives with inefficient and bureaucratic government purchasing centers.28 Overall, nationalization went far further in Tanzania

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than in other socialism-oriented countries of Africa, covering all real estate, banks and insurance companies, factories, wholesale trade, and many plantations. Free press too was gradually phased out. In 1971, a national militia was set up to ensure that the populace would not sabotage the rapid movement to the bright future. Simultaneously, following the Maoists (who had themselves replicated Stalinist Russia), Nyerere introduced a five-year plan. Again, mimicking the Chinese, Nyerere created the so-called Green Guards. The regime also started purging secondary schools of Western “capitalist” ideas. Learning from the Chinese and moving away from gradualist Fabian ways, the Tanzanian government resorted to coercive measures to railroad national socialism. The landmark year was 1973, when the regime suddenly confiscated properties belonging to Europeans and Asians. Because the nationalized assets belonged to the ethnic aliens, the measure was very popular among both TANU activists and its rank and file members. Lal, who researched the ujamaa project in detail, felt a need to stress this aspect because earlier scholars had frequently portrayed Tanzanian socialism as devoid of any racial and ethnic phobias.29 A good example of such scholarship is popular Seeing Like a State by anarchist geographer James Scott. Although Scott vividly showed the debacle of ujamaa as a social engineering project, he totally ignored the ethno-racial aspect of Tanzania socialism.30 As a person raised in the spirit of Christian humanism, Nyerere felt disturbed by the “blood and soil” enthusiasm of his fellow activists who were applauding the assault on the aliens. He was upset that the populace failed to grasp that the essence of socialism was not about “us” and “them” but about living a morally pure life.31 Still, catering to his base, Nyerere silently endorsed attacks against the Indian shopkeepers, the “Jews of Africa,” in the name of ujamaa. This effectively canceled his own earlier statements against racialism. Official press portrayed the Indians as “political gnats” and the “network of bloodsuckers.”32 The policy of harassment of and physical attacks against Asians culminated in the expulsion of 160 merchants from the country. Those who remained became known as “paper citizens,” which meant that they were stripped of all rights despite being the citizens of the country. Again, this xenophobia was not unique to Tanzania. In fact, in that country it was very mild if compared to other African countries of the socialist orientation (e.g., Zimbabwe, Angola, Ethiopia). After the racial aliens were out, attention was turned to indigenous Tanzanians. In 1973, with the general radical drive of the regime, the ujamaa “villagization” became compulsory and evolved into a typical project of socialism from above.33 The government unleashed activists from the Tanzania Youth League on the millions of peasants, who were forced to move into ujamaa sites chosen by party bureaucrats. It was a nationwide assault on the countryside. Officially called “Operation Planned Villages,” the policy

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was conducted in earnest from 1973 to 1978. In 1973, only 15% of the peasantry resided in governmental villages. Yet, by 1980, already 90% of the Tanzanian countryside was removed to the new settlements.34 Overall, about five million Tanzanians were forced to take part in this nationwide project.35 Ironically, the earlier colonial administration had never attempted such grand assault on the entire fabric of the Tanzanian society. Just like Stalinist collective farms and Maoist peasant communes, ujamaa collectives were ruled by party bureaucrats who worked to fulfill production quotas issued by the government. A village head was simultaneously a TANU party secretary. Despite the officially proclaimed goal of self-government, the residents of these villages had no voice in decision-making. Like Stalin and Mao, Nyerere contemplated these large villages as modern agricultural factories where peasants would eventually become wage workers. Under the tutelage of experts and using modern machinery, ujamaa settlements were expected to demonstrate the miracles of productivity. In fact, affected by that modernist drive, since 1973 Nyerere gradually stopped referring to these enlarged villages as ujamaa. Instead, he and the party elite began calling them “planned villages”—a clear invocation of factory analogies. It was obvious that now the whole project was revised to look modern and efficient in contrast to small and unplanned traditional villages.36 Last but not least, the concentration of peasants in large settlements was to ease the control over population and the collection of produce. The whole scheme worked as follows. Government bureaucrats were instructed to collect peasants, who had been scattered around in small traditional villages, and bring them into new enlarged settlements that were located along major roads. A planned village, with about 250 households in each, was to be divided into ten production units. Each unit was to collectively work on an assigned communal farm. Nyerere’s planned villages became a mild version of the totalitarian Soviet and Chinese collective farms. Resettled peasants could cultivate small personal strips of land in addition to their major workload—a large track of state-owned land where they were expected to work collectively; the latter was called “shoulder-to-shoulder” cultivation. Governmental planners expected that through that hybrid work scheme personal plots and a communal field would eventually merge into one collectively worked village field.37 To speed up this movement toward the greater collectivism, the government had houses in new planned villages built no farther than thirty feet away from each other. This rule was expected to phase out the traditional settlement pattern, when households were frequently separated by miles from each other. With an excitement, TANU newspaper The Nationalist described one of these settlements as a booming collection of houses that were “immaculately lined as if they were soldiers in a parade.” Among themselves, party activists

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frequently referred to the planned villages as “line by line” and “national” settlements to stress their new modern nature in contrast to traditional villages.38 Unlike Soviet Union and China, those Tanzanian peasants who refused to move to new sites were not imprisoned. Instead, they were harassed and intimidated. Nyerere himself spelled out well such “benign intimidation”: “I could not turn people into socialists by force but my government would ensure that everybody live in a village.”39 On several occasions, the dwellings of stubborn refuseniks were set on fire to teach others a lesson. The government also employed army to escort peasants to new sites. Esha Nantende, one those who were forced to settle in a planned village, later testified, “They did not consult us. People, those police. And weapons one by one, and vehicles. Taking all your implements and putting them into the vehicle. And going to dump them like this in the field.” Another woman, Esha Namituli, remembered “If you had stayed and they met you, they burned with fire. Fire! All your belongings were taken and put outside. Children put outside. So we came here.” One peasant who had to undergo the forced removal called it a new version of colonialism.40 The spearheads of the “Operation Panned Villages” were young male radicals from Tanzania Youth League, which was modeled after the Chinese Red Guards. Most of them were sincere enthusiasts of the planned villages policy and felt that they were on a mission of building the nation based on social justice. A former activist of the ujamaa movement Mohammed Yusuf, who supervised the construction of planned settlements in the Mtwara province, explained that his original goal to join the movement was “to build our nation”: “The Father of the Nation [Nyerere] called for an army for the security of citizens living together. To do what? Youth Leaguers must have their [party] card and be reliable, and they should cooperate in the security efforts of collecting citizens from the forest and bringing them to houses.”41 The occasional skirmishes with the Portuguese colonial troops who chased guerilla fighters from neighboring Mozambique and a short bloody war with Uganda won by Tanzania eased the forced relocation of peasants; the spirit of militarism and the state of emergency became good mobilization tools. Like in the case of Soviet Russia and China, turning the countryside upside down through the state-imposed collectivism ruined agriculture and brought Tanzania to the brink of a famine. Up to 60% of village sites chosen by governmental bureaucrats had poor semiarid soil unsuitable for agriculture. Others were located far away from the sources of fuel, wood, and water. From 1974 to 1979, annual cashew production, one of the major Tanzanian export crops, dropped from 145 to 41 thousand tons.42 A sympathetic observer estimated that of 5,000 new government settlements created by the mid-1970s only 400 were able to produce surpluses crops.43 The annual work plans and

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production quotas which were issued in a Soviet- and Chinese-style manner by central planners, were not fulfilled. Peasants on a mass scale turned to black markets to sell whatever little produce they were able to harvest on their personal land strips. In governmental stores set up in new villages shelves soon became empty. Their merchandise, which was viewed as belonging to everybody, was either stolen or ended up on black markets. Villagers referred to these practices of emptying government stores as “eating away the money.”44 Luckily for the Tanzanians, unlike Stalin and Mao machinery of terror, their state was weak, and Nyerere personally was hesitant to totally terrorize his people into submission. Despite the coercive policies and targeted repressions, there were no nationwide terror and murders, and no totalitarian state was ever established in Tanzania. The regime relied more on random intimidation and payoffs as policy instruments.45 Not a small thing was the fact that the country was not shut down from the outside world, with English language remaining the major mode of an intellectual communication. It appears that despite all their animosity to the West, British-educated elite of Tanzania was sufficiently “infested” with constitutional ideas to mute the traits of the “Oriental” despotism that the Nyerere regime tried to import from Maoist China. With peasants sabotaging production quotas and with no police power to enforce those quotas, local commissioners had to resort to manufacturing statistics to report to their superiors nonexciting success stories. Soon Tanzania faced the situation that was painfully familiar from the experiences of all countries that have claimed building socialism, from the Soviet Union and China to the present-day North Korea and Venezuela: severe shortages of food and consumer goods. Still, until the early 1980s, the regime doubled down on its control over economy, resorting to the direct distribution of food and goods. The network of roadblocks was established to enforce that distribution scheme. Yet, the whole situation was only getting worse. From a country exporting produce Tanzania turned into a nation importing food and grain. It was obvious that socialism left the country poorer than it had been prior to the independence. Nyerere and his associates were gradually realizing that the ideology they tried to package as African socialism did not work. Instead of continuing to pressure the “ignorant” populace, at the end of the 1980s, Nyerere began to silently scale down the governmental control over agriculture. Simultaneously, like the rest of his socialist colleagues in China and Eastern Europe, he was trying to introduce modest economic incentives. The fact that China, his major sponsor, was turning away from Mao’s Stalinist policies toward embracing elements of market, too prompted the Tanzanian regime to shift its gears. What also set Nyerere apart from other communist and non-communist dictators, was his humility and ability for

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self-reflection—a rare quality among the people of his caliber. Contemplating on the repeated disasters of his experiment in equity, Nyerere eventually had the guts to state, “I am a very poor prophet.”46 In 1990, Nyerere did not want to seek a reelection, thereby preceding the sinking of Gorbachev and the Soviet “red Atlantis” by a year. Nyerere stepped down to allow a pragmatic party leader Ali Mwinyi to succeed him and initiate economic liberalization. Ironically, while Mwinyi was inclined to bring more free market into Tanzanian centralized economy, politically, in a Chinese manner, he was still eager to maintain a one-party authoritarian system. In contrast, Nyerere acted as Gorbachev, favoring a multiparty system and simultaneously being reticent about going full speed toward economic liberalization. Nyerere sensed that free farming and free market would demolish his ujamaa project and the cherished idea of social equality.47 Overall, the Tanzanians might have benefited because their elite eventually blended the “Chinese” and “Gorbachev” approaches, moving toward what in the current left and alt-right usage is called neoliberalism (global outreach, elements of market, token political freedoms, and the traits of an old authoritarian state). All in all, it was the first modest step toward gradual decentralization and greater liberty. Corruption certainly did not disappear overnight. Yet, the country saw the emergence of free press, regular elections, and most important, people did not starve anymore. Living standards improved. By the early 1990s, the last ujamaa villages were disbanded. Governmentowned model factories were also either shut down or sold to higher bidders, some of them to former Chinese communist apparatchiks who rebranded themselves as state capitalists. Socialist rhetoric and policies that sustained the Tanzanian elite and parts of the populace from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s gradually evaporated. One can summarize the results of the ujamaa experiment as follows: Nyerere succeeded in building the nation but failed to make it prosperous by enforcing his socialist utopia.48 Like in the former Soviet Union and China, in Tanzania the tradition of the top-to-bottom governance, which was practiced by the Nyerere’s regime, has not yet disappeared. Unfortunately, this paternalism feeds on the sentiments of the populace, a large part of which still expects the government and foreign donors to provide them help and deliver goods.49 ZIMBABWE: SHONA, MATABELE, AND THE RISE OF ROBERT MUGABE Not all African countries were as lucky as Tanzania to have an enlightened despot like Nyerere, who somehow had a humility to step down. The rest of

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that “tribe” is usually reluctant to vacate its thrones. One of these “normal” tyrants with a socialist orientation was Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the second longest-serving state leader (1980–2017) after Fidel Castro, the late communist dictator of Cuba (1959–2008). Like Tanzania, Zimbabwe toyed with socialism until the 1990s. Yet, reticent about fully embracing “neoliberalism,” it maintained suffocating state regulations, replacing the earlier socialist rhetoric with naked nationalism and racism. Present-day state of Zimbabwe originated from South Rhodesia—a colony that had been set up by English adventurer Cecil Rhodes north of the Limpopo River. Rhodesia replaced the Matabele (Ndebele) kingdom, which the British and their black allies defeated in the 1890s. Prior to the 1890s, the brutal Matabele kingdom had conquered local Shona tribes and imposed on them a heavy tribute. Squeezing out the Matabele, Rhodes took control of their lands along with Shona territories, and began selling them to white commercial farmers who streamed to Rhodesia being attracted by her fertile soils. Eventually, most of the land ended up in the hands of these settlers. In 1930, the colonial government adopted the Land Apportionment Act that divided the whole country by race into white and black domains with less fertile lands reserved for the use of African peasants. The law was ingrained into the political fabric of Rhodesia, planting the seeds of resentment between local blacks and whites.50 In 1964, when, all over the world colonial empires were going down, local whites, who represented 5% of the population, feared that African majority might take over and dislodge them. As a preventive measure, they declared their own independence from Britain. The newly minted country excluded the black population from political participation, which triggered a bloody war and set South Rhodesia on the course of an economic decline. Before 1964, Rhodesia was one of the most prosperous African countries. Nicknamed as the “Switzerland of Africa,” she was famous for its exports of high-quality beef, tobacco, wines, and leather. Refusing to accept the minority rule, black nationalist leaders unleashed a guerilla warfare against the regime. The struggle was led by two groups: Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) headed by Joshua Nkomo (1917–1999), who was backed up by the Soviet Union, and the Chinasponsored Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) headed by Mugabe. Both claimed that, when Rhodesia was liberated, they would build socialism. Like Nyerere and many other independence leaders of Africa, Mugabe was a teacher by profession and the product of the Christian missionary school system. Being educated by Jesuits at the Kutama Catholic Mission School, he matured into a studious young adult who was obsessed more with books than with sports and outdoor activities. From his Jesuit teachers he picked up a strong sense of self-discipline and self-confidence. In 1958, Mugabe

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left Rhodesia and took a teaching position in Ghana, the first black African country to gain independence. Following the contemporary political fad, Ghana too claimed building socialism. Like a sponge, Mugabe was absorbing various socialist texts, processing them through the eyes of black nationalism. This eventually prompted him to quit his job as a teacher and return to Rhodesia to get involved into the liberation of his country from the British.51 ZANU that he came to head and ZAPU, a rival force, were not ordinary political parties. They were rather ethnopolitical movements. ZANU represented mostly the Shona who were 75% of the country’s population, whereas ZAPU served as a political umbrella for the Matabele. These nineteenth-century newcomers, who at one point had conquered and subjugated the Shona, were a minority that resided in the southwestern part of Zimbabwe. In the nineteenth century, the Matabele kingdom not only imposed a heavy tribute on the Shona, but it also used them for “martial practicing.” An essential part of the Matabele war-like culture was keeping their warfare tradition intact. For this purpose, young Matabele warriors were expected to regularly raid the surrounding tribes to kill some of their males. The goal was to keep the Shona in line and to simultaneously maintain the Matabele’s own militaristic spirit alive. The Matabele newcomers despised the Shona so much that they did not view them as human beings. In fact, the very name “Shona” was derived from the Matabele word for a dog.52 The British invaders, who dislodged the Matabele, had different plans for local black populations. Instead of killing and terrorizing them, the Europeans wanted to turn them into the source of cheap labor on their mines and agricultural fields. Thus, well before in 1980 Zimbabwe won her independence, there had been already much bad blood between the two ethnic groups. To the present day, the Shona and Matabele distrust each other. No sooner had ZANU and ZAPU launched the liberation struggle than they became political rivals. The animosity was at times so vicious that Nkomo and Mugabe people attacked and murdered each other. Since ZANU was more grounded in the Shona countryside, it came to rely on peasant guerilla warfare, replicating flamboyant martial rhetoric of Maoists. As early as 1970, some of Mugabe’s utterances sounded like renditions from Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book: “Our votes must go tougher with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer—its guarantor.”53 ZAPU was less radical and more urban, which matched the urbanite and technocratic “advanced socialism” of their Soviet sponsors. In contrast to Maoists, Nkomo people spoke about a gradual movement toward socialism. They did not seek immediate nationalization of land and industry, arguing that the country should not antagonize white commercial farmers (“white kulaks”) who were the backbone of the country’s economy. The ZAPU way was gradualism.54

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Incidentally, when Mugabe took over as the prime minister in 1980, he too adopted this approach and followed it for almost twenty years. The fight against the white Rhodesian army was an exhausting tug of war with numerous causalities on both sides. Eventually, in 1980, Mugabe and Nkomo signed a compromise agreement with the Rhodesians. Provided their properties secure and unmolested, the white minority agreed to accept free elections in the country. As expected, representing the country’s majority population, Mugabe came out as the winner. He became the prime minister in 1980 and subsequently the president in 1987. In fulfillment of the agreement, Mugabe declared a racial reconciliation, assuring white farmers that their land would be secure. Moreover, he encouraged whites to purchase more farmlands and cultivate them.55 This did not sit well with many rank and file Shona members of the ZANU movement who were expecting a double revenge against the European and Matabele minorities. Bound by his agreement with the whites who were backed up by Britain, Mugabe at first focused on phasing out his ZAPU rivals. To accomplish this goal, Mugabe invited North Korean instructors to train a special tasks military brigade that was loyal personally to the president. Named Gukurahundi (“the rain that blows away the chaff” in Shona), in 1983, the brigade unleashed the reign of terror on Matabeleland, killing ZAPU activists, raping women, and intimidating the local populace. According to the most conservative estimates, these thugs were responsible for murdering 20,000 Matabele.56 In desperation, one of Matabele dissidents, described what happened with his ethnic group under Mugabe: “When liberation was achieved, we were merely transferred from British colonialism to Shona colonialism.”57 One of the key leaders of Gukurahundi was Emmerson “Crocodile” Mnangagwa, who in 2017 replaced aged Mugabe as the president. After many ZAPU activists were murdered, Nkomo was gradually sidelined, whereas rank and file members of his party were forced into ZANU that was renamed into ZANU-PF (Patriotic Front). Having declared a socialist orientation, Mugabe established a one-party regime, following the Soviet-Chinese ideological blueprint. Accordingly, the Zimbabwe leadership focused all their efforts on empowering the state and public sector. This led to Mugabe’s personal control over all institutions that he used to benefit himself, his associates, and his base represented by Shona guerrilla veterans. A Trotskyite academic from California, who closely observed the evolution of the Mugabe regime in the 1980s, admitted that Zimbabwean socialism did not move toward an expected class-based egalitarian utopia. The radical scholar lamented that, like the rest of contemporary socialist and communist projects, the Zimbabwean experiment went in a “wrong direction”; instead of empowering people, the Mugabe government came to “help” people.58

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Although current writings on Zimbabwe have repeatedly referred to Mugabe’s authoritarianism and failed economic policies, they have hardly mentioned that these practices were the integral part of socialist rhetoric and policies his regime followed until the 1990s.59 The fact that later the dictator dropped this rhetoric does not mean that this had been merely a meaningless smokescreen he had used to maintain his Cold War alliances. Writers who strip the Mugabe regime of its early ideological orientation have clearly downplayed the role contemporary radical socialist ideology played in the formation of his regime’s institutions and policies. For example, a South African historian Alois Mlambo has written that in the 1980s the Mugabe government was reticent to encourage the creation of an independent class of African businesspeople because it was hard to control individuals who were not dependent on the state. Mlambo has also added that the regime reduced the black empowerment to a mere filling of the government bureaucracy with black officials and clerks.60 The scholar has presented these facts as some random out of the blue policy decisions, when in reality they were clearly informed by the ideological choices (nationalism and socialism) that drove the Mugabe regime in the 1980s. In addition to the one-party state and the centralized control over economy, the Zimbabwe government initiated other measures that represented the standard toolkit of contemporary socialism: free health care and free education for the general population. In fact, these measures naturally allowed Mugabe to get additional scores in their eyes of common people. Funds to finance those money-consuming schemes came from generous Western sponsors: social democratic governments of Europe and international finance organizations. In 1980–1981, the first year of independence, the country received more than $1 billion dollars of economic help (grants and loans). Socialist policies also included price regulations, extractive taxation, and subsidizing state-run industrial enterprises staffed with a large army of governmental bureaucrats. By the 1990s, the growing bureaucracy, shrinking private sector, excessive taxation, and regulation, along with generous welfare programs that the country could not fund on its own, began to kill Zimbabwean economy. By the end of the 1990s, foreign donors, who saw that the aid was spread around to buy public support instead of being invested into manufacturing, reduced the financial shower. Trapped into the web of its generous public obligations, the Mugabe government had to rely on deficit spending. Zimbabwe faced the classical situation described by Margaret Thatcher in her catchy phrase she uttered during one of her speeches: “They’ve got the usual Socialist disease— they’ve run out of other people’s money.”61 As a result, by the year 2000, an average Zimbabwean was poorer than before the independence.62 Moving along with the tide of time, when at first China and then Soviet Russia liberalized their socialist policies, Mugabe too partially deregulated economy.

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He allowed free trade, downsized public sector, and trimmed state subsidies. The goal was to fight the increasing budget deficit. Wages were dropping and unemployment was on the rise. Price control ended, school and health care fees were introduced again. Masses of people who got used to welfare programs and perks became angry. Opposition to the deregulation was strongest among former combatants, students, and trade unionists.63 NATIONAL SOCIALISM ON THE BANKS OF THE LIMPOPO RIVER By trimming his redistributive socialism, Mugabe began to quickly lose public support. Veterans of the war were especially outspoken; with the economic situation deteriorating, they resented the situation when the government was still sticking to its promise to respect the property rights of the white farmers who controlled most of the commercial lands. In fact, that promise was written down in the country’s constitution. Former combatants viewed these lands as their victory prize. To Mugabe supporters, the very fact that 4,200 white families owned large and prosperous commercial farms with 840,000 black peasants barely surviving on their communal farms appeared offensive. Filled with the righteous indignation, veterans and party activists did not want to see that, in contrast to failing communal settlements where land was owned collectively, 8,500 privately owned black farms too did very well economically. Neither did they want to notice that the white-owned farms provided employment to 350,000 black workers.64 In the meantime, the newly formed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) challenged Mugabe’s authoritarian drive. Urban-based and Matabeleled, MDC was more concerned about his attempts to usurp power than about the land issue. To secure his control over the country, in 2000, Mugabe initiated a referendum to amend the constitution that was to extend his presidency for two more terms; to placate his base, he also suggested another amendment that allowed the government to confiscate white-owned lands without any compensation. Despite a strong support among veterans, Mugabe was shocked to find out that he was defeated. Fifty-five percent of people voted against amending the constitution.65 To save themselves, Mugabe and his ethnopolitical clan resorted to an open violence and rigged elections. In the same year during presidential elections, through terror and fraud, Mugabe was able to scrap 56% of the votes and stay in power.66 Playing to the sentiments of his supporters, Mugabe ditched the constitutional promise to respect property rights and gave a green light to open invasions of white farms and land seizures. Among Zimbabweans, this helter-skelter policy became known as Jambanja (mayhem). The best way

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for a failing government to distract people’s attention from social and economic and political problems is to unleash a small war or to find a convenient “alien” scapegoat. The successful farmers of European descent became such a scapegoat even though they had developed a strong sense of a local identity and came to think about themselves as indigenous. Essentially, these farmers were chosen to play the role of “Rhodesian Jews.” Official media began to portray them as evil aliens who were responsible for all economic and political troubles that haunted the country. Mugabe also blamed the whites in conspiring with his black opponents from MDC that led to the referendum debacle. With his chauvinistic calls about the grand land repartition, the president-dictator did stir emotions of many, especially among his Shona base. Western media frequently described this assault on the white farmers as something extraordinary. In fact, the racial card Mugabe played was a manifestation of widespread sentiments that naturally sprang up in formerly colonial countries that had large segments of “alien” minorities who happened to be influential in local economic life. In Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and later in South Africa, there was a widespread conviction that after independence “white” and “Asian” resources should be confiscated and given to blacks. Therefore, there was a segment of black Zimbabweans who expected that, after the independence, whites would be driven out of the country and blacks would take control of the entire land domain.67 Veterans and other Mugabe’s supporters believed that the new government should look up for them the way the former colonial government had looked up for the whites. So, strictly speaking, Mugabe’s plan to go after “white kulaks” was not a sudden spontaneous initiative but rather the fulfillment of those expectations. The only “unique” feature of Zimbabwe was that the constitutional guarantees delayed the whole process until 2000. Aaron Walter, one of the Mugabe’s veteran supporters, vividly manifested that attitude. He joined the national liberation fighting in 1977 in an act of revenge after he, a fifteen-year-old boy, had been severely beaten by white Rhodesian troops on suspicious of assisting guerrilla fighters. Inflicting ferocious vengeance on enemy troops, he was soon nicknamed as Aron Kill the White People. In 1980, for his martial skills, Aron was chosen to join the Mugabe security team, thus becoming part of the military elite. Douglas Rogers, a New York-based Anglo writer of a Rhodesian extract, who interviewed him, explained, “Listening to Walter that evening, I realized that they [veterans] were believers. To them, having fought in the war gave them rights. They had suffered, sacrificed, seen comrades killed; they had survived the bullets and bombs, and unleashed their share of the same in fighting back. But in winning the war and ending white rule, they had earned a privilege that those who never fought could never have—the right to rule. The war might have ended twenty-seven years before, but for the men such as Walter it was

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still very much alive. And I realized then there could be no easy solution. The collapse of the nation was inevitable and unstoppable force, but the ruling party was also an immovable object. That would one day come a terrible reckoning, that much I now knew.”68 Despite the solid support among war veterans, the actual job of invasions, vandalism, and assaults on the farms was performed by unemployed youth whom the government paid cash for their raids. Armed with axes and machetes, these storm troopers invaded the “alien” properties (see Fig, 11.2), threatening to kill their owners or in fact killing them. They also slaughtered stock, stole tractors, destroyed crops, and polluted water supplies.69 The government provided trucks to move around these thugs and supplied them with regular food rations. Overall, the regime forcefully nationalized 6,481 farms. Of them, about 2,000 farms were invaded and seized without any bureaucratic procedures.70 White owners of these farms were either chased away or killed. Yet, the terror against the white farmers and attempts to instigate a racial war do not provide the full picture of the mayhem. In fact, Mugabe’s terror was a wide ethnopolitical campaign directed both against white farmers and his black opponents who were crusading against his corrupt and authoritarian regime. Simultaneously with the farm invasions, the regime turned to physical assaults and intimidation of those black and white opponents who supported the MDC. An opposition politician Blessing Chebundo narrowly

Figure 11.2  A “White Kulak” Farmer Elizabeth Mccellen Confronts Mugabe’s Militants who Came to Seize her Farm Outside of the Town of Raffingora, 2000. Source: Courtesy of Peter Jordan/Alamy Stock Photo.

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escaped several murder attempts, including a plot to burn him alive.71 Moreover, the removal of white farmers was accompanied by beatings and evictions of their black workers.72 Thirty thousand of these workers lost their jobs and houses, which either turned them into vagrants or forced to escape to neighboring countries. Although many black Zimbabweans did back up the regime, it appears that most of the population rejected the assault on white farmers. In 2000, when Mugabe lost his referendum, an opinion pool, showed that only 9% of the population endorsed open land seizures.73 A few years later, after the first round of the land confiscations, the process acquired an “orderly” form. Those Mugabe supporters who expressed a desire to get a farm were required to file an official “wish” request for a farm with the register of deeds. If approved, they received an offer letter. With this letter, an applicant simply drove to a farm and handed it to its white owner, announcing that, since then on, he was a new owner.74 The irony of the situation was that many of those black Zimbabweans who acquired land through the seizures did not actually gain much from it. Formally, by 2013, about 276,620 black households received land plots cut out from the former commercial farms.75 These squatters, who frequently had no experience in commercial farming, found themselves in an unfamiliar environment with little clues on how to proceed. As a result, many of them could not use the land and quit. In the ensuing scramble for white farms, Mugabe’s friends, party bureaucrats, army and police commanders, and youth “activists” too seized farmlands to use them as their own vacation and retreat facilities.76 Mugabe’s first wife Joyce and second one Grace were among the beneficiaries of these expropriations of “kulak” holdings. The writer Rogers, who witnessed the land seizures, described one of Mugabe’s commissars who, along with his retinue, arrived to take over a farm, which he later ruined by turning it into his vocation cottage: “Expensive briefcase, scuffed shoes, stylish raincoat, frayed shirt. It all made perfect sense. Here was the embodiment of Zanu-PF man: part-urban, part rural, caught between the trappings of the modern world and the traditions of the tribal. A schizophrenic state between two worlds. They spoke of tribal customs and traditions, then bought Armani suits and BMWs. They railed constantly against the West, then complained when the West stopped investing into them.”77 To justify his land repartition measures, the Mugabe regime spread around false statistics that 4,500 white families owned 70% of the county’s landmass. In fact, this official statistics was related only to land occupied by tobacco farming and only in one district near the capital city of Harare. Yet, this totally misrepresented the status of nationwide land ownership. By 2000, commercial farming occupied only 25% of the territory of Zimbabwe. Of this, Black Farmers Union controlled 3% of this land. The Governmental Development Trust owned 6%. Besides, private black farms occupied 4% of that commercial

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land, and the forest service controlled 1% of land. Overall, it was only 14% of the Zimbabwean territory that belonged to white farmers. At the same time, this 14% portion delivered 65% of all agricultural produce of the country and provided 50% of all Zimbabwean revenues from foreign trade. Furthermore, 76% of these white-owned farms were not inherited from colonial times. They were purchased between 1980 and 2000, when many “Anglos” came to trust Mugabe statements about the racial reconciliation in the country. In short, it was the Mugabe government itself that had originally encouraged the expansion of white farming in the 1980s and the early 1990s. On top of this, commercial farms employed 2 million blacks, including agricultural workers.78 The original endorsement of the enterprising segment of the population and the subsequent efforts to squash it reminded very much the Bolshevik policies toward peasant kulaks in the former Soviet Union. There, the Reds at first too had formally invited the peasants to expand their farming in the 1920s. Yet, nine years later, they cracked down hard on them by confiscating and nationalizing their land plots. The second round of the “racial justice” campaign took place in 2008. It was timed to a next cycle of presidential elections. Acting together, Mugabe’s black and white opponents were able to beat him in the first round. To “correct” the situation, Mugabe again unleashed war veterans and young thugs on the opposition’s neighborhoods. People were intimidated and forced to vote in a “right” way during the second round that eventually secured his victory. Houses of black opposition activists were burned down. Instigating a racial warfare, Mugabe’s “brown shirts” menacingly marched the streets of the capital, chanting, “We will not allow the country to be returned to whites.”79 Continuing that national socialism policy, in 2008, the regime adopted the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Act that served to legalize racist and xenophobic economic practices. In fact, the law was a mirror image of the 1930 segregation law adopted by the colonial government of South Rhodesia that divided the country’s territory into while and black domains. The only difference was that now it was directed against indigenous whites and black Africans from other African countries. The law listed “strategic” business that were to be exclusively owned and operated by black Zimbabweans. Among such businesses to be owned by the indigenous blacks were the ones that were involved into the production of food and cash crops, retail and wholesale trade. The list also included barber shops, hairdressing and beauty salons, employment agencies, estate agencies, grain mills, bakeries, tobacco, packaging and processing plants, advertising agencies, milk processing facilities, and businesses dealing with local arts and crafts as well as marketing and distribution.80 Under the new law, all-white citizens living in Zimbabwe were recast into foreigners. Along with actual foreigners, the indigenous whites were required to shut down their businesses by 2014.

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This law effectively made racism and xenophobia the official policy of the regime. In no uncertain words, Mugabe himself stressed the racial and ethnocentric nature of his policy: “The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.”81 Historian Mlambo, who traced in detail the economic policies of the Mugabe regime, stressed that, despite the attempt to play a racial card, the ultimate goal of the entire indigenization policy was to placate the Shona-speaking majority at the expense of white and black minority groups. The sad irony of Mugabe’s ethnoracial politics was that, strictly speaking, no group of population can claim Zimbabwe as its “authentic” and “indigenous” domain. In addition to such new arrivals as English-speaking people and the Matabele, Mugabe’s Shona themselves had been earlier newcomers to the area. Historically, like many other countries, modern Zimbabwe was the nation of immigrants.82 “CROCODILE” ECONOMY: ZIMBABWE BECOMES A FAILED STATE In the 1930s, Western progressives stayed silent when millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants were being starved to death in the Soviet Union. It was not because those progressives were bad or mean people. They were convinced that, despite its flaws, ultimately Stalin’s radical collectivization was benevolent because it was bringing modernization to the backward Russian countryside. In the same manner, the Western left played down Mugabe’s regime naked racism toward the white minority and the xenophobic treatment of his black opponents as unfortunate excesses of the transitional period on the way to the radiant future. After all, Mugabe was viewed as a prominent hero of national liberation movement who, on top of this, claimed a socialist agenda. Eventually, feeling uncomfortable about Mugabe’s increasing atrocities, Western social scholarship silently dropped the whole subject of Zimbabwe into a “memory hole” of oblivion.83 Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa, his police chief with a suggestive nickname “Crocodile,” who currently serves as the president, drove their country toward an economic disaster. From 1999 to 2004, Zimbabwean economy shrank by 1/3. The farms’ seizures and intimidation of black opponents of the regime killed commercial export agriculture and also forced many whites and middle-class blacks to leave the country. Once a self-sufficient country that did not need to import food, after 2000, the country faced a famine and had to rely on international food aid. Yet, like former Soviet and Chinese leaders who had routinely blamed the flaws of their socialist agriculture on bad weather, Mugabe kept talking about a rampant drought that was destroying Zimbabwean countryside. In 2009, economist Eddie Cross

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estimated the overall losses from the “land reform” (farms’ confiscations) reached $20 billion, which included lost export revenues, jobs, and the cost of food aid imports.84 The regime found solution in printing more money, which led to an inflation of astronomic proportions. Like Weimer Germany of the 1920s, Zimbabwe became a proverbial example of a financial failure. In 2007, her inflation rate reached 10,000%.85 In the early 2000s, US $1 cost $1 million Zimbabwean dollars. Instead of giving people incentives to work, in 2007, amid the skyrocketing inflation and rising prices, the regime double downed on “social justice” agenda, continuing its quest for scapegoats. This time, the government resorted to a class warfare in classic Marxist style. It announced that unscrupulous shop owners, both white and black, were responsible for the inflation and price hikes. The regime explained to the populace that evil capitalist bloodsuckers, “in collusion with the West,” intentionally charged people too much to pitch the desperate population against its own government. All shop owners were ordered to slash their prices by 50%. In this urban replay of the agricultural terror, soldiers, policemen, war veterans, and idle youth were again mobilized to raid stores all over the country to enforce the price cuts. Those store owners who refused to comply were arrested for profiteering. Taking advantage of this government-induced “Black Friday,” the mobs of shoppers immediately rushed in and emptied stores of all food, household, and luxury items. The friends and family members of the storm troopers were the first to rampage through aisles. Such luxury goods as TVs and computers suddenly became “affordable” and soon reappeared for sale on black markets. Vigilante thugs helped themselves by “purchasing” cars for whatever price they felt was right.86 One of the most famous hotels in Harare lost its entire winery collection when Mugabe “social justice warriors” discovered and “purchased” it. Soon the country had no bread because bakeries did not want to bake it and petrified store owners did not want to restock their shelves. New York reporter Rogers, who personally witnessed this second edition of the mayhem, wrote in 2007: “Shop owners who lost everything overnight could no longer afford to buy new stock. Manufacturers, unpaid by shop owners, could no longer afford to produce. Plants and factories shut down. The government tried to pass a law forcing them to produce, but the tides did not obey. By August [2007] virtually every supermarket in the country was bare, and surreal film footage of endless empty aisles was broadcast around the world.”87 The extractive economic policies of the regime, which reached cannibalistic proportions, led to a unique 94% unemployment rate in 2009.88 This triggered another mass exodus of people from the country. Not only whites but also many black professionals (doctors, nurses, teachers) escaped from the

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country. Now, about 1.4 millions of Zimbabweans live abroad, and four million people within the country depend on foreign food aid.89 A non-partisan African scholar who explored the economic consequences of Mugabe’s policies came to a sad conclusion that the majority of the Zimbabwean population now live worse off than prior to the independence. The country that was earlier the breadbasket of South Africa, now resorted to importing food.90 By 2017, 93-year-old Mugabe, who secured his personal rule over the country, was already a feeble old tyrant. He frequently fell asleep during official meetings, reminding the half-paralyzed dictator Leonid Brezhnev in the late Soviet Union. This triggered a succession struggle between the police chief “Crocodile” Mnangagwa and Mugabe’s 52-year-old wife Grace. The “Crocodile” was able to receive support of the military and China, the major sponsor of Zimbabwe, and came out as the winner. Mugabe was sent into retirement and soon died. The former police chief, who had been among the major spearheads of the authoritarian regime, maintained much of its extractive “crocodile” economy, promising the ZANU-PF party bureaucracy that its power would be secure. Ironically, despite the spectacular collapse of Zimbabwe, neighboring South Africa has now been moving in the same direction. Since the early 2000s, plugged by corruption, increasing crime, anti-labor policies, radical elements of African National Congress (ANC), whose ideology had been heavily affected by Soviet Marxism and black power nationalism, have made attempts to channel social tensions in a convenient racial direction. For this purpose, they invoked the same ghost of “racial justice” that had been already tried north of the Limpopo River. The South African radicals too demanded the confiscation of white-owned commercial farms without compensation. On February 18, 2018, the country’s parliament adopted a special amendment to the country’s constitution allowing land expropriation without compensation. The economic consequences of this reckless policy had already become obvious prior to this law. As a result of the regime uncertainty regarding land ownership and random murders of white farmers, commercial farming in South Africa began to shrink. As early as 2009, for the first time in her history, the country had to import food.91 There was a double irony regarding that land “reform.” The assault on white farmers in South Africa has come at the time when the new government of Zimbabwe set up a compensation committee to give a chance to former commercial farmers to receive small reimbursements for the land seized from them eighteen years ago. History indeed does not teach anything. It is also notable that, just like in Zimbabwe, playing the race card appeared to be the job of a small but vocal group of political activists. Only 1% of South Africans found the land issue relevant and essential.92 The majority of them

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are more concerned about deteriorating public services, endemic corruption of public officials, unemployment, crumbling housing, and skyrocketing crime.

NOTES 1. Jeffrey Brian Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–1857 (Johannesburg and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 2. Robert Pinkney, Democracy and Dictatorship in Ghana and Tanzania (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 1997), 94; Charles W. Anderson, Fred R. von der Mehden, and Crowford Young, Issues of Political Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 218, 221. 3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 1963), 34. 4. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1976), 178–179. In his recent study of the French New Left engagement of the Third World as a new revolutionary force in the 1960s, Christoph Kalter explored the activities of a left think tank Cedetim (Centre Socialiste d’Etudes et de Documentation sur le Tiers-Monde). Founded in 1967 and staffed with activists who had Maoist and Trotskyite backgrounds, it had 160 members inside France and 700 supporters in former French possessions among intellectual elites of French and indigenous origin. Cedetim was instrumental in streamlining French developmental assistance to the Third World along socialist lines. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 311–363. 5. Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 6. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 41. 7. Alois S. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” in Mugabeism? History, Politics, and Power in Zimbabwe, ed. Sabelo J. NdlovuGatsheni (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 47. 8. Anderson, von der Mehden, and Young, Issues of Political Development, 228. 9. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 238. 10. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise, 200. 11. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 8–9. 12. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 201. 13. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 39. 14. For more about how Third World intellectuals and the Western New Left cross-fertilized each other, which eventually reshaped Marxian socialism along cultural lines, see Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World. 15. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 210. 16. Ibid., 204. 17. Christopher C. Liundi, ed., Julius K. Nyerere: Collected from Speeches and Writings (Dar es Salaam: Mkukina Nyota, 2012), 39.

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18. J. K. Nyerere, “Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism,” in Modern Socialism, ed. Massimo Salvadori (New York: Walker, 1968), 382. 19. Ibid., 378. 20. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 230. 21. Nyerere, “Ujamaa: The Basis of African Socialism,” 379. 22. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 31–32. 23. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 235. 24. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 213. 25. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 53. 26. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 208. 27. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 54. 28. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 215. 29. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 121. 30. Moreover, being part of the socialist thought collective, Scott omitted fact that the whole Nyerere’s project was inspired by contemporary socialist ideas. Strange as it may sounds, one will not find the expression “socialism” in his discussion of ujamaa. Instead, Scott attributed the disastrous results of that project to the harmful influence of colonial legacy on Tanzanian governance and to the overall mobilization drive in the wake of World War II, leaving out the role of the socialist ideology as a radical manifestation of high modernism. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 223–224. 31. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 210. 32. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 122. 33. Evaristi Magoti Cornelli, “A Critical Analysis of Nyerere’s Ujamaa: An Investigation of its Foundations and Values” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2012), 213. 34. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 161; Maia Green, “After Ujamaa? Cultures of Governance and the Representation of Power in Tanzania,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 54, no. 1 (2010): 23. 35. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 223. 36. Ibid., 234. 37. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 158–159. 38. Ibid., 98, 192–193. 39. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 218. 40. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 181–182. 41. Ibid., 97. 42. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 161. 43. Pinkney, Democracy and Dictatorship in Ghana and Tanzania, 105–106. 44. Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, 199. 45. Pinkney, Democracy and Dictatorship in Ghana and Tanzania, 95. 46. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 219. 47. Pinkney, Democracy and Dictatorship in Ghana and Tanzania, 108. 48. Ben Wattenberg and Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, A PBS Documentary, Transcript, http:​/​/www​​.heav​​enone​​arthd​​ocume​​ ntary​​.com/​​trans​​c​ript​​.html​

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49. Green, “After Ujamaa,” 26–28. 50. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 51. 51. Norman H. Murdoch, “Robert Mugabe,” in Encyclopedia of the Developing World, ed. Thomas M. Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1089–1099. 52. Eric Louw, “Ethnic Conflicts: Southern Africa,” in Encyclopedia of the Developing World, ed. Thomas M. Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2006), 623. 53. Martin Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule: And How It Will Hold Zimbabwe Back,” Foreign Affairs, 97, no. 2 (2018): 129. 54. Tom Meisenhelder, “The Decline of Socialism in Zimbabwe,” Social Justice, 21, no. 4 (1994): 84–85. 55. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 133. 56. Jane Onyanga-Omara, “Five Things to Know about Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe,” USA Today, November 15, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.usa​​today​​.com/​​story​​/ news​​/worl​​d​/201​​7​/11/​​15​/fi​​ve​-th​​ings-​​know-​​zimba​​bwes-​​presi​​dent-​​robe​r​​t​-mug​​abe​/8​​ 65557​​001/ 57. Samantha Power, “How to Kill a Country: Turning a Breadbasket into a Basket Case in Ten Easy Steps-the Robert Mugabe Way,” The Atlantic, December (2003), https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/ma​​gazin​​e​/arc​​hive/​​2003/​​12​/ho​​w​-to-​​kill-​​​a​-cou​​ ntry/​​30284​​5/ 58. Meisenhelder, “The Decline of Socialism in Zimbabwe,” 85. 59. See, for example, Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development.” 60. Ibid., 53. 61. Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 10, 1975,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​garet​​thatc​​her​.o​​rg​/do​​cumen​​​t​ /102​​777. 62. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 134. 63. Meisenhelder, “The Decline of Socialism in Zimbabwe,” 98. 64. Craig J. Richardson, “How the Loss of Property Rights Caused Zimbabwe’s Collapse,” Economic Development Bulletin (Cato Institute), 4 (2005), https​:/​/ww​​ w​.cat​​o​.org​​/publ​​icati​​ons​/e​​conom​​ic​-de​​velop​​ment-​​bulle​​tin​/h​​ow​-lo​​ss​-pr​​opert​​y​-rig​​hts​-c​​a​ used​​-zimb​​abwes​​-coll​​apse.​ 65. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 134. 66. Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 371. 67. Meisenhelder, “The Decline of Socialism in Zimbabwe,” 84. 68. Douglas Rogers, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa (New York: Three Rivers Pres, 2010), 238. 69. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 135. 70. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 50. 71. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 135. 72. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 51; Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 135. 73. Richardson, “How the Loss of Property Rights Caused Zimbabwe’s Collapse.” 74. Rogers, The Last Resort, 128. 75. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 51.

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76. Rogers, The Last Resort, 128. 77. Ibid., 133. 78. Ibid., 103. 79. Rogers, The Last Resort, 284. 80. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 57. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Murdoch, “Robert Mugabe,” 1090. 84. Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo, “Expropriating Land without Compensation is Impossible-Take it from Zimbabwe,” Quartz Africa, March 1 (2018), https​:/​/qz​​.com/​​12183​​09​/so​​uth​-a​​frica​​-to​-t​​ake​-l​​and​-w​​ithou​​t​-com​​pensa​​tion-​​as​ -zi​​mbabw​​e​-bac​​ktrac​​ks​-​on​​-seiz​​ing​-w​​hite-​​farms​/ 85. Rogers, The Last Resort, 231. 86. Ibid., 248. 87. Ibid., 249. 88. Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 369. 89. Meredith, “Mugabe’s Misrule,” 137. 90. Mlambo, “Mugabe on Land, Indigenization, and Development,” 58. See also, Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 369. 91. Ilana Mercer, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from PostApartheid Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011), 79. 92. Daniel J. Mitchell, “South Africa’s Land Seizure is Classic Populism,” Foundation for Economic Education News, March 10, 2018, https​:/​/fe​​e​.org​​/arti​​cles/​​ south​​-afri​​ca​-s-​​land-​​seizu​​re​-is​​-clas​​​sic​-p​​opuli​​sm/

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The Western Left “Third Way” and Neoliberalism, 1970s–2010s

The decades between 1930s and the 1970s were the heyday of socialism. Although the left severely clashed with each other (e.g., the Soviet Union and China, China and Vietnam, Western social democracy and communism), countries and movements that claimed socialism and communism, exercised a large worldwide influence during that time. One can talk about the existence of the socialist thought collective that dominated the contemporary mainstream. Even those who were not fans of socialism had to admit that the future belonged to some sort of the “third away,” a “marriage” between capitalism and socialism. In Western countries, this trend manifested itself in the social-democratic (Keynesian) model that put stress on the redistributive role of an expanding welfare state. Scholars have frequently attributed to this model the “golden age” of economic prosperity in all Western countries.1 By the 1970s, social-democratic parties in Europe, Latin America, and the left-wing of the Democratic Party in the United States actively embraced this philosophy. Moreover, in several Western countries, social democrats and center-right reached a consensus that the “third way” was the only way to govern.2 In this intellectual environment, socialism was considered part of the mainstream. Recollecting his intellectual upbringing in the 1960s and the 1970s, Rainer Hank, a German veteran of the New Left stressed: “Surely, other worldviews and intellectual trends could have affected our lives. I am not saying that every contemporary youth turned to the left. Nevertheless, this was the dominant mental blueprint that surrounded us.” His friend, who belonged to the same group, added that at that time it was hard not to become a lefty. Generalizing about his generation, Hank explained that in the 1960s and the 1970s college students read or pretended that they read Marx, Hegel as well as fashionable radical philosophers and writers, from Herbert Marcuse and 299

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Theodore Adorno to Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume bestselling biography of Trotsky. Yet, they never read or even heard of such names as F. A. Hayek or Adam Smith.3 Yet, in the 1970s and the 1980s, the left and left of center mainstream consensus began to crack. While communist regimes, which were still lingering on ideological steroids, entered the state of an economic stagnation, in social-democratic countries the economic growth too slowed down or stopped. It became obvious that not only communist societies but also the countries that followed the “third way” were equally capable to retard economic development and cage an individual initiative in a web a bureaucratic control. Compulsory insurance schemes, guaranteed minimum wages, free health and educational facilities in most Western countries, statesubsidized housing, and direct monetary handouts and benefits with little strings attached put a heavy pressure on a financial system, which led to an extractive taxation. The result was a decline of profitability and economic stagnation.4 By the 1980s, it was obvious that the amount of revenues collected by governments in overregulated Western welfare states was rapidly shrinking. For example, the UK, where by the middle of the 1970s income taxes reached 98%, was on the way to becoming the communist “Eastern Germany” of Western Europe.5 Overall, the social-democratic welfare state became the victim of its own success. Western governments took it for granted that the increasing deficit spending was the way to deal with the situation. For example, Western Germany had a state debt of 20% of her GNP in the middle of the 1970s. By 1985, it increased up to 40% of GNP.6 According to Keynesian prescriptions, increased public expenditures were expected to boost economic growth. In fact, the opposite happened: economy stagnated, an unemployment was increasing, tax revenues were shrinking, and public deficit was growing. This was the background setting that made appealing famous Ronald Reagan’s 1981 rhetorical utterance “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”7 Incidentally, trapped by the inertia of the existing politico-economic machine, in its actual policies, the Reagan administration hardly went beyond such rhetoric, continuing to follow the “third way” Keynesian methods (deficit spending, public expenses, and money printing).8 Still, along with Margaret Thatcher who in fact was able to implement part of her “neoliberal” agenda, Reagan acted as an important conversation starter who began to question the monopoly of state worship—the view he himself had earlier shared as a New Deal democrat. Since the 1980s, among intellectual elites, educated public, and politicians, the increasing number of people were coming to the realization that not only retarded communist economies, but also progressive Keynesian policies represented retrograde ways of governance that were inherited from the past martial age. Gradually,

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a new thought collective was taking shape in the intellectual and political mainstream, which was acquiring broad anti-socialist features. In left social scholarship, this process became known as the neoliberal counterrevolution.9 Individualism, economic freedom, deregulation, and decentralization became catch words. The existing “Overtone window” shifted more toward individual choice and away from state worship. For example, in addition to big questions, in Europe, people began more often to ask the following “trivial” questions that they never posed before: Did it make any sense for a state to police stores’ opening and closing hours and penalize those who did not want to stick to the state-imposed mandatory work schedules, or why should a state have the monopoly on public broadcasting? They also began asking themselves if these and similar state monopolies really helped people.10 Moreover, since the 1990s, worldwide public sentiments have been gradually shifting away from such big omnipotent global structures as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, Soviet Union, and European Union toward a greater local autonomy and individual sovereignty, and later toward decentralized internet communities. On the left, there was a deep fear that growing sentiments in favor of a private sector, for lowering taxes, the expansion of local self-government, and against state interferences in people’s lives would increase inequalities. By the 1980s, socialism was increasingly losing its ideological drive. Both communists and social democrats were rapidly losing their social and electoral base. With the communist millenarian frenzy already being out of steam and with social democracy fixated on the expansion of a centralized welfare state, socialism became incapable to offer any attractive alternatives to free market and local autonomy. Intellectually, many on the left were still trapped in the old ideological paradigm that the complexity of political and economic life demanded more state planning and regulation, whereas on the ground societies, east and west, were moving in a different direction. Earlier marginal and ostracized, ideas revolving around individual liberty were becoming new ideological icons of the time, captivating not only the right but also part of the left. The major challenge to socialism, the radical child of the modern martial age, was the prolonged period of peace, when there was no global social breakdown and emergency situations. Therefore, there was little room for a collective action and constant mobilization. For the past seventy-five years, for the first time in human history, the world has not seen any lethal wars that used to have killed tens of millions of people. Despite such local tragedies as the man-made famine in communist China at the turn of the 1960s, the 1976–1978 genocide perpetrated by the Cambodian communist regime, the 1994 Rwandan ethnic genocide, and the Iran-Iraqi war, which did destroy

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millions of people, no full-fledged international warfare has ever taken place in the world. By the end of the past century, the martial and mobilization ethos that fed various collectivist and statist schemes began to evaporate. It became clear that heavily centralized economies of China and Soviet Russia along with ballooned welfare states in the West, the products of the twentiethcentury age of extremes, suffocated economies and killed an initiative.11 THE WESTERN LEFT MAINSTREAM: EXORCIZING COMMUNISM AND PLAYING DOWN MARX, 1960S–1990S Simultaneously with the gradual drift toward economic and political liberty in the East, the Western left began losing their prestige and electoral base, especially in the wake of Polish workers’ revolt against the communist bureaucracy in 1980. The process accelerated a decade later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since the 1980s, it was not only socialism proper but also the so-called Keynesian “third way” that was in decline. From the 1930s to the middle of the 1970s, the Keynesian “marriage” of socialism and capitalism served as the foundation of the social-democratic welfare state. Until the 1970s, it was assumed that the expansion of a welfare state (heavy progressive taxation and economic regulations, cash handouts, public works, and the like) and the injection of printed money (limited inflation) into economy was the way to go. According to Keynesian prescriptions, such policies were expected to increase purchasing power of the population, boost economic activities, and drastically reduce unemployment. Yet, in the 1970s, the opposite happened. Along with the increasing inflation and ballooned welfare state, unemployment was skyrocketing, and economy was stagnating. In a revealing utterance, a left theoretician and socialist activist Boris Kagarlitsky commented on this situation without explaining the roots of the 1970s crisis: “Numerous problems and contradictions, which had been accumulating for years, all weak sides of the welfare state suddenly resurfaced. Economy acted as it went crazy, being unable to respond to familiar regulatory methods.”12 This emboldened the critics of interventionism and socialism, who earlier had been marginalized by the mainstream. The crisis also inspired the libertarian left and anarchists who had been always critical of state worship and Stalinism. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the growing antistatist and anti-totalitarian sentiments on the left targeted not only communism but also social democracy. By the 1990s, the voices that were speaking against that type of “governmentality” became very vocal. In the meantime, communists, who in the halcyon days of socialism had dissed a welfare state either as a bourgeois fraud or at best as a stopover on the way to the radiant

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socialist future, were increasingly turning into its major defenders. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the “virus” of individual liberty and economic freedom became very contagious, gradually “infesting” various parts of the globe. Although not always clearly visible, its effects manifested themselves in Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s UK, Solidarity’s Poland, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and Deng Xiaoping’s China. In fact, as early as the 1960s and the 1970s, the emergence of humanistic trends and sects among traditional Western communists and the New Left had already signaled the intellectual bankruptcy of the old left that had been focused on the state worship and top to bottom activism. The New Left and dissident communists were turning away from authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practices, peddling instead the memes of socialism with a human face, socialist humanism, Marxism-Humanism, and Eurocommunism.13 The shift to individual human agency away from viewing people as abstract class aggregates manifested itself in growing movement on the left for local autonomy, direct democracy, and individual self-actualization. Even the most radical elements of the 1960s’ New Left were speaking against totalitarian practices and economic determinism of classical Marxism and Leninism. The sudden interest in the early writings of Marx, in which the founder had not “fallen” yet in economic determinism, and the invocation of the ghost of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) by the New Left were the manifestations of that attempt to channel emerging libertarian sentiments into the left creed by using the “sacred” books of the creed. For example, Luxemburg became relevant in the 1960s and the 1970s because, in the first decade of the twentieth century, she had locked horns with Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik elitism. This Polish-Jewish-German cosmopolitan revolutionary had advocated grassroot activism and could not stomach Lenin’s pet project of the vanguard party.14 Prior to the 1950s, the majority of the radical left had dismissed her as a naïve romantic idealist. Yet, with the emergence of the anti-totalitarian trend on the left in the 1960s, her ideas became relevant. Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent “limousine left” French intellectual and a former Maoist active during that decade, later wrote, “If I could single out a single aspect of France’s May ’68, it would be its libertarianism and therefore antiauthoritarianism, and therefore antiStalinism, and therefore—whether we want to admit it or not—its profound, fundamental anti-totalitarianism.”15 The path of anti-totalitarianism taken by many on the left naturally led them to anti-Sovietism and further to anti-communism. Socialist and socialdemocratic parties, which had been earlier stamped as revisionist traitors by their communist brethren, had started ditching the last vestiges of Marxism as early as the 1950s. Being aware of the economic misery of the Soviet “really existing socialism,” social democrats gave up on projects of total

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socialization. Instead, they began advocating progressive income taxation and expanded welfare, arguing that it was true socialism.16 For example, in 1959, the German Social Democratic Party formally dropped Marxism from its program and the word “comrade” as a form of address for its members. The party recognized the importance of private property and markets and mentioned socialization as a distant possibility. German social democrats settled for a partial expropriation through various redistributive schemes. At the same time, such income sharing measures were never clearly defined, which always left a possibility for the government to arbitrarily increase the level of the redistribution. Essentially, the difference between the socialdemocratic welfare system and the declining Soviet-style socialism could be summarized as follows. The Soviet government was concerned about what salaries to pay to individuals who were assigned to various positions in the centralized economy, whereas the social-democratic redistributive welfare state was preoccupied with distributing collected taxes.17 By the end of the past century, with the declining popularity of the left, the greater part of the public came to associate communism and socialism with totalitarian temptations. Once popular, the very expressions “socialism” and “communism” were gradually disappearing from the left usage. Italian and several other European communist parties underwent a name changing, dropping the word “communism” and instead referring to themselves as socialist, labor, or simply as left parties and alliances. By the end of the 1990s, in the United States, a country where historically socialism had not been popular, socialists of various brands began using such neutral expression as “the American left” along with the old cliché “progressives.”18 A symbolic adjustment to the changing spirit of the time was the rebranding of UK New Left Books into neutral sounding Verso Books. Originally launched by a group of the New Left and former communist party members who congregated around New Left Review, currently Verso is the major publisher of left literature in the entire English-speaking world. Political and ideological name changing is not a trivial matter. It usually signals a shift in mainstream opinions. In France and Italy, where both communism and socialism had been deeply imbedded into political cultures, there emerged vocal anti-Soviet New Left and dissident communists (the so-called new philosophers and the libertarian left), who unleashed an assault on state socialism and its totalitarian “high modernist” impulses. This intellectual negation eventually began chipping away at the existing ideology of welfare state that some on the left came to view as the product of the socialist hegemony. In the 1980s, Italian, Spanish, and, to some extent, French communist parties had to disentangle themselves from the toxic Soviet experience. Still, it did not help much, and their social and electoral base shrank. Italian and Spanish communist parties eventually came to endorse the Western constitutionalism, and they also launched a

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severe critique of the Soviet totalitarian practices, including jailing of dissidents by the Soviet secret police and curbing freedom of speech. The Western European communists tried feverishly to save whatever remained from the creed. The product of their last-ditch ideological efforts was a stillborn movement called Eurocommunism. In a nutshell, this was an undeclared attempt to silently shift Western communism toward the old social-democratic strategy of defending and expanding a welfare state. Eurocommunists also reminded the public that, in contrast to their Soviet comrades, they respected human rights, free speech, and free elections. Politically, this mimicry hardly helped. By the end of the 1990s, communist parties of Western and Central Europe were either dead or lost much of their base. Intellectually, the most devastating blow at the socialist creed in Western Europe and beyond was the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973)—an oral history of Stalin’s concentration camps.19 Interestingly, in the 1930s, during socialism’s heyday and the triumph of martial modernist sentiments, similar books had been either ignored or smeared with dirt. Now, with the general shift in the public opinion away from martial and statist practices of socialism, readers were eager to consume that type of literature. Although, for example, in France, some socialist and communist media still desperately tried to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s book, Gulag Archipelago did shake the whole generation of the French left to the core.20 Hardly a masterpiece from a literary point of view, the book arrived at the right time to fulfill its role of an intellectual icebreaker. Incidentally, it was in the wake of the Solzhenitsyn’s “literary bomb” that Foucault, one of the major intellectual apostles of the current Western left, famously exclaimed, “Don’t talk to me about Marx anymore! I never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx.”21 In France, the anti-bureaucratic libertarian left picked up Gulag Archipelago and used it as a powerful propaganda ram to smash the socialist mainstream that controlled much of the country’s media, culture, and educational institutions. As a result, the intellectual hegemony of Marxism in France, which lasted from 1945 to about 1975, abruptly ended. The Communist Party of France, which had been assimilated into the political culture of the country and which routinely drew around 25% votes, for the first fell behind socialists in 1978.22 Similar developments were taking place in other Western countries. In the 1970s and the 1980s, there was growing an intellectual longing on the left for an acceptable exit from Marxist socialism. For many on the left, who were in a state of disarray, the matrix of post-modernism came to fill the ideological void that emerged in the wake of Marxism’s collapse. With its critique of high modernism hubris and with its fixation on the individual,

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spontaneous, decentered, unique, and queer, post-modernism provided a “safe space” for those on the left who felt frustrated about all-explanatory “scientific” paradigms of traditional Marxism.23 Yet, taken to its logical extreme, the post-modernist mindset was to lead to intellectual and political relativism and potentially to methodological individualism: “anything goes” as a former Marxist philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously put it.24 This clearly posed a threat to various brands of socialism, most of which were based on a blind ideological faith in the infallibility of selected groups they defined as oppressed. To traditional Marxist writers and ideological gatekeepers, the avalanche of postmodern fragmentation of knowledge, and the excessive focus on the individual, brought an “unhealthy” attention to individual liberty at the expense of the state and the collective, which, as one of them put it, potentially could lead to the “cultural defense of capitalism.”25 I will show in the next chapter, how that “dangerous” trend was safely arrested by the injection of identity politics into the left creed. “MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE”: THE GREAT NEOLIBERALISM SCARE, 1990SC–2010SC The partial dismantling of communism in Chinese economy in the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the almost simultaneous ascent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan with their rhetoric of a limited state and free market, the disappearance of socialist practices in India since 1990, and finally the attempts of Swedish social democrats to trim their own omnipotent welfare state in the 1990s signaled the change of the mainstream zeitgeist (spirit of the time). Commenting on this change in the public opinion, Marxist sociologist Kagarlitsky talked about the sudden expansion of a worldwide market utopia. On a popular level, at the turn of the 1990s, especially in Eastern Europe, it frequently manifested itself in a crude conviction that the invisible hand of a free market on its own without any legal system was to somehow organize society. This spontaneous backlash reaction to the decades of statism and enforced collectivism upset not only career bureaucrats in collapsing communist countries. It also confused and frustrated many among the Western left, especially those activists and academics whose entire lives and careers evolved in and around the left subculture. French-Italian professor of humanities Enzo Traverso, a member of that collective, wrote a book-length study on the pessimism and melancholia on the left in the post-1989 period. He noted the devastating effect the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent Soviet collapse produced on the entire left fellowship: “The defeat suffered by the left in 1989 did not occur after a battle and did not engender any pride; it ended a century and summarized in

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itself a cumulative sequence of downfalls that, suddenly gathered and condensed in a symbolic historical turn, appeared as overwhelming and unbearable. Such a defeat was so heavy that many of us preferred to escape rather than face it. It struck us like a boomerang whose strength was as great as the energy with which it had been launched one century earlier from Petrograd, Berlin, and Budapest.”26 In the intellectual space created by that intellectual downfall there entered such figures as F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, James Buchanan, Robert Nozick who had been earlier marginalized by the mainstream; several of them had been scornfully labeled as paleoconservatives. Despite differences in their views, they advocated policy solutions that lay not only beyond traditional socialism but also went beyond Keynesian prescriptions. By the early 2000s, seeking to explain what caused the massive ascent of the “market utopia” in various parts of the globe, some left writers and activists came to a conclusion that it was the result of a global counterrevolution that was orchestrated from above by malicious “dark” right-wing forces against the progressive forces of “light.” This explanation went as follows. In 1938, a group of right-wing intellectuals headed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek got together and launched a movement with a single goal to demolish the social state and impose free-market ideology. This was the birth of what later left social scholarship labeled as neoliberalism. In 1947, joined by Milton Friedman and a few others, that small “cabal” set up a right-wing international—Mont Pèlerin Society. At first, they were a marginal group, and nobody wanted to listen to them. Yet, gradually, this group somehow became so persuasive and influential that it spread its tentacles in the corporate world, financial institutions, government, and further in the mainstream. Their “manifesto,” The Road to Serfdom (1944) by Hayek was widely read, and, as one of the leftist authors stressed, the book “came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax.”27 Eventually, according to neoliberalism studies, during the past three decades of the last century, through their intellectual manipulations, excellent rhetoric and persuasion skills, right-wing intellectuals and politicians highjacked commanding heights in Western countries and became the “masters of the universe,”28 railroading free-market ideology into society. George Monbiot, who writes for the left-wing Guardian and who popularizes the neoliberalism conspiracy theory, grimly summarized, “The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers.”29 Those who have speculated about the ascent of neoliberalism stress that as a result of its toxic influence, our world now has to exist in the iron grips of this sinister, suffocating, and at the same time, as they admit, the most successful utopia in human history.

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Popular political writer Naomi Klein portrayed the ascent of neoliberalism as a malicious “grand plan” of a shadow international cabal that wanted to cage the innocent populace within the market utopia. David Harvey, an influential Marxist geographer whose book A Brief History of Neoliberalism30 is widely used in Western academia as a primer on neoliberalism, explained, “I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s.”31 Another proponent of the same conspiracy narrative Mike Makin-Waite has insisted that it was not the economic debacle of former communist countries but the malicious plot of international financiers and corporate moguls to reclaim their class power.32 The greater part of neoliberalism studies does avoid Harvey and Monbiot type crude conspiracy generalizations about the cabal of right-wing intellectuals and international financiers who designed a political project to roll back the world to “dark times.” Most students of neoliberalism present the ascent of free-market idealism and individual liberty as an anonymous and omnipotent discourse that has being promoted by the multitude of reactionary forces.33 Drawing on Foucault concept of governmentality and power, neoliberalism studies ascribe to that discourse “vital and ongoing power. ” Their imagination portrays contemporary society as being sucked into a deep vortex of the sinister world of deregulation and decentralization: “Neoliberalism invaded the stage; never, since the Reformation, had a single ideology established such a pervasive global hegemony.”34 To be fair, if one removes pejorative notions from their analysis, one can see that that scholarship did capture the tectonic shift in public opinion that was going in at the end of the past century. At the same time, I would not call neoliberalism the omnipotent and dominant mainstream philosophy because currently it competes for an ideological space with advancing nationalism and lingering socialism. The meme of neoliberalism, which originally came from Latin American Studies, by now has entered the intellectual mainstream. Loaded with pejorative sentiments, for many it became the lenses to screen all economic, political, and social events. Neoliberalism is frequently held responsible for the production of poverty, inequality, and violence across the globe.35 The most bizarre manifestation of this blame game could be found in the article of Monbiot, who holds the Hayek-Friedman “cabal” responsible for child poverty, hurricane Katrina, crisis of 2008, global warming and many other current evils: “These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place sixty years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.”36

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The conspiracy trait we find in the concept of neoliberalism seems to have channeled deeply grounded fears and concerns shared by left audiences about their declining status and power.37 It was indeed hard to accept and process the rapid collapse of socialism worldwide and the continuing decline of the welfare state. Neither were the left ready to face a simultaneous expansion from below of the ideas of individual liberty, economic freedom, and local self-government. With that, it was natural for many of them to fall for the easy explanation that the whole process was a sinister political project masterminded by right-wing intellectuals and global financiers who were able to somehow “colonize” popular imagination.38 Another recurring trend of the neoliberalism scholarship is its apocalyptic notions. Incidentally, the expression itself gained popularity in the left media in the 1990s—the very same time when the communist system was rapidly collapsing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The favorite trope of neoliberalism studies is a born-in-blood narrative that ties the origin of the “neoliberal counterrevolution” to the market reforms tried by the right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) in Chile between 1975 and 1986.39 In 1973, Pinochet toppled down the freely elected socialist government of Salvador Allende (1908–1973) who had polarized society and ruined Chilean economy through the nationalization of businesses and uncontrolled government spending policies.40 The popular neoliberalism narrative is focused on the so-called Chicago boys a group of invited free-market economists who are portrayed as the intellectual fountainheads of the Pinochet regime, which is simply not true. Promoting this narrative neoliberalism scholars aim at linking the rise of the “market utopia” to authoritarian governance.41 At the same time, nobody looked at the market reforms in Chile, which the dictator originally did not have on his agenda, as a factor that in fact chipped away at the authoritarian regime. The greater economic liberty and the protection of private property that was written down in the new Chilean constitution not only economically stabilized the country but also opened her up and linked to the wider world. Eventually, the greater economic freedom led to political changes. In 1990, Pinochet voluntarily stepped down as a result of a free referendum—a rare case among dictators. The born-in-blood narrative misses the historical context of the 1970s–1990s and downplays the tectonic shift in the public opinion away from centralized planning and the worship of a benevolent state—a process that is impossible to reduce to a global conspiracy of a sinister neoliberal cabal. In fact, simultaneously with Chilean reforms, in 1978, the Chinese communist dictatorship too began drifting away from centralized planning toward a greater economic freedom. So did the Hungarian communist dictatorship during the same decade. In 1970s and the 1980s, in the UK, the United States, and France one could see an increasing public criticism of a welfare state and

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bureaucratic control. Moreover in 1980, in Poland, workers from the Gdansk shipyard, who were supposed to be the gravediggers of capitalism, revolted against their own communist government, demanding economic and political liberties. On the edge of the world, in New Zealand, which, like Sweden, had the most expanded welfare state in the world, people too became fed up with the stagnant economic and social development. Like the rest of the West, that small country, which practiced the social-democratic “third way,” had to face chronic unemployment, slow growth, declining wages, unsustainable social programs, and high inflation.42 Again, like in Sweden, Italy, and France, in New Zealand, it was a left-wing government that initiated market reforms because there was a mainstream consensus in her society to move away from the declared socialist principles. Since 1984, that government cut personal and corporate taxes, trimmed welfare benefits, removed subsidies and regulations, and sold stagnant state enterprises into private hands. It was obvious that in the 1970s–1990s such diverse countries as Chile, China, and New Zealand began to move away from the socialist and welfare state policies toward a greater economic liberty. With their market reforms, right-wing Pinochet’s Chile and left-wing Deng’s China could be viewed as stopovers on the way toward economic and eventually to political freedom away from the twentieth-century statist schemes. The notion of neoliberalism as a counterrevolution that returns the world to “dark times” in fact helps us explain why neoliberalism became a favorite word of choice for left activists and scholars, who have been using less the old classical expression “capitalism.” On their evolutionary scale of historical development, capitalism is associated with a stage of society’s development that, in their view, had risen and then exhausted its progressive potential by the early 1900s. In this narrative, capitalism was on the way to its extinction, gradually mutating into a Western-type benevolent welfare state or turning into a Soviet-style socialism. The assumption was that the world was moving toward a greater state control, social justice, and eventually toward “true” socialism as the ultimate destination point. The sudden advance of economic freedom and individual liberty and the collapse of communism shredded into pieces this well-crafted narrative. By the 1980s, it was obvious that the world became more decentralized and diverse. People were shedding off a crowd mentality, becoming less conformist and less inclined to follow one “true” path. Individualism and difference became popular memes. To a person who was part of the left thought collective and who had to cope with those changes, the ascent of neoliberalism appeared as the product of malicious elite activism—an attempt roll back society to the “dark age” of the nineteenth-century classical liberalism. Not many of them were able to admit that the socialist and Keynesian consensus

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that dominated until the 1970s was in fact a manifestation of the mainstream conservatism and conformism. In 2008, political scientists Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Mors reviewed 148 academic essays dealing with the topic of neoliberalism. They found out all these writings, which were incidentally produced by humanities and social scholars with little or no knowledge of economics, opposed free markets and used this expression in a pejorative sense.43 As such, the expression of neoliberalism eventually entered the intellectual mainstream where left (and most recently the identitarian right) writers use it as a bogeyman to oppose attempts to release society from a governmental control and make room to free markets. In the left imagination, after 1945, there was an ideal “normal” consensus world where markets were tamed by the enlightened progressive state. The left talked about this postwar period that lasted until the 1970s as the golden age of democratic socialism.44 What they have viewed as normal was in fact the historical product of the two world wars, Cold War, and the overall mobilization twentieth-century ethos. In 1989, this martial narrative was buried under the debris of the Berlin Wall. Above-mentioned Traverso, who lamented the decline of that left narrative, indirectly admitted this when he wrote, “It was an entire representation of the twentieth century that had fallen apart.”45 The very idea of a benevolent state that was planning economic life from above and fairly distributing goods on behalf of an entire society became the hallmark of the left ideology in the twentieth century. It shaped the entire identity of the left. For many of them, to acknowledge that the twentieth-century state-sponsored collectivism and mobilization schemes could be just a passing historical episode instead of the highest form of organization on the human evolutionary scale was scandalous and akin to the betrayal of the creed. With a tone of sadness, Harvey, a Marxist geographer whom I mentioned earlier, stressed that the increasing number of people on the left were thinking in libertarian terms, which was dangerous from an ideological viewpoint: “I think much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism. A lot of people on the Left don’t like to hear that. But of course the question arises: Is there a way to organize which is not a mirror image? Can we smash that mirror and find something else, which is not playing into the hands of neoliberalism?”46 Activist journalist Monbiot has been similarly disgusted with some of his progressive comrades who internalized “neoliberal” notions: “Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral. Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyze crisis after crisis.”47

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In his turn, UK communist party activist Mike Makin-Waite was frustrated to discover that many free-market “reactionaries” and proponents of individual liberty “reappropriated some of the radical language that the left had developed in the 1960s and the 1970s,” particularly the slogan of the freedom of choice.48 Such notions expressed by left writers and spokespeople make one wonder who is a reactionary or who is a progressive here. Unfortunately, being used to see themselves as people who have been always on the right side of history, neither Harvey nor Monbiot nor Makin-Waite cannot grasp the cruel irony of history, which in a cunning manner, frequently turns tables, relegating those who are used to see themselves as the messengers of a radiant future to the ranks of retrogrades and obscurantists. In fact, writing for radical socialist magazine Jacobin, one of the left activists has admitted that the current right acted as a revolutionary force, whereas the mainstream left tended to be conservative, being concerned about safeguarding existing welfare state and a political status quo.49 I do not think it is accidental that recently there emerged an expression the “regressive left.”50 At the turn of the millennium, many on the left lamented the decline of their traditional identity that was tied to romancing a benevolent welfare state, collectivism, and the Manichean dichotomy of the “oppressed” and the “oppressors.” Radical segments in socialism felt nostalgia for the bygone days of revolutionary activism. Incidentally, the outburst of the left terrorism between the 1960s and the 1980s signaled the crisis of the once-popular creed. Unable to stir unresponsive masses and navigate them toward a socialist revolution, the most radical elements on the left went nuts. They were resorting to a helterskelter tactics, murdering bankers, police officers, and politicians who to them were the manifestations of the “system.” Hence, the Weather Underground in the United States, Red Brigades un Italy, Baader-Meinhof Red Army Factions in Western Germany, and the Shining Path in Peru. The most visible feature of the neoliberalism scholarship is their clear denial of what Marxists of old called “the role of masses.” In other words, neoliberalism studies refuse to acknowledge that the “sinister” ascent of that “omnipotent” doctrine could be the result of a gradual change in public opinion and had something to do with the failure of the socialist institutions that had retarded social and economic development. If we invert the apocalyptic speculations of neoliberalism studies about the omnipotent power of neoliberalism, we will clearly see that those utterances reveal the intellectual insecurities of the left. Commenting on Monbiot’s conspiracy speculations about neoliberalism, one of Guardian readers uttered a devastating remark: “Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. The left and center have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years. Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure.” The same reader also added that “to propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the twenty-first century is “a sign of obscurantism.”51

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Progressive historian Mirowski, a prominent student of neoliberalism, admitted the conspiracy turn taken by some unhinged and apocalyptic speculations of his colleagues about that “omnipotent beast.” Moreover, he alerted his readers that “those e leftists who try to intellectualize neoliberalism and who talk of a ‘neoliberal project’ are giving it too much credit—sometimes verging dangerously towards conspiracy theories.”52 Ideas are very powerful and important, but without support or at least silent agreement from both “deplorable masses” and elites, neither proverbial “Washington consensus” nor “great persuaders” such as Friedman and Hayek would have been able to single-handedly hammer the “evil” creed of neoliberalism into the mainstream. NOTES 1. Rosemary Wakeman, “The Golden Age of Prosperity, 1953–1973,” in Themes in Modern European History since 1945, ed. Rosemary Wakeman (New York and London: Routledge, Year: 2003), 45–59. 2. Smaldone, European Socialism, 230. 3. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 30, 48, 83. 4. Christian Joppke, “The Crisis of the Welfare State, Collective Consumption, And the Rise of New Social Actors,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987), 237. 5. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 60. 6. Ibid., 57. 7. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.rea​​ganfo​​ undat​​ion​.o​​rg​/ro​​nald-​​reaga​​n​/rea​​gan​-q​​uotes​​-spee​​ches/​​ina​ug​​ural-​​addre​​ss​-2/​ 8. David Stockman, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 55–69. 9. Dieter Plehwe, “The Origins of the Neoliberal Economic Development Discourse,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MS and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 240. 10. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 85–87. 11. This catchy expression, which conveys well the essence of the martial spirit of the last century, was introduced by the unrepentant communist historian Eric Hobsbawm who himself heavily contributed to sustaining the radical élan of socialism. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 12. Boris Kagarlitsky, Neoliberalizm i revolutsia [Neoliberalism and Revolution] (St. Petersburg: Poligraf, 2013), 37. 13. Erich Fromm, ed., Socialist Humanism; An International Symposium (New York: Anchor Books, 1965); 1965; Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution; Santiago Carrillo, Eurocommunism and the State (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1978). 14. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 168–174. 15. Lévy, Left in Dark Times, 54. 16. Hoppe, Social Democracy, 7, https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/li​​brary​​/soci​​al​-de​​​mocra​​cy.

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17. Ibid., 8, 12, 25. 18. Jeffreys-Jones, “Changes in the Nomenclature of the American Left,” 83–100. I want to remind that the original usage of expression “the left” and “the right” goes back to the 1789 French Revolution, when the supporters of the revolution sat on the left side in the French National Assembly. 19. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation [1973], transl. from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, Abridged and Introduced by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., with a foreword by Jordan B. Peterson (London: Vintage Classics, 2018). 20. Lévy, Left in Dark Times, 57. 21. Quoted after Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (2002): 260. 22. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 89–112; Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 70, 78–79. 23. Simon Susen, The “Postmodern Turn” in the Social Science (New York: PalgraveMacmillan 2015), 32; Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Phoenix, AZ: Scholargy Publishing, 2004), 171–174. 24. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975). 25. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 158. 26. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 22–23. 27. George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems,” Guardian, April 25 (2016), https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​016​/a​​ pr​/15​​/neol​​ibera​​lism-​​ideol​​ogy​-p​​robl​e​​m​-geo​​rge​-m​​onbio​​t. 28. I borrowed this expression from a title of a book about the ascent of the “neoliberal hegemony”: Jones, Masters of the Universe. 29. Monbiot, “Neoliberalism—The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.” 30. Klein, The Shock Doctrine; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 31. David Harvey, “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project,” Jacobin, July 23, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.jac​​obinm​​ag​.co​​m​/201​​6​/07/​​david​​-harv​​ey​-ne​​olibe​​ralis​​m​-cap​​itali​​sm​-la​​bor​​ -c​​risis​​-resi​​stanc​​e/, accessed 3/7/2017. 32. Mike Makine-White, Communism and Democracy: History, Debates, and Potentialities (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2017), 234. 33. Philip Mirowski, “Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” American Affairs 2, no. 1 (2018), https​:/​/am​​erica​​naffa​​irsjo​​urnal​​.org/​​2018/​​ 02​/ne​​olibe​​ralis​​m​-mov​​ement​​-dare​​-no​t-​​speak​​-name​/; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013). 34. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 2. 35. See, for example, Klein, Shock Doctrine; Monbiot, “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems”; Simon Springer, The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

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36. George Monbiot, “How the Neoliberals Stitched up the Wealth of Nations for Themselves,” Guardian, August 27 (2007), https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​mment​​ isfre​​e​/200​​7​/aug​​/28​/c​​ommen​​t​​.bus​​iness​​comme​​nt. 37. It is interesting to compare the presence of similar conspiracy notions in the so-called Cultural Marxism theory—a concept that is popular on the right. Just as some of their opponents on the left, who have ascribed the ascent of neoliberalism to the malicious activities of the right-wing Mont Perelin intellectual cabal, some fringe right writers have attributed the intellectual hegemony of the left in academia, public schools, and culture in general to the “malicious” activities of the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory. For the analysis of Cultural Marxism, see chapters 14 and 15. 38. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 3. 39. Megan McArdle, “Milton Friedman and Chile,” Atlantic Magazine, July 15 (2008), https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​om​/bu​​sines​​s​/arc​​hive/​​2008/​​07​/mi​​lton-​​fried​​man​​-a​​nd​ -ch​​ile​/3​​841/;​ Tomás Undurraga, “Neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile: Common Antecedents, Divergent Paths,” Revista de Sociologia e Política 23, no. 55 (2015): 16, http:​/​/www​​.scie​​lo​.br​​/pdf/​​rsocp​​/v23n​​55​/01​​04​-44​​78​-rs​​ocp​-2​​​3​-55-​​0011.​​pdf 40. Jack Devin, “What Really Happened in Chile: The CIA, the Coup against Allende, and the Rise of Pinochet,” Foreign Affairs 93, No. 4 (2014): 30. 41. Rebecca Liu, “The Chicago Boys Now and Then,” Kings Review, September 27 (2016), http:​/​/kin​​gsrev​​iew​.c​​o​.uk/​​artic​​les​/c​​hicag​​o​​-boy​​s​-now​/. Such narrative is especially visible in a popular book of Naomi Klein about the “bloody origin” of neoliberal capitalism: Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 60–71. 42. Paula Pereda-Perez and Christopher A. Howard, “Post-Authoritarian and Democratic Neoliberalism; Chile and New Zealand in the Wake of Global Discontent,” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 30–61. 43. Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Mors, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44, no. 2 (2009): 137–161. For another important objective assessment of this concept, see also Rajesh Venugopal, “Neoliberalism as Concept,” Economy and Society 44, no. 2 (2015): 165–187. 44. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 179. 45. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 2. 46. Harvey, “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project.” 47. Monbiot, “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problem.” 48. Makine-White, Communism and Democracy, 234. 49. Chris Maisano, “Letter to the Next Left,” Jacobin, March 26, 2011, https​:/​/ja​​ cobin​​mag​.c​​om​/20​​11​/03​​/lett​​er​-to​​-th​e-​​next-​​left 50. Sophie Dulesh, “The Regressive Left and Dialectics,” Humanist Perspectives (2017): 1–18. 51. Monbiot, “Neoliberalism–The Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.” 52. Philip Mirowski, “This is Water (or is it Neoliberalism?),” Institute for New Economic Thinking, May 25, 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ine​​tecon​​omics​​.org/​​persp​​ectiv​​es​/bl​​og​ /th​​is​-is​​-wate​​r​-or-​​is​-​it​​-neol​​ibera​​lism,​ accessed 3/7/2017

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Retreat of Socialism in the Soviet Union and China (1980s–2008)

Prior to the 1970s, and especially in the war-driven first four decades of the past century, the power of an omnipotent state, crowd mentality, collectivism, and a blind faith in social engineering did enjoy a wide public support. At that martial period of history, socialism did resonate with large segments of population, particularly in underdeveloped countries where its rhetoric was widely used for national modernization. As such, socialism was organic, natural, and spontaneous, being embraced by Soviet Russia and China and by many elements in Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Yet, with the prolonged period of peace, the lack of emergency situations, and the rise of new complex economies that required decentralized knowledge, the command, control, and bureaucratic regulation schemes did not work anymore. The rhetoric of socialism gradually stopped resonating with people. The largest blow to the socialist faith were the partial erosion of communism in China at the turn of the 1980s and its collapse in the Soviet Union in 1991. The sudden romance of intellectual elites and part of the populace in former communist Eastern Europe with free-market ideas of Hayek and Milton Freidman in the 1980s and the 1990s was a natural backlash reaction to the years of suffocating Soviet-style command system. Although, in the early 2000s, the social pendulum in Russia and several Eastern European countries did shift away from the “market utopia,” the Overtone window of individual and economic freedom became open. Current authoritarian regimes of Russia and China, which are slow to shed their martial communist legacy, are certainly a far cry from the former Soviet Union and Maoist China. The fact that, in the 1970s–1990s, among ardent proponents of market reforms and decentralization one could find former top leftist spokespeople and apparatchiks was not accidental. This was the best evidence that the socialist thought collective was in crisis. For example, in the late Soviet 317

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Union, the major mover and shaker was Alexander Yakovlev (1923–2005). He became “infected” with the ideas of economic and individual freedom when he served as a Soviet ambassador to Canada in the 1970s. Away from the Soviet matrix, this inquisitive mind had an opportunity to contemplate on the blunders of the Soviet centralized economy and read forbidden Western books. Ironically, appointed by Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of the chief communist party ideologist (1985–1991), this career member of the nomenklatura elite became the major anti-communist in the Soviet government. Another good example is Alfred Sherman (1919–2006), one of the driving forces behind Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation reforms. A son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he became a card-carrying activist of the British Communist Party. Like many internationalist leftists in the interwar period, he took part in the 1930s’ Spanish Civil War, fighting against Franco’s nationalists. Being a long-time witness to the debacle of the Stalinist experiment and the economic decline of the UK under the Labor Party’s democratic socialism, he eventually converted to libertarian ideas of Hayek. In fact, with the same religious passion that he demonstrated when he was a Marxist, Sherman set out to railroad capitalism into the UK society. Sherman, who stressed that communism represented a surrogate religion, at the same time, admitted that he brought the spirit of messianism into the 1979 Thatcher market revolution. As early as 1973, along with Keith Joseph, another intellectual offspring of a pious Jewish family, Sherman nourished an idea to convert the English elite, which had earlier capitulated to socialism, to Hayek’s ideas. In 1973, Joseph and Sherman met Margaret Thatcher and began contemplating a free-market revolution.1 Such people like Yakovlev, Sherman, and Joseph would have been doomed to remain marginal dreamers if it had not been for the debacle of communism, the crisis of a welfare state, and the general change in a public opinion regarding socialism and interventionism in the 1970s and the 1980s. Sherman’s, Joseph’s, Yakovlev’s, and similar conversions of leftists to “neoliberalism” were the sign of changing zeitgeist (spirit of the time). This was a huge contrast with the 1920s–1930s when one could witness opposite conversions, from classical liberalism to socialism and national socialism. Many conservatives tend to ascribe the fall of the Soviet Union to the tough international stand of President Reagan, who is said to have exhausted the Soviets by his arms race. Yet, if one places the collapse of the Soviet Union in the historical context, one will see that this was hardly the case. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 was in fact a manifestation of the systematic failure of state socialism that was not able to sustain itself anymore and that was going down anyway with or without the arms race.2 To be fair, the latter might only have sped up the whole process. By the 1980s, devoid of its fertile martial environment, the command-control economy

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of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist states was already bankrupt without Reagan’s arms race and the “persuasive skills” of the “neoliberal” intellectuals. The Soviets were able to linger on by selling their vast natural resources, whereas China already resorted to dismantling socialism in agriculture at the turn of the 1980s. What happened with the Soviet Union was a local manifestation of a general shift away from socialism, state worship, and centralized planning that, in a snowball effect, spread over Europe, China, India, Africa, Latin America between the 1970s and the 1990s. This “neoliberal revolution,” which was spontaneously spreading worldwide, revealed itself not only on the right but also on the left. For rhetorical purposes, even communist parties in the West were dropping slogans of a total nationalization, which had been so dear to their hearts, and embracing social democratic ways of regulated capitalism. Simultaneously, socialists and dissident communists sought to exorcise Stalinism and totalitarianism from their creed and make it more humane. Hence, the increasing popularity in the 1960s–1980s of such memes as “socialism with a human face,” “democratic socialism,” “MarxismHumanism,” “socialist humanism,” and “autonomous Marxism.” IN THE SOVIET HOUSE OF CARDS: FROM “ADVANCED SOCIALISM” TO STILLBORN “SOCIALISM WITH A HUMAN FACE,” 1960SC–1991 Despite the egalitarian claims of the Marxism-Leninism ideology, the Soviet Union was a hierarchic and elitist state.3 From the beginning to its very end, it represented a one-party state that was at first controlled by a dictator and then, after the death of Stalin, by a few top bureaucrats called Politburo. Politburo ruled the country through the so-called nomenklatura—the elite cadre of several hundred thousand people who represented a caste with its own privileges and who were not subjected to regular rules and laws that guided the behavior of regular subjects.4 Incidentally, the similar nomenklatura system was reproduced in all other Soviet-style regimes, from Cuba and Poland to China and Vietnam. In the 1930s and the 1940s, when the Soviet Union represented one-man totalitarian dictatorship, nomenklatura members could not feel safe despite their elite status. In fact, during the Stalin Great Terror of the 1930s, or in Mao’s China in the 1950s and the 1960s, many of these apparatchiks were purged and annihilated, being replaced with new nominees—a weird way of “professional mobility” under the totalitarian dictatorship that made part of the populace happy. In the wake of 1956, Soviet party bureaucrats, who were tired of the way the cadre were “rotated” under Stalin, secured their status and positions by establishing themselves as the

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ruling elite. They aspired to fully control resources they supervised and clans they patronized. Although under Stalin the nomenklatura never felt secure, the perks they were able to enjoy while in power were a nice carrot in contrast to the miserable conditions of the rest of the Soviet populace. In the early Soviet Union (1920s–1940s), the greater part of this bureaucracy and a large segment of the populace took the communist ideology seriously. They were convinced that despite purges and material shortages, with the ascent of the utopian egalitarian society of communism life would be better.5 The major problem for communist bureaucrats was to follow constantly changing rules of the politically correct game. Even the most skillful ideologists among Soviet propaganda workers were frequently confused. Driven by erratic sentiments of the dictator, the “planned chaos” of the Stalinist regime sent around mixed and contradictory signals. The most successful apparatchiks were those who were able to catch the hidden meaning of each bureaucratic signal. The essence of the Soviet hierarchical system set up in the 1920s hardly changed until its collapse in 1991. Despite its stagnant nature, the Soviet Union lasted for more than seventy years. There were several reasons why that society was able to linger on for so long. At first, the Soviet regime simply lived off the assets confiscated from the “bourgeois” classes, then cannibalized forced labor of the peasantry and slave labor of GULAG prisoners. Through this efforts, in the 1920s–1940s, the Soviet regime was able to extract necessary resources to sustain itself. The diminished number of people consumed less fuel, ate less food, and required less clothing and housing. The Soviet population survived by relying on meager food rations and semi-legal black markets, which the government had to tolerate on the margins of the nationalized economy. After 1953, when the dictator died, the elite began to realize that the extractive polices reached their limit. In 1956, the Soviets partially denounced Stalin’s cult of personality along with his genocidal policies, and the communist faith started to crack. It became harder to continue cannibalizing human resources without delivering some goods to the populace. As a result, in the 1960s–1980s, the state resorted to the mass sale of vast natural resources to the West (oil, gas, gold, diamonds), which allowed the regime to generously fund its military and also to provide meager welfare to the greater part of society: limited basic foods, one-month vocations, one-year maternity leaves, free health care, free college education, municipal studio-type apartments as well as crude household and wear items. Incidentally, during this time, the Soviet Union began on a regular basis to export grain from Canada and the United States to feed its population. This was the best evidence of the collapse of the ideologically driven agricultural policy that killed work incentives in the countryside.

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When Stalin was alive, the Soviet system was mostly driven by the discipline of fear. Neither the elite with their privileges and status nor regular populace felt secure. The extreme politicization of economic and regular administrative activities, when a minor error could be qualified as a counterrevolutionary sabotage, stagnated any initiative, cultivated subservience, and irresponsibility. The paralysis of initiative was revealed in the beginning of World War II, when the world’s largest and better equipped Soviet Army was attacked and crushed by a smaller but highly motivated National Socialist German army. Moreover, it took three more years and the unlimited American hardware, food, and fuel resources for the stagnant Stalinist military machine to finally overwhelm Nazi Germany. After the death of the dictator, new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev partially denounced Stalin, calling him a criminal. The “red pope” was presented to the party and general populace as a bad apple who had spoiled the healthy body of the communist faith. Hence, Khrushchev’s calls to move away from Stalin’s “knowledge” and return to the canonical scriptures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin that were expected to help purify the creed. Although inconsistent and partial, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalinism in 1956 was part of the emerging trend in contemporary socialism to mute its totalitarian temptations. Ironically, simultaneously with that de-Stalinization drive in the Soviet Union, communist regimes in China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where Stalinist-style practices were introduced in the 1950s–1960s, were only beginning to experiment with communism’s deadly biopolitics. For this reason, there was a severe ideological clash between the Soviets, whose millenarian zeal had been already exhausted by the 1950s, and such countries as China that were only entering their communist “great awakening,” and they did not want to drop it in a mid-leap. Part of Khrushchev’s revisionism was his clumsy attempts to improve living conditions of the Soviet populace without changing Soviet economy. Because he stubbornly maintained the inefficient system of collective agriculture, Khrushchev failed on the “food front.” Yet, he accomplished a lot in housing, providing millions of urban working-class people with small studiotype apartments, which was a large step away from cramped communal housing of the Stalin age. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Soviets also made the first steps to revitalize consumer industry. Khrushchev and his successors sought to combine these measures with skyrocketing investments into the military-industrial complex. At the same time, Khrushchev, who made a few holes in the building of Stalinism, irritated the ruling nomenklatura. Although its members were not executed anymore, they feared that his de-Stalinization campaign could undermine the very faith he was expected to revitalize. Leonid Brezhnev, who came to power in 1964 as a result of a nomenklatura coup

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against Khrushchev, secured the status of the party oligarchy, stopped deStalinization, and simultaneously concluded a silent agreement with society: permanent cradle to grave welfare handouts in exchange for its recognition of the one-party dictatorship and a formal loyalty to the religion of MarxistLeninism. The development and export of oil and gas resources, coupled with their growing prices at the world market, allowed to subsidize the Soviet welfare-warfare state (see Fig. 13.1).6 Still, pressured by the burden of increasing financial and military commitments to its numerous client regimes worldwide, the Brezhnev regime had a hard time maintaining minimum living standards within the country. Long lines for basic food and household items became a permanent part of the Soviet landscape. By the end of the 1980s, the inefficiency of the Soviet planning system was becoming obvious to its own ideologists and functionaries, some of whom began to sheepishly suggest that the regime might want to use elements of market socialism to somehow incentivize people. For fear of breaking the ideological taboo on private property and private enterprise, those who came up with such suggestions tried to make them fit the clichés of the Marxist-Leninist theology by appealing, for example, to Lenin’s New Economic Policies of the 1920s. Still, feeling threatened, the greater part of the communist oligarchy each time buried such “suspicious” projects. Thus,

Figure 13.1  Soviet “Advanced Socialism” in Action (1970s): by Selling Natural Resources Abroad, the Stagnating Soviet Regime was Struggling to Provide Minimum Welfare and Project Housing to its Populace. Source: © Iulianna Est /iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

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in the middle of the 1960s, the Soviet nomenklatura shut down a conversation about giving industrial enterprises limited rights to market and sell their products and set up salaries. If fulfilled, that abortive reform could have triggered the emergence of the Yugoslavia-type socialism. Soviet plant managers continued to be driven by distorted incentives when their bonuses depended not on the quality but on the quantity of products. For the Western reader to get a glimpse of how the perverse incentives worked under the now-extinct Soviet system, one can use as an example any state hierarchical organization with a set budget (a state university, war department, veterans’ hospital, or department of education). Administrators in such institutions are prompted to use as many resources as possible or else they would lose them when a new financial year kicks in. Now, imagine that all our institutions and enterprises, from Netflix and Walmart down to a mom and pap store, are state-owned and work in the abovementioned manner. That was the way the entire Soviet economy operated. The actual job of planning was performed by the infamous Gosplan (State Planning Bureau). Gosplan decided not only how much money to allocate in particular industries and how much steel and grain produce but also how many shoes and pencils were to be manufactured. The natural outcome of such practices was fake statistics. Local managers purposely inflated their numbers to get rewards and credits from their superiors, simultaneously hording part of their resources for an informal under the table barter exchange with other enterprises. The publication of raw data about Soviet economic performances and living standards was a state secret. The doctored and incomplete statistics distorted the picture of the Soviet economic performance to such an extent that Soviet top leaders themselves had a vague idea of what exactly was going in their economy. Such Western intelligence agencies as CIA, which tried to penetrate this hall of distorted mirrors to find out the truth, had to frequently operate with the same numbers from nowhere, becoming prisoners of the fake data. As late as 1989, mainstream Western economists were still convinced that the Soviet economy was doing well and that it would be growing and expanding.7 Although Soviet scientists occasionally made breakthrough scientific discoveries in military-related fields and put them into practice (the space exploration is the best example), overall, creative initiatives and scientific discoveries, failed to translate themselves into enterprising projects simply because they challenged the heavily centralized system of resource allocations and control. Bureaucrats did not want to take a risk to deal with innovations that could jeopardize their security and status. It was only when scientists were able to get an ear of a high party or secret police official and dramatize the strategic significance of their projects that a scientific breakthrough was possible.

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Soviet economy was customized for emergency martial conditions. With that, consumer needs occupied a secondary place. The central government defined what was needed with little or no feedback from below. This centralized planning mindset vividly revealed itself during the famous “kitchen” debate between the U.S. president Richard Nixon and Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959. When Nixon demonstrated to the Soviet leader a lemon squeezing machine, Khrushchev scornfully dismissed it as “wasteful” decadent product: “What silly thing, Mr. Nixon! I think it would take a housewife longer to use this gadget than it would for her to slice a piece of lemon, drop it into a glass of tea, then squeeze a few drops.” Khrushchev explained to the American president that the Soviets would soon overtake the United States in the production of milk, butter, and meat because Soviet planners did not waste their funds to produce such silly things as the lemon squeezer. Under communism, as he proudly explained, resources were allocated to manufacture products that were really needed for the country.8 Khrushchev, of course, was not aware that innovations usually emerged in a form of marginal and “useless” items. It was up to consumers from below to decide what items they wanted for their practical use and what they intended to dismiss as exotic objects. The totally centralized system of Soviet socialism worked against consumer needs by paralyzing any initiative. By the 1980s, plagued by declining oil prices and exhausted by the arms race, the retarded economy of the Soviet Union began to collapse. The new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev realized that he needed to reform the system, but he did not know how. Instinctually, he felt that he should somehow release the initiative of people. After toying with several silly measures such as a prohibition campaign and an empty slogan of “speeding up” economy, Gorbachev lifted press censorship and launched a nationwide campaign of exposing Stalinism, which Khrushchev had not completed. This became known as the policy of openness (glasnost). Like many naive Western leftists, Gorbachev was convinced that exorcising Stalinism from the body of socialism would somehow help save and revitalize the faith. Hence, his attempt to capitalize on the “socialism with human face,” the slogan he borrowed from the 1968 Prague Spring reformers who had been crushed by Soviet tanks. He was not aware that, like a house of cards, any authoritarian regime began to collapse as soon as one took two important blocks from the building of a dictatorship: a control over information and a monopoly on power. Defying the political tradition of the Soviet regime, Gorbachev dared to introduce a multiparty system in 1990. Under these circumstances, the collapse of Soviet socialism was a matter of time. Still, between 1987 and 1990, Gorbachev’s motion to pitch democratic socialism inspired the reformminded left in the West who expected that finally the Soviet Union found the “correct” way. This was the time when Western progressives streamed to

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Russia in hope to find a proof for their utopian dreams or at least to get their five minutes of fame. For example, Stephen Cohen, who wrote an apologetic biography of Nikolai Bukharin, was able to briefly shine in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.9 This political scientist and a New Left sympathizer suggested that the Bukharin plan to prolong Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) and to maintain elements of market under socialism was the missed humane socialist alternative to Stalinism. There were also visiting Western Trotskyites who naively believed that the short-lived curiosity of the Soviet public about formerly forbidden books, including Trotsky’s writings, meant that Russian “masses” stepped on the “correct” path. Yet, soon, with the avalanche of uncensored print media, which was increasingly crossing the line of a permitted criticism, Bukharin’s NEP “alternative plan,” “socialism with a human face,” and similar memes dressed in a politically correct garb of “democratic socialism” were cast aside. Pushing the borders of permissible, the mainstream media soon went ballistic, turning to anti-communism in a backlash reaction against the decades of mandatory state-imposed socialist preaching. Widening the window of opportunity opened by the regime, from the smokescreen politically correct talks about democratic socialism, the intellectual mainstream turned to direct attacks on Lenin, communism, and further on the whole idea of socialism. The fact that, by 1980s, many Soviet bureaucrats and the large part of the populace became cynical about the worn-out slogan of official “advanced socialism” eased this movement. While communist ideology and political system were in the state of disintegration, the government was reluctant to move full ahead toward market system. Gorbachev miserably failed on the economic front. Raised as a communist faithful, he was reluctant to free prices and to puncture the communist “innocence” by openly endorsing a private property. Instead, he began to toy with an idea of cooperatives as a “middle ground” approach between state socialism and free enterprise system. Shrewd entrepreneurial people used this “coop” niche as an excuse to launch private clothing workshops, dineries, restaurants, construction companies, auto repair shops, and first computer dealerships. At the same time, the Soviet leader was afraid to grant economic independence to Soviet factories in fear to trigger unemployment—the major capitalist vice. Gorbachev simply could not understand basic economics because he and many of his advisers were the products of the Soviet ideological bubble. As a result, central planners continued to set prices and issue production quotas as late as 1991. In the fifteen multinational republics of the Soviet Union, freed from the cementing control of the communist party, local members of ethnic nomenklatura along with elements from the secret police and black market moguls were seizing power and resources. This led to the erosion and fragmentation of

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the country. In a domino effect, communism began to simultaneously collapse in Eastern Europe, where many viewed it as a Soviet imposition. In 1989, in Poland the communist government legalized the nationwide Solidarity movement. This underground trade union was originally launched by the industrial workers. As early as 1980, these poster Marxists proletarians challenged the communist government that claimed to speak on their behalf. As a result of the first free elections in 1989, the communist bureaucracy of Poland, which, ironically, carried the name United Polish Workers Party, was ousted from power. Hungary, which was nicknamed the “freest barrack in the communist camp” for silently endorsing elements of economic liberty in her communist system as early as the 1970s, followed the suit; the Hungarian communist party disbanded itself in October 1989. The notorious Berlin Wall fell on November 9. The following day, Bulgaria’s Soviet puppet dictator stepped down. Two weeks later, in what became known as the “velvet revolution,” the entire communist elite of Czechoslovakia resigned, opening a door for dissidents Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubček to head a new non-communist government. In Eastern Europe, Romania was the only exception. In that country, the independent national communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who was balancing between China, Russia, and Yugoslavia, refused to step down. After a brief shoot out with secret police troops, the mob of people, which flooded the streets of Bucharest, caught him and his wife and executed them on the spot after a mock trial. Unsure what to do and how to proceed, Gorbachev was caught between those who supported reforms and those who were against them. On August 18, 1991, conservative elements in the army and secret police tried to stage a coup. They confronted him in the Crimea where the general secretary was vacationing, demanding that he declare the state of emergency and step down. When the Soviet leader refused, coup organizers had him put under a house arrest. The following day, tanks rolled through Moscow streets along with the news that Gorbachev became ill and an emergency committee took control. Though most of the country were simply sitting on a fence and watching, concerned people gathered at the Russian parliament building, the so-called White House. Although anti-communist forced freed Gorbachev, he came back to Moscow to find himself the head of the country that was falling apart in front of his eyes. The Soviet communist party was declared a criminal organization, the Soviet Union was abolished, and Gorbachev resigned in December of 1991. His plans for reform were fundamentally impossible. Gorbachev’s attempts at reform unleashed forces that escaped communist control and, in the end, dissolved the pyramid of power and strict control that maintained the Soviet system. For seven decades, the political religion of communism was nourishing the paternalistic system where any initiative, except the zealous demonstrations

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of loyalty, was discouraged. Several generations of the Soviet populace underwent a negative selection, when the spirit of enterprise was being phased out from society. Instead, the “commonsense” approach prevailed that could be summarized by one phrase: do not stick out from the collective. For example, in the countryside, which was totally devastated by the Stalinist collectivization, there remained few people who wanted to take advantage of the 1990s market reforms and to become private farmers. In 1992 only 3% of agricultural land was in the hands of private farmers. Five years later, the number increased to 6%. According to the 1990s’ opinion pools, only 10% of former collective farms’ members expressed a desire to get involved into private farming.10 A reliance of handouts from the benevolent state and a habit of looking up to the government became deeply ingrained in the fabric of the Soviet society. This allowed the former communist nomenklatura and the secret police establishment to regroup and seize control in the country. These elements opened a door to the authoritarian rule of President Vladimir Putin, who has been building a hybrid regime that draws on the eclectic mix of the remains of the Soviet political culture, elements of the Russian Orthodox traditionalism, and crony capitalism. In fact, under the Putin regime, lingering Soviet practices, have resurfaced in the form of a massive expansion of a state sector and bureaucratic control. Central and local authorities suffocate entrepreneurial activities through formal and non-formal extorsions imposed on business. The government crackdowns on the freedom of speech again empowered police that now practices target repressions. The rise of anti-Western sentiments and the partial revival of Soviet symbols, including a tacit exoneration of Stalin, too became a permanent feature of the current Russian system. In fact, according to the 2015 opinion poll, 45% of the Russians said the Great Terror under Stalin was justified.11 Despite this natural backlash reaction of society and its elites to the cavalier 1990s’ attempts to introduce economic and political liberty, present-day Russia did move far away from the insulated and heavily policed byzantine Soviet Union. People can freely leave the country and return. Although extremely monopolized and regulated, Russian economy is no more a centrally planned society of “advanced socialism.” Even such corrupt throwbacks from the Soviet secret police apparatus as Putin understand well that without some market mechanism of prices economy would not be able to function. Most important, the new generation of Russians are concerned more about legality and fair rules of the political and economic game. They do not buy anymore the twentieth-century memes about the equality of outcomes that are still popular among people who are in their fiftieth and beyond. Even revived Russian Communist Party, which was incorporated by the present regime into the political system and whose propaganda blends Russian Orthodoxy with

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Stalinism, now talks about “people’s entrepreneurs” and “patriotic business.” All in all, the country has been slowly and painfully exiting from socialism. A CAPITALIST BIRD IN A COMMUNIST CAGE: “SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS,” 1978–2010SC So has China that, in contrast to Russia, still formally remains a communist dictatorship that is ruled by the iron hand of the vanguard party. Observing open attacks on Stalin and Lenin in the late Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not a pleasant experience for Chinese communist apparatchiks. Yet, the most horrifying effect on them was the 1989 footage of a crowd in Bucharest capturing and executing Nicolae Ceausescu, a dictator who presided over the Romanian brand of national socialism. These were warning signals for the Chinese nomenklatura, forcing it to put a cap on their own reforms. Ironically, while agonizing on where and how to put barriers to the “virus” of liberty that was infecting their own society, by the end of the 1980s, China had moved far ahead of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in economic life; she had released her peasants from economic bondage and dismantled collective farms. The party also allowed elements of capitalism to sink into her communist economy by designating several coastal areas as market-friendly zones open to Western investors and companies. Even Hungary, which was nicknamed as the freest barrack in the Soviet camp, could not compete with Chinese communists whose apparatchiks were rebranding themselves into state capitalists. Unlike Chinese communists, the Soviets never seriously contemplated market socialism until 1987. Yet politically, China remained a dictatorship with the communist party exercising the monopoly control over political power. To the present day, free elections, freedom of press, and political dissent are not permitted. To some extent, China’s centaur-like system, where commanding heights are controlled by the party and the secret police and where capitalism is allowed in economy, became the fulfillment of the NEP that Lenin set up in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. In fact, Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), the person who pioneered market socialism in China, resorted to relevant Lenin’s writings on NEP to theologically justify the new course after Mao Zedong, “Chinese Stalin,” deceased in 1976. Deng, a graduate of the Moscow University for Oriental People, was a career communist and a close associate of Mao. In the 1960s, during the infamous Cultural Revolution, Mao had him exiled because Deng (a Chinese analogy of Nikolai Bukharin) dared to question his reckless radical experiments in economic and political life. In 1978, tired of purges and insecurity,

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the communist bureaucracy, marginalized and ousted a few fanatic radicals among Mao’s immediate heirs and brought Deng back to power. He was the only available charismatic communist who could offer an alternative to Maoism. In contrast to Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin but who kept intact the Stalinist economic system, Deng followed a different route. Focusing all his efforts on economic reforms, he did not openly condemn Mao. In fact, to the present day, the Chinese communist party never took a responsibility for the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Instead, it has been evasively referring to the years of Maoism as “the spiritual void.” In the Soviet Union, to save the Marxist-Leninist theology, the communist elite could safely ditch Stalin and return to the “sacred books” of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet regime. In contrast, for Chinese communist mandarins, Mao was both Lenin and Stalin. That is why they could not simply dump him into the “memory hole.” Eventually, Deng came up with a bizarre formula by announcing to the populace that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong.12 Remaining within the bubble of Marxist-Leninism and still pledging a formal allegiance to Chairman Mao’s teaching, Deng began to cautiously incentivize people on the ground to unleash productive forces of the Chinese populace. Like the Soviets under NEP in the 1920s, Deng had peasants released from mandatory grain requisition quotas and introduced elements of the market. The person who fed Deng reform ideas was a communist economist Chen Yun, who too was critical of Mao’s policies in the 1950s–1960s. As early as 1962, Yun came up with a metaphor of a capitalist bird that should sing but only in a communist cage. In the 1960s, Cultural Revolution’s zealots muted and sidelined this communist “liberal,” but in the 1980s his ideas became relevant. In fact, Yun was one of the driving forces behind the rehabilitation of Deng as a politician. Like in the 1920s’ Soviet Union, the original intention of the “bird in the cage” project was to sit on two chairs: to unleash some private initiates to feed the starving populace and simultaneously to maintain power in the hands of the communist party. The NEP-style Lenin policies gradually expanded and led to the robust embracement of formerly despised economic liberalization. Deng’s government began to promote what they euphemistically called “family responsibility system,” which completely did away with collectivization in the countryside. By the end of the 1980s, a family farm was restored as the major unit of Chinese agriculture.13 Although the land still belonged to the state, peasants could cultivate their individual household land strips and freely sell produce. Simultaneously, the government permitted rural markets. Last Mao’s communes were shut down as early as in 1982. Unlike the Soviet Union, where three generations were forced to live under Stalin’s collectivization system, Chinese peasants experienced only twenty years of Maoist assaults, which did not erase the tradition of work ethics and family farming.

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There was another important difference. In 1930s, in the Soviet Union, the Stalinist state pursued a negative biopolitics in the countryside by imprisoning and exiling all enterprising peasants (kulaks) into GULAG concentration camps and special settlements. In contrast, during the Chinese collectivization in the late 1950s and the 1960s, downgraded and abused well-to-do peasants were not exiled. Instead, they were forced to join communes. This preserved in the countryside the most enterprising human resource that carried work ethics. When Deng rolled back Maoism and opened the window of opportunity, these people were the first to take advantage of his reforms. By the end of the 1990s, living standards of the Chinese dramatically improved and people did not starve anymore. Overall, by the early 2000s, some 200 million Chinese dramatically improved their diet and living conditions.14 Since 1978, China began turning her coastal areas into special economic zones, providing Western companies tax incentives to set up industrial plants. The goal was to employ cheap Chinese labor that was to produce cheap export goods. By the middle of the 1980s, fourteen coastal cities were opened to Western investors and businesses. In the nineteenth century, it was Western imperialists who crack opened isolated China for international trade by imposing their own administrative and financial regime in these coastal areas. Ironically, at the turn of the 1980s, it was Chinese communists that reached out to hated imperialists, trying to lure them back into the country. China moved so fast in her economic liberalization that, by the 1990s, many Western leftist true believers stopped considering it a socialist country; in a similar manner, many on the right naively believed that the country was moving fast forward toward a free-market utopia. By now, nominally private sector generates up to 80% of Chinese GNP and employs 60% of the entire work force. Yet, despite the elements of free market and the emergence of a large middle class of about 109,000,000 people,15 the communist state not only exercises a complete hegemony in political life, but it also controls the banking system, railroad and aviation industry, and the allocation of all major resources. Chinese economy is still driven by five-year plans, and party cadres are still rated on how well they meet planning objectives in economy.16 There is still no legal system that safeguards property rights and contracts. De-collectivization of the countryside in the 1980s gave villagers a right to work-family plots and freely sell their produce, but it never granted Chinese peasants full private property rights to those plots. Rural lands are still collectively owned, and people cannot sell and buy them. Today, Chinese countryside represents the mosaic of shareholding cooperatives, whose members hold shares that they have no right to sell and which are subject to the control of local communist party bosses. In this system people have the right to income but they are stripped of any control over the source of this income.

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Ultimately, it is the communist state that exercises the unconstrained power to manage land.17 Much of the private sector in China is only nominally private. The greater part of “private enterprises” belong either to spouses and other relatives of influential communist party bosses or to “owners” who were put there by the communist party. As such, these people act more as managers than private entrepreneurs. For example, Jack Ma, a former CEO of the large e-sale internet giant Ali Baba, is a communist party member.18 So is Ren Zhengfei, the current head of Huawei—one of the world’s largest information technology providers. All these people, who were appointed to act as “capitalists,” report to the communist party and its intelligence apparatus.19 The major beneficiaries of this state enterprise system are party apparatchiks and their family members. Moreover, enterprises that belong directly to the state still occupy a privileged position in the Chinese economy. When needed, the communist state bails them out, making sure that such enterprises enjoy the monopoly status. No Chinese or foreign corporation can disturb this status.20 This naturally leads to a constant misallocation of resources and eventual stagnation. Present-day China is certainly not a Stalinist state. Its political and economic system reminds more of national socialist Germany of the 1930s, where one could observe the same “harmony” between businesses and the omnipotent one-party state that controlled business and made it work toward centrally defined nationalist goals. The communist state in China never gave up on its policy of mass intervention in economic life.21 Property rights, respect for contracts, fair and honest accounting, labor safety, and right of employees do not exist in China. Neither private property nor labor are protected by Chinese laws. When in the early 2010s world media was still salivating about the Chinese economic miracle, skeptic scholars showed that the schizophrenic attempts to combine socialist ideology with the capitalist market would eventually contribute to the economic and political undoing of China.22 Because of insecure property rights, unpredictable taxation, the communist party capriciousness, Chinese “capitalists” are afraid to make long-time investments. Privately, because of the regime uncertainty, many of them seek to siphon their capitals out of the country. Educational and political institutions of the authoritarian socialist state continue to suffocate creativity and penalize independent initiatives. In contrast to other countries, where (like in Poland, Hungary, and India) it was relatively easy to shed off the thin veneer of socialism layered on their societies, China, like Russia, still does not give her population any real choice.23 National socialism that has developed in post-Mao China aims at securing the power of the communist party, military, and intelligence bureaucracy. In contrast to Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, the Chinese elite never even contemplated such reforms as lifting censorship or introducing multiparty system.

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Mao’s original goal was to build up a strong industrial nation by using Stalinist martial methods of mass mobilization. Since these led to a total economic failure, his successor Deng switched to “neoliberalism,” which was a change in methods but not in the strategy. The rational of the party bureaucracy was very simple. If the heavily regulated market system, which did not touch the power of the communist party, was able to deliver more goods than the totally nationalized economy and to advance China to a rank of a powerful nation, this was acceptable. Yet, the NEP-like hybrid system of China with some capitalism below in economic life and with the commanding heights in the hands of communists harbored potential dangers. At some point, the expanding “neoliberalism” in economy was to create new social and political expectations that could not fit the iron-clad framework of the one-party state. In fact, by the end of the 1980s, a growing number of dissenters, primarily students, began to push for political liberty. However, the Chinese nomenklatura dug in. When in 1989, inspired by Gorbachev’s reforms, thousands of students went to the Tiananmen Square to demonstrate for free elections and lifting censorship, the party chose to violently suppress this movement and literally massacred people by using tanks. To the present day, in China, it is forbidden to even mention the Tiananmen event. Unlike the Chinese, the Soviets could not use the force because, from the very beginning, the whole program of Gorbachev’s reforms was hanging on the expansion of freedom of speech and political reforms. The Chinese communist elite never promised such things to their own people in the first place.24 After 1989, to consolidate its power and cement the loyalty of the population, the communist leadership began to gradually shift Marxism-Leninism to a backburner, while simultaneously amplifying Chinese nationalism. Communist mandarins instinctively felt that this form of collectivism was more durable and potent than the earlier class-based socialism.25 The result of the ideological blend of communism and nationalism was national socialism or, according to the official propaganda, “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—an ideological meme that was officially proclaimed in 2017. An essential part of this hybrid ideology was the celebration of a glorious Chinese past. For example, since 1984, party propaganda began to openly commemorate the Confucius birthday, glorifying the virtues of this secular sage and what he had done for the Chinese nation. In the 2010s, there emerged so-called socialist Confucians, a group of party ideologists who were promoting the syncretic blend of Confucianism with “methodologies of Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.” Sincerely or out of a sheer opportunism, these scholar bureaucrats started to argue that such ideological manipulations in fact helped strengthen communism. The neglected Confucian temple in Beijing, which had been vandalized during the Cultural Revolution, was refurbished and

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Figure 13.2  Socialism Remains the Political Religion of China: Middle-Level Party Bureaucrats During their Pilgrimage to Xibaipo, October 23, 2012. The area, which accommodated the commanding post of the Chinese Communist party in 1947–1948, is one of the Red sacred sites in China. Source: Courtesy of Lou Linwei/Alamy Stock Photo.

turned into a pilgrimage site and renamed into the “Holy Land of National Studies.”26 Invoking the spirit of Confucianism, propaganda workers began to put more stress on maintaining authority, order, and stability. In 2002, the communist party stopped calling itself a revolutionary movement, switching to the meme “party in power.”27 Detailing its role in society, the party explained to the populace that it promoted “core socialist values, adheres to Marxism as its guiding ideology, fosters the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics, promotes patriotism-centered national spirit.” Emphasizing its national socialist goals in its constitution, the communist oligarchy intends “to carry forward the fine traditional culture of the Chinese nation and develop a thriving socialist culture.”28 Although heavily diluted with nationalism, the religion of MarxismLeninism, which was assimilated into the political and social fabric of China, continues to linger on in schools, colleges, and on TV. Party cadre are still obligated to study that ideology and its texts in a traditional no-questionsasked Confucian rote manner (see Fig. 13.2). With frustration, traditional leftists in the West keep stressing that this attempt to marry socialism and nationalism has nothing to do with Marxism because, instead of promoting a class struggle, it aims at reviving traditional Chinese governance.29 This ideological blend indeed has little to do with

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classical Marxism but it has very much to do with the general postmodern identitarian mutation of socialism that has been unfolding both in the East and the West for the past fifty years. In my last chapter, I explore how traditional leftists in the West have to deal with a similar “Cultural Marxism” phenomenon in their own backyard, where identity woke politics has prevailed at the expense of the class-based approach. The goal of the Beijing national socialism is to withstand what the Chinese communist party defines as “Western liberalization” and to promote “the patriotism of the Chinese people.”30 Communist propaganda workers appeal to Chinese and Asian “inherent” collectivism that opposes “rotten” Western individualism. “Document Number 9,” a secret party memo that is designated for the communist elite, has warned against subversive currents in Chinese society, especially coming from the West.31 Just as identity studies in the West, Chinese textbooks hold the Western civilization responsible for all evils that had happened with their country in the past, whereas any anti-European and xenophobic revolt in Chinese history is glorified as a forerunner of the final liberation of the country by the communist party in 1949. Generalizing about the role of communists inside the country and abroad, current leader Xi Jinping (1953–), who has been effectively made into a life-long president in 2018, stressed that the party was acting as the guardian of all things Chinese. Deceived by the shift toward nationalism, outside observers often think that the Chinese communist bureaucracy pays only a lip service to the official ideology. In fact, socialism is still living and breathing political creed that sustains the communist bureaucracy. Moreover, the ruling elite, which has finally begun to feel how economic liberalization threatened their political power, has recently attempted to tighten its ideological grip over society. The communist oligarchy still maintains the nationwide network of the so-called party schools (an ideological practice that goes back to Stalinism), which indoctrinate the cadre with the basics of the socialist creed and also teach them the art of political correctness to better grasp the changing nature of “socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” Moreover, like in the former Soviet Union, ideological classes in Marxism and socialism continue to be mandatory for students of any major. All members of the party are still required to study The Communist Manifesto. The general public too gets a portion of this ideological brew in weekly TV shows called Marx Got It Right.32 To get promotion, power, and money, one still must belong to the communist party. Jordan Wang, a 26-year-old graduate student and one of the opportunist hacks, shared with a British scholar how she was able to squeeze herself into that elite club. Towing a politically correct line and stressing that the communist party was “the guiding light of our China,” Wang commented about her induction into the party membership: “The whole process takes so

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long. We have to pass difficult exams on Marxism and the history of CCP [the communist party]. There is so much to study for this and it is difficult. They also interviewed your classmates, teachers, people who know you, even my girlfriend, to make sure that you are a good person and will be a good fit. It is very strict. My family was very proud. Both my father and my grandfather are members, and now I join them. It will be beneficial for my career, of course, but also, I do love the Party.”33 In 2016, Xi Jinping stressed that “higher education institutions must be guided by Marxism.”34 In fact, before taking over, Xi’s was the chairman of the Beijing Communist Party School—the ideological hub of the regime. After being appointed the head of the country in 2012, he brought with him to the central apparatus the host of propaganda “wise men” who now advise him on various economic and political issues. In addition to massaging Chinese nationalism, Xi made it clear that he aspired to revive the tradition of the Leninist-style control.35 To show that he meant business, the government squashed dissidents and had more than one million communist bureaucrats arbitrarily arrested for corruption. Xi also made efforts to expand a state sector. In a recent study on ideological mutations in the post-Mao period, Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu have revealed that China’s lingering leftist identity feeds cultural conservatism. The scholars found out that those who embraced nationalism and welcomed traditional Confucian values also glorified a strong state and spoke in favor of a governmental regulation of economy and wealth redistribution. In contrast, those who leaned toward democratic values and cared less about Chinese nationalism were more supportive of market reforms and individual freedom.36 In 2013, a large statue of Confucius was erected near the Tiananmen Square next to the Mao’s mausoleum. Yet a month later, it was removed and set in a courtyard of a nearby museum. This is an excellent example of a schizophrenic situation when Chinese ideologists struggle to keep an appropriate ideological balance between socialism and nationalism. So far, the regime can somehow merge decomposed socialism with nationalism and capitalism. It is unclear to where this ideological brew will eventually lead the country. The national socialist scheme plays well with the older generation that grew up in the post-Maoist age of controlled prosperity. Yet it might eventually fail with the recent generation of the Chinese who are becoming less accepting of the suffocating ideological control.

NOTES 1. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 65–66. 2. Stockman, The Great Deformation, 75.

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3. Figes, Revolutionary Russia (1891–1991), 178; Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism: Comparative Sociology and Politics (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Books, 1980), 108. 4. Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class. 5. Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 179. 6. Dmitri Travin and Otar Marganiya, “Resource Curse: Rethinking the Soviet Experience,” in Resource Curse and Post-Soviet Eurasia: Oil, Gas, and Modernization, ed. Vladimir Gel’man and Otar Marganiya (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 29–37. 7. David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Soviet Growth and American Textbooks: An Endogenous Past,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 78, no. 1–2 (2011): 110–125. 8. B. K. Marcus, “How Ice Cream Won the Cold War,” Freeman, June 8 (2015): 31, Foundation for Economic Education, https​:/​/fe​​e​.org​​/arti​​cles/​​how​-i​​ce​-cr​​eam​-w​​on​ -th​​​e​-col​​d​-war​/. 9. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. 10. Strayer, The Communist Experiment, 173. 11. Makine-White, Communism and Democracy, 233. 12. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “70 Per Cent Good, 30 Per Cent Bad China Has Found a Simple Formula to Assess Mao Zedong’s Legacy,” International Politics and Society, October 8 (2017), https​:/​/ww​​w​.ips​​-jour​​nal​.e​​u​/in-​​focus​​/the-​​polit​​ics​-o​​f​ -mem​​ory​/a​​rticl​​e​/sho​​w​/70-​​per​-c​​ent​-g​​ood​​-3​​0​-per​​-cent​​-bad-​​2216/​. 13. Starr, Understanding China, 110. 14. Sorman, The Empire of Lies, 110. 15. Zhou Xin, “The Question Mark Hanging over China’s 400 Million-Strong Middle Class,” South China Morning Post, October 12, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.scm​​p​.com​​ /econ​​omy​/c​​hina-​​econo​​my​/ar​​ticle​​/2168​​177​/q​​uesti​​on​-ma​​rk​-ha​​nging​​-over​​-chin​​as​-40​​​0​ -mil​​lion-​​stron​​g​-mid​​dle 16. Sebastian Heilmann, Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy Making Facilitated China’s Rise (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2018), 148. 17. Karita Kan, “Weapon of the Weak? Shareholding, Property Rights and Villager Empowerment in China,” China Quarterly, March (2019): 133–141; Chun Peng, Rural Land Takings Law in Modern China: Origin and Evolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 133, 238. 18. Pei Li, Cate Cadel, “Alibaba is the Force Behind Hit Chinese Communist Party App,” Reuters, February 18, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.reu​​ters.​​com​/a​​rticl​​e​/us-​​china​​-alib​​aba​ -g​​overn​​ment/​​aliba​​ba​-is​​-the-​​force​​-behi​​nd​-hi​​t​-chi​​nese-​​commu​​nist-​​party​​​-app-​​sourc​​es​ -id​​USKCN​​1Q70Y​7 19. Steven W. Mosher, “How Arrest of Chinese ‘Princess’ Exposes Regime’s World Domination Plot,” New York Post, December 22, 2018, https​:/​/ny​​post.​​com​/2​​ 018​/1​​2​/22/​​how​-a​​rrest​​-of​-c​​hines​​e​-pri​​ncess​​-expo​​ses​-r​​egime​​s​-wo​r​​ld​-do​​minat​​ion​-p​​lot/ 20. Sorman, The Empire of Lies, 112. 21. Incidentally, this massive intervention of the Chinese state on behalf of its state-controlled monopolies became the major source of the tension between China and the United States since the middle of the 2010s. Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely

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Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 268–277. 22. For more about this, see Carl Walter and Fraser Howie, Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundations of China’s Extraordinary Rise (New York: Wiley, 2012). 23. Sorman, The Empire of Lies, 105, 107–109. 24. Strayer, The Communist Experiment, 181. 25. Symeon Giannakos, “Chinese Nationalism: Myths, Reality, and Security,” Nationalities Papers 47, no. 1 (2019): 158–159. 26. Evan Osnos, “Confucius Comes Home: Move Over, Mao,” The New Yorker, January 13 (2014): 30–32. 27. Ibid., 31 28. “Full Text of Constitution of Communist Party of China,” China Daily, November 21 (2012), http:​/​/www​​.chin​​adail​​y​.com​​.cn​/c​​hina/​​19thc​​pcnat​​ional​​congr​​ess​ /2​​012​-1​​1​/21/​​conte​​​nt​_29​​57862​​5​_3​.h​​tm 29. Timothy Cheek and David Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” Dissent 65, no. 4 (2018): 71, https​:/​/ww​​w​.dis​​sentm​​agazi​​ne​.or​​g​/art​​icle/​​makin​​g​-chi​​na​-ma​​rxist​​-agai​​ n​-xi-​​​jinpi​​ng​-th​​ought​. 30. Namaste Ni Hao, “Maoism Marries Confucianism: How China’s Communists Are Appropriating Confucius,” Swaraja, February 6 (2016), https​:/​/sw​​arajy​​amag.​​com​ /w​​orld/​​maois​​m​-mar​​ries-​​confu​​ciani​​sm​-ho​​w​-chi​​nas​-c​​ommun​​ists-​​are​-a​​ppr​op​​riati​​ng​-co​​ nfuci​​us. 31. Neil Collins and David O’Brian, The Politics of Everyday China (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019), 12, 57. 32. Cheek and Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” 71. 33. Collins and O’Brian, The Politics of Everyday China, 9. 34. Ibid., 15. 35. Cheek and Ownby, “Make China Marxist Again,” 73. 36. Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu, “China’s Ideological Spectrum,” The Journal of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018): 254–273. http://jenpan​.com​/jen​_pan​/ideology​.pdf

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How Marxism Became Cultural Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and the New Left

1956 was a pivotal year for the socialist thought collective. This was the time when the Soviet nomenklatura elite partially exposed Stalinism, trying to polish the tainted image of socialism. During the same year, taking advantage of the limited destalinization, people of Hungary openly rose in an anticommunist revolt against the Soviets. The suppression of the Budapest rebels by the Soviet tanks was a devastating blow at the morale of those left idealists around the world who still believed that the Soviet Union was acting on the side of the forces of light (see Fig. 14.1). Without wishing this, the Soviets, who denounced Stalin, the “red pope” of communism, made a huge crack in the entire building of the socialist faith. Moscow, which had billed itself as Red Jerusalem and the vital center of left radicals appeared as conservative, oppressive, and ideologically suffocating. In the 1930s and the 1940s, the sympathetic left somehow could excuse Stalin’s socialism along with its police state, terror, and labor concentration camps as a temporary mobilization scheme that was needed to successfully fight fascism and railroad backward Russia into the radiant world of modernity. Yet, after 1956, it became harder to tow that politically correct line. When in 1946 Soviet defector engineer Victor Kravchenko revealed Stalin’s crimes, European communists and their fellow travelers felt no shame in dismissing the existence of GULAG concentration camps and genocidal collectivization as fake news, and large segments of the public swallowed it.1 Yet, ten years later, when Stalin's heir Nikita Khrushchev himself indirectly revealed the brutal reality of Soviet communism, the nature of the Bolshevik regime was impossible to deny. There was a growing frustration with the Soviet model of socialism that was tied to a total nationalization and centralized planning. Moscow was rapidly losing its status as the utopian place. It 339

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Figure 14.1  1956—the Year that Signaled the Eclipse of the Soviet Brand of Socialism. Here, a Hungarian man burns the portrait of Lenin during the anti-communist revolution, Budapest, 1956. Source: Courtesy of Mccool/Alamy Stock Photo.

was natural that 1956 signaled the emergence of the so-called New Left who sought to disentangle themselves from the Soviet experience. In the meantime, the working-class people in the West dramatically improved their living conditions and did not express any desire to go to barricades to smash capitalism. In the postwar West, the proletarians “betrayed” their cause by concluding social partnership with business by agreeing to mute their nationalization demands and support some free market in exchange for the welfare state. Between 1945 and 1973 (before the expanding welfare state became the victim of its own success by stagnating growth and productivity), the living standards of workers in the West skyrocketed. Social democrats were shedding the last vestiges of Marxism, and communist parties were increasingly losing their membership. The left, especially their radical wing, were poised to turn into rebels without a cause. The major character from a 1956 John Osborn play expressed it best when he uttered a

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phrase that became classic: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left.”2 There was not much to gain for the left by sticking to the economic playing field, where “rotten” capitalism colluded with social democrat by “corrupting” the proletariat through the economic prosperity. Those who wanted to keep radical left agenda alive had to reformat the traditional left subculture. The Trotskyites, cosmopolitan Marxist-Leninist heretics, who were the victims of vicious political assaults from their Stalinist rivals, did arouse a sympathy among dissident communists who were upset with the Soviets. After all, the Trotskyites were the first to struggle to preserve the internationalist and radical élan of the Marxist creed, while simultaneously attacking both capitalism and Stalinism. Yet, with their old and worn out mantra about the primacy of an economic basis, vanguard party, and false claims about an increasing misery of the industrial working class, the Trotskyites were out of touch with reality. They simply appeared as reenactors of the bygone era who could not generate any visible support among workers and who were rapidly degenerating into an esoteric intellectual sect. “SENSE OF CLASSLESSNESS” AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES, 1950SC–1970SC Since 1956, to dissociate themselves from the Soviet brand of socialism and economic determinism of classical Marxism, the Western left sought to humanize Marxism. Hence, a natural shift toward the issues of culture and identity. Later, this trend manifested itself in the emergence of such contemporary memes as “socialism with a human face,” “democratic socialism,” “socialist humanism,” and “Marxism-Humanism.” A Jamaican-born UK Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall, one of the fountainheads of the New Left, remembered that he and his comrades wanted to find a new political space through the rejection of both Western social democracy and Stalinism.3 One of the major trailblazers of the movement toward humanized Marxism and culture and away from economic determinism was a dissident group of British Marxist intellectuals who were later labeled as the New Left. Several of them came from the so-called Communist Party Historians Group that was set up within the British Communist Party in 1946. Others were communist fellow travelers or independent Marxists. At the end of the 1950s, these historians, sociologists, and literary scholars either quit on the party or drifted away from traditional Marxism-Leninism, challenging its Stalinist theory and practice. Among the most visible members of that group one can name E. P. Thompson (1924–1993), Herbert Hoggart (1918–2014), Christopher Hill (1912–1996), Raymond Williams (1921–1988), Christopher Hill (1912– 2003) Stuart Hall (1932–2014), Raphael Samuel, (1934–1996), John Saville

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(1916–2009), Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), George Rudé (1910–1993), Rodney Hilton (1916–2002). Several of them (Hall, Hobsbawm, Hoggart, Thompson, and Williams) had a profound impact on Western social scholarship, especially in English-speaking countries. Thus, Hall and Williams literally laid the foundations of current cultural studies. In their turn, Thompson and Hobsbawm had a huge impact on history scholarship, helping to shift its mainstream direction toward writing about the past “from below.” These New Left dissidents began to question the old and debunked Marxian notion that the end of capitalism was linked to the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat. Instead, they started arguing that the need for socialism was arising from the very bourgeois affluence and consumerism. Furthermore, these ex-communists cracked the traditional Marxist conviction that economic class interests conditioned politics, social life, people mindsets, and culture. Gradually shedding off economic determinism, these scholars who had invested their whole careers into “scientific socialism,” found a new outlet to continue their intellectual pursuits—retrieval of the popular folk culture of working-class people. Their intellectual quest eventually gave rise to New Left Review. Launched in 1960, it became the major periodical of the emerging New Left. In fact, the very expression “the New Left” originated from a collective that congregated around this journal and that was hanging in and around the Partisan Coffee House in Soho (a bohemian area of London) and the Birmingham Institute of Cultural Studies. Searching for a new identity, the New Left changed the very concept of political, moving away from the traditional left “sacred sites” such a factory and a trade union to the realm of labor culture, folklore, lifestyles, and individual behavior. Hall, who was part of this ideological collective, noted that he and his comrades were looking for a better place to ground their radical socialism. Incidentally, one of Hall’s speculative essays carried a characteristic title “A Sense of Classlessness.”4 Looking for a social space to apply their idealism, Hall and his comrades turned to politicizing various issues surrounding college life, high schools, movie theaters, art, and other walks of life and institutions. Jumping ahead, I want to stress that for the current cultural left politicizing the issues of lifestyle is one of the major ways of sustaining their identity. Hall defined this ideological search as “the proliferation of potential sites of social conflict and constituencies for change.” The famous slogan of radical feminism “the personal is political” captured well the essence of that quest. Overall, as Hall stressed, all kinds of issues, including personal troubles and complaints could be amplified and opened to politicization. Far from ditching the proletariat, the “chosen people” of traditional Marxism, Williams, a political scientist and literary scholar, suggested moving toward embracing a cultural approach to the proletarians and learning

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about their “authentic” ways. To dramatize his opposition to the economic materialism of Marxism, Williams labeled his method as “cultural materialism”; Marxist-oriented anthropologists, many of whom too were working to exorcise economic materialism peddled a similar notion in within their scholarship. Because of Williams’ heavy media presence, his ideas about the working-class culture and group identity trickled down into Western humanities, where later they were used as a methodological blueprint for feminist, racial, gay, and queer theories.5 To legitimize the cultural shift, the dissidents had to appeal to the authority of foundational Marxist texts and use relevant quotes from its founders. Just as their Soviet counterparts who, when cleaning the house of Stalinism, turned to Marx and Lenin, the Western New Left had their intellectual “Reformation” by invoking the early writings of Marx. Besides such writings as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, they particularly became drawn to the so-called Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844),6 vague and abstract notes made by young Marx about humanism and alienation. Excavated and published by Bolshevik scholars in Moscow in the 1920s, those notes appeared to contemporary radical socialists irrelevant as raw speculations of the great mind in its infancy. Yet, given the New Left efforts that aimed at muting economic determinism, the same vague notes that contained speculations about the fate and identity of human beings in modern society suddenly became relevant and “mature.” What especially resonated with the British dissident Marxists and the New Left in general was Marx’s generalizations about alienation of human beings in modern Western society. The ultimate task was to revise the traditional Marxist canon, which preached that economic basis conditioned political and cultural “superstructure,” and to place instead an emphasis on the “superstructure.” In his Culture and Society, Williams furnished relevant quotations from Marx and Engels to make a case that the cultural superstructure should not be reduced to the economic basis.7 Instead of old speculations about the economic conditions of the working class in England, the scholar was on the quest for the traditional working-class culture, which he romanticized as organic, wholesome, and authentic. Moreover, Williams sought to separate it from “artificial” bourgeois mass culture. He assumed that this “authentic” proletarian culture should phase out “rotten” bourgeois ways. Marxist sociologist Hoggart, who founded the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, too portrayed the idealized workingclass culture as organic and natural, contrasting it to the “non-authentic” bourgeois culture. According to Hoggart, mass bourgeois culture was undermining and phasing traditional and wholesome working-class ways. It was natural that Williams and Hoggart, who celebrated the bygone traditional labor culture, became drawn to romantic poets and writers who celebrated

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Merry Ole England.8 In fact, their intellectual speculations surprisingly resembled dismissive rants of conservative critics regarding modern British culture. Irving How, a walk-away American Trotskyite and socialist sceptic who was observing these cultural speculations of his English comrades, could not resist making a comment: “I suspect that in their stress upon the workingclass neighborhood and its indigenous culture men like Williams and Hoggart are turning to something that is fast slipping away.”9 Another prominent member of the same group of dissident Marxists historians was Hobsbawm, whose books became must read in many history and anthropology courses. He gives us an example of a true believer who was literally tormented by the idea of how and where to find a “class-savior” at that age of “classlessness.” Moreover, at the turn of the 1950s, still infested with the idealism about the proletariat as the ultimate victim-savior, Hobsbawm put his two cents in the famous debate about the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the living conditions of the working class in England; in the spirit of classical Marxism, Hobsbawm was trying to argue that by 1800 the life of the factory laborer had become miserable if compared with the preindustrial Britain.10 Yet, at the turn of the 1960s, being unable to operate on the familiar economic playground of classical Marxism, Hobsbawm slowly began to drift toward new “pastures” in the Third World. He naturally fell for Cuba, and also went to Peru, exploring revolutionary movements in that part of the world. Particularly, he engaged Peruvian peasants in talks, trying to find out how they were oppressed and if they were ready to rebel. At some point, Hobsbawm became so excited about the revolutionary potential of Latin America that he defined it as the engine of the future socialist revolution. At the same time, unlike his wayward comrades such as Thompson, Hobsbawm, he chose to remain in the British Communist Party and formally pledged his allegiance to the old mantra of the proletariat. As his recent biography remarked, “Eric wanted to have his cake and eat it too.”11 In 1959, Hobsbawm published Primitive Rebels that became a runaway bestseller, which was translated in all major European and Asian languages. In fact, the enthusiastic reception of the text demonstrated that the historian did tap in the popular longing among the left to find new “chosen ones” to letch on. Although the current woke left might find his title too patronizing and Eurocentric, Primitive Rebels did clear the ground for the cultural turn in the general shift away from the proletariat. The book represented a history account that romanticized “noble outlaws” from English Robin Hood types and Sicilian mafia to peasant communism in Italy and Ukraine and Spanish anarchists of the 1910s–1930s.12 Hobsbawm defined them as social and noble bandits. The indirect message of the book was that all those segments fomented a spontaneous social justice movement by undermining oppressive systems.

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Those independent New Left, who were not constrained by their ties to the communist movement, went further and began to completely debunk the role of workers as the “chosen people” destined to save the world from capitalism. In 1960, American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), an emerging intellectual guru of the New Left, openly challenged what he called the “labor metaphysics” of the old comrades. He scorned the idealization of the proletariat as “Victorian Marxism” and called it a survival of the past. Trying to fill the old Marxist clichés with a new content, the sociologist insisted that in the new “post-industrial” conditions the true catalyst of revolutionary changes would be the intellectuals in the West and Soviet bloc countries as well as the Third World people who were to seize the “cultural apparatus.”13 Those New Left, who like E. P. Thompson, continued to believe in the proletarian class struggle, were confused and upset about such flamboyant attack on the sacred pillar of Marxism. On the one hand, they wanted to exorcise Stalinism and economic determinism from “scientific socialism.” Yet, on the other hand, they were too attached to the core Marxian pillar of proletarians as the “chosen people” to simply cast it aside. GRAMSCI, FRANKFURT SCHOOL, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF THE PROLETARIAT, 1920SC–1970SC To be fair, Mills’ rants against the “Victorian Marxism” and about the intellectuals as the surrogate proletariat had been preceded by earlier Marxian dissenters who had been marginalized at the age when Stalinism was shining and the “iron forces” of Marxian economic laws were held in high esteem. One of them was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a Comintern agent and one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. He became an involuntary Marxist theoretician when, in 1926, the Mussolini dictatorship threw him into prison for twenty years. Confined to a solitary cell and then released three years later, he had to spend the rest of his days under a house arrest. The intellectual product of that lockdown was the so-called Prison Notebooks (1926–1937). In these notes, Gramsci contemplated on modern history, philosophy, sociology, trying to find a better strategy for the radical left to win.14 Gramsci argued that Marxists should not gamble on triggering proletarians to revolt against capitalism and nationalize an economic “basis.” Surrounded all around by the bourgeois culture, proletarian minds were infected with the alien ideology that effectively muted their revolutionary potential. Gramsci suggested that, under these circumstances, the radical left needed to pay more attention to taking over a “superstructure” (education, media, art, and culture in general). His rational as a revolutionary was that those who dominated the world of ideas and culture would eventually come to control political and

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economic power.15 In the interwar period, when classical Marxist notions of economic nationalization and class warfare were still reigning supreme, Gramsci’s radical left colleagues treated such speculations as bourgeois revisionism and a concession to capitalism. No leftist could notice his prison notes anyway since they were not excavated and published until the 1950s; the first English translation appeared only in the 1970s. However, in the 1960s and the 1970s, during the emerging cultural turn on the left, the argument he had come up with made a perfect sense to those committed leftists who wanted to move away from economic determinism of traditional Marxism and who were at the same time upset that capitalism “corrupted” the revolutionary potency of the working class. What especially attracted the New Left was Gramsci’s argument that in winning over the cultural “superstructure” the primary role belonged not to the proletariat but to what he called “organic intellectuals.” By their sheer position as outsiders, who by their very status were critical of existing culture and institutions, such intellectuals formed a separate group that was poised to awake and guide masses toward socialism. Prison Notebooks added an additional weight to the abovementioned radical sociologist Mills, who put forward the same argument without even reading Gramsci. As a recovered text that belonged to the communist martyr, Gramsci charisma legitimized the coming ideological changes. Gramsci pointed out that a class that controlled media, culture, and education exercised hegemony over society. Therefore, the chief task of radical intellectuals was to gradually take over the “superstructure” from the bourgeoisie and exercise “cultural hegemony” of socialism on behalf of proletarian masses. Exercising control over education and media, revolutionary intellectuals would reeducate masses, including the proletariat, teaching them “better” forms or life and purging “evil” bourgeois mindset. This, in turn, was to open a door to the control over economy, political sphere, and the rest of institutions. Such strategy was expected to demolish capitalism from within and make power fall like a ripe fruit into the hands of the righteous. The most radical proponents of Mills and Gramsci line of thinking argued that it was not organic intellectuals but students that were destined to become true surrogate proletarians. The radicals assumed that students were oppressed and alienated by universities and corporations just as factory workers in old times—a comical attempt to drag the Marxist ideological clichés of oppression/exploitation and the “chosen people” into a new setting. Still, the whole talk about the cultural hegemony by radical intellectuals and students as surrogate proletarians indirectly pointed to the gradual transformation of the mainstream left that was evolving from a predominantly working-class movement to a middle-class collective that became increasingly concerned about culture and identity.16 This was the fulfillment of a grim prediction

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issued by Williams, one of the fathers of the cultural turn. He warned that the making-over of the workers’ cause into the intellectuals’ cause would eventually collapse that whole cause.17 If we continue to further back track, we will find out that the first to make cracks in the building of Marxian economic determinism and to try to move the socialist thought collective toward the issues of culture and identity was the so-called Frankfurt School that had emerged in the early 1920s. The Frankfurt scholars Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Friedrich Pollock (1894–1970), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), George (György) Lukács (1885–1971), Karl Korsch (1886–1961) were also the first to revise the role of the proletarian “messiah class.” The Frankfurt School had been a marginal intellectual trend, which hardly any socialist and communist had paid attention to amid the class battles of the 1920s and the 1930s. Yet, it reemerged from obscurity and became very much relevant in the 1960s and the 1970s. For the past twenty years, there has been much fuss about that school both on the right and on the left. The latter celebrate the “Frankfurters” as the fountainheads of the current leftist ideology of Critical Theory that revolves around the issues of race, culture, and identity. The right demonize Frankfurt scholars as the spearheads of “Cultural Marxism,” which, as several conservative writers believe, was a political project designed to undermine Western civilization. Current identity-oriented progressive writers and scholars do not like to use expression “Cultural Marxism.” Moreover, those of them who did not take time to explore the history of Marxism and neo-Marxism and their genetic links with the current (cultural) left have been quick to label “Cultural Marxism” as a hate taboo term that promotes fascist, Nazi, and anti-Semitic ideas.18 The left instead prefer to use the abovementioned term Critical Theory and the host of expressions derived from it: Critical Cultural Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and so forth.19 However, earlier left authors (Ioan Davis, Dennis Dworkin, and Douglas Kellner) did not see any problems in using “Cultural Marxism.” In fact, they assumed that this very expression captured well the essence of the socialist thought collective that was undergoing an adjustment to the new conditions in the 1960s–1990s.20 At the same time, traditional Marxists, who still stick to economic determinism and the class-based approach, have frowned upon their wayward comrades that have been inspired by the Frankfurt School and the British Cultural Studies, calling them traitors to the cause and “bad Marxists.”21 On their part, conservative writers (William S. Lind, Kerry Bolton, and Jeffrey D. Breshears),22 who generalized about Cultural Marxism, have come to view it as a grand conspiracy of the left that was spearheaded by the Frankfurt School. The most grotesque versions of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory link it exclusively to the activities of German-Jewish scholars.

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That theory goes as follows. A group of mostly Jewish intellectuals, who were part of radical socialist and communist forces in the 1920s’ Germany, were upset about the failure of the 1917 Communist revolution in Europe and decided to modify the Marxist-Leninist project of world revolution by mixing Marx and Freud. Eventually, the “Frankfurters” came to the conclusion that the best way to smash capitalism was not through the cultivation of the working-class indignation but through undermining Western culture and civilization (traditional family, gender hierarchies, and sexual norms). In the 1930s, being kicked out by national socialists from Germany, the Frankfurt School cabal moved to the United States, where it became the “Trojan horse” of the radical left, setting out to erode the culture and values of the United States—the economic and political hub of the Western civilization. One of the major proponents of this view has been Lind, who in fact was instrumental in popularizing the expression “Cultural Marxism” on the right. It is mostly by drawing on his writings that the left journalists came up with the argument that this expression serves as an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Several scholars and writers have recently revisited the activities of the Frankfurt School and the content of Cultural Marxism, trying to separate the conspiracy elements from actual intellectual links between the “Frankfurters” and the current cultural left.23 Although I believe that the term “Cultural Marxism” can be useful, especially when we need to stress those links, it might be too narrow. So, I personally prefer to use such broad definitions as the “cultural left” and “identitarian left.” The Frankfurt School originated from a meeting in Thuringia, Germany, where in May 1923, political scientist Felix Weil and an economics scholar Friedrich Pollock (both were radicalized sons of rich German-Jewish manufacturers) brought together a group of social scholars and bohemians, primarily of German-Jewish and German origin, for the so-called Marxist Work Week.24 Indeed, the major item on their agenda was to explore how to better unleash the revolutionary potential of the Western proletariat that was incapable to replicate the Bolshevik 1917 Revolution. Eventually, the intellectuals and activists who took part in that event were able to get an affiliation with the Frankfurt University. This was the formal birth of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. The institute was funded by Weil, whose contribution in fact was the largest monetary investment ever made into German social sciences prior to World War II.25 Scholars also believe that this 1923 event was a symbolic spark that ignited the emergence of Western Marxism.26 The Marxist Work Week included George (György) Lukács, Karl Korsch, Karl Wittfogel, Julian Gumperz, and Richard Sorge. This was a bunch of colorful characters who later became famous in various fields, from philosophy and history to the murky world of international espionage. Lukács was a

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German-speaking intellectual of a Jewish-Hungarian extract who was trained as an economist and a philosopher at the Budapest University. From early on, this son of a wealthy banker felt guilty about his affluent origin. In 1919, Lukács joined the short-lived communist government of Soviet Hungary as a minister of culture, and, after the debacle of that regime, he escaped to Soviet Union. There, he wrote on Marxist aesthetics, narrowly surviving the slaughterhouse of Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. Lukács is mostly known for his book on working-class consciousness, which, in the 1960s, made him into one of the major icons of the New Left.27 Like Lukács, Gumperz was a “trust baby.” The son of a rich Americanborn Jewish-German factory owner, he received a good university education and became a Marxist economist. In addition to editing the German Communist Party newspaper, Gumperz became the husband of adventurous Hede Massing, a Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) operative. No less colorful was her friend Sorge, a playboy intellectual of a German-Russian origin, who too worked for the Soviet Military Intelligence. Being born in a family of a top executive of a German oil company, Sorge developed a despise for the world of affluence and remained a fanatic believer into communism to the very end. On Soviet orders, he wiggled himself into the German embassy in Japan. At some point, in 1938, cosmopolitan Sorge lost trust of his provincial and paranoid Stalinist bosses who contemplated about bringing him to Moscow for either an execution or imprisonment. Then they chose to silently drop him, which did not discourage the fanatic true believer to work for the Soviets on his own. Eventually, Sorge was caught and executed by the Japanese in 1944.28 Philosopher Korsch, who, like Lukács, contributed heavily to Western Marxism, came from a middle-class German family. Korsch was introduced into the “trade” by his father who dubbed into philosophy as a hobby. The son later picked up this passion and made it into a profession. In his early years, Korsch became famous for his ardent opposition to World War I. By intentionally joining the German army, he set out to show off his active pacifism at frontlines. An Aryan version of American Desmond Doss, Korsch refused to take a gun in his hands, trying instead to jump into the middle of combat actions to save as many wounded as possible. Later, Korsch joined communists and became an active participant in the abortive 1918 German revolution. A free spirit, the philosopher was never fully admitted into the ranks of the faithful communists because of his irritating habit to pester his totalitarian comrades by demands that the Marxist creed be always questioned and adjusted to changing times. Korsch became famous for his Marxism and Philosophy (1926).29 In this book, the philosopher insisted that the role of the proletariat as the “political messiah” was not absolute. It was conditioned by circumstances and a time period, and the “proletarian baton” could be passed

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to another group. The latter was later to become an important intellectual jumping ground for those New Left who wanted to revisit the “messiah role” of the proletariat. Wittfogel, another German member of the Frankfurt School, was a historian of China and simultaneously an active communist organizer. Later, in the 1950s, disgusted with what he referred to as a backward Asiatic Soviet model of socialism, he produced a thick volume with a catchy title Oriental Despotism, a sweeping condemnation of autocratic Eastern despotic regimes from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to contemporary communist Russia and China.30 Later, the Frankfurt family was joined by non-communist German-Jewish left scholars such Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Bloch, Wilhelm Reich, Franz Neumann, and Walter Benjamin. Some of them were secularized intellectuals, whereas others maintained spiritual and intellectual links with the world of Judaism. Thus, Horkheimer, who became the director of the institute in 1930, Adorno, and Marcuse were completely secular philosophers. In contrast, Fromm, Lowenthal, and Bloch, at first were active in traditional Judaism discussion groups headed by charismatic rabbis. Later, being drawn to Freudian and Marxist ideas, they dropped out from their faith and became secularized by dubbing in psychoanalysis.31 In fact, several of the “Frankfurters” claimed that they exorcised their Judaism by undergoing actual therapy sessions on the proverbial Freudian couch—a popular cultural fad among progressive middle-class bohemians in the 1910s and the 1920s. Incidentally, the ideological mix of Marx and Freud became the signature approach of the Frankfurt School. Engaging Freud’s ideas became a way out of the economic determinism of classical Marxism. Lowenthal explained their original drive to assimilate Freud into Marxism as follows: “The systematic interest that must have spawned this fascination with psychoanalysis for me and many of my intellectual fellow travelers was very likely the ideal of ‘marrying’ historical materialism with psychanalysis. One of the fundamental problems in Marxist theory is, after all, the absence of mediating elements between the base and superstructure, which psychological theory might supply. And for us, psychoanalysis came to fill this gap.”32 After 1933, all members of the Frankfurt School had to escape to the United States, where they continued to drift away from classical Marxism, simultaneously trying to humanize and revolutionize that creed. Since the 1960s, the Frankfurt scholars’ writings came to exercise a powerful influence on the entire Western intellectual culture. The texts of F-scholars shaped the minds of two generations of American and British social scholars, who later developed them into what today is known as Critical Theory—an attempt to dissect surrounding life (including economy, art, entertainment industry,

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social scholarship, advertising, education, family relations, work space) to pinpoint ideological, social, and racial interests that are believed to hide behind any personal, social, economic, and political activities. Concerned about the ways of engaging and waking up the proletarian “sleeping beauty,” the 1923 Marxist Work Week revolved around the discussion of History and Class Consciousness (1923) by Lukács. In this volume, in metaphysical terms, Lukács speculated about the collective mind of the working class as the ultimate embodiment of the progressive spirit and the highest form of human wisdom. In the 1920s, the book had been condemned by Moscow ideologists for its idealism and was forgotten. Yet, the New Left excavated it in the 1960s, turning it into one of their sacred texts. For mature Marx and later for Lenin, class consciousness of the proletariat was conditioned by its economic status in society and determined by the laws of historical evolution. At the same time, Lenin argued that the collective mind of workers was doomed to remain dormant if not awaked by a vanguard party—a group of enlightened Marxist activists, who knew how to read the laws of history and when to choose a revolutionary “judgment day” to smash capitalism. Such vanguard party was to act as a collective missionary that was to wake up proletarians and educate them about their historical mission, instill revolutionary knowledge in their minds, and lead them to revolutionary battles. There was a “dialectical” ambiguity in Lenin’s argument. On the one hand, the behavior of the proletariat was conditioned by their economic status and historical laws, and they were to “ripe” for revolutionary battles on their own. Yet, on the hand, it was assumed that there must be a group of superheroes (a professional vanguard armed with superior knowledge) who were to arrive from outside and inject from above the “holy spirit” of the revolutionary knowledge into the proletarian masses. Lukács sought to overcome this ambiguity by arguing that the proletariat by its very status already represented a “vanguard” class of people endowed with the highest wisdom that did not need a navigator. Lukács viewed the working class as the ultimate revolutionary “noble savage.” This muscular collective “atlas shrugged” from industrial urban “jungles” was not overburdened with superfluous bourgeois knowledge. Proletarians were pure and wholesome. As the “chosen people,” they possessed the whole truth, which others did not have. They were able to “feel” history with its twists and turns. As a class, they already possessed superior knowledge that other classes and groups in society did not have. According to Lukács, the proletariat knew the future and was actively working to near it.33 Comintern propaganda workers quickly noticed that in this scheme there was no room for a party vanguard and correctly denounced Lukács’ book as a dangerous heresy. According to Lukács, instead of acting as superior masters, radical left intellectuals were to “go native” and learn from proletarians. Only the

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members of the revolutionary proletariat and those outsiders who completely assimilated its wisdom were capable to acquire “inner knowledge” that allowed them to understand the present and future, and especially to figure out what needed to be done about launching a revolution. How do we know that the proletariat was superior to the rest of the population? The answer, according to Lukács, was simple: the Marxist teaching “scientifically” proved the proletariat’s historical role through the theory of socioeconomic formations. As we remember, this theory claimed that, at the very end of the “oppressive days,” the working-class would come to the forefront as the ultimate savior of the humankind. To Lukács, Marxism represented the cutting-edge science of the day. As such, it provided the only authentic vision of the world and its future. Lukács assumed that non-Marxists, who pursued “false knowledge,” were not capable to comprehend and explain society and history. To gain the true knowledge, one had to become a part of the Marxists thought collective and “go native” by converting to the high wisdom of the proletariat—another edition of the old romantic “noble savage” utopia in a new garb. In other words, Lukács insisted that a person would see the “light” only after his or her conversion to Marxism and assimilating the proletarian “spirit.” Later, in the 1960s, with the eclipse the “scientific” hubris of traditional Marxism, the New Left eagerly picked up this “go proletarian” line of Lukács’ thought and developed it further. Lukács resonated with the radical activists who wanted to believe that, once they mastered the working-class “mindset” and became real proletarian “Injuns,” they could perform a revolution any time irrespective of circumstances. It was assumed that those who assimilated the proletariat “spirit” were not constrained anymore by natural laws of history. Neither were they concerned about an economic “basis.” In fact, later, some among the New Left openly declared that socialism was “an active faith in a new society.”34 After their relocation to the United States in the 1930s, the Frankfurt scholars became famous for their research into the so-called authoritarian personality, singling out composite character traits that they attributed exclusively to the people on the right.35 Moreover, they developed a so-called F-scale—a psychological litmus test that allowed to pinpoint “fascist” right-wing tendencies by grading people on the basis of nine character traits: submission, aggression, anti-intellectualism, superstition, stereotyping, longing for power, destructiveness, lack of imagination, and obsession with sex. Adorno was unpleasantly surprised when a colleague who was not associated with the “Frankfurters” pointed to him that their F-scale in fact could be equally applicable to left-wing radicals.36 The F-scale and “fascism studies” are considered one of the major Frankfurt School contributions that were later assimilated into mainstream humanities and culture.37

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Marxist sociologist Bershady, a veteran New Left and himself a product of the immigrant socialist subculture of the Eastern European Jewry, stressed that this “Frankfurt methodology” reeked of moralistic bigotry because it totally ignored the vast army of authoritarians on the left. In fact, Bershady went further by dismissing Frankfurt scholars’ approach to society as an intellectual arrogance. He suggested that they channeled into their research their own personal traumatic experiences as Jewish refugees from the German national socialists.38 Meeting and interacting with one of the Frankfurters (Marcuse) in person and reading the writings of this intellectual collective, Bershady was also stunned by their obsession with the alienation issue in modern society. As an American-born scholar, Bershady could not get rid of an impression that the whole alienation business in fact represented blown out of proportions intellectual speculations based on their own personal experiences as Jews. Growing up within German culture that simultaneously had been rejecting them as ethnic aliens, they might have projected this personal experience to the rest of society.39 The “one-dimensional” view of society demonstrated by the Frankfurters especially revealed themselves in the scholarship of Marcuse, who is considered an intellectual guru of the New Left in the 1960s–1970s (see Fig. 14.2). Besides his writings on the repressive nature of the Western civilization that, as he argued, restrained natural “organic” instincts of human beings, this philosopher became known for his political message addressed to the New Left—the essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965).40 Marcuse argued that, despite their declared tolerance and formal constitutional freedoms, Western liberal democracies were repressive because they reflected the interests of the dominant Euro-American majority. To correct this situation and to give voice to the “damned of the earth” (left-wing political movements, women, people of “color” and other minorities), one needed to withdraw toleration and freedom of speech from those whom Marcuse relegated to the political basket of a reactionary majority. He insisted that the system must be bent in favor of the left because they were the embodiment of the righteous and history was on their side. As a Marxist, Marcuse viewed political life as a zero-sum game, and, for him, maintaining an equal playing field for all groups in society was out of question. He did realize that deciding who would be assigned the role of a “bad” guy to be squashed was a tricky question. To give an additional boost to his argument, the philosopher resorted to the following “logic.” He insisted that, despite occasional drawbacks, the historical record of the left was generally good and benevolent in contrast to the right who were always evil and sinister. Marcuse especially stressed that brutalities and violence that accompanied Chinese, Cuban, and Russian revolutions were totally justified because these had been done for the sake of the greater good and directed against well-to-do classes.

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Figure 14.2  Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), One of the Deans of the New Left, Speaks at a Mass Rally in Frankfurt, Germany (June 6, 1972), in Defense of His Student Angela Davis, an American Communist Activist Who was Arrested for Supplying Guns in a Plot to Assist a Prison Escape for One of Her Comrades. Source: Courtesy of Keystone Press/ Alamy Stock Photo.

Driven by such “logic” and historical “evidence,” Marcuse concluded, “Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements on the Left.”41 Explaining how to make the existing system fair, the philosopher suggested that the power of the state be used to restrict liberties for the right by adopting special laws and educational decrees. He defined these discriminatory restrictions on thought and speech of those who did not belong to “progressive” classes and groups as “liberating tolerance.” Marcuse openly called to ban “regressive” indoctrination and instead to aggressively promote “progressive” indoctrination.42 Eventually, as he prophesized, this strategy was to make room for what the philosopher defined as the “better forms of life.” Social scholarship, media, and education, stressed Marcuse, should all ideologically educate people, which would help to do away with value-free learning.43 Again, the philosopher understood that the measures he suggested meant censorship. Yet, he did not see here any problem, insisting that this would be a noble censorship, serving a good cause and directed against the “censorship of free media.” Marcuse’s ideological prescriptions, which later entered the cultural mainstream, planted the seeds of infamous political correctness that has been retarding the intellectual life in the United States and other Western countries.

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NOTES 1. For more on the Kravchenko daring escape to the United States in 1945 and the Western left massive campaign to shut him down, see Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, 181–265. 2. John Osborn, Look Back in Anger (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 84. 3. Stuart Hall, “Life and Times of the First New Left,” New Left Review 61, no. 1 (2010): 177. 4. Stuart Hall, “A Sense of Classlessness,” Universities & Left Review 5 (1958): 26–31, https​:/​/pd​​fs​.se​​manti​​cscho​​lar​.o​​rg​/9e​​87​/2b​​6df78​​cfef9​​69512​​af32d​​2aab​8​​f0d84​​ b453.​​pdf 5. Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 88. For a critique of Williams’ Cultural Materialism (Cultural Marxism) from the classical Marxist angle, see R. S. Neale, “Cultural Materialism: A Critique,” Social History 9, no. 2 (1984): 199–215. 6. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964). 7. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 283–303. 8. Herbert Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, With Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); Steven Gotzler, “Speaking of the Working Class: On Richard Hoggart,” Lost Angeles Review of Books, April 25 (2018), https​:/​/la​​revie​​wofbo​​oks​.o​​rg​/ar​​ticle​​/spea​​ king-​​of​-th​​e​-wor​​king-​​class​​-on​-​r​​ichar​​d​-hog​​gart/​ 9. James D. Young, “Neo-Marxism and the British New Left,” Survey, January (1967), https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​histo​​ry​/et​​ol​/wr​​iters​​/youn​​g​/196​​7​/ne​o​​ -marx​​ism​.h​​tm. 10. Hobsbawm, “The Standard of Living During the Industrial Revolution,” 119– 134. This debate was lingering on for a long time with scholars bringing to the picture more statistics and changing their time spans and angles to back up their arguments. For example, some left scholars, who were not able to deny radical improvements in the living conditions of English labor between the 1760s and the 1860s, began talking about relative deprivation in contrast to absolute deprivation. 11. Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: Life in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 352. 12. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1959). 13. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, SeptemberOctober (1960): 18–23, https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​subje​​ct​/hu​​manis​​m​/mil​​ls​-c-​​wrigh​​t​/ let​​te​r​-n​​ew​-le​​ft​.ht​​m; Daniel Geary, “‘Becoming International Again’: C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left, 1956–1962,” The Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008): 11; Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 87–88, 93.

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14. Antonio Gramsci, Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 55–132. 15. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 237–244. 16. Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1959–1972 (New York: Dodd, Mean & Co., 1974), vii; Nikos Sotirakopoulos, The Rise of Lifestyle Activism: from New Left to Occupy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 39–40. 17. Williams, Culture and Society, 290. 18. Patrick Garrat, “Herbert Marcuse and ‘Cultural Marxism’,” Verso Blog, March 29 (2019), https​:/​/ww​​w​.ver​​soboo​​ks​.co​​m​/blo​​gs​/42​​85​-he​​rbert​​-marc​​use​-a​​nd​-c​u​​ltura​​l​ -mar​​xism;​ Tanner Mirrlees, “The Alt-right’s Discourse on ‘Cultural Marxism’: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate,” Atlantis Journal 39, no. 1 (2018), http:​ /​/jou​​rnals​​.msvu​​.ca​/i​​ndex.​​php​/a​​tlant​​is​/ar​​ticle​​​/view​​/5403​; Ben Alpers, “A Far-Right Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Becomes a Mainstream Irritable Gesture,” Society for US Intellectual History, December 1 (2018), https​:/​/s-​​usih.​​org​/2​​018​/1​​2​/a​-f​​ar​-ri​​ght​ -a​​nti​-s​​emiti​​c​-con​​spira​​cy​-th​​eory-​​becom​​es​-a-​​mains​​t​ream​​-irri​​table​​-gest​​ure/;​ Ari Paul, “‘Cultural Marxism’: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope,” FAIR, June 4 (2019), https​:/​/fa​​ir​.or​​g​/hom​​e​/cul​​tural​​-marx​​ism​-t​​he​-ma​​instr​​eamin​​g​-of​-​​a​-naz​​i​-tro​​pe/. 19. For the most recent critical study of the Critical Theory, including the Critical Race Theory, see Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity-and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020), 111–123. 20. Ioan Davies, “British Cultural Marxism,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 323–344; Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain; Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies [2004],” https​:/​/pa​​ges​.g​​seis.​​ucla.​​edu​/f​​acult​​y​/kel​​lner/​​essay​​s​/cul​​tur​al​​marxi​​sm​.pd​f 21. John Hutnyk, Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor, MI and London: Pluto Press, 2004); North, The Frankfurt School, Post-Modernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. 22. William S. Lind, “The Roots of Political Correctness,” American Conservative November 19, 2009, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ameri​​canco​​nserv​​ative​​.com/​​2009/​​11​/19​​/the-​​roots​​ -of​-p​​oliti​​ca​l​-c​​orrec​​tness​/; Kerry Bolton, “Cultural Marxism: Origins, Development and Significance,” The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies 43, no. 3–4 (2018): 272–284, http:​/​/jsp​​es​.or​​g​/sam​​ples/​​JSPES​​43​_3_​​4​_b​ol​​ton​.p​​df; Jefrey D. Breshears, American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and the Culture War, A Christian Response (Marietta, GA: Centre Pointe Publishing, 2020). 23. Keith Preston, The Tyranny of the Politically Correct: Totalitarianism in the Postmodern Age (London: Black House, 2016); Alexander Zubatov, “Just Because Anti-Semites Talk About ‘Cultural Marxism’ Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Real,” Tablet, November 29, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.tab​​letma​​g​.com​​/scro​​ll​/27​​6018/​​just-​​becau​​se​-an​​ti​ -se​​mites​​-talk​​-abou​​t​-cul​​tural​​-marx​​ism​-d​​o​esnt​​-mean​​-it​-i​​snt​-r​​eal; Allen Mendenhall, “Cultural Marxism is Real,” Mises Wire, January 9, 2019, https​:/​/mi​​ses​.o​​rg​/wi​​re​/ cu​​ltura​​l​-mar​​​xism-​​real;​ Dominic Green, “What’s Wrong with ‘Cultural Marxism’?” Spectator USA, March 28 (2019), https​:/​/sp​​ectat​​or​.us​​/what​​s​-wro​​ng​-cu​​ltura​​l​​-mar​​ xism/​.

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24. For more about the lifestyles and sentiments of these “bourgeois communists,” see the memoirs by a German-Jewish socialite and Soviet military intelligence spy, who was hanging with people from the Frankfurt circle in its early days: Massing, This Deception, 26–82. 25. von Mises, Omnipotent Government, 210–211. 26. John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 62. For more on the history of the Frankfurt School, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1994). 27. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923] (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1971). 28. Robert Whymant, Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006) 29. For an English translation, see Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). 30. Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). 31. Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School, 64, 187–188. 32. Ibid., 194. 33. Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, 270. 34. Hall, “Life and Times of the First New Left,” 194. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). 36. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 71. 37. Ibid., 78. 38. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 236. 39. Ibid., 238–239. 40. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 81–123. 41. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 109. 42. Ibid., 101, 104. 43. Ibid., 112.

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The Cultural Left and the “Curse” of the Western Civilization, 1960s–2010s

Many among the New Left were ready to give up on proletarians who “misbehaved” by converting to “bourgeois” values, virtues, materialism, and enjoying the material perks of capitalism. The former “noble savages” who were destined to become the “chosen people” to redeem humankind from oppressive capitalism, were all sucked into the consumer culture of capitalism. From a traditional Marxist viewpoint, they betrayed the true cause and adopted the “false consciousness.” Thus, Marcuse argued that the bourgeoisie was purposely buying the loyalty of masses by improving their living standards to make sure these masses would not desire to make fundamental changes in political system and their personal lives.1 In 1962, Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for Democratic Society, a U.S.-based New Left organization, told his comrades that the working class “is not just the missionary force we can count on.”2 In fact, as early as the 1920s, several members of the Frankfurt School had already expressed doubts about the “chosen ones” as the great revolutionary hope. Pollock, one of the founders of the school, remembered how, during that decade, he, along with Erich Fromm and several other “Frankfurters,” had been upset about the revolutionary potential of industrial workers: “The workers were much more interested in middle-class furniture and apartments than in transforming society.”3 Furthermore, the whole structure of traditional labor was undergoing a dramatic change in postwar Europe and North America. In the 1970s, 42% European workers were employed in blue-collar manufacturing jobs. By the 1990s, this number further dropped to 33%, and in the early 2000s, it declined to 16%. The increasing number of people entered service industries; in our days, the shift to digital technologies has continued washing out manufacturing jobs. Finally, in 1982, André Gorz, one of the prominent New Left ideologists, pointing to social and economic changes that phased out the traditional 359

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industrial proletarians, came up with a landmark book whose title sounded as a verdict: Farewell to the Working Class.4 Exorcising the messiah class from the body of socialism was not a straight-forward process. In the 1960s, among the emerging New Left, marginalized communist parties, and Trotskyite fossils, there were still activists who continued to believe into the revolutionary élan of the proletariat. In fact, the most committed still tried to “go native” by shedding their middleclass bourgeois skins. A good example is Joschka Fischer, a prominent 1960s radical who later was active in the Green party and who subsequently became a Western German foreign minister.5 After a brief stint in the militant Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction, which was specialized in violent attacks on police officers, he decided to “root” himself among proletarians. With his fellow student radicals, Fischer purposely went to work at an Opel automobile factory’s conveyer lines, seeking to establish a bond with working masses and “wake up” their revolutionary potential. Yet, the “oppressed” German workers did not want to have anything to do with the “limousine left” who pestered them by trying to convert them into “authentic” proletarians.6 The New Left were scanning the political horizon for new groups of “chosen people” to act as surrogate proletarians to fulfill the messianic role of liberators. If the “corrupt” proletarians were incapable to perform this role, it should be somebody else who could be qualified to serve as an oppressed victim and simultaneously as the redeemer from the state of oppression. Describing that ideological quest of the 1960s–1970s, Irving Howe, a prominent veteran of the American left, remembered, “Almost everyone on the left, but the Marxist remnants especially, was fervently on the hunt for a ‘substitute proletariat’—some agency that might yet undertake the historical mission assigned to the workers by Marxism. Some turned to the blacks, some to Asian and African peasantries, some to the intelligentsia, some to homosexuals and—in the last, mad days of the Weatherman—even to high school students.”7 “NOBLE SAVAGES” OF THE NEW LEFT Eventually, the New Left began to transfer metaphysical features of the industrial proletariat to national liberation movements in the Third World, people of “color” within Western countries, chronically unemployed, women and gays. For example, James Young, a British socialist who was witnessing that ideological shift, commented on how his comrades “discovered” for themselves the Third World, “When the indigenous working class had failed to act out its preordained historic role, the substitutionalists soon found their

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saints and saviours in Cuba and Algeria.”8 Just like the proletariat of the old, the newly found groups were thought to become new oppressed redeemers. On the one hand, such revision of traditional Marxism gave an opportunity to the New Left to disentangle themselves from the Old Left. Yet, on the other hand, this very revisionism allowed them to continue the familiar Marxist tradition in the new intellectual garb.9 The abovementioned groups and areas with different economic, social, and political status were frequently lumped together in an abstract category of the poor and disadvantaged. This was another genetic link that connected the New Left with old Marxism that generalized about the proletariat as a homogenous impoverished class, downplaying regional, religious, and economic differences within this group. The most passionate New Left cast the newly found surrogates into authentic, uncorrupt, and holistic people, the caretakers of the egalitarian ethics and natural goodness.10 In a religious-like manner, New Left activist Casey Hayden, described her feelings about the American people of “color” as the newly found classes of the “chosen ones”: “We believed that the last should be the first, and not only should be the first, but in fact were first in our value system. They were first because they were redeemed already, purified by their suffering, and they could therefore take the lead in the redemption of us all.”11 Another New Left writer characteristically titled his book about “unspoiled” and “authentic” rural blacks in Mississippi A Prophetic Minority (1966).12 A large role in shifting the left mainstream toward race and identity issues belonged to Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a popular anti-colonial writer whose landmark text The Wretched of the Earth (1961) became a book of choice for the whole generation of the Third World national liberation activists in the 1960s–1970s. Fanon’s bashing of the West also won him numerous disciples in the countercultural circles and among the New Left in Europe and the United States.13 Between the 1980s and 1990s, assimilated by the academic left (Postcolonial Studies and Critical Race Theory) into educational system and media, Fanon’s writings later became an important ideological source for the rise of identity studies and identity politics.14 A psychotherapist by profession, Fanon was a French-speaking intellectual who took part in World War II and then in the Algerian War of independence (1954–1962). In his writings, Fanon focused not on economic liberation but on the cultural and psychological decolonization of the Third World. Drawing on Marxist class clichés, Fanon revised them along racial lines: “You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”15 One can describe this approach by an expression marxisant, which is used in French language to refer to people who speak Marxist and use its clichés, but who do not necessarily commit themselves to all aspects of its philosophy.16 Fanon insisted that the colonial periphery became the mentally imperiled by Western values, which natives needed to shed off because these were

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“white values”: “Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. Let is not imitate Europe. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”17 In his view, Europe was deadly sick and the keys to the liberation of humanity were in the hands of the Third World that was destined to shape the New Man; incidentally, the latter meme also originated from Marxism. Fanon’s friend Jean-Paul Sartre, a famous French philosopher and Soviet apologist, felt happy that “the most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists.” Repeating the classical formula of the old left, Sartre assumed that the mingling of race with class was “not a conclusion” but a transitional stop on the way to a greater color-blind commonwealth. When Fanon read these Sartre’s words, he felt utterly offended as if he was robbed of his identity. Contrary to what his philosopher friend believed, for Fanon, “racialized Marxism” was the conclusion.18 Traumatized by the brutalities of the French he witnessed during the Algerian liberation war, Fanon insisted that nothing connected the colonizers and the colonized except racist violence. Ignoring the multitude of social, economic, and cultural relations in the contemporary colonial and postcolonial periphery, he argued that “the colonial world is a Manichean world.”19 In his irreconcilable “black and white” world, oppressed victims held the ultimate truth because of their sheer status of being colonized people. To Fanon, morality and truth were relative. They depended on how well these two things served a liberation cause. This included lying and committing violence, provided these vices served a good cause. Stressing that truth was a matter of political expediency, he wrote, “Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects natives, and ruins foreigners. In this colonialist context, there is not truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil to ‘them’.”20 To overcome their oppressive state, the colonized had to take the place of their masters by resorting to a redemptive violence. The “natives,” who wasted their energy in mutual tribal conflicts and indulged into ecstatic tribal dances, were better to channel their energy into the anti-colonial violence against whites.21 In fact, violence occupied an important place in the entire Fanon’s liberation philosophy. He romanticized violence and attributed to it a pedagogical value: “Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.”22 Fanon viewed violence not only as a tool of liberation and education but also as a powerful vehicle of a nation-building and racial consolidation. In the process of their struggle, oppressed natives were expected to nourish the sense of a unified

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collective: “Individualism is the first to disappear,” and “the community triumphs.”23 Using Marxist categories and simultaneously filling them with a new content, Fanon argued that in undeveloped colonial countries the only revolutionary class was peasants. These rural masses carried armed struggle from the countryside into cities. This meant that the class that was to liberate the colonial periphery and the rest of humankind from capitalism was not industrial workers (proletarians) but the Third World peasantry; incidentally, this nicely resonated with what Chinese communists preached at that time about the Third World “proletarian” countryside challenging the Western and Soviet “urban” imperialism. With such a view, Fanon naturally came to idealize Third World peasant collectives as the cradle of the ideal human commonwealth. Invoking the romantic meme of European primitivism, he contrasted “evil” Western individualism with the “noble” African culture of collectivism represented by village councils, people’s committees. According to Fanon, the anti-colonial struggle was to rekindle and strengthen those collectives. Moreover, a solidarity nourished during an anti-colonial war was to heal a corrupt indigenous bourgeoise—the creature of the West.24 Through its involvement into the common anti-colonial movement, this bourgeoise would reunite itself with its indigenous soil, merging with common into a united Volksgemeinschaft-type people’s community. Out of anti-colonial sentiments of such Third World intellectuals as Fanon and their colleagues from Western countries, there grew a natural animosity to the West, which was held collectively responsible for colonialism. This attitude went hand in hand with the increasing idealization of non-Western societies as the holders of better forms of life. The fact that in the 1950s and the 1960s, the West was involved into two bloody colonial wars (France in Algeria, and the United States in Vietnam) amplified those sentiments. As a result, since the 1960s, for the left, the major existential enemy was increasingly associated with the Western civilization that was linked to imperialism, colonialism, consumerism, and moral decay. In the 1960s, writer Susan Sontag conveyed well that negative attitude, which was becoming part of the intellectual mainstream, by saying that the white West was the “cancer of human history.”25 Given such attitude, the New Left silently assumed that groups and societies that were classified as oppressed by the West should not to be held responsible for crimes, suppression of the dissent, and the lack of freedom of speech. To do otherwise was interpreted as blaming victims. Morality of political movements and individual regimes did not matter if a political force, ethnic group, and a country was on the side of the “righteous.” For example, mass violence and abuse during the Cultural Revolution in China, imprisonment of

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dissidents and gays in Cuba, criminal links of Black Panthers, virulent antiwhite racism and anti-Matabele chauvinism of the Zimbabwe regime were played down or simply ignored. Feminist activist Kathie Sarachild rationalized such approach as follows: “Truth is in the interest of the oppressed and against the interests of the oppressor. Taking sides is what it’s all about.”26 This profoundly ideological approach implied the purity of intention, which must be demonstrated through a ceaseless fight against the impure.27 Like in the case of industrial proletarians, those individuals among the newly found “chosen” groups who did not display “correct” behavior that fit a progressive narrative were dismissed as people who were infested with “false consciousness” and who were not “authentic” members of their own groups. Later, this attitude gave rise to such memes as “genuine” and “non-genuine” blacks, women, gays, and so forth. The shift from “economic Marxism” to “cultural Marxism” was accompanied by the change of ideological beacons. The “European” Soviet Union was not (or better to say was not the only) the left-wing Mecca anymore. Her already tarnished reputation was further undermined by the brutal suppression of Czechoslovakia’s “socialism with a human face” in 1968. New utopian lands emerged on the left horizon to be worshipped, visited, and advertised. And all these new places were located in the Third World: China, Vietnam, and Cuba. Stalin, Lenin, and even Marx with Engels were either complemented or replaced as holy fathers by new icons such as Mao (see, for example, Fig. 15.1), Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. Third World elites and spokespeople, who made the critique of the Western civilization the signature approach of their nation-building, came to exercise a powerful effect on the political identity of the New Left in the West. Even for the traditional class-oriented left, assailing the Western civilization as the den of racism and imperialism gradually came to occupy an essential ideological place besides their critique of capitalism as an economic system. Thus, despite being formally tied to the conventional Marxian theology, British Trotskyites from the Socialist Workers Party were among the first traditional Marxists who, as early as the 1970s, pointed to the “progressive potential” of the radical Islam. Admitting that Islam was reactionary, they nevertheless pointed out that this religion manifested strong anti-Western sentiments. As such, it moved in the “progressive” direction. Driven by this sentiment, the British Trotskyites declared Islam a powerful engine of a new insurrection of the oppressed against the West. The animosity toward Western institutions, which were considered the major source of oppression, permitted an alliance with forces that were described as “less dangerous” and “less oppressive,” including those that denied people their fundamental human rights.28 Apparently, a similar quest for new allies and

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Figure 15.1  Strengthening Bonds Between the Western Identitarian Left and the Third World Communism: In the Process of his Conversion to Communism and Relocation to Socialist Ghana, Willian Dubois (1868–1963), a Prominent Pan-African Intellectual from the United States, Meets Chinese Dictator Mao Tse-Tung, 1959. Source: Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries MS 312, mums312-i0741

potential redeemers drove Michele Foucault, a 1960s’ radical and later one of the classics of current Western humanities, to briefly flirt with the 1979 Islamic revolution as a new revolutionary light coming from the East.29 A similar ideological transformation was performed by the cultural left with racial, ethnic, and religious groups that were defined as oppressed within their own Western societies (e.g., blacks, Native Americans, later Muslim immigrants). This revisionism fed nicely into the abovementioned narrative promoted by many Third World writers and intellectuals that their indigenous cultures were inherently socialistic and did not need to appropriate class-based Marxism that was hopelessly Eurocentric.30 Thus, in his landmark Black Marxism, African-American political scientist Cedrick Robinson came up with a concept of “racial capitalism,” arguing that it had been race and race

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exploitation rather than class that had defined the development of Europe, Americas and the rest of the world since as early as middle ages. He also stressed that, in modern time, blacks in the Atlantic world developed their own egalitarian socialist tradition that was self-sufficient and did not depend on Western Marxism.31 In his polemics with a U.S.-based and pro-Chinese Revolutionary Communist Party, Ward Churchill, a Caucasian ethnic studies scholar who masquaraded as a Native American, argued that Native Americans did not need European-based Marxism because, by their very nature, American Indians had been tribal egalitarians prior to Marx.32 The overall outcome of such racial and cultural revision of Marxism was the idealization of the “egalitarian” indigenous tradition of “non-Western” people. Gender issues and discrepancies were too revised through the eyes of that “Cultural Marxism” and phrased in the categories of oppression and exploitation. Let us see, for example, how women were assimilated into that paradigm as surrogate proletarians. With the wide involvement of women into a labor force and politics, the left had to revise traditional Marxism that had been preoccupied with the idealization of muscular male proletarians as the ultimate “noble savages” of the socialist creed. In response to this, in a form of an imagined letter to “Dear Mr. Marx,” socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham criticized the founding father for his male-centered view of the working class.33 Among other things, she blamed Marx for neglecting child-rearing, domestic cooking and cleaning as legitimate “proletarian activities” that, strictly speaking, were no different from the labor performed by poster male proletarians who handled machines, steel, and coal at industrial sites—the major “sacred space” in classical Marxism. Judging by the Manichean ideological logic of Marxism, she was absolutely right. Indeed, why should one privilege the “oppressed” male proletarian who handled “heavy metals” at a proverbial factory and dismiss a woman who was “exploited” by a male partner at the household and kitchen “factory” by performing domestic work? Pushing gender to the center of a revolutionary struggle, left-leaning feminists and the New Left who embraced radical feminism began to argue that, by itself, the fixation on class would not resolve women’s inequality. The most ardent proponents of this approach insisted that the traditional Marxist account of history did not make sense because the number one oppressor was not capitalism but patriarchy. Criticizing canonical books of traditional Marxism, socialist feminists nevertheless singled out those classical writings that they found useful. For example, they amplified the significance of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, where the founder had romanticized “primitive” tribal societies, particularly the Iroquois Indians who allegedly had practiced matriarchy and had been ruled by matrons before the coming of the white man.34 The vibrant multimillion workshop and print culture of the New Age, which

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propagated Goddess spirituality and valorized matriarchy as the primordial foundational stone of society at its dawn, provided a powerful spiritual background to that narrative. Recasting the old Marxist doctrine of the proletariat into the feminist garb, the 1969 Manifesto of the Redstockings (a New Left feminist group) stated, “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet or our lives. The conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.”35 Very much like industrial proletarians in traditional male-oriented Marxism, women as a group were now ascribed profound metaphysical wisdom and redeeming qualities of the class that was destined to usher in the new world of peace, love, and prosperity. By the 1990s, for many socialist feminists, who grew out of the New Left, women as new revolutionary “noble savages” effectively replaced male proletarians as redeemers of the world from oppression. Just as communist radicals, who had scorned those social-democratic workers who had been prone to “bourgeois” virtues and who had no wish to go to “barricades” and join the cause, radical feminists dismissed women who chose to “confine” themselves to their families and “female” occupations as “lost souls” who were trapped in the web of false consciousness; the latter was a metaphor appropriated from classical Marxism.36 Very much like old Marxist scholarship, which had revolved around the working-class perspective as the only correct way of viewing the world, feminist scholarship began to claim the status of the privileged knowledge.37 The gradual shift of the New Left attention from the “corrupted” Western working class to the Third World, women, and minorities’ issues eventually changed the ideological face of the mainstream left in the West. The old dichotomy of capitalist oppressor and the proletarian oppressed was gradually replaced by a new ideological paradigm: the “white” male Western civilization as the oppressor and the rest of the world cultures as its oppressed victims. MARXIAN SOCIALISTS AND THE CULTURAL LEFT By the early 2000s, identity agenda of the cultural left acquired the status of the mainstream thinking in many Western universities, where it found a haven.38 Eventually, this agenda metastasized into a politico-cultural industry with its ideological apparatus that used administrative and judicial system to police and streamline “diversity” in various walks of life. Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, who has been trying to revive the traditional class-based approach, noted with alarm, “The ideology of political correctness, which treat society as a conglomeration of minorities that need protection, turned

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into a new orthodoxy, which in fact became more aggressive and intolerant that the earlier [conservative] one.”39 Shiva, a Pakistani-American writer and another left critic of his identitarian colleagues, commented with frustration on the runaway identity-based politics that became infallible: “None dare to question the catechism, except at the cost of excommunication. The icons of identity politics are beyond the pale of criticism.”40 The traditional class-oriented leftists, who were increasingly marginalized, began lamenting that the identity politics embraced by the mainstream Western left destroyed the solidarity of people. The most ardent left critics of the cultural turn stressed that the identitarian left in fact helped “neoliberalism” to control masses by empowering the old “capitalist” tactic of divide and rule. Particularly, the traditional left became worried that their identityobsessed comrades not only downplayed class issues, which transcended race and ethnic differences, but they also treaded the dangerous “blood and soul” ground by toying with the mystique of culture and race.41 The most recent intellectual battle between the class-based left and the identitarians concerned so-called Project 1619—an ambitious attempt on the part of the cultural left to explain the entire American history and its current problems through the prism of the “original sin” of slavery. This very much upset the American Trotskyites, who, from their class-based angle, stressed that not only blacks, but all other underdogs were equally oppressed by capitalism. They particularly spoke against the unwarranted effort to reduce the driving motive for the 1776 American Revolution exclusively to colonists’ attempt to preserve slavery in North America. In contrast, according to the Marxian interpretation, 1776 was a progressive bourgeois revolution that opened doors for the development of capitalism and the rise of the proletariat, eventually pushing society toward socialism. To Marxian socialists, the political danger for the exclusive fixation on the history of “black America” was the legitimizing of the history of “white America” that only amplified a racial divide and strengthened capitalism.42 To David North, a socialist writer who rebuked Project 1619, one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole conversation on this issue was the mainstream identification of the left with identity politics. In fact, in a quixotic attempt to correct this perception, North had earlier come up with a booklength critical study of the cultural left, whom he defined as pseudo-left and anti-socialist. Among other things, this proud veteran of the Trotskyite movement bashed the “malicious” influence of the Frankfurt School on the entire left fellowship.43 At the same time, upset about the marginalization of the traditional Marxists by their identitarian brethren, North refused to examine social, economic, and intellectual causes for the rise of the cultural left. He was also reluctant to see their genetic links with Marxism. As a true-believer, this Trotskyite writer chose a simple and natural option—to excommunicate

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the rivals for not sticking to the letter of the classical creed. To North, the very shift from the old class-based paradigm to identity politics was the betrayal of Marxism: “After that [1960s] wave of the middle–class radicalism receded, its influence became consolidated in universities and colleges, where so many ex-radicals found tenured positions. From within the walls of the academy, the partisans of the Frankfurt School conducted unrelenting war-not against capitalism but against Marxism. In this struggle, they were remarkably successful.”44 Not infrequently, traditional Marxists also noted that in their attempts to dismantle the “white” “male” Western hegemony, the cultural left muted negative features of non-Western cultures (e.g., Native Americana, Tibetan Buddhism, and African cultures), censoring attempts of cultural criticism and disseminating instead romantic notions about such cultures as the embodiment of highest wisdom. Marxian socialists also became frustrated that all those societies as well as women and gays were portrayed as perpetual victims of Western hegemony.45 According to the critics of the cultural left, the constant politicization of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity of the “non-whites” triggered a natural emergence of the White Power movement—a mirror image of the Black Power, Latino Power and similar movements among the people of “color.”46 Thus, Shivani noted that by cultivating and empowering the racial and ethnic identity of the “underprivileged,” the cultural left legitimized and invited “blood,” “soul,” and “soil” agendas in American politics. Therefore, it was quite natural that “the rise of each group in terms of recognition encourages countervailing reactions amongst other groups, so that recognition becomes simultaneously self-inflating (breeding reactionism and irrationality) and an impossible ideal to attain. Again, the rise of white nationalism recently is a testament to this tendency, a natural corollary to the very logic of identity politics.”47 Shivani and like-minded authors have repeatedly warned that the amplifying of identity issues did a great disservice to the left. It eventually corrupted the entire society, trivialized the liberation cause, and enhanced racial and ethnic animosity and distrust. Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent European Marxist sociologist, has been scornful of those who genuflected and humbled themselves in front of non-Western “others,” while simultaneously despising or casting aside the interests of the deplorable “others” who belonged to their own race and nation. Moreover, he directly confronted American and European mainstream left with a question: what represented their criteria of solidarity: culture or class.48 The sociologist has stressed that within their own identity groups, racial, ethnic, and gender minorities did not share the same economic interests. Poking fun of identity tribalism promoted by the cultural left, Kagarlitsky

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sarcastically noted that, although they were all animals, wolves and sheep happened to have different interests. The ideological discourse of the identitarian left has indeed produced numerous cases of a cognitive dissonance. For example, for the sake of cultural tolerance of the non-Western “others,” they could see no problem in denying gender equality and emancipation for Muslim women, while simultaneously advocating the same rights for their Euro-American sisters. As applied to real life, such “tolerant” attitude has in fact cultivated the most hideous aspects of patriarchic culture. In a similar manner, dealing with the uncontrolled immigration into Western countries, the cultural left have hardly differentiated among migrants to Europe who came from the Middle East and northern Africa. All of them were indiscriminately piled into the same group of the “oppressed” and “suffering” people of “color.” Yet, these people not only had different interests, but they were also involved into fierce mutual conflicts. For example, does it make sense to treat as a homogenous group Muslim fundamentalist “refugees,” who came to milk generous European welfare system, and individuals who fled to the West to break away from that very fundamentalism that they could not stomach? Do we differentiate among migrant workers and migrants who are small businessmen or ethnic Mafiosi? American sociologist Bershady, a veteran Marxist who in fact had added his own two cents to poking holes in the traditional left creed in the 1960s, nevertheless became concerned that left identity politics took over much of social scholarship and the cultural mainstream. What especially frustrated him was the fact that scholar-activists who embraced that methodology downplayed individuality. To them, as Bershady stressed, “I was a Jew, period.” Or in case of a woman: “She was a female, period.” Revisiting his and his comrades’ experiences, the retired New Left baby boomer concluded, “Categories are necessary for many things, certainly for scholarly and scientific research, but they are essentially abstractions and their misuse often obscures the individual person to whom they are applied.”49 Nevertheless, it appears that the whole identity-based methodology contains elements of its natural self-destruction. Somewhere since the 1990s, the cultural left began to question the broad racial, gender, and sexual identity categories that they helped to embed into the fabric of Western political systems. For example, in the United States, the emerging intersectionality theory and its policy prescriptions problematized both the established male-female gender categories and the existing ethno-racial “pentagon” classification (whites, blacks, Asians, Latino, and Native Americans) that was transplanted into the policy machine of the American welfare state since 1977.50 Intersectionality scholars have melted the large identity categories into smaller groups and subgroups of the “oppressed” and “underprivileged,” creating the detailed and complicated hierarchy of the oppressed; incidentally,

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founders of intersectionality stressed that, among others, their intellectual inspiration came from Marxism and nationalism.51 Giving a critical look to the established identity categories, intersectionality scholars did ask correct questions. For example, if a black woman was oppressed as part of the “black race,” what about her being oppressed as a AQ: Please black woman by a black man?52 Or, if males were inherent oppressors and provide females were perpetual victims of patriarchy, how did transgendered people complete fit this Manichean male-female oppression-domination paradigm? Thus, in author name contrast to earlier radical feminists, who treated women as a class oppressed for reference Crenshaw by males, the intersectionality scholarship denied that women had common ‘’Beyond experiences and came to question gender as a category.53 With that, inter- Racism’ in sectionality scholars came to construct new more complicated hierarchies note 52. of victimhood and oppression, provoking a debate who was more oppressed and who was less. This type of natural question is poised to compromise the whole group identity methodology. The ongoing production of the alphabet soup of new exotic groups of victims might soon lead to the collapse of the whole model under its own weight. If one pushes the intersectionality methodology to its logical end, it comes to an absurd conclusion that every individual in our society becomes simultaneously a victim and an oppressor. Having stepped on the path of problematizing the established identity categories, an honest scholar eventually reaches a natural conclusion that the ultimate “minority” is an individual.54 Overall, if the acolytes of the intersectional theory treat it as an open project without reducing it to a new set of fixated identity groups and subgroups, it has a potential to become a positive corrective that might lead social scholarship and policymakers toward a greater appreciation of individual agency. As early as the 1970s, when the identitarian left were still in their infancy, UK socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham had already expressed a concern about the potential traps of the cultural turn: “When the black movement in the late sixtieth followed by women and gay people asserted the idea of oppression which could include the cultural and personal experience of being subordinated as a group as well as economic and social inequalities, it was an important corrective to the emphasis within the left on class and economic exploitation. But arguing in terms of a series of separate ‘oppressions’ can have an ironic consequence. We can forget that people are more than the category of oppression.”55 Drawing on the popular postmodern sensibilities, Rowbotham in fact suggested that further fragmentation of collective identities could be a good thing. It was to become the “socialism of the future” that would leave behind the dark legacy of state worship and the Leninist-style vanguard mindset that haunted and still haunts the left. Indeed, since the 1990s, with the debacle of Soviet-type socialisms and their authoritarian command and control methods,

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segments of the left began to move in a libertarian direction toward maximizing local self-government, self-fulfillment, and individualism. One can see this trend in the increasing popularity of “going horizontal”—a political meme that part of the left has embraced for the past ten years. In fact, this slogan is a direct continuation of the famous call “small is beautiful” that had been drummed by the New Left in the 1960s–1970s. APOCALYPSE NOW: ECO-SOCIALISM The idealization of the female, non-Western, tribal, and the “primitive” by the mainstream left as the new liberation force was a part of their general perception that humans were enslaved and alienated by the technology-driven “male” individualistic West. As was mentioned, this cultural left’s narrative came to downplay the old Marxian story of an economic growth, progress, and capitalism robbing workers of a surplus value. In fact, after the 1960s, the very notion of economic progress became a curse phrase. Reflecting on that intellectual stance, Marxist sociologist Harold Bershady stressed that this trend carried obvious reactionary undertones: “It was a kind of left-wing conservatism.”56 To be fair, the cultural left similarly dismissed the Marxist proponents of progress as retrogrades who got stuck in the past. Moreover, the most radical New Left labeled Marxism as “the most sophisticated ideology of advanced capitalism” that promoted “archaic myths of technological progress and economic determinism.”57 Gradually ditching the failed argument of the old left, who had insisted that capitalism had been profoundly inefficient and could not provide material affluence, the New Left were switching to the moral and cultural critique of that very affluence that now was declared a major vice. Ayn Rand, a rising countercultural icon on the right who, in contrast to the Marxist ultimate proletarian “savior,” invented her own version of a “noble savage” in a form of heroic capitalist “savior” entrepreneur, responded to those sentiments with a loaded sarcasm: “The old-line Marxists used to claim that a single modern factory could produce enough shoes to provide for the whole population of the world and that nothing but capitalism prevented it. When they discovered the facts of reality involved, they declared that going barefoot is superior to wearing shoes.”58 Among the items of the Western affluence, they attacked such “unnecessary” commodities as TV sets, comics magazines, soap operas, and the variety of household items. To this, there were added various nature-related issues such as environment pollution, disasters such as Fukushima, and especially the morbid apocalyptic prophecy about man-made global warming, which was also blamed on the predatory nature of the Western civilization.

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Exposed to sensationalized media stories about actual cases of pollution, both intellectuals and wider public were caught in a perpetual fear of “ecological Hiroshima.”59 It was natural that the New Left found a common ground with environmentalists, many of whom preached an apocalyptic vision of the global collapse of natural habitat if not arrested by massive government regulations. Driven by a spiritual belief that everything in our universe is somehow balanced unless disrupted by human beings, radical environmentalists have amplified the effect of human action on nature. Not trusting the ability of human beings to adapt to human-made and natural changes, they spread around doomsday ecological scenarios along with a conviction that without a total centralized control over economic activities humans would perish. This provided a perfect niche for socialism to rekindle its anti-capitalism and traditional twentieth-century command and control ethos. Therefore, since the 1970s, besides amplifying identity matters, the left began plugging in ecological issues. In fact, the greater part of those who joined the left in the 1970s simultaneously participated in Green and other environmentalist movements. In 1979, Marcuse, an intellectual leader of the New Left, delivered a landmark talk in which he declared that all ecological issues should be treated as political because they were the product of destructive capitalist and state communist systems whose only concern is profit and economic development. This and follow-up statements coming from other radical intellectuals linked environmental movements to left-wing agenda. Dismissing routine conservation projects and struggle for clean environment as petty and trivial, Marcuse and the like held Western capitalist system responsible for all kinds of pollution and ecological problems, suggesting that the resolution of these problems depended on how fast progressive forced smashed that system.60 The drift among the left to join the environmentalism cause escalated after the fall of the Berlin Wall when socialists were struggling to find their new identity. The shift of the New Left priorities from the industrial growth to the critique of this very growth went parallel to the emergence of the ecological awareness and environmental panics such as, for example, the DDT scare that was triggered by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) in the 1960s.61 The publication of the landmark 1972 report Limits to Growth further enhanced the urgency of nationwide and global regulation and centralized control over economy. The report was a “scientific” prophecy with apocalyptic undertones that was based on computer models issued by the so-called Club of Rome, a group of experts from leading Western universities.62 Printed in 30 million copies in 30 languages, Limits to Growth advocated a theological premise that the earth’s resources were finite. The report warned that the humankind

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was doomed because in the first half of the 1990s all earth’s renewable resource (oil, gas, copper, and the like) would be exhausted. Simultaneously, a known population expert Paul Ehrlich added his two cents to that doomsday scenario by giving a second wind to the old Malthusian argument. The scholar passionately argued that the earth’s limited food resources would be depleted and there would no way to feed the planet’s skyrocketing population. The expert predicted that, by the year of 2000, UK would be an impoverished island harboring 70 million hungry inhabitants. To fix the problem, the Club of Rome and Ehrlich envisioned an UN-run planetary regime that was to impose a rational order to control limited resources, ration them globally, distribute wealth from the fortunate to the less fortunate for the sake of survival, and launch mass sterilization programs.63 Since the apocalyptical notion of decline is an enduring part of the Western tradition, the failure of the Limits of Growth and Population Bomb prophecies did not affect new doomsday scenarios.64 Neither did it prevent arrogant attempts to predict future development of the world on the basis of computer models. In contrast to premodern prophecies about the end of the world that had worn a religious garb, modern and postmodern apocalyptic scenarios have been dressed into the language of science, yet still carrying a strong ahistorical religious tone.65 Eco-socialist Brian Tokar conveyed this idea well when he stressed that the choice that faced us was “between purification and destruction.”66 Currently, the belief in the limits of growth continues to captivate public imagination, although by now it mutated into a new and far more potent and politicized prophecy about the sinister effect of the manmade global warming (climate change). In this latter-day ecological dystopia, which is similarly based on computer models, the emphasis shifted from the imminent depletion of energy resources to their deadly effect on global environment. In the 1930s, socialists preached social doomsday if society did not phase out capitalism that, in their view, “retarded” economic development and did not provide affluence. The present-day cultural left argue that capitalism is killing nature, and, in a similar manner, they prophesize the end of the world unless a government steps in to regulate and eventually to take over economy. Again, like Marxian socialists of old, who based their agenda on “science” and “natural laws” of history, the latter-day socialists appeal to the authority of “hard science” to back up their grand social engineering schemes that aim at saving human beings from the climate change. The most recent example of such apocalyptic thinking on the left is the Green New Deal project advocated by a group of American democratic socialists headed by Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez. By now, the mainstream left has replaced the debunked concepts of progress and growth-oriented economy with new political memes such as

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environmental justice and exploitation of nature by capitalism. The classical Marxian mantra about giant factories staffed with muscular industrial proletarians became the relic of the bygone days. In fact, since the 1970s, the eco-socialists and the New Left came to severely criticize social democracy and communism for downplaying environmental issues and for their fixation on material growth. Thus, unlike his classical predecessors, Marcuse argued that the sinister nature of contemporary capitalism stemmed from making a fetish out of consumer industry that was producing too many goods. With the help of advertising, this industry allegedly forced people to buy various items that people did not actually need. That was how, according to Marcuse, capitalism imposed on people unwanted wishes and planted into masses bourgeois “false consciousness.” Unfortunately, as he stressed, the greater part of Western society assimilated “harmful” consciousness that must be phased out to jump-start better forms of life.67 Essentially, Marcuse tried to tell people that their wishes were false and that they must have “correct” desires not related to goods and commerce. This fundamentally elitist approach suggested that the New Left philosopher somehow knew that people were unhappy, although people themselves were not aware of this. In fact, Marcuse’s arrogant attitude might serve as a punch line against socialism: having lost the economic debate to capitalism, the radical socialist cried fraud.68 While for the greater part of the humankind, who lived the life of scarcity behind the Iron Curtain or in the Third World countries, it was hard to comprehend that Marcuse’s “logic,” for European and American middle-class radicals, who took for granted the affluence of Western society, all this did make sense. By the end of the 1970s, the aversion toward technology and industry became part of the mainstream left ethos in the West. It is notable that at the dawn of the computer revolution in the 1980s, for a brief while, computer centers became the targets of campus protests as the symbols of the oppressive Western “machine” civilization. Not many now remember that at that time Utne Reader, a popular magazine of radical environmentalists and eco-socialists, insisted that computers “caused disease and death in their manufacture and use.”69 This brings to mind English luddites who had been wrecking textile machinery protesting against textile “satanic mills” in the early nineteenth century. Like many brands of environmentalism, some eco-socialists has preached “Green austerity” such as ascetic life styles, lower-level material comfort, less work and greater leisure.70 At the same time, other activists have realized that peddling “monastic” living standards and scarcity as a moral ideal would hardly win popular votes. Given traditional leanings among socialists in favor of social engineering and top-to-bottom approaches, some of them have suggested that society needed an enlightened dictatorship, a sort of

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“green Stalin” to force “correct” environmental measures onto the stubborn and “dump” populace that did not realize what was good for them. Being convinced that the humankind faced a global man-made environmental disaster, many eco-socialists have insisted that any dissent opinion regarding such “resolved” issues as the climate change must not be tolerated. To effectively marginalize and shut down their opponents, who have suggested that the climate change depended on natural causes, the left have labeled them as “climate deniers,” linking them to the Holocaust deniers. As early as the 1970s, radical political scientist and writer William Ophus, who was spearheading then the popular scare regarding shrinking resources, stressed that the only effective solution would be establishing “a government possessing great powers to regulate individual behavior in the common interest.” In his view, the best option was to concentrate power in the hands of several experts who knew how to run the “ship” and who were ready to switch from rugged individualism to a communitarian ethic.71 Although David Runciman, an eco-socialist of our days, has argued that it is not the shrinking resource base but the excessive reliance on fossil fuels that is to lead us to an imminent environmental disaster, the solutions he offered are still the same: in the mortal fight against the global environmental catastrophe democracy poses a problem and should be curtailed.72 What is common between the earlier 1970s environmental scares and the recent global warming apocalyptic prophecy is that they employ the apocalyptic language of survival to promote radical state regulations that are expected to be enforced from above by enlightened experts who know the way. Commenting on earlier doomsday prophecies of his radical comrades, Irving Howe, a prominent New York intellectual and a veteran of the Trotskyite movement, once sardonically remarked regarding his comrades, “Yielding to the hunger for apocalypse too easily slides into moral suicide.”73 The most recent hysteria regarding the coronavirus, which placed the climate change prophecy on a backburner, has proved yet again that an emergency situation that leads to a social breakdown of society invokes the socialist solution. Laura Westra, a philosopher and a proponent of environmental justice, stressed that, if they were left to themselves, people would slide onto the path of a collective self-destruction. To save the planet, a group of enlightened guardians and governmental experts should bypass Western judicial and political system and navigate the humankind in the “correct” direction. In short, as she metaphorically phrased it, we needed “some sort of Platonic philosopher queen” to promote environmental justice.74 Such schemes go back to the Bolshevik-style ideas about a vanguard of social engineers and further to the old utopian project of the world-wide scientific “Councils of Newton,” which had been pioneered by Henri Saint-Simone in the early nineteenth century.

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Today, many on the left are convinced that, by decree or by legislation, national governments and world organizations must impose a centralized control over all major industries and eventually to phase out capitalism.75 To be fair, there is a libertarian trend on the left that includes eco-socialism and that seeks to avoid the totalitarian temptations. The proponents of this trend come up with projects of handing control over nature to local communities and regions. Yet, this decentralization drive has been constantly muted by the powerful tradition of state worship that we see in socialism. Scholar activist David Pepper expressed best that schizophrenic mix of the authoritarian and libertarian trends when he stated that “eco-socialist production, with distribution, would be rationally planned, perhaps by an enabling state—but in general eco-socialism mistrusts the state and has more anarchistic visions.”76 On ecological issues, some libertarian left are also inclined to follow a naïve but popular New Age “multicultural” solution. A UK communist activist, Makin-White, who is fond of this approach, stressed that learning from tribal collectivist ethic and ecological wisdom of the indigenous non-Western people is a good strategy for the left to follow.77 This advice again draws on the old romantic “nostalgia for mud” primitivist notion that has been always lingering on in Western tradition and that was mainstreamed by the New Left since the 1960s. Most recently, Bernie Sanders, one of the major spokespeople for democratic socialism in the United States, invoked the same “noble savage” narrative when speaking publicly about the significance of “tribal wisdom” for the climate change movement: “Young people all over the world are looking to the Native American community for leadership. Once again, we’re going to need your leadership on how we go forward on respecting the environment.”78 Seeding through Marxist classics for a theoretical confirmation of their environmental justice agenda, the cultural left have been cherry-picking them for relevant passages and sentences. It was known that Marx was a die-hard proponent of the industrial capitalist growth. He was convinced that, as an “unavoidable evil,” capitalism was to prepare a solid material foundation for future communism and to “breed” proletarians, the class of the chosen ones, who were destined to destroy this very capitalism. Incidentally, this explains why Marx endorsed a European expansion overseas and colonialism, which were expected to drag underdeveloped areas of the world into the orbit of capitalist production and exchange economy. To Marx, all this was progressive because it was pushing the humankind closer to the revolutionary “final judgement.” In contrast, current eco-socialists have been revisiting foundational Marxist texts, adjusting them to current needs. For example, the famous utterance from the Communist Manifesto about the “idiocy of rural life”79 was twisted and reinterpreted as the condemnation of capitalism that uprooted

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countryside and deprived peasant farmers of opportunities to cultivate their mind and human potential.80 Unfortunately for the present-day left, the founding fathers of Marxism meant exactly what they said—a disgust with the traditional peasantry whom they considered provincial and backward on their evolutionary scale. The founders wanted to celebrate capitalism—the necessary evil that was tearing down that old feudal world and that was nearing the forthcoming revolutionary Armageddon and the eventual jump in the golden future.81 Eco-socialist Elizabeth Terzakis justified such selective use of Marx scriptures as follows: “As eco-socialists, we have to decide which of Marx’s treatment of nature we think needs to be carried forward and which left behind.”82 Moreover, she has also hinted that Marx had actually predicted that ecological issues would become the acute global problem, which she has blamed on capitalism.83 This eco-socialist interpretation of Marx disregards the fact that he was the man of his time who had nothing to do with radical environmentalism. One of the most bizarre and exotic attempts to use left classics to serve current ideological needs has been an essay that put the mantle of an ecological warrior on Vladimir Lenin, the chief Bolshevik.84 Theologically speaking, such rereading of the foundational texts of Marxism makes a perfect sense, especially to the members of the socialist fellowship. After all, religious creeds regularly perform similar revisions of their sacred books, adjusting them to contemporary needs and settings. If the left had not privileged such interpretations as the true and scientific, there would not have been any questions about such an approach.

NOTES 1. Quoted after Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 207. 2. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 147. 3. Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations, 216. 4. André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (London: Pluto Press, 1982). 5. In the 1970s and the 1980s, many former New Left activists entered Western educational, cultural, and governmental institutions, fundamentally changing the political mainstream. This has been noted by writers both on the left (Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011) and on the right (Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000). 6. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 42–43. 7. Irving Howe, “The Decade That Failed: A Prominent Member of the Old Left Recalls the 1960’s,” New York Times Magazine, September 19 (1982): 86. 8. Young, “Neo-Marxism and the British New Left.”

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9. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 277. 10. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 150–151. 11. Quoted after Ibid., 152–153. 12. Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York: New American Library, 1966). 13. Lionel Abel, “Seven Heroes of the New Left,” New York Times Magazine, May 5 (1968): 132. 14. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 218. 15. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 31. 16. Christopher L. Miller, “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and the ‘Immanent Negro’ in 1935,” PMLA, 125, no. 3 (2010), 748. 17. Quoted after Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 224. 18. Abel, “Seven Heroes of the New Left,” 131. 19. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 31. 20. Ibid., 39. 21. Ibid., 45. 22. Ibid., 118. 23. Ibid., 36–37. 24. Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 220–221. 25. Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” Partisan Review, 34, no. 1 (1967): 57–58, http:​/​/joh​​nshap​​lin​.b​​logsp​​ot​.co​​m​/201​​2​/11/​​whats​​-happ​​ening​​-in​-a​​meric​​ a​-1​96​​6​-by_​​8613.​​html.​ 26. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 201. 27. Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism, 130. 28. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 25–26. 29. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 30. For the most comprehensive study of the appropriation of the Third World by the Western New Left, who worked to fill in the empty spot of the revolutionary mover and shaker, see Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World. 31. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983). 32. Ward Churchill, ed., Marxism and Native Americans (Boston, MS: South End Press, 1982). 33. Newman, Socialism, 89. 34. Sharon Smith, “Engels and the Origin of Women’s Oppression,” International Socialist Review, 2 (1997), http:​/​/www​​.isre​​view.​​org​/i​​ssues​​/02​/e​​ngles​​_fami​​​ly​.sh​​tml. 35. Quoted after Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 204. 36. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 140. 37. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 221. 38. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 177. 39. Boris Kagarlitsky, Mezhdu klassom i diskursom: levie intellktualy na strazhe kapitalizma [Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals as Guardians of Capitalism] (Moscow: HSE Publishing House, 2017), 42.

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40. Anis Shivani, “Time to Give up on Identity Politics,” Salon, September 2 (2017), https​:/​/ww​​w​.sal​​on​.co​​m​/201​​7​/09/​​02​/ti​​me​-to​​-give​​-up​-o​​n​-ide​​ntity​​-poli​​tics-​​its​-d​​ raggi​​ng​-th​​e​-p​ro​​gress​​ive​-a​​genda​​-down​/. 41. Walter Benn Michaels, Charles W. Mills, Linda Hirshman, and Carla Murphy, “What Is the Left without Identity Politics,” Nation, December 16 (2016), https​:/​/ww​​ w​.the​​natio​​n​.com​​/arti​​cle​/w​​hat​-i​​s​-the​​-left​​-with​​out​-i​​de​nti​​ty​-po​​litic​​s/; Shivani, “Time to Give up on Identity Politics.” 42. David North and Eric London, “The 1619 Project and the Falsification of History,” World Socialist Web Site, December 28 (2019), https​:/​/ww​​w​.wsw​​s​.org​​/en​/ a​​rticl​​es​/20​​19​/12​​/28​/n​​​ytr​-d​​28​.ht​​ml. 43. North, The Frankfurt School, Post-Modernism, and the Politics of the PseudoLeft, xxiii. 44. Ibid., 134. 45. For more about the production of victimhood by the cultural left, see Bruce Bawer, The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (New York: Broadside Books, 2012); Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (London and New York: BloomsburyContinuum, 2019). 46. Chris Hedges, “The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism [2016],” https​:/​/ww​​w​.tru​​thdig​​.com/​​artic​​les​/t​​he​-re​​venge​​-of​-t​​he​-lo​​wer​-c​​lasse​​ s​-and​​-the-​​rise-​​of​​-am​​erica​​n​-fas​​cism-​​2/; Shivani, “Time to Give up on Identity Politics.” 47. Ibid. 48. Kagarlitsky, Mezhdu klassom i diskursom, 20, 23. 49. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 226. 50. “Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (May 12, 1977),” https​:/​/wo​​nder.​​cdc​.g​​ov​/wo​​nder/​​help/​​popul​​ation​​s​/bri​​dged-​​race/​​Dire​ c​​tive1​​5​.htm​​l. 51. Mari J. Matsuda and others, “Introduction,” in Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda and others (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 6. 52. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 139–167; Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew,” in Words That Wound, 111–132. 53. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 123–127, 138. 54. Jordan Peterson, “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege,” British Columbia Free Speech Club, Vancouver, November 13, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=PfH​​8IG7A​​wk0​&f​​eatur​​​e​=you​​tu​.be​, 1:48:40 55. Newman, Socialism, 115. 56. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 99. 57. Brian Tokar, “Bookchin’s Social Ecology and Its Contributions to the RedGreen Movement,” in Eco-socialism as Politics: Rebuilding the Basis of Our Modern Civilisation, ed. Qingzhi Huan (London and New York: Springer, 2010), 129.

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58. Ayn Rand, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Penguin, [1969] 1999), 168–169. 59. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 55. 60. Mike Makin-Waite, Communism and Democracy: History, Debates and Potentials (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), 242. 61. For more about the social and medical consequences of this panic, see Paul Offit, Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2017), 161–190. 62. Donella H. Meadows and others, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York, Universe Books, 1972). 63. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballentine Books, 1968); Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 260; Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History, 409–411. 64. Bjorn Lomborg and Oliver Rubin, “The Dustbin of History: Limits to Growth,” Foreign Policy, November 9 (2009), https​:/​/fo​​reign​​polic​​y​.com​​/2009​​/11​ /0​​9​/the​​-dust​​bin​-o​​f​-his​​tory-​​lim​it​​s​-to-​​growt​​h/; Brian Hayes, “Computation and the Human Predicament—The Limits to Growth and the Limits to Computer Modeling,” American Scientist, May–June (2012), https​:/​/ww​​w​.ame​​rican​​scien​​tist.​​org​/a​​rticl​​e​/com​​ putat​​ion​-a​​nd​-th​​e​-h​um​​an​-pr​​edica​​ment 65. Vaclav Smil, “Limits to Growth Revisited: A Review Essay,” Population and Development Review 31, no. 1 (2005): 159–163. 66. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 261. 67. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 68. Unger, The Movement: A History, 24. 69. Quoted after Sotirakopoulos, The Rise of Lifestyle Activism, 212; Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 259. 70. Newman, Socialism, 107. 71. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 254–255. 72. Makin-Waite, Communism and Democracy, 246. 73. Howe, “The Decade That Failed,” 83. 74. Ellis, The Dark Side of the Left, 265. 75. Elizabeth Terzakis, “Marx and Nature: Why We Need Marx Now More Than Ever,” International Socialist Review (ISR), 109 (2018): 121. 76. David Pepper, “On Contemporary Eco-socialism,” in Eco-socialism as Politics: Rebuilding the Basis of Our Modern Civilisation, ed. Qingzhi Huan (London and New York: Springer, 2010), 34. 77. Makin-Waite, Communism and Democracy, 246. 78. Amie Rivers, “Sanders Talks Native Issues,” The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, January 3 (2020): A3, https​:/​/wc​​fcour​​ier​.c​​om​/ee​​ditio​​n​/pag​​e​-a​/p​​age​_c​​83ecd​​ b7​-2b​​fe​-50​​f9​-b8​​​23​-20​​3f2a5​​58f68​​.html​ 79. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​archi​​ve​/ma​​rx​/wo​​rks​/1​​848​/c​​ommun​​ist​-m​​a​nife​​sto​/c​​h01​.h​​tm 80. Terzakis, “Marx and Nature,” 107.

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81. Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century, 169–170. 82. Terzakis, “Marx and Nature,” 120. For the major eco-revision of Marx, see the work of a Trotskyite-turned eco-socialist: John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 83. Terzakis, “Marx and Nature,” 115. 84. Fred Strebeigh, “Lenin’s Eco-Warrior,” New York Times, August 7, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​017​/0​​8​/07/​​opini​​on​/le​​nin​-e​​nviro​​nme​nt​​-sibe​​ria​.h​​tml

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Conclusion From Left Melancholia to New Militancy

Those who read often quoted 1984 by George Orwell remember that Winston Smith, its major character, tried to question the power of the infamous Big Brother, which policed the minds of people through a vast bureaucracy and constantly changing politically correct prescriptions. When doing this, Smith had to face a tough situation on a personal level. Not only could not he find any ally among surrounding people, but he also realized that his closest friend Julia took for granted that state of things because that was the way she had been raised. Just like Julia, throughout the last martial century, generations of people, from Beijing to Moscow and San Francisco, had been raised at the bosom of an omnipotent state, and they internalized state paternalism with its command and control institutions. Whatever has been mandated by state bureaucrats and their experts, who routinely invoke the language of science, people often take for granted. In other words, the spirit of top to bottom mobilization became the new normal. Talking about the twentieth-century state-sponsored paternalist systems, Michele Foucault, a famous guru of Western humanities, perceptively referred to these systems as “social pacts of war,” highlighting the crucial role of warfare in shaping political religions of the past century.1 In our age of a prolonged peace, that martial ethos is sustained and amplified by the situations that people interpret as global emergencies. Socialism, a radical child of the modern age had embraced wholeheartedly that state enabled mobilization ethos. Tom Nairn, an influential left thinker, noted that both socialists and communists were accustomed to view political and economic institutions serving a centralized state as progressive and benevolent provided they formally declared their commitment to public good. Questioning this orthodoxy, he pointed to the obvious: such institutions could not miraculously become benevolent once they announced that public 383

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“good” was their goal. Neither did these institutions necessarily represent an advanced stage of history on the “evolutionary scale” of human development that was to lead us away from the “outdated” capitalist “anarchy.” Like Foucault, Nairn reminded us that socialist and welfare state institutions with a questionable reputation could be simply the product of the past century’s martial spirit.2 At its dawn, nineteenth-century socialism saw such diverse trends as anarchism, grassroot communitarian movement, Fabianism, cooperative socialism, and Marxism. Yet, later, under the influence of World War I, the interwar totalitarian drive, World War II, and during the subsequent Cold War, socialism crystallized into two most influential historical projects: communist centralized planning system and social-democratic welfare-warfare state. Both came to dominate political and economic mainstream. The collapse of the Soviet-type communism was the defeat of the radical faction of the creed and the simultaneous victory of its social-democratic brand. In a sense, socialism did not retreat after 1991.3 Detailing what happened, sociologist Peter Beilharz, a reformed socialist who devoted the whole book to the fate of the left at the turn of the 2000s, stressed that social democracy prevailed worldwide as the ultimate progressive path by defeating national socialism and communism.4 To be fair, in the 1930s and the 1940s, the social-democratic “third way” might have been indeed the best possible option available at the time when the greater part of the political mainstream was pushed to choose between Soviet-style communism and German National Socialism. Winning the political debate, the social-democratic path became the dominant way of governance in the West after 1945. Parallel to this, in the Soviet Union, China and several other parts of the world, there reigned an ideological mantra that communism was the way of the future. With communism and social democracy dominating the political and ideological mainstream until the second half of the 1970s, there was a popular conviction worldwide that the political and economic future was to lead to a socialist-type society or to some fusion between capitalism and socialism. Incidentally, the 1960s–1970s saw the emergence of popular theories of convergence of the two systems into an ultimate order of a higher caliber.5 In 1989, anticipating the collapse of communism, political science celebrity Francis Fukuyama immortalized this fusion in his often-quoted dictum about the “end of history.”6 Yet, between the 1970s and the 1990s, burdened by a suffocating state control over economy and retarded by politically correct restrictions, communist states started to crumble. Socialism became the object of a severe public scrutiny. In this context, the social-democratic model, which was based on Keynesian prescriptions and which advertised itself as the “middle ground” between capitalism and socialism, too gave a crack. People not only called

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to reform the socialist creed but also started to question its very validity and universality. Earlier, many had taken the social-democratic path for granted as the best “end of history” option, which shone when compared to its mad communist cousin. In the 1980s, that path too appeared to be questionable. According to Terry Eagleton, one of the current deans of Marxism, by 1986, the left alternative lost much if its appeal in the mainstream.7 In the wake of 1991, those on the left who were ready to exercise critical thinking and move beyond the traditional class-based and statist bubble, initiated an extensive soul searching. Overall, at that time, there was a widespread pessimism among progressives about the prospects of erecting the “paradise on the earth.” The landmark essay “Resisting Left Melancholy” (1999) by Wendy Brown reflected well that general mood. Analyzing the prevailing “left melancholy,” she blamed her fellow comrades for sticking to backward dogmas and class identities, which made them feel comfortable but that were in fact retrograde and obscurantist.8 Brown detected a dangerous trajectory in the left movement that became more focused on defending various old entitlements and on a blind critique of society without offering a viable alternative.9 She stressed that, after 1991, the decline of the left cause not only led to a loss of an intellectual anchor but also to a loss of its subculture (socialist speak, attire, political rituals) that sustained the faith of her colleagues for the entire century. Moreover, Brown resorted to the expression “left traditionalism” to refer to her comrades who stubbornly clung to the class-based doctrine and who still thought about surrounding society in terms of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The situation reminded the spiritual drama faced by the religious faithful who suddenly experienced the collapse of their entire worldview. Her general message was defeatist and focused on learning to live within the “neoliberal” state. That ideological vacuum was gradually filled by the cultural (or identitarian) left who later became the progressive mainstream. The New Left, who exorcised the industrial working class from Marxism in the 1960s and the 1970s, prepared a ground for the cultural turn. Historically, the New Left “cultural Marxists” served as an intellectual bridge between the old Marxian socialists and the current woke progressives. The “scorched earth” tactics of post-modernism that demolished and fragmented the omnipotent castle of Marxism and positivism further cleared an intellectual space for the gradual rise of the cultural left in the 1990s. The latter embraced race, gender, and environmentalism at the expense of class. Overall, identity politics became the popular exit for the mainstream left from the earlier ideological conundrum. The old economic categories of Marxism were refilled with the new cultural content. To be fair, the search for new ideological niches developed not only along the route of a group identity. Remaining within the ideological matrix of

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socialism, some shifted their priorities toward the greater appreciation of individualism and local autonomy away from traditional state worship that had defined the face of classical socialism. Thus, at the turn of the 2000s, Simon Griffiths, a UK political scholar and socialist, suggested that it was time for the Western left to go back “home” to their classical liberal roots by invoking individual liberty and local autonomy. American radical activist David Markus, editor of Dissent magazine, expressed well this sentiment by stressing that if the left wanted to be successful, they needed to “go horizontal.”10 It is obvious that since the 1990s, the socialist creed somewhat shifted toward embracing the individual, local, unique, and decentralized. As I mentioned, intellectually, for many, such transformation went on within the framework of post-modernism, which privileged the fragmented, unique, and individual.11 Prominent European sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015), a scholarly celebrity who, as a “Rorschach” man, rode the most popular intellectual trends in the West, began talking about “reflexive modernity” and announced the arrival of “individualization.”12 In the 1990s, some progressive critics of the traditional social engineering mentality began to remind themselves and their comrades that historical roots of the left lay in the classical liberal (or libertarian if we were to use American political jargon) camp. Indeed, the early nineteenth-century free-market economist Frédéric Bastiat had sat on the left side of the French national assembly together with such anarcho-socialist celebrity as Pierre Proudhon. Incidentally, Bastiat was the first person in the French Legislative Assembly in 1849 to campaign for the right of the workers to strike. The critics also pointed out that quite a few of the causes that one usually associated with the left wing (feminism, anti-slavery, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers, and consumers against big business) had been originated initiated and promoted by free-market radicals.13 Still, the period of that soul-searching did not last long. After the brief ideological hic up of the 1980s and 1990s, many on the left began falling back on the familiar ground of martial, march, and mobilization mode of thinking. The landmark event that signaled this return to the ideological roots was the crisis of 2008, which, on the one hand, uprooted many workers and middleclass people, and, on the other hand, led to mass governmental bailouts of large banks and corporations. Like in 1929, the left again ascribed the causes of the crisis not to the stifling interference of governments into economy but to the failure of the free-market system. Hence, the resurgence of old twentieth-century demands to stop the “chaos” and “anarchy” of capitalism and to increase state regulation for a greater good in economic life, social sphere, and, recently, in cultural life. In culture and media, one could see symbolic events that signaled the return of the classical class-based left to the political scene in the wake of the

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crisis. For example, in 2013, the premier of Waiting for Lefty (1935), an old play by Clifford Odets, became a media hype. Popular in the 1930s, during the heyday of socialism, the play sampled a classic scene from the repertoire of traditional socialism: a meeting of workers (in this case cab drivers) planning a strike. Furthermore, in 2009, a Newsweek issue carried on its cover the famous headline that emboldened the left: “We are all socialists now.” The editors paraphrased an expression ascribed to Richard Nixon who allegedly uttered, “We’re all Keynesians now” to signal the post–World War shift in favor of the welfare state consensus.14 Words are very meaningful. Throwing the catchy Newsweek phrase in the media mainstream was a drastic shift from the behavior of the left in the 1990s, when many of them were seeking to downplay or to erase from their ideological attire such expressions as “socialism” and “communism,” switching to less radical labels such as “progressive,” “people’s,” or simply “left.” Although overall in the United States, only 29% favored socialism against 52% who liked capitalism (2016), the Harvard University survey found that among young adults (18–34 years) the left enjoyed a higher reputation: 33% liked socialism compared to 38% who embraced capitalism. To be fair, the survey problematized these results a bit by pointing out that in the same age group, when asked directly what ideology they firmly identify themselves with, 16% said they were socialists, and 19% stated they were staunch advocates of capitalism.15 Still, 33% and 16% were significant numbers considering the traditionally negative attitude toward socialism in the United States in the past. In Europe, socialism traditionally drew more sympathizers. Thus, the same year, in the UK, among people of the same age group (18–34 years) the ratio was exactly reverse (19% identified themselves as socialists and 16% as proponents of capitalism); overall, in the UK, 36% people were fond of socialism in contrast to 33% who liked capitalism. In Germany, the cradle of the Marxian left, the popularity of socialists was even higher: 46% favored socialism and only 26% chose capitalism.16 Overall, the resurgence of socialism in the United States mostly concerned millennials (23–38 years), where a sympathy for socialism was highest (50% in 2019). Moreover, in this age group the number of those who favored Marxism increased from 29% to 35% (2018–2019); even though the general favorability of socialism in the country dropped from 42% to 36% (2018–2019); the curve went down because the youngest ones (16–22) and Baby Boomers (ages 55–73) began feeling less sympathy toward that socialist creed.17 The growing number of millennials sympathizing with socialism and the increasing membership of left-wing groups inspired progressive activists and organizers. Thus, the Democratic Socialists of America, the major party-like group that promotes socialism in the United States, increased its ranks from about 5,000 in 2016 to 45,000 in 2018.18 This

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does not include hundreds of thousands of fellow-travelers. Much of this growth should clearly be attributed to the general radicalization of American progressives and the Democratic Party for the past three years in response to the 2016 elections. In the UK, one could witness a similar radicalization of the Labour party, which was taken over by such firebrand as Jeremy Corbyn, who set out to ditch the “third way” and decided instead “to challenge global capitalism.”19 In the wake of the 2008 crisis, radical elements among the left began falling back on the familiar apocalyptical thinking. Following the tradition of Marxian socialism, many among them read the economic crisis in the “end of time” manner as a signal of the imminent collapse of capitalism. In this context, the period of the 1980s and the 1990s appeared to the left as a “neoliberal” detour from the “main course” of history where all roads were to eventually lead to the “socialist depot.” When in 2008, the late public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, a wayward leftist, argued that the left must renounce any version of apocalyptic history along with various mad schemes about how to create the heaven on earth, he was already a dissenting voice amid the rising tide of radicalism.20 By their content, the rekindled doomsday prophecies reminded those that were popular during the first three decades of the past century, when, during the 1929–1933 Great Depression, socialists had preached global economic collapse of capitalism. What changed is the format of the apocalyptic thinking that is now more focused on professing the end of the world because of an imminent planetary ecological disaster for which capitalism is again held responsible. The solution to the professed ecological Armageddon is an omnipotent government control and regulation. The most picturesque manifestation of such apocalyptic vision is utterances of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star of American democratic socialism who blamed man-made global warming (“climate change” in a more recent usage) on capitalism. She called for a strict nationwide regulation and eventual curtailment of all industries that she held responsible for global warming. Among her most exotic proposals are a nationwide carbon emission tax as well as the shutting down of the aviation industry and beef production that, in her view, caused the greater part of carbon emissions on the planet. In 2019, to dramatize the urgency of a governmental regulation of economy, she stressed that the world was going to end in twelve years if politicians did not harness climate change.21 Interestingly, drumming what became nicknamed as the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez has appealed to the familiar martial schemes that had been so popular among the left in the first half of the past century. She has insisted that in fighting global warming, no debate must be tolerated. American economy and people must be mobilized as it had been done during World War II when U.S. life was militarized to fight the Nazi Germany:

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So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II. And so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before. None of these things are new ideas. What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war. We had a direct existential threat with another nation, this time it was Nazi Germany, and the Axis, who explicitly made the United States an enemy. What we did [during the World War II] was that we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialized our entire economy and we put hundreds if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country. We have to do the same thing to get us to 100 percent renewable energy.22

To be fair, the recent panic over the coronavirus to some extent muted the doomsday climate change prophecy. Moreover, that very panic effectively created a global emergency situation that has already empowered state bureaucracy to a great extent and unleashed various mobilization schemes that curtailed people’s liberties. With the small renaissance of the traditional statism on the left, there has been much talk about the relevance of Karl Marx. As Fredric Jameson, one of the deans of post-modernism, put it, “Marxism must necessarily become true again.”23 The titles of such popular books as Capital for the 21Cetiry by Thomas Piketty and Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton has spelled out this new hope to rekindle traditional Marxian socialism.24 To be fair, such scholar-activists as Eagleton and Piketty did not need to work hard to inject these texts and ideas into society. They were building on the intellectual culture that had been already set up by the New Left in the 1960s and the 1970s; veteran activist and sociology scholar Harold Bershady has noted that by 1980 not only in colleges but also in high schools Marxist literature became a staple reading.25 In the wake of the 2008 crisis, following the Marxian Armageddon logic, radical elements on the left began again to “correctly” read the signs of time, suggesting that the final revolutionary battle between the “house of capitalism” and the “house of socialism” was near. For current activists, who seek to revive classical class-based Marxist theology, one of the most frustrating aspects of surrounding life is the absence in their ranks of the proletariat that, in a classical Marxist manner, was to play the role of a revolutionary savior. Simply relegating all hired workers to a homogeneous collective of oppressed “proletarians,” as Jodi Dean has suggested in her The Communist Horizon,26 does not work anymore. Incidentally, the abovementioned sociologist Beck tried to find a “solution” to that theological problem by claiming that, in contrast to old times when only the proletariat was victimized, now in the light of the imminent global warming Armageddon, all groups in society, including both the poor and the

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rich, were under threat. For this reason, we all became the victims of ecological capitalism and, therefore, surrogate proletarians.27 Unfortunately for the left, by now, the working class stopped being their major electoral and social base. Identity concerns and debates about proper speech codes, which preoccupied the cultural left, alienated many ordinary employed and unemployed “proletarians.” Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent Russian Marxist sociologist and a public intellectual who works to revive the class-based politics, puts the major blame for that on left intellectuals who downplayed and utterly neglected social and economic issues. In a hindsight, such an accusation makes little sense because the cultural left ideology naturally grew out of their 1990s “melancholy” and frustration with class politics, which so well was described by Brown. The “identitarians” gradually emerged because of the crisis of the creed at the end of the past century amid attempts on the left to anchor themselves in the new “neoliberal” environment and find new causes to letch on. The Marxian left lament that their cultural brethren, who by now became the ideological mainstream, reduced much of their activities to the “cult of minorities.” They say that this flawed strategy relegated selected minority groups to the demeaning role of both victims of political system and simultaneously ideological “prison guards” that are expected to police the rest of society about proper ways of behavior.28 What has been forgotten here is that precisely the same role the old left had earlier reserved for the industrial proletariat that too had been elevated both to the role of a victim of capitalism and the master class that was to save humankind from capitalism and instill into of society “higher wisdom” and “better forms” of life. For the past forty years, the greater part of working-class people in the West and beyond not only shifted in their sympathies to the right but they also began to repeatedly vote for the parties on the right. For example, as early as the 1990s, in France, French civic nationalists made deep inroads in working-class neighborhoods that had used to vote communist. During the 2012 presidential elections, many of these neighborhoods gave their votes to the National Front of Marine Le Pen who promised to curb unemployment, European Union bureaucracy, political correctness, and to provide safeguards for what she defined as Western values. In that year, Le Pen, who toned down her anti-immigrant rhetoric, secured the fourth place by receiving 11% of all votes. Incidentally, this number also included those French people of “Muslim” descent who did not care about Islam.29 In contrast, the candidate of the freshly minted New Anticapitalistic Party (Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste), which brought together leftovers of the radical cultural left who made political correctness their signature election issue, received only 1.2% of votes. This was three times fewer than the number that the party had received during earlier elections. By jumping on the bandwagon

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of the same identity ideology, socialists and communists too lost many votes. Indeed, many mainstream voters became confused when they heard from the French identitarian left of various brands bizarre calls to simultaneously respect Islam and the rights of gays. This did not make any sense to voters who saw with their own eyes that the mainstream Islam openly denied a public space for sexual minorities.30 As a result of this, it is people on the right who mostly ended up leading current anti-establishment movements in the West. Although since 2008, the left did increase their visibility in media, overall, they continue to lose to the right. In fact, socialist scholars William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, who analyzed the current state of the Western left, have admitted that the right more effectively than progressive forces tap into the legitimate grievances of the disenfranchised, marginalized, and dispossessed masses.31 The elitist and “vanguard” approach to masses that continue to linger on among the left and their conviction that they know the “correct” way have frustrated many “common people.” Alain Badiou, an iconic left philosopher who claimed that he came up with a “communist hypothesis” for the twenty-first century, demonstrated such despise for “unwashed masses” by openly calling the left to exercise “cultural hegemony” in society by smashing respect for individual freedoms, including a right to open a business and own a property. He defined these rights as the cultural traits of the “stupid majority.” To Badiou, the way out of this “neoliberal” system was to resort to a good old Platonic scheme by entrusting enlightened progressive philosophers to educate the “deplorable” about “animal-like finiteness of personal identity.” In his view, this is expected to help masses achieve progressive transcendence—a kind of a communist grace when a person would be illuminated from within about the high truth of collectivism. Flamboyant Slavoj Žižek could not resist poking fun of the “communist hypothesis,” remarking that a “religious revelation is its secret paradigm.”32 The promise issued by socialism about bringing the “heaven on earth” through the power of a benevolent state has been both strength and weakness of this creed. In the past century, socialism masqueraded as a “scientific teaching” that was to deliver the world of plenty by relying either on the “science” of Marxism or on the power of technocratic regulation and nationalization. At the same time, this was an obvious weakness of socialism. When people wanted the verification of the “science” by demanding the fulfillment of the prophecy, each time socialists were not able to deliver goods. As a result, throughout the entire twentieth century, the left had to repeatedly move from one utopian scheme to another trying each time to make it fit an ideal socialist blueprint. At first, the Soviet Union was the utopia to be worshiped and glorified. Then, after the revelations of Stalin’s crimes, it was Maoist China and Cuba that took the baton of the ideological icons. Parallel to these

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two, democratic socialists peddled the “Scandinavian model of socialism” as the great new hope. There were also minor Third World utopias such as “village socialism” in Tanzania or the “autonomous zone” in Mexican Chiapas that too failed to live up to utopian expectations and that were later silently removed from an ideological radar. Incidentally, many opponents of the Soviet Union among the radical left became happy when that country, which had claimed to have built “advanced socialism,” went down the drains. The extinction of that dinosaur allowed the left to flush that largest albatross on their neck down the Orwellian memory hole to make sure it would not tarnish anymore the noble image of the socialist utopia and to move to another utopian project.33 French writer and socialite Bernard Levy, one of the prominent New Left apostates, remarked regarding this attempt to sweep the Soviets under the historical rug: “I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”34 In fact, in the 1980s, that frustrating jumping from one socialist utopia to another eventually gave rise to a small school of moral or “utopian socialism” (a return to the roots!) that announced that socialism must always remain a moral ideal rather than a concrete ideological scheme to be imposed on or instilled into society. As such, socialism was to exist simply to ennoble people’s characters and serve as a canary in the capitalist mine, checking on the flaws of free market.35 A recurrent attitude on the left toward the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, and other countries that claimed building socialism has been a denial that they had “true” socialism. The left have insisted that those utopias in power did not built socialism correctly, failing to follow some Marxian, Leninist, Maoist, anarchist, and other ideal blueprints.36 For example, many socialists continue to cling to a theological rational that such grand socialist experiments as Stalinism and Maoism had nothing to do with the “genuine” socialist creed. One of such people, anarcho-communist historian Vadim Damier, who is a research fellow at the Russian Institute of World History, resorted to a religious metaphor to exonerate the socialist ideal. Addressing the critics of socialism on the right and those on the left who lost their faith, he wrote, “Shall we accuse the natural aspiration of the human being toward freedom, equality, happiness, harmony, and mutual aid because tyrants used it to cover their rule with these beautiful words? Shall we accuse Jesus Christ for the evils of Inquisition? Shall we hold Buddha responsible for the oppression of religious minorities in Buddhist countries? So, what exactly did die [with the Soviet Union]? Socialism or something else that pretended to wear its cloak? How can we sing a funeral song over something that has not yet been born?”37

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Such rhetorical truism looks strange coming from the mouth of a social scholar. At the same time, it makes a perfect sense as a theological device that religious reformers routinely use to tune their creeds to changing times or to make them more benign and attractive. If we do not like specific movements that claimed to have followed prescriptions of Jesus, Buddha, and Marx, this does not automatically disqualify these movements from being considered Christians, Buddhists, and socialists. As I indicated earlier, a portion of the left did learn a lesson from the repeated failure of the Soviet-type societies, developing since the 1960s a revulsion toward a large bureaucratic state. Later, they extended this attitude toward such supranational globalist structures as the European Union (EU), World Trade Organization, and the like. The libertarian left, who privilege local autonomous collectives, consider such transnational monsters as the Soviet Union and EU as the forms of state-monopoly capitalism. Despite recent authoritarian outbursts on the left (the project to mandate the so-called Green New Deal and attempts to police speech), there is a “going horizontal” movement among some segments of the left away from the “vanguard” party mindset, the cult of the centralized state, total nationalization, and other staple “niceties” of the past century. This process of “liberation” of the left has been retarded by the persistence of the Marxian narrative in the left thought collective: the Manichean approach to society in the categories of oppression and exploitation, the concept of “chosen” groups of victims/redeemers, “false consciousness,” and so forth. The popularity of the cultural left (Cultural Marxism), which filled the old “class bottles” with new “identity wine,” and the most recent small renaissance of Marxism in the wake of the 2008 crisis are the examples of that ideological tenacity. Still, it is instructive to revisit the figures about the “demography” of socialism that I provided earlier. The 2016 Harvard survey, which pointed to growing sympathies toward socialism among young adults in the United States, did not in fact demonstrate an affection toward the traditional socialist creed with its worship of a benevolent state and top to bottom vanguard mobilization. Instead, that survey showed a growing libertarian trend. In the age group (18–29 years) that favored socialism most of all only 27% believed that government should regulate economy. Moreover, in the same group, only 26% agreed that government spending was an effective way to increase economic growth. Analyzing the details of that Harvard research, John Della Volpe, the polling director, revealed, “They’re not rejecting the concept [of capitalism]. The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people—that’s what they’re rejecting. What they are mostly against is crony capitalism.”38 The anti-statist sentiments on the left emerged as early as the 1960s among the New Left, who advocated “participatory democracy” and “humanistic

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socialism.”39 These sentiments were further amplified by the left’s attempts to mute their totalitarian temptations in the wake of the communism collapse in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the increasing popularity of anarchism, which had been marginal in the past century, and the emergence of such memes as libertarian socialism were manifestations of that trend. During most street protests and demonstrations organized by the radical left in Western countries since the 2010s black flags either matched or outnumbered red ones. Strictly speaking, even the black-clad violent storm troopers from the notorious Antifa network, which has been terrorizing large American cities, too fit that decentralization shift. In contrast to their highly disciplined and authoritarian terrorist predecessors from the Socialist Revolutionaries Party in the early twentieth-century Russia, the Maoist Shining Path in Peru, and Red Brigades in Italy of the 1970s, Antifa cannot be called an organization. It represents a loose decentralized chain of amorphous groups of militants who operate spontaneously through social media with no central leadership.40 Despite that “going horizontal” trend, since the last economic crisis, many on the left do seek to rekindle the vanguard, martial, and social engineering practices, building on the past century’s popular tradition. In their book, which they revealingly titled Reclaiming the State, scholar activists Mitchell and Fazi have suggested that, in addition to rejecting identity politics and embracing the old class-based approach, the left must capitalize on statist solutions. They have argued that the left need to focus on the expansion of the state’s role in all spheres. And, first of all, they should radically downsize the private sector in investment, production, and distribution. Essentially, this has been a call to revive the tradition of economic nationalization—one of the major pillars of radical socialism in the past. Arguing that Western countries have unlimited capacity to spend, Mitchell and Fazi have suggested that governments put all labor to productive use by guaranteeing a job on demand to everybody.41 Both statist and libertarian trends in current socialism reflect the contradictory nature of socialism as a modern political religion. Trying to define its place in world history, economist and philosopher Murray Rothbard characterized it as a misguided relative of the classical liberal tradition. To him, socialism was a confused middle-of-the-road movement that tried to achieve liberal ends by using conservative means: “Socialism accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism.”42 To the present day, the greater portion of the left political identity is still closely tied to statism, radical social engineering, and mandated political correctness, which were responsible for squashing libertarian and anarchist trends among progressives during the past

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century. When forced to make a choice, the majority of socialists frequently opt for a statist solution. A classic example is the recent behavior of Jeremy Corbin, a far left leader of the UK Labour Party. He originally spoke in favor of autonomy and endorsed the UK exit (the so-called Brexit) from the European Union that was led by the right-wing Independence Party. Yet, at the last moment, he radically changed his position and voted to remain within EU.43 The currently expanding internet economy, which empowered individuals, who own computers and cell phones as their “means of production,” spontaneously created decentralized networks of free people who are working to establish free in-kind and financial connections, bypassing traditional state bureaucracies, unions, and corporations. It appears that the left should cheer this process as the fulfillment of what Karl Marx called free associations of free producers. Unfortunately, the greater part of them is still reluctant to embrace and promote internet companies that operate outside of both heavily regulated state sector and existing internet monopolies. Not infrequently one can see among the left a literal fear of new forms of economic, social, and digital organization. For example, leftist activists became notorious for their attempts to smash informal car-sharing schemes and such companies as Uber.44 Another stunning aspect of the current left agenda is their suspicion of and active efforts to shut down independent digital platforms, producers, and speakers that exercise freedom of speech outside of speech codes the left arbitrarily define as “proper.”45 A symbolic manifestation of this authoritarian trend was a recent event in the town of Berkeley, CA, which ironically was the center of the free speech movement against conservative college establishment in the 1960s. In 2017, with a silent agreement of a progressive municipal authorities, a large group of local Antifa radicals, vandalized a University of California building that was to accommodate a conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos. While wrecking the meeting hall and surrounding facilities, those vigilantes severely beat people who came to listen to him and even stubbed one person. What is also interesting about this incident is that Milo, acting as a political jester and clown, made a career by poking fun of the current sacred icons of the cultural left (identity politics and political correctness) that became part of the political and social mainstream in the West. The aggressive reaction to his humor reminds of the attempts of by-gone Soviet ideologues to shut down and censor people who shared anti-communist jokes and limericks. It is obvious that if one feels insecure about his or her ideology or religion, it surely means that something is wrong with that ideology or religion. Several veterans of the New Left have expressed a concern that the current left lost their progressive spirit.46 Instead, they became part of the establishment that seeks to police people’s behavior. It seems the emergence of the

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expression “regressive left” has not been accidental. One cannot avoid various troubling questions that arise in that respect. Was a Soviet communist, who in 1989 defended the reactionary and oppressive system of Soviet socialism, a left and progressive? Or was this person a plain retrograde and obscurantist? Are the current attempts of the woke left in the West to cancel the freedom of speech progressive or reactionary? Was it progressive, for example, for the German left to ally themselves with conservatives and nationalists in a collective demand to shut down amazon​.c​om for German customers and to use state subsidies to support traditional bookstore? Was a recent 2019 initiative by aforementioned democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez to block the amazon effort to build its headquarters in New York, which cost the city 25,000 jobs, a progressive or reactionary measure? Was the socialist government of Bolivia acting reactionary when it finally adopted a special law that allowed child labor in response to persistent demands of the young and teenagers of that country to give them permission to work? On how the left are going to address these and similar uncomfortable questions depends whether people continue to consider them vibrant and progressive or relegate them to the “dustbin of history.”

NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics—Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 216–217. 2. Quoted after Makine-White, Communism and Democracy, 236. 3. Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism. 4. Beilharz, Socialism and Modernity, 137. 5. See, for example, Pitirim Sorokin, “Mutual Convergence of the United States and the U.S.S.R. to the Mixed Sociocultural Type,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 1 (1960):143–176; John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1967). 6. Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 3–18. 7. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 3, 5. 8. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Boundary 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–27, http:​/​/www​​.comm​​onhou​​se​.or​​g​.uk/​​wp​-co​​ntent​​/uplo​​ads​/2​​014​/0​​4​/bro​​wn​-me​​ lanch​​oli​a-​​of​-th​​e​-lef​​t​.pdf​, 20. 9. Ibid., 26. 10. Simon Griffiths, ed., Engaging Enemies: Hayek and the Left (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); David Markus, “The Horizontalists,” Dissent, Fall (2012), https​:/​/ww​​w​.dis​​sentm​​agazi​​ne​.or​​g​/art​​icle/​​the​-h​​or​izo​​ntali​​sts, accessed 2/11/2016. 11. Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Phoenix, AZ: Scholargy, 2004).

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12. Midori Ito, “The Concept of Ulrich Beck’s Individualization: Individual and society in reflexive modernity,” Japanese Sociological Review 59, no. 2 (2008): 316–330. 13. Sotirakopoulos, The Rise of Lifestyle Activism, 23. 14. Newsweek, February 6, 2009; David Weigel, “‘We are All Socialists Now,’ Nine Years Later,” Washington Post, February 12 (2018), https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​ onpos​​t​.com​​/news​​/the-​​fix​/w​​p​/201​​8​/02/​​12​/we​​-are-​​all​-s​​ocial​​ists-​​now​-n​​ine​-y​​ears-​​later​​/ ​ ?utm​​_term​=​.d07​​71f5e​​a866 15. Harvard Public Opinion Project, Executive Summary Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service, April 25 (2016), 7, https​:/​/ io​​p​.har​​vard.​​edu​/s​​ites/​​defau​​lt​/fi​​les​/c​​onten​​t​/160​​425​_H​​arvar​​d​%20I​​OP​%20​​Sprin​​​g​%20R​​ eport​​_upda​​te​.pd​f 16. Will Dahlgreen, “British People are More Likely to View socialism Favourably Than Capitalism,” YouGov, February 23, 2016, https​:/​/yo​​ugov.​​co​.uk​​/topi​​cs​/po​​litic​​s​/ art​​icles​​-repo​​rts​/2​​016​/0​​2​/23/​​briti​​sh​-pe​​ople-​​view-​​socia​​lism-​​​more-​​favou​​rably​​-capi​. 17. Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Annual Report on US Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism, and Collectivism, October (2019), 4, https​:/​/vi​​ctims​​ ofcom​​munis​​m​.org​​/wp​-c​​onten​​t​/upl​​oads/​​2019/​​12​/VO​​C​-YG_​​US​-At​​titud​​es​-So​​ciali​​sm​ -Co​​mmuni​​sm​-an​​​d​-Col​​lecti​​vism-​​2019.​​pdf. 18. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How the Democratic Socialists of America Learned to Love Cynthia Nixon,” New Yorker, August 2, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​ yorke​​r​.com​​/news​​/news​​-desk​​/how-​​the​-d​​emocr​​atic-​​socia​​lists​​-of​-a​​meric​​a​-lea​​rned-​​to​-lo​​ ve​-cy​​nthia​​-nixo​​​n​-and​​-elec​​toral​​-poli​​tics.​ 19. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 367. 20. Christopher Hitchens, “Bons Mots and Bêtes Noires,” New York Times, September 23 (2008), http:​/​/www​​.nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/20​​08​/09​​/21​/b​​ooks/​​revie​​w​/Hit​​​chens​​-t​ .ht​​ml. 21. William Cummings, “‘The World is Going to End in 12 Years if We Don’t Address Climate Change,’ Ocasio-Cortez Says,” USA Today, January 22 (2019), https​:/​/ww​​w​.usa​​today​​.com/​​story​​/news​​/poli​​tics/​​onpol​​itics​​/2019​​/01​/2​​2​/oca​​sio​-c​​ortez​​ -clim​​ate​-c​​hang​e​​-alar​​m​/264​​24810​​02/. 22. Benjamin Fearnow, “Ocasio-Cortez Compares Climate Change to Nazi Germany in Call for ‘Radical’ US Environmental Efforts,” Newsweek, October 21 (2018), https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​sweek​​.com/​​alexa​​ndria​​-ocas​​io​-co​​rtez-​​clima​​te​-ch​​ange-​​nazi-​​ germa​​ny​-se​​basti​​an​-go​​​rka​-g​​lobal​​-1180​​175. 23. Eagleton, Why Marx was Right, 8. 24. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MS: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Heidi Moore, “Why is Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Book a Bestseller,” Guardian, October 21 (2014), https​:/​/ww​​ w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/mo​​ney​/2​​014​/s​​ep​/21​/​-sp-​​thoma​​s​-pik​​ett​y-​​bests​​eller​​-why;​ Owen Jones, “We Need Permanent Revolution: How Thomas Piketty Became 2014’s Most Influential Thinker,” Guardian, December 22 (2014), https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​ /bu​​sines​​s​/201​​4​/dec​​/22​/w​​e​-nee​​d​-a​-w​​ealth​​-tax-​​thoma​​s​-pik​​etty-​​2014s​​-m​ost​​-infl​​uenti​​al​ -th​​inker​; Eagleton, Why Marx was Right. 25. Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 146.

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26. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 195; see also her more recent Crowds and Party (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2016). 27. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992). 28. Boris Kagarlitsky, Neoliberalizm i revolutsia (St. Petersburg: Poligraf, 2013), 99. 29. Ibid., 114, 116. 30. Ibid., 108, 114. 31. William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, “Make the Left Great Again.” American Affairs 1, no. 3 (2017): 75–91. https​:/​/am​​erica​​naffa​​irsjo​​urnal​​.org/​​2017/​​08​/ma​​ke​-le​​​ft​ -gr​​eat/.​ 32. Evelyne Pieiller, “Communism Revisited,” Le Monde diplomatique, May (2011), https://mondediplo​.com​/2011​/05​/13badiou 33. Jean-Francois, Revel, Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a PostSoviet Era (New York: Encounter Books, 2009), 11. 34. Lévy, Left in Dark Times, 52. 35. Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); see also Martin Aidnik and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “The U-turn of Utopia – Utopia, Socialism and Modernity in Zygmunt Bauman’s Social Thought,” Irish Journal of Sociology 22, no. 1 (2019): 22–43. 36. For a typical example of such approach, see Paresh Chattopadhyay, “On a Strange Misreading of Marx: A Note,”: 81–83. 37. Vadim Damier, Stal’noi vek: sotsial’naia istoria sovetskogo obshchestva [Steel Century: Social History of Soviet Society] (Moscow: Librikom, 2013), 6. 38. Max Ehrenfreund, “A Majority of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows,” Washington Post, April 26 (2016), https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​onpos​​t​.com​​/news​​/ wonk​​/wp​/2​​016​/0​​4​/26/​​a​-maj​​ority​​-of​-m​​illen​​nials​​-now-​​rejec​​t​-​cap​​itali​​sm​-po​​ll​-sh​​ows/.​ 39. Unger, The Movement: A History, vii. 40. For more about Antifa origin, history, and structure, see a partisan study authored by its acolyte Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-fascist Handbook (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2017). For a critical study of this movement, see WND Special Report, Antifa: What Americans Need to Know about the Alt-Left (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2017). There is also a balanced neutral account of Antifa activities: Eamon Doyle, ed., Antifa and the Radical Left (New York: Greenhaven Publishing, 2019). 41. William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (London: Pluto Press, 2017). 42. Murray Rothbard, Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, [1965] 2010), 15. 43. Muravchik, Heaven on Earth, 373. 44. Sotirakopoulos, The Rise of Lifestyle Activism, 177. 45. Michael Recktenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Nashville, TN: New English Review Press, 2019). 46. Hank, Link, wo das Herz schlagt, 229; Bershady, When Marx Mattered, 99.

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AQ: The Highlighted terms throughout the index were cross references which is not found as main entry. Please check and confirm whether it can be deleted.

The ABC of Communism (1919), 40; Chinese communists’ interest in, 245. See also Bukharin, Nikolai Adorno, Theodore, 300, 350, 352. See also Frankfurt School “advanced socialism,” xx, xxx, 284, 319, 325, 327, 392; beneficiaries of, xxxiv; Eldridge Cleaver on, xxvi; and the period of stagnation in Soviet Union (1970s), 132; and Soviet housing, 322. See also Brezhnev, Leonid; Soviet Union African socialism, xxxv; as alternative to Marxian socialism, 274; definition of, xx; gradual phasing out of (1980s–1990s), 281; spearheaded by Julius Nyerere, 69, 274. See also Mugabe, Robert; Nyerere, Julius; ujamaa Allende, Salvador, 309. See also neoliberalism studies; Pinochet, Augusto Anarchism, 384; growth of (1980s–1990s), 394; as major rival of Marxian socialism (19th century), xxiv; marginalization of (by the 1900s), 44; Stalin’s crackdown on (1937), xxiv. See also Bakunin,

Mikhail; Kropotkin, Peter; Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph Angka, 254, 259; omnipotence of, 255– 57. See also Khmer Rouge Animal Farm (1945): left mainstream rejection of (later 1940s), 153; as satire of communist elite (nomenklatura), 97. See also Orwell, George Antifa, 394; University of California building vandalized by, 395. See also Anarchism; Red Army Factions; Red Brigades; Shining Path; Weather Underground Arlosoroff, Haim, 217. See also nationalist socialism; national socialism; kibbutzim Attlee, Clement, 69. See also Fabians Babeuf, Francois-Noel “Gracchus,” 12 Bakunin, Mikhail: youthful passionate Christianity of, 50–51; as Karl Marx rival, 46–47. See also Anarchism Ballod, Karl, 81, 143; and Bolsheviks, 82. See also Ludendorff Erich; Rathenau, Walther; War Socialism Bauer, Bruno, 30. See also Marx, Karl Bauer, Otto, 78

431

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 431

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Index

Bazard, Saint-Amand, 18; as apostle of Saint-Simonian Religion, 19. See also Saint-Simon, Henri de Bazhanov, Boris, 98; on Stalin purge of cosmopolitan Bolsheviks, 99. See also Stalin, Joseph Beck, Ulrich, 386; on humanity as collective “proletariat,” 389–90. See also eco-socialism Begin, Menachem, 230. See also kibbutzim; Zionism Bellamy, Edward, xxv–xxvi, 143; evangelical background of, 81; as spearhead of socialism in US, 80. See also Looking Backward (1887) Ben-Gurion, David, 217; dismissal of Yiddish by, 226. See also Zionism Berg, Aksel Johan, 196. See also cybernetics; Lange, Oskar; socialist calculation debate Bernstein, Eduard, 82, 106, 241; background of, 64; as critic and reformer of Marxism, 65–66, 192, 199; Fabian influence on, 67; Lenin’s crusade against, 70–71. See also Kautsky, Karl Besant, Anne, 67; conversion to socialism, 68. See also Fabians; Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Beveridge, William Henry, 194; Beveridge Report (1942) and, 149, 151; British socialism and, 150. See also democratic socialism; Laski, Harold biopolitics, 321; expression, origin of, 199; German national socialism and, 175, 178; Stalinist regime and, 330; Swedish social democrats and, 202. See also Foucault, Michel; Kjellen, Rudolf; Myrdal, Alva; Myrdal, Gunnar Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 343. See also British Cultural Studies; Cultural Studies

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 432

Bismarck, Otto von, 62; state socialism and, 61. See also Lassalle, Ferdinand Black Book of Communism, xiv Black Panthers, 364. See also critical race theory; Fanon, Frantz; Maoism; woke Bolsheviks, xvii, xxxiii, 72, 76, 97, 111, 120, 176, 179, 240; Asian colonial periphery and, 95; attitudes to Russian peasant of, 238; bureaucratization of, 98; Chinese revolutionaries interest (1919) in, 235; class classification of society by, 108; communist rites and iconography of, 128; control of Comintern by, 93; fetish of centralized panning and, 80, 146; German nationalism and, 170; German Nazi view of, 160; industrialization zeal of, 116; martial methods embracement by, 82; Mensheviks rivalry with, 73; millenarianism of, 79, 90, 127; Mirsaid Sultan Galiev and, 217; 1917 popular sentiments in Russia and, 87; 1920 Polish crusade of, 91–92; omnipotent power of top, 159; opposition to World War I and, 89; peasant collectivization policies (1929–93) of, 117–18, 144; peasant policies, (1920s) of, 114–15; prominent names among, 155; radical egalitarianism of, xxix; rereading classical Marxism by, 96; Stalin against cosmopolitan, 98–99; War Communism and, 88; Western social democrats (1919–1920s) and, 77; world revolution and, 168; World War I and, 74. See also Comintern; Lenin, Vladimir; Marxism-Leninism; Trotsky, Leon Borochov, Dov Ber, 216–17. See also Labor Zionism; nationalist socialism; socialist Zionism

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Index

Bounarotti, Philippe, 12; views of, 13. See also Babeuf, Francois-Noel “Gracchus” Bourne, Randolph, 82 Branting, Karl Hjalmar, 77; Bernstein revisionism embracement by, 199. See also Swedish model British Cultural Studies, 347. See also Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies; cultural left; Cultural Marxism; Frankfurt School; Hill, Christopher; Hoggart; Marcuse, Herbert; Stuart Hall; Williams, Raymond Buddhism, xxxi; Blend of Communism with, 234; Chinese MarxismLeninism and, 235; Khmer Rouge and, 255; Taiping crusade against, 236; Western cultural left and, 369 Bukharin, Nikolai, 40, 91; comparison of Deng Xiaoping with, 328; dismissal of millenarian interpretation of Bolshevism by, 79; former Khmer Rouge activist on, 260; New Economic Policy (NEP) and, 115; Stephen Cohen idealization of, 134, 325; subservient letter to Stalin (1938) by, 263; view of war as harbinger of socialism by, 82. See also ABC of Communism Cabet, Étienne, 11, 14, 20. See also utopian socialism Cambridge Five, 105. See also Deutsch, Arnold, Philby Kim; Hiss, Alger; fellow travelers; White, Dexter Carson, Rachel, 373. See also ecosocialism Castro, Fidel, xx, xxvi, 242, 253, 282, 364 Ceausescu, Nicolae execution of. See nationalist socialism; national socialism Chase, Stuart, 159. See also fellow travelers

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 433

433

Che Guevara. See Castro, Fidel; New Left Cheka (Bolshevik secret police), 88. See also Bolsheviks; Dzerzhinsky, Felix; KGB; NKVD; Red Terror Chief of Chukotka (Soviet movie) (1966). See also Marxism-Leninism Chomsky, Noam, xxxii; endorsement of Khmer Rouge by, 261; JewishAmerican left luminaries and, 107; visit to kibbutz of, 220. See also kibbutzim; mobilized diaspora Cleaver, Eldridge, xxvi climate change, 374; Alexandria OcasioCortez on, 388; apocalyptic notions and, 389; ideological intolerance and, 376; indigenous spiritual “wisdom” and, 377. See also eco-socialism; global warming collectivization (in the Soviet Union), 1929–1933, 114, 144, 179; background and genocidal consequences of, 115–18; Bolshevik true believers and, 129; (in Cambodia), 254, 257; (in communist China), 237; Great Depression effect on, xxxii, 116; long-term harmful economic effect of, 327; similarities and difference with Soviet, 240, 330; Soviet sympathizers and Western fellow-travelers endorsement of, 158, 291, 339; Mao attempt to outdo Soviet, 242; post Mao leadership dismantling of, 329, 330. See also Great Leap Forward; Maoism; Stalin, Joseph Comintern (Communist International), xxix, 93–95, 170; cosmopolitan and diaspora composition of, 105, 153, 168, 345; dismissal of Zionism by, 217–18; German national socialism assessment by, 184–85; ideological heresies and, 150, 351; radical Western left insurrections and, 143; social democrats and, 187; Soviet

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Index

intelligence apparatus and, 96; Stalinist purges of, 120–21; Stalin shut down of, 112 communism, xiii–xiv, xxiii, xxxiv, 14, 20; anarchist view of, xxiv; concept of political religion and, xv; first manifestations of (in the wake of French Revolution), 23; modernity studies and, xvii; national/cultural settings and, xxxiii; social democracy links to (scholarly opinions), xix–xx; terminological origin and meaning of, xxviii–xxxi, 9, 11 Communist Manifesto (1848), 26, 30; contents of, 41; current socialist ideology in China and, 334; debunking Weitling and, 36; Hess contribution to, 29; on “idiocy of rural life” in, 377. See also Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl Communist Workers Party (Germany), 170. See also National Bolshevism; national socialism Comte, Auguste, 16; lasting influence on Western thought of, 21–22; Religion of Humanity (“positive church”) of, 17–18. See also Counter-Revolution of Science (1955); Ecole Polytechnique; positivism; Religion of Humanity; Saint-Simon, Henri de Confucianism, xxxiii; Asian/Chinese communism and, 233–34, 236; current Chinese Communist Party appropriation of, 333; a fine line between North Korean communism and, 250–51; Korean tradition and, 249 Corbyn, Jeremy, 388. See also democratic socialism “Council of Newton,” 15, 45, 147; twentieth-century reincarnation of, 129. See also Saint-Simon, Henri de; utopian socialism Counter-Revolution of Science (1955), 15–16. See also Hayek, F. A.

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 434

Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), 62. See also Marx, Karl; proletariat, dictatorship of critical race theory, 347, 361. See also Critical Theory; Cultural Marxism; Fanon, Frantz Critical Theory, 315; critical study of, 356; Frankfurt School and, 350; race, culture, identity and, 347. See also Cultural Marxism cultural left, 359; apocalyptic views of, 374; classical Marxist critique of, xxxviii, 369–70; dismissal of Marxist concept of progress by, 372; ecological rereading of Marxism by, 377; expression of “Cultural Marxism” and, 347; intellectual hegemony of, 367, 393; intellectual links between Frankfurt School and, 348; (Milo) poking fun of, 395; multiculturalism in Sweden and, 207; politicization of lifestyles by, 342; post-modernism and rise of, 385; preoccupation with identity politics and speech codes of, 390; Project 1619 and, 368; romanticization of Third World and non-Western cultures by, 365. See also Cultural Marxism; New Left Cultural Marxism, 40, 334; conspiracy notions and, 315, 348; Frankfurt School and, 347; gender issues and, 366; (origin) definition of, 348; popularity of, 393; shift from economic Marxism to, 364. See also Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; cultural left; Frankfurt School; Gramsci, Antonio; Hall, Stuart; identity politics; Lukács, George; Marcuse, Herbert; New Left Cultural Revolution (in China), 243–44. See also Maoism; Red Guards Cultural Studies, 339; British, 340–43; classical Marxists dismissal of, 347. See also Cultural Marxism; New Left

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Index

cybernetics, 196. See also Berg, Aksel Johan; Lange, Oskar; socialist calculation debate Das Kapital (1867), 32; first (1872 Russian) translation of, 51–52; Marxists symbolic use of, 63. See also Marx, Karl democratic socialism, 34; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, 388; attempts to humanize Marxism and, 340; Bernie Sanders and, 206, 377; Beveridge Plan (1942) and, 149; communist left ideological exit strategy and, 319; golden age (1945–1970s) of, 311; Gorbachev peddling of, 324; ideological exit from communism (1987–1991 Soviet Union) use of, 325; Julius Nyerere formal allegiance to, 272; UK Labour Party and, 318. See also Bernstein, Eduard, Fabians; Keynes, John; Laski, Harold Democratic Socialists of America, 387 Deng Xiaoping, 237; Bukharin’s ABC of Communism and, 245; economic liberalization in China and, 303, 329–30, 332; global liberalization of economy and, 310; Mao legacy and, 329; Mao purge of, 243, 328; market socialism of, 328. See also Mao (Zedong) Deutsch, Arnold, 105. See also Cambridge five; mobilized diaspora; NKVD Deutscher, Isaac, 105; Jews role among the left, view by, 98; left celebrity status of, 300 “doctors plot,” 126. See also National Bolshevism; “rootless cosmopolitans”; Stalin, Joseph Dubček, Alexander, 326. See also democratic socialism; Prague Spring (1968) Dunayevskaya, Raya, xi. See also Marxism-Humanism; New Left

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435

Duranty, Walter, 158. See also fellow travelers Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 155. See also Cheka; mobilized diaspora; NKVD Eastman, Max, 151 Ecole Polytechnique, 13, 16; Enfantin and, 18; Henri de Saint-Simon and students/graduates of, 15; SaintSimonians and, 20. See also Comte, Auguste; Counter-Revolution of Science (1955); Saint-Simone, Henri de; utopian socialism eco-socialism, 372–78. See also climate change; global warming; OcasioCortez, Alexandria Ehrlich, Paul, 374. See also ecosocialism Enfantin, Prosper, 18–19; model town commune in Ménilmontant and, 20; totalitarian temptations of, 21. See also Saint-Simone, Henri de; utopian socialism Engels, Friedrich, xviii, xxii, 25, 36–37, 47, 52, 57, 60, 7, 129, 133, 161, 199, 236, 248, 343, 364; attitudes toward anarchists, 43–44, 46–47; background of, 31; death of, 64, 192; Hegel and Comte influence on, 39; Hess and, 27–28, 34, 216; invention of proletariat and, 29, 34, 40; Kautsky and, 65; Lassalle and, 62; making of “scientific socialism” by, 26, 35, 42–43; Marx complete financial dependence on, 62–63; Marx first intellectual encounters with, 32; Marxism “history laws” and, 70; North Korean postal stamps with image of, 250; The Origin of Family, Private Property by, 366; use of expression “communism” by, xxix; views on communist future by, 41; views on socialist revolution of, 73; views of working class conditions in England (1830s–1840s) by, 8

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Eurocommunism, 303; social democratic evolution of, 305. See also “new philosophers”; neoliberalism Fabians, 67–70, 154; Nyerere and, 271. See also Besant, Anne; fellow travelers; Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Fanon, Frantz, 268; dismissal of Western civilization by, 363; ideological views of, 361–62. See also African socialism; critical race theory; Cultural Marxism fellow travelers, 63, 131, 137; dismissal of Western civilization by, 363; Stalin-Trotsky debate (1920s) and, 99. See also Cambridge Five; Chase, Stuart; Duranty, Walter; Frank, Waldo; Gide, Andre; Hiss, Alger; Laski, Harold; Stephens, Lincoln; Straight, Michael; Tugwell, Rex; Webb, Sidney and Beatrice; White, Dexter Feyerabend, Paul, 306. See also postmodernism Fischer, Joschka, 360. See also New Left Folkheim (people’s home), 199; national socialist “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and, 200. See also Branting, Karl Hjalmar; Kjellen, Rudolf; Myrdal, Alva; Myrdal, Gunnar; Volksgemeinschaft Foner, Eric, 107. See also mobilized diaspora; New Left Foucault, Michel, xxxii, 384; dismissal of Marx by, 305; as intellectual guru of Western social scholarship, 16, 383; neoliberalism studies and, 308; 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and, 365 Frank, Waldo, 155–56. See also fellow travelers Frankfurt School, 22, 339, 359; current Trotskyites dismissal of, xxxviii,

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 436

347, 368–69; early members, 104, 348; the first meeting (the 1923 Marxist Work Week) agenda of, 351; founders of, 103; growing popularity (1960s–1970s) of, 185, 299; Herbert Marcuse and, 186; origin of, 348; prominent members of, 347, 350; the radical right’s view of, 315, 347–48. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism; Fromm, Erich; Lukács, George; Marcuse, Herbert; New Left Freemasons, 13; early socialist groups and, 35–36. See also Bounarotti, Philippe; utopian socialism Friedman, Milton, 307; left demonization of, 308, 313 Genovese, Eugene, xiii “German operation” (1937), 120–21. See also Great Terror; National Bolshevism; Stalin, Joseph Gide, Andre, 156–57. See also fellow travelers Gitlin, Todd, 107. See also mobilized diaspora; New Left global warming, 152; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on, 388; apocalyptic prophecy of, 372, 374, 376; computer models and, 19; HayekFriedman “cabal” and, 308; surrogate proletarians and, 389–90. See also climate change; eco-socialism Godesberg program (1959), 195. See also social democracy “going to people,” 213. See also populists Goldberg, Jonah, 190 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 303, 318, 331; August 18 (1991) coup and, 326; communist China (1989) and, 332–33; exorcising Stalinism from socialism and, 324–32. See also Yakovlev, Alexander Gordon, Aaron David, 217. See also socialist Zionism; Zionism

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Index

Gorz, Andre, 359. See also New Left Gosplan (the central planning bureau in the Soviet Union), 118, 126, 323 Gramsci, Antonio: cultural hegemony theory of, 345–46. See also Cultural Marxism; Frankfurt School; New Left Great Awakening: Bolshevik, 95; early socialism and, 10; Maoist, 321; secular offshoots (1820s–1830s) of, xxii. See also Owen, Robert; Shakers Great Depression, 139, 165; collapse of capitalism prophecy and, 388; rise of national socialism in Germany and, 167–69, 185; rising martial policies and, 138; social democratic policies and, 142–43; Stalin collectivization policy and, xxxii, 116; Stalin Soviet Union in the context of, 158–59; Sweden and, 201. See also fellow travelers Great Leap Forward (in China), 242–44; Mao’s responsibility for, 329; shotting for Super (in Cambodia), 254. See also Maoism; Mao (Zedong) Green New Deal, 374; Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez and, 374; atrial sentiments in, 388, 393. See also eco-socialism; Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), 349; communists and fellow traveler agents of, 104, 131. See also Cambridge Five; KGB; Massing, Hede; NKVD; Poretsky, Elizabeth Gukurahundi, 284–85. See also Mugabe, Robert GULAG, 320; enterprising peasants (kulaks) confinement to, 117, 330; Soviet German in, 196; Western left dismissing existence of, 154, 339. See also collectivization; the Great Terror

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437

GULAG Archipelago (1973), 305. See also Solzhenitsyn, Alexander halls of science, 3, 5; social hymns in, 9. See also Owen, Robert; utopian socialism Harvey, David, 311; neoliberalism as political project and, 308; dismissal of libertarian trend by, 312 Hayek, F. A., xxxii, 152, 192, 196; former communist countries romance with ideas of (1980s–1990s), 317; intellectual marginalization of, 300; left conspiratorial view of, 307–8, 313; Margaret Thatcher and, 318; Orwell and, 152; The Road to Serfdom (1944) by, 149, 307; Socialist Calculation Debate (1930s) and, 142, 145–49; view of Ecole Polytechnique social engineers by, 15; view of labor living standards in the wake of the English Industrial Revolution by, 23; Western mainstream ostracism of, 150–51. See also Keynes, John M.; Lange, Oskar Hegel, Wilhelm, 27, 299; Ferdinand Lassalle and philosophy of, 59–60; Moses Hess and philosophy of, 28; three-stage view of history evolution and, 39 Herzl, Theodor, 224; socialist leanings of, 218. See also Zionism Hess, Moses, xx, 23, 35, 46, 62; background of, 28; communist prophecy of, 25; foundation of Zionism and, 27; invention of proletariat and, 29, 37; Lassalle and, 59; Marx and Engels making fun of, 34; meeting and collaboration with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 26; shift from communism to Jewish nationalist socialism, 32, 216–17; stance on anti-Semitism, 33; stance on Jews in history, 31; Weitling and,

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438

Index

36. See also Borochov, Dov Ber; Engels, Friedrich; Labor Zionism; Marx, Karl; nationalist socialism; socialist Zionism Hilferding, Rudolf, 75. See also Lenin, Vladimir Hiss, Alger, 131. See also Cambridge Five; fellow travelers; Massing, Hede Hitler, Adolf, xiv, xx, xxvi, 122, 126, 140, 155–56, 165, 169; appropriation of German socialist tradition by, 167; doctrine of Lebensraum (living space) and, 168; historian Ernest Nolte on, 100; left downplaying socialist tendencies of, 166; making of national socialism and, 170; redemptive role of their “science” and, xvii; Stalin pact with, 152; stance on future of nationalism in Soviet Union, 112. See also national socialism Hobsbawm, Eric, 23, 313; Communist Party Historians Group and, 342; search for new revolutionary class by, 244; Standard of Living During Industrial Revolution debate and, 355 Hong Xiuquan, 236. See also Taiping rebellion Horowitz, David, 107. See also mobilized diaspora How the Steel Was Tempered (1932), 131. See also Marxism-Leninism; Ostrovsky, Nikolay Humbert-Droz, Jules, 4. See also Comintern identity politics: classical Marxist critique of, 394; Fanon writings contribution to, 361; fear to challenge catechism of, 368; German national socialist, 166, 170, 182; intellectual and cultural hegemony of, 370, 395; irrationality and reactionary nature of, 369; left creed and, 306; left exit strategy

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 438

(1970s–1980s) and emergence of, 385; socialism sliding into, xxv, xxvii, xxxii; Soviet, 113. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), 32. See also Bakunin, Mikhail; Marx, Karl Jambanja (mayhem), 287. See also Mugabe, Robert Joseph, Keith, 318. See also Sherman, Alfred; Thatcher, Margaret juche (self-reliance), 249; emergence of, 250; gradual degeneration of, 252. See also Kim Il-sung Kagarlitsky, Boris, xii, xxxv, 306; attempt to revive class-based politics and, 390; on connection between Great Depression and Stalin collectivization, 116; critique of cultural left and identity politics by, 367, 369; Marxist failure to explain 1970s crisis and, 302. See also neoliberalism; neoliberalism studies Katyn massacre, 122–23. See also Great Terror; National Bolshevism; “Polish operation”; Stalin, Joseph Kautsky, Karl, xxix; background of, 64; blind faith in Marxian “natural laws” and, 65; endorsement of social engineering by, 78; Marx Engels and, 192; rank and file Bolshevik mad at, 95 Kerensky, Alexander, 88 Keynes, John, 152; attitude to Stalin regime of, 157; democratic socialists and social democracy embracement of, 193–95, 199, 299, 302, 311, 384; endorsement of Nazi economic policies by, 172; Hayek and, 142, 149; intellectual opportunism of, 150; intellectual hegemony of, 151; left changing attitudes to, 148; libertarian challenge (1970s–1980s) to, 307;

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Index

retrograde prescriptions (in 21st century) of, 312; Richard Nixon and, 387; socio-economic model of, 14, 141, 300; stance on great potential of warfare, 140. See also democratic socialism; “third way”; Thomas, Norman KGB, 131. See also Cheka; NKVD Khmer Rouge, xxvi, 252, 262; Marxism-Leninism and, 254; Noam Chomsky soft spot for, 261; origin of, 253; radical Maoist stance of, 254; secrecy and anonymity of, 255; stance on urban life and urban residents, 256, 259; thought policing and, 257; xenophobia and nationalism of, 258, 260. See also Maoism; Pol Pot Khrushchev, Nikita, 329; communist utopia and, 132; de-Stalinization efforts of, 129, 321, 339; “kitchen debate” with Richard Nixon and, 324; North Korean dictatorship suspicion of, 248; Soviet bureaucracy coup against, 322 kibbutzim, xx; diverse socialist trends among, 220, 228; ethnopolitical goals of, 216, 224; Israeli government generous subsidies to, 230; Marxist, 227; martial nature of, 229; romancing manual labor among, 223; socialist Zionism among, 215, 218, 221, 225; spread, number, and sponsorship of, 219. See also Arlosoroff, Haim; Borochov, Dov Ber; Labor Zionism; socialist Zionism; Trumpeldor, Joseph; Zionism Kim Il-sung, 240; background of, 246; Soviet military rank of, 247. See also juche; Tasan Kjellen, Rudolf, 199; Swedish social democracy and, 200, 209 Klein, Naomi, 308. See also neoliberalism studies

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439

Kopelev, Lev, 129. See also MarxismLeninism Korsch, Karl, 347; origin of Frankfurt School and, 348. See also Frankfurt School kulaks, 121, 240; exile of, 117, 330; segregation and discrimination of, 108, 113, 120, 122, 132, 167, 179; Stalin regime demonization of, 115; white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe as, 284, 288, 290. See also collectivization Labor Zionism, 184, 215; Borochov and, 217. See also Borochov, Dov Ber; Hess, Moses; socialist Zionism Lange, Oskar: “defeat” of Hayek by, 147–48; marginalization of Hayek and, 151; market socialism of, 145, 148; “perfect equilibrium” of, 146; stance on computers and socialist calculation, 196 Laski, Harold, 141; dismissal of Hayek by, 150–51; endorsement of Stalinist regime by, 155; George Orwell and review of, 153; praise of warfare as crucible of socialism and, 138–40 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 57, 64; background of, 58–59; Eduard Bernstein and legacy of, 66; Karl Marx relations with, 62–63; Marxism and, 60, 70; romancing state power by, 61 Latsis, Martin, 88. See also Cheka; KGB; NKVD; Red Terror Lebensraum (living space), 168. See also national socialism Lenin, Vladimir, xi, xxxii, 87–89, 95, 99, 169, 179, 241, 262, 343, 364; adjustment of Marxism to Russian soil, 73; background of, 71; burned portrait (Hungary, 1956) of, 341; Chinese communism (Maoism) and texts of, 236–39; concept of imperialism and, 42, 74–75; current left ascribing ecological activism

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440

Index

to, 378; death of, 96; dismissal of Bernstein revisionism, 70; (Dora Lazurkina, 1961) dream vision of, 129; European social democrats and, 77–78; fomenting revolution in Russia by, 74, 76; George Lukács and, 351; Karl Ballod blueprint of socialism and, 81–82; Khmer Rouge and idea of, 254; Khrushchev’s call to return to canonical writings of, 321; kibbutz displaying portraits of, 223–24; kibbutzim and ideas of, 227; market socialists use of New Economic Policy (NEP) ideas of, 322, 325, 328–29; Mao use of, 52; northern Asia socialist movements and, 234; North Korean dictatorship shifting view of, 248–49; Ossendowski biography of, 84; political religion of MarxismLeninism and, 127–28, 133, 154–55; promotion of world revolution by, 90–91, 93, 168; reintroduction of expression “communism” by, xxix; Rosa Luxemburg and, 72, 303; Slavoj Žižek and ideas of, 261; Solzhenitsyn book about, xxxiii; stamps (in North Korea) of, 250; totalitarian Bolshevik state machine and, 97–98; vanguard party concept and, 37, 71, 94, 303; view on Jewish progressives contribution to 1917 revolution of, 100, 102; vision of socialism by, 83 Leningrad Case (1949–1950), 126. See also National Bolshevism; “rootless cosmopolitans” Leroux, Pierre, xxviii. See also utopian socialism Little Red Book, 245, 254; Robert Mugabe and, 284. See also Maoism; Mao (Zedong) London School of Economics, 142; Fabians and, 68, 154

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 440

Looking Backward (1887), xxv–xxvi, 8–81. See also Bellamy, Edward Lukács, George (György), 347; 1919 Hungarian Revolution and, 349; 1923 Marxist Work Week (first Frankfurt School) and, 348; romancing class spirit of proletariat by, 351–52. See also Cultural Marxism; Frankfurt School Luxemburg, Rosa, xi, xxxii, 70; dismissal of her Jewish background by, 106; Lenin and, 71–72; New Left invocation of, 73, 303; radical revolutionary internationalism of, 74 Mao (Zedong), xx, xxvi, 184, 237, 246, 280–81, 319; adjustment of Marxism-Leninism to Third World and, 52, 74, 238–39, 332; background of, 237; collectivization policy (Great Leap Forward) of, 240– 43; Confucius statue and mausoleum of, 335; Cultural Revolution of, 243–46; current Chinese Communist Party assessment of, 329; death of, 328; dismissal of Deng Xiaoping (1960s) by, 328; dismissal of Soviet de-Stalinization by, 242; image of, 365; Khmer Rouge and, 253–55, 257; Marxism-Leninism and, 242, 333; North Korea and, 248, 251. See also Maoism; Marxism-Leninism Maoism (Maoist), 329, 391; Confucianism and, 235–36; current Chinese communist ideological blend of Confucianis and, 333; current Western left view of, 392; Deng Xiaoping and alternative to, 329–30; French left think tank Cedetim and, 294; Julius Nyerere appropriation of, 276–78, 280; Khmer Rouge and, 253–58; Western radical leftist acolytes (1950s–1980s) of, 261–62, 303, 364–65, 394; Zimbabwe national socialists flirt with, 270,

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Index

284. See also Mao (Zedong); Marxism-Leninism; Mugabe, Robert; Nyerere, Julius Marcuse, Herbert, xxxii; dismissal of consumerism and bourgeois “false consciousness” by, 375; Frankfurt School collective and, 299–300, 347, 350, 353; political correctness project of, 353–54; politicization of ecological issues by, 373; stance on use of expressions “Nazi” and “National Socialism,” 186–87; view on eclipse of proletariat, 359. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism; Frankfurt School; New Left; “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) market socialism, xxvi, 145; abortive attempts (Soviet Union) to introduce, 322–23, 328; Deng Xiaoping and, 328; Lange concept of, 147–48, 196; Tito’s Yugoslavia as example of, 161, 203. See also Lange, Oskar; Yugoslavia “self-government” socialism Marx, Karl, xi, xviii, xxii, xxix, xxxii, 28, 57, 69, 93, 223, 227, 236, 262, 299, 393, 395; dismissal of anarchists (Bakunin and Proudhon) by, 43–47; dismissal of “utopian socialists” by, 34–36; eco-socialist rereading of, 377–78; Engels and Hess collaboration with, 26–27, 216; Engels partnership with, 32; Ferdinand Lassalle and, 58–59, 62–63; Gareth Stedman Jones biography of, xv; Henri SaintSimon influence on, 21–22; image of, 27; invention of proletariat by, 29, 34, 40, 351; Khrushchev and writings of, 321; Michel Foucault dismissal of, 305; Moses Hess drift away from, 216; North Korean dictatorship ideological use of, 248, 250–51; present China TV and, 334; revolution of 1848 and, 42; Russian

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 441

441

socialist populists and, 47, 213; socio-economic formations theory of, 37, 43; Soviet use of writings of, 129, 133, 155; stance on Jewish question and identity, 29–30, 72; stance on peasantry and countryside, 73; stance on “socialism” of Russian peasant commune, 52; unconscious appropriation of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition by, 39–41; use of expression “communism” by, xxix; use of Hess work by, 31; Werner Sombart and, 180. See also Engels, Friedrich; Hess, Moses; Scientific Socialism marxisant (French usage), 361. See also Fanon, Frantz; New Left Marxism, xi, xv, xvii, 8, 36, 44, 59, 165, 237–39, 334, 384; The ABC of Communism (1919) as primer of, 40; African liberation spokespeople racial reinterpretation of, 272; Anarchism and, xxiv; Antonio Gramsci revision of, 345–46; August Comte influence on, 17, 22; autonomous, 319; Bolshevik adjustment of, 96; Catholicism and, xxi; concept of world revolution in, 28, 73; current revival of, 389, 393; C. Wright Mills against Victorian, 345; dismissal of political religion concept by, xxxvi, 79; economic determinism of classical, 340; ecosocialism and, 372, 375; Eduard Bernstein revision of, 65–67, 199; Eric Hobsbawm and, 344; Fabians and, 69; feminist rereading of, 366–67; Ferdinand Lassalle and, 60, 63; Frankfurt School cultural revision of, 347–48; Frankfurt School merging of Freud with, 185–86, 348, 350; French consultants in Africa (1960s) practicing, 270; German National Socialists assault on internationalism of, 167, 181–82;

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442

Index

intersectionality theory an, 371; Israel kibbutzim appreciation of, 227; Jewish nationalist socialism and, 217–18, 223; Jewish Socialist Bund and, 215; Jewish tradition and, 101–2; Julius Neyerere rejection of, 273; left mainstream (1890s–1900) endorsement of, xviii, 63–64; left mainstream drift (1970s–1980s) away from, 305–6, 385; Lenin revival of revolutionary, xxix, 70–72, 77, 87, 93; millenarian nature of, 41, 79; modernity and, 25; Moses Hess as spearhead of, xx; Murray Rothbard on religious nature of, xi; North Korean Stalinist regime and, 249–50, 252; polemics of present-day cultural left and traditional, 368–70, 390; popularity (in 2018–2019 US) of, 387; present China mandatory classes in, 334–35; racialization of, 362–63, 365; replacement of god with humans in, 38; romancing of proletarians as “chosen people” in, 38, 40, 57, 98; Russia-Jewish populists conversion to, 214–15; Russian populists conversion to, 49–51; “science” of, xxiii, 43, 71, 79–80, 352, 391; social democrats dropping, 304, 340; social democrats genetic links (1890s–1950s) to, xxxi, 78; social democrats revision of, 192–93, 195; socialism in one country and, 99; teaching about stages of human evolution in, 39; Third World revolutionaries appropriation of, 239; utopian socialism and, xxii; vision of communist future in, 41–42; Western, xxxv, 348–49, 366; Western New Left drift away from, 342–43, 346, 360–61; Western New Left revision of, 385; Yugoslavia communist creative adjustment of, 161

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 442

Marxism-Humanism, xi–xiii, xxxv, 107, 319, 340 Marxism-Leninism, xxxi, 234, 319; African liberation leaders appropriation of, 268, 270; African National Congress (ANC) and Soviet, 293; American apostates of, 107; assessment of Nazi regime in, 184; Black Power nationalism and, xxvi; Chinese tradition and, 234–36, 245; class classification in, 122; class classification of Mongolia in, 95; collectivization of agriculture as major pillar of, 116; current Trotskyite attempt to maintain radical elan, of, 340; Den Xiaoping and, 246; Israel kibbutzim and, 215, 219–21, 227, 228; Khmer Rouge and, 254–55, 257–58, 260; Maoism as continuation and assimilation of, 237–38; Maoist attempts (1960s) to maintain revolutionary spirit of, 242–43; millenarian nature of, 94–95; political religion of, 127–33, 155, 322, 329; present Chinese communist blend of Confucianism, nationalism, and, 333; Stalin National Bolshevism and, 112, 126; summer camp (US) of, 94; Third World revolutionaries appropriation of, xx; Western New Left turn away from, 303, 341. See also Lenin, Vladimir; Mao (Zedong); political religion; Scientific Socialism; Stalin, Joseph; Trotsky, Leon Massing, Hede, 103–4, 349, 357–58. See also Cheka; Frankfurt School; GRU; mobilized diaspora; NKVD; Sorge, Richard Matabele (Ndebele), 282–83, 287, 291; Robert Mugabe assault on, 284–85, 364. See also African socialism; Mugabe, Robert; Nkomo, Joshua

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Index

Mensheviks, 73; 1917 denouncement of Bolshevik dictatorship by, 77. See also social democracy Meyerson (Meir), Golda, 125, 229 Mills, C. Wright, 345–46. See also New Left Mises, Ludwig von, xxxii; Hayek and, 145, 149–50, 166; intellectual ostracism of, 151; Lange “defeat” of, 148; left conspiratorial view of, 307; refutation of Lange by, 147; Socialist Calculation Debate and, 142–44; socialist Otto Baur and, 78; stance on ration cards, 82. See also Bauer, Otto; “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920); Hayek, F. A.; Neurath, Otto; socialist calculation debate (1920s–1930s) Mnangagwa (“Crocodile”), 285, 291, 293. See also Mugabe, Robert mobilized diaspora, 102; concept of, 109. See also Cheka; Dzerzhinsky, Felix; GRU; Massing, Hede; NKVD; Poretsky, Elizabeth modernity, v; Bolshevism and National Socialism as extreme manifestations of, 79; “Council of Newton” as example of, 147; critics of, xxiii, 14; high, xviii; Judeo-Christian tradition and, 38–39; Julius Nyerere blend of traditionalism and, 274; popular practices of, 78; reflexive, 386; secular religions of, xv, 1, 13; socialism as radical child of, xvi, xxxiv, 25; Soviet state practices link to, 84, 154; Stalinist, 151, 339; Western progressives endorsement of Stalin collectivization as fulfillment of, 158 modernity studies, xxxiv. See also Scott, James Monbiot, George, 307, 311; neoliberalism conspiracy theory of, 308, 312. See also neoliberalism studies

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443

Mugabe, Robert, xxvi, 276, 282; assault on private business by, 292; assault on white farmers by, 287–89; authoritarian rule of, 290; background of, 283; as leader in Zimbabwe national liberation movement, 284; Maoism and, 270; retirement of, 293; socialist practices of, 285–86; xenophobia of, 291. See also African Socialism; Nkomo, Joshua Myrdal, Alva, 139, 202; celebration of warfare practices (as prerequisite for strong welfare state) by, 140 Myrdal, Gunnar, 138, 141; and demographic policy in 1930s Sweden, 201; on positive role of war-time mobilization for cultivating welfare and socialism, 139; praise of regulatory state practices by, 139; promotion of state intervention by, 140, 146; as spearhead of Swedish model of socialism, 197, 201; unsuccessful challenge to, 203. See also biopolitics; Folkheim (people’s home); social democracy; Biopolitics; Folkheim (people’s home) Nabokov, Vladimir, 154 National Bolshevism: German, 170– 71; Stalin, 111, 112, 166; study (Brandenberger) of, 126; Trotskyites against, 130 national (nationalist) socialism (Israel), 33; Communist International dismissal of, 217–18; kibbutzim and, 220, 225 national socialism (Africa), 269; Tanzanian, 273, 275, 277; Zimbabwean, 286–91 national socialism (China), 331, 333–34 national socialism (Nazi), xiv, xvii, xx, 14, 79, 123, 149, 165, 185, 318, 384; emergence of, 166–71; ideological novelty of, 180; ideology of, 179;

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444 AQ: Please provide the page locator for the term “origin of the expression of”.

Index

origin of the expression of; popular imagery of, 186; predatory nature of, 175; “scientific” nature of, 182; scholars views on, 184–85; Soviet communism and, 152–53; use of expression of, 166, 183, 186–87. See also Hitler, Adolf; Nolte, Ernest; Sombart, Werner national socialism (Romania), 328 national socialism (Sweden), 299 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi), 168, 183 neoliberalism, xii, xxxiii, 299, 306, 309; birth of, 207; capitalism and, 310; China switch to, 332; conversion of leftists to, 318; “dangerous” pockets of, 205; ideological use of term of, 281, 311; Western identitarian left and, 368; Zimbabwe and, 283 neoliberalism studies, xviii, 311–13; conspiracy notions in, 147–49, 307–9, 315. See also Harvey, David; Mirowski, Philip; Monbiot, George Neumann, Franz, 350. See also Frankfurt School New Christianity (Nouveau christianisme), 2, 11; emancipated Jews and, 20; “scientific” religion of, 15, 17, 18. See also Saint-Simon, Henri de; utopian socialism New Economic Policy (NEP), 114, 118, 144; Bukharin and, 115, 325; Deng Xiaoping appeal to, 328–29, 332; search for socialist “alternative” (1970s–1980s) and, 134, 325; Yugoslavia market socialism and, 161. See also Bukharin, Nikolai, Stephen Cohen; Lenin, Vladimir; market socialism New Harmony, 2–3, 5, 10, 82; image of, 6. See also Owen, Robert; utopian socialism New Left, xiii, 35, 339; aged xxxiv; anti-Soviet trend in, 304; anti-statist sentiments in, 393; Antonio Gramsci

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 444

and, 346; assault on Western civilization of, 364, 372; assimilation of George Lukács legacy into, 349, 351; change of Western intellectual mainstream by, 378, 389; communist China as new revolutionary Mecca and, 261; criticism of “Victorian Marxism” by, 345; emergence of, 185, 340–43; environmentalists and, 373; feminism and, 367; French, 294; idealization of non-Western cultures by, 47, 363, 377; interest in early Marx writings of, 343; Maoism and, 242; Marcuse as intellectual guru od, 353–54, 373, 375; Marxism-Leninism and, 303; messianic role of proletariat and, 40, 350, 352, 359–60, 385; search for new revolutionary classes by, 360–61, 366–67, 379; veterans of, 100–101, 106, 299, 325, 353, 370, 392, 395. See also Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies; Frankfurt School; New Left; Hall, Stuart; Hayden, Tom; Marcuse, Herbert; Mills, C. Wright; New Left Review New Left Review, 342. See also New Left Nkomo, Joshua, 283–85. See also African socialism; Mugabe, Robert NKVD (Soviet secret police), 121. See also Cheka; KGB Nolte, Ernest, 100 nomenklatura (nomenclature), 318; Chinese, 328, 332; emergence of, 97; hostility to innovations (in Soviet Union) on part of, 323; Khrushchev and Soviet, 321; Orwell satire of, 97; Stalin control over, 99; status (in Soviet Union) of, 319–20, 325, 327, 339; Western fellow traveler on Soviet, 156 Nongqawuse, 267

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Index

North, David, 368. See also Cultural Marxism; Marxism-Leninism Nozick, Robert, xxxii; change in intellectual mainstream (1970s–1980s) and, 307 Nyerere, Julius, xx, 270, 283; African socialism and, 69; “Arusha Declaration of Socialism and Self-Reliance” (1967) by, 275; background and intellectual evolution of, 271–72; ideological flirt with Maoism, 280–82; misrepresentation of socialist policies (James Scott) of, 295; modernity and, 274; racialism of, 273; romancing African tribalism by, 273–74; ujamaa policy of, 276–82 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 396; invocation of martial sentiments by, 388 “On the Jewish Question” (1844), 30. See also Marx, Karl “Operation Planned Villages” 276–82. See also African socialism; Nyerere, Julius; ujamaa Orwell, George, 149, 187, 383; contemporary left mainstream ostracism of, 153; review of Hayek Road to Serfdom (1944) by, 152; satire of communist ruling elite by, 97; Soviet Union and metaphor of “memory hole” of, 392. See also Animal Farm (1945) Osterhammel, Jürgen, 268. See also African socialism; cultural left Ostrovsky, Nikolay, 131. See also How the Steel Was Tempered (1932); Marxism-Leninism; National Bolshevism Owen, Robert, xxii, xxviii, 1, 8, 13, 15; apprentices of, 11; introduction of expression “socialism” by, 2; Marx-Engels and, 26, 34; millenarian notions in teaching of, 10; New

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445

Harmony commune and, 6, 82; New Lanark reform of, 3; Saint-Simonians and, 19; “scientific” religion of, 5, 9; stance on slavery, 3–4 Pascal, Pierre, 155. See also Bolsheviks Philby Kim, 131. See also Cambridge Five; Deutsch, Arnold Piłsudski, Józef, 92. See also Tukhachesky, Mikhail Pinochet, Augusto, 309; global drive for economic liberty and, 310. See also Allende, Salvador; neoliberalism studies plan (centralized planning), 21, 301; African socialists interest in, 269; Bolshevik centralized, 77, 82; Bukharin “alternative,” 325; chaos of socialist, 143–44, 178, 320; collectivization, 117; communist centralized, 384; current Chinese five-yer, 330; eco-socialist, 377; Edward Bellamy and, 80; F. A. Hayek on dangers of, 149–50; German National Socialist, 172, 177; global shift (1970s–1990s) away from, 309, 319; Gunnar Myrdal on, 146, 197; Herbert Backe Hunger, 176; Karl Ballod concept of, 81; Mao, 242; MarxEngels grand, 41–42; Nyerere introduction of centralized, 272, 274–75, 277–80; Oskar Lange on benefits of, 145, 148, 196; social democrat (1920s) fixation on, 78; socialist computer economic, 197; socialist fetish of, xxv, 394; Soviet state, 118, 126, 157–58, 322–24, 339; Swedish Commission for the Postwar Economic, 140; Swedish social democrats dropping 1991 socialization, 203; utopian socialist, 7, 14–15, 20; Walter Rathenau, 138; Western mainstream (1920s–1970s) embracement of, 142, 151, 159, 311

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446

Index

Poale Zion, 106. See also socialist Zionism “Polish operation,” 120. See also Great Terror; National Bolshevism; Stalin, Joseph political religion, xv, 57, 78, 394. See also Gentile, Emilio; Slezkine, Yuri; Voegelin, Eric Pollock, Friedrich, 347–48, 359. See also Frankfurt School Pol Pot, xxvi, 253–55, 257–61. See also Khmer Rouge populists (Russian), 47, 71, 212; “going to people” campaign of, 48; Lenin dismissal of, 73; Marxism and, 50–52, 72; romancing peasant socialism by, 49, 212; RussianJewish revolutionaries and, 213–14. See also Axelrod, Pavel; Deich, Lev; Labor Zionism; Lavrov, Peter; socialist Zionism; Zasulich, Vera; Zundelevich, Aron Poretsky, Elizabeth, 104, 119. See also Cheka; GRU; Massing, Hede; mobilized diaspora; National Bolshevism; NKVD proletariat, xxii, 22, 34, 45, 90–91, 132, 216, 344, 368, 385, 390; advanced German, 90; Arabs and Jewish, 217; Bukharin on, 82; “class” of women as surrogate, 367; current attempts to revive Marxist theory of, 389; dictatorship of, xxv, xxix, xxxi, 43, 62, 65, 70, 76–77, 80, 83, 87, 165, 169–70; George Bernard Shaw frustration with, 69; Hess essay on revolutionary role of, 29; intellectuals as surrogate, 345–46; Jews as “chosen people” and invention of, 101, 104; Khmer Rouge surrogate, 254; kibbutzim view of, 227; intellectual exit from Marxism and, 305–6, 386; leftist romantic vision of, 156; Lenin concept of vanguard party in charge of, 71;

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 446

Lukács on spirit of, 351–52; Maoism and theory of, 238–39; Marx-Engels on messianic role of, 37–40, 46, 60; Mongolian surrogate, 95; New Left debunk Marxist theory of, 342, 345; New Left on non-Western societies as surrogate, 360–61; New Left search for surrogate, 272, 345, 350; 1920s Bolsheviks and invention of, 96; North Korean dictatorship surrogate, 251; post-modernism, 385, 389; small number (in old Russia) of, 47; socialism in one country theory and Western, 97; Soviet affirmative action and, 122; Trotskyite fossils and revolutionary elan of, 360; Western radical left frustration with “corrupt,” 340, 348. See also Critical Theory; cultural left; Cultural Marxism Prague Spring (1968), 324. See also democratic socialism Project 1619, 368. See also critical race theory; Cultural Marxism; Fanon, Frantz; North, David Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 46, 386; background of, 43; Marx and, 44; views and philosophy of, 45 Pushkin (1799–1837), Alexander, 121– 22. See also National Bolshevism; Stalin, Joseph Radek, Karl, 90, 99; Stalin anecdote by, 98 Rand, Ayn, xxxii; stance on antiWestern sentiments of cultural left, 372 Rathenau, Walther, 81, 141; anticapitalist sentiments of, 138; war rationing and, 82. See also Ballod, Karl; War Socialism Reagan, Ronald, 300; collapse of Soviet Union and role of, 318–19; global shift to economic liberty (1970s–1980s) and, 303, 306.

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Index

See also neoliberalism; Thatcher, Margaret Red Army Factions, 312 Red Brigades, 312 Red Guards; Bolshevik, 88; Cultural Revolution in China (1960s) and, 244–45; Tanzanian socialists imitating Chinese, 277, 279. See also Cultural Revolution (in China); Maoism Red Terror, 77; Bolshevik class classification and, 88, 113; fanatic Bolshevik eager to attempt, 95. See also Bolsheviks; Cheka, Lenin, Vladimir; NKVD regressive left, 312; conservatism of, 396. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism; New Left “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), 353. See also Marcuse, Herbert Road to Serfdom (1944), 149–52, 192; neoliberalism conspiracy theory and, 307. See also Hayek, F. A. Robinson, Cedrick, 365. See also critical race theory; Cultural Marxism Rome and Jerusalem (1862), 33, 216. See also Hess, Moses; nationalist socialism; Zionism “Rootless cosmopolitans,” 125. See also National Bolshevism; Stalin, Joseph Rosenberg, Alfred, 168. See also Hitler, Adolf; mobilized diaspora; national socialism Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 107. See also fellow travelers; mobilized diaspora Rothbard, Murray, 147; intellectual mainstream (1970s–1980s) and, 307; stance on Marxism as form of religion, xv; stance on progressives’ attitude to warfare, 137; view on place of socialism in world history, 394

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447

Rowbotham, Sheila, 366, critical view of cultural turn by, 371. See also feminism; New Left; proletariat Saint Simon, Henri de, xvii, xii, xxxix, 2, 11, 26, 41, 61, 79, 129, 376; anarchist critique of, 45; background of, 13; Gunnar Myrdal continuation of tradition of, 197; Hayek debunking of, 147; Marx and Engels dismissal of, 34; secular “scientific” religion of, 16–22; views of, 14–16. See also utopian socialism Sanders, Bernie, 107; invocation of “noble savage” narrative by, 377; Scandinavian social democracy and, 206 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 362. See also Fanon, Frantz scientific socialism, xx, 391; German social democracy adoption (1891) of, 64; invention of, 26–34, 36; kibbutzim and, 228; Lassalle promotion of, 60; Marx and Engels promotion of, xxii; religion of, 129; New Left (1950s–1960s) drift away from, 342, 345; Russian populists and, 47, 50, 52. See also Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl; MarxismLeninism; political religion Shaw, George Bernard, 69. See also Fabians Sherman, Alfred, 104; Margaret Thatcher deregulation program ideological backup by, 318. See also neoliberalism; Thatcher, Margaret; Yakovlev, Alexander Shining Path, 312, 394. See also Maoism Shona, 282–83; Robert Mugabe securing political power for, 284–85, 287, 291. See also African socialism; Mugabe, Robert social democracy, xiv; anti-statists trends (1970s–1980s) and, 302;

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448

Index

centralized welfare state and, 301; left mainstream (turn of 2000s) and, 384; New Left critique of, 341, 375; statist nature of, xxiv–xxv socialism: advanced (Soviet), xxvi; advancing industrial revolution in 1820s–1830s and, xxiii; African, 267–94; communism and, xix, xxiv, xxvii–xxxiii, 106, 299, 304; definitions of, xxvii–xxxv, xli; eco-, 372–78; Fabian, 67–70; forerunners of, xxi; Freemasonry and, xxii; German (1800s–1910s), 57–66; German National, 165–87; global decline (1980s–1990s) of, 301–2, 309, 312, 317–19; golden age (1945– 1970s) of, 311; (Gramsci) “cultural hegemony” of, 346; Jewish diaspora and, 100–107; Keynesianism and, 193–95, 299; kibbutz, 211–30; Lenin 1918 program of construction of, 83; libertarian rereading of, 386, 394; market, xxvi, 196; Marx criticism of German, 70; Marxian, 25–55, 305; Moses Hess as father of German, 216, 57–63; New Left view of, 352; political religion of, xiii–xxi; resurgence (2008–2019) of, 388–89; Retreat of Chinese (1978–2010s), 328–35; Retreat of Soviet (1960s– 1991), 319–28, 371, 392; Stalin, 111–63; state (turn of 2000s) of, 384; Swedish, 149, 191–92, 197–8; UK and US (2016–2019) popularity of, 387, 393; utopian, 1–25; War, 78, 81–82; (Wittfogel) backward Asiatic Soviet model of, 350 “socialism of the race,” 171, 179, 181, 272. See also Hitler, Adolf; national socialism Socialist Calculation Debate (1920s–1930s), 142. See also Bauer, Otto; Hayek, F. A.; Lange, Oskar; market socialism; Mises, Ludwig von; Neurath, Otto

Znamenski_9781498557306.indb 448

socialist Zionism, 27, 103, 106, 212, 215, 225; Comintern dismissal of, 217; eclipse of, 230; emergence of Israel and, 211; evolution of, 231; Moses Hess and, 33; religion of labor and, 222; urban life ways and, 224. See also Borochov, Dov Ber; Labor Zionism; nationalist socialism; national socialism; Poale Zion Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, xxxiii; Western left and, 305. See also GULAG Archipelago (1973) Sorge, Richard, 348–49. See also Cheka; GRU; Massing, Hede; NKVD Sozialismus der Tat (socialism of action), 173. See also national socialism Spanish Civil War, xxiv, 318; Stalin Great Terror and, 119, 123. See also Great Terror; Stalin, Joseph Stalin, Joseph, xx, xxvi, 91, 105, 122, 124, 127, 131, 133, 192, 196, 238– 39, 260, 328–29; Bukharin 9138) letter to, 265; Chinese communism assimilation of ideological guidelines of, 236–37, 240–43, 245; collectivization of Soviet agriculture project and, xxxii, 115–17, 158, 176, 291; fanatic Bolsheviks letters to, 95; George Orwell and, 152; Hitler regime and regime of, 166, 169–70, 172–73, 179, 182–85, 193; Joseph Bros Tito and, 161; Khmer Rouge and legacy of, 254–55, 257; Khrushchev assault on culture of personality of, 129, 321–22, 339; kibbutzim and, 224; Kim Il-sung and, 246; National Bolshevism of, 112–13, 121, 124–25; nomenklatura system and, 319–20; northern Asia and, 234; North Korea dictatorship assimilating ideological guidelines of, 247–48, 250; nostalgia (2010s) for, xxvii, 327–28; 1937–1938

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Index

assault on anarchists and Trotskyites and, xxiv, 123, 130; 1939 doctored demography statistics and, 118; Nyerere and legacy of, 278; paranoia of, 119; phasing out of cosmopolitan and diaspora segments by, 98–99, 102, 120–21, 126, 227; radical left search for “green,” 375–76; religious background of, 155; socialism in one country project of, 96–97, 111; Soviet economy and, 144–45; stance on socialism as transitional period between capitalism and communism, xxix, 62, 132; worship of, 127–28, 227. See also Great Terror; MarxismLeninism; National Bolshevism; NKVD Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid, 217. See also Arlosoroff, Haim; Cultural Marxism; nationalist socialism; national socialism Taiping Rebellion (1856–1862), 41; radical egalitarianism of, 236. See also Marx, Karl Tasan, 249–250. See also juche; Kim Il-sung Thatcher, Margaret, 286, 303; agenda of, 300; chief ideologists of, 318; global shift to limited state (1980s–1990s) and, 306. See also neoliberalism; Reagan, Ronald “third way,” xxx, 140; social democratic, 148, 153, 192–97, 299–302, 310, 384, 388. See also democratic socialism; Keynes, John; Lange, Oskar; market socialism Thomas, Norman, 194; stance on robotic revolution and socialism, 196. See also democratic socialism; Keynes, John; “third way” Thompson, E. P., 341–42, 344–45 Tiananmen massacre, 332, 335. See also Maoism

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449

Tito, Joseph Bros, 161, 203. See also market socialism Trotsky, Leon, xi, xxxix, 74, 128, 325; biography of, 300; ethnic cosmopolitanism of, 106; Jewish Bolshevik cadre and, 103; Jewish left diaspora and, 103; Lenin and, 76; millenarian vision of world revolution by, 90–91, 168; (1917) Bolshevik take over and, 88; purge of, 96–98; Stalin project of socialism in one country and, 99; stance on his ethnic origin, 105; supporters (1930s) of, 130, 153. See also Fourth International; Lenin, Vladimir Trumpeldor, Joseph, 222. See also kibbutzim; socialist Zionism; Zionism Tugwell, Rex, 158–59. See also fellow travelers Tukhachesky, Mikhail, 87; world revolution prophecy and, 91 ujamaa, 271–82, 295; social engineering tradition and, 14. See also African socialism; Nyerere, Julius Uritsky, Moses, 155. See also Bolsheviks; mobilized diaspora utopian socialism, xviii, 13, 392 Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community), 167, 181, 221, 273; present North Korean analogy of German, 246; Swedish socialism and German, 200; Third World racialized socialism and, 363. See also Folkheim (people’s home); national socialism War Communism, 76–78, 88, 143; Bolshevik martial tradition and, 115; mass escape from, 168. See also Bolsheviks; Lenin, Vladimir

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450

Index

War Socialism, 57; spirit of, 138; World War I mobilization practices and, 78, 81–82. See also Ballod, Karl; Ludendorf Erich Weather Underground, 312, 360. See also New Left Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 68, 154. See also Fabians Weber, Max, 198 Weishaupt, Johann Adam, 13. See also Freemasons Weitling, Wilhelm, xxii, xxiv, 47; background of, 34–35; Marx conflict with, 36–37 White, Dexter, 131. See also fellow travelers; Hiss, Alger Williams, Raymond, 341–44, 347. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism; New Left Wilson, Edmund, 101 Wittfogel, Karl, 348, 350. See also Frankfurt School woke, xxvii; current Western cultural, 217, 334, 344; freedom of speech and, 396; (1870s-1890s) Russian and Jewish populist, 48–49, 213;

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New Left as forerunners of current Western, 385; (1960s) Maoist fanatical, 244. See also cultural left; Cultural Marxism; identarian left; identity politics Yakovlev, Alexander, 318. See also Gorbachev, Mikhail; Sherman, Alfred; neoliberalism Yiannopoulos, Milo, 395. See also Antifa Zamyatin, Eugene, 253, 255. See also Khmer Rouge; Maoism; totalitarianism Zasulich, Vera, 72; Christian background of, 50; Karl Marx correspondence with, 52, 73, 212–13; terrorist act of, 51. See also Marx, Karl; populists Zionism, 27–28, 33, 64; Comintern dismissal of, 184–85; socialism and, 103–4, 106, 211–31. See also Hess, Moses; Labor Zionism Žižek, Slavoj, 16; Noam Chomsky and, 261

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About the Author

Andrei Znamenski has studied history and anthropology both in Russia and the United States. Formerly a resident scholar at the Library of Congress, then a foreign visiting professor at Hokkaido University, Japan, he is currently professor of History at the University of Memphis, TN. He authored several books on the history of religions, including Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (2011). Znamenski has also contributed to The Independent Review, Claremont Review of Books, and notesonliberty​.com​.

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