The Dilemma of Communists
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, July-August
1938]
There is much gnashing of teeth these days among the Marxists. The
Trotskyites gnash over the "perfidy of Stalin." The
Stalinites gnash over the "betrayers of the revolution," as
they confess and are shot.
But the gnashing is most pitiful among the "intellectuals,"
who, free from emotional bias (except in so far as they adhere to the
faith), find in the debacle of the Russian Economo-political
experiment a fundamental fault in the heretofore unassailable
thought-ritual. The orthodox Marxian state is fallible. That is a
bitter pill to swallow. And the gnashing of teeth among these Marxist
pundits results from the feverish attempts to rationalize away a
previous rationalization which experience has confounded.
It must not be assumed that faith in the Marxian shibboleths has
weakened. Before the altars of "class warfare" and the "dictatorship
of the proletariat" theses fact-befuddled priests still bend a
dutiful knee. But, they cannot ignore the complete collapse of another
Marxian theory another crumbling of the pillars upon which the
beautiful structure of Marxian ideology has rested these long years.
The Marxian theory of the state has fallen.
What is this theory? The state is an instrument of class oppression;
it will therefore disappear with the disappearance of classes. Quite
simple, isn't it? All we have to do is to wipe out class distinctions,
and the state which is used by one class, in control of it, to oppress
the other class, will vanish into thin air. But, how are we to wipe
out these class distinctions? Ah! there's the rub.
The heretofore irrefutably logical formula for abolishing classes was
to elevate the oppressed class, who, by virtue of their having been
oppressed are endowed with holy motives and vested with divine
intelligence to the position of power. These new rulers, made superior
by Marxist ideology and overalls, will then proceed to eradicate from
the body politic all vestige of "capitalistic" culture which
means, roughly speaking, the elimination from men's minds of any idea
of satisfying their desires with the least effort. Human egoism is
not, according to this theory, congenital, but is rather the product
of a bad class organization of society. We are "conditioned"
by this form of society to want things for ourselves.
Now continuing the theory the new rulers will recondition society.
This re-conditioning period and process is called revolution. "Social
control," consisting of propaganda and bayonets, is the
instrument of re-conditioning, and the process must be continued until
"all need for force will vanish ... since people grow accustomed
to observing the elemental conditions of social existence without
force and without subjection." (The quotation is from Lenin.)
With the appearance of the communistic society the state will
disappear.
What has gone wrong with this anarchistic Utopia in Russia? (Of
course, there are many who claim that the revolutionary process there
is far from complete, that the Stalin purges are a necessary part of
it, and that it will take several more generations of slaughter and
education before the ideal of no-state through all-state will be
achieved. Quite a few, however, have been disturbed by the turn of
events, and it is with their mental plight that we are concerned.) The
bureaucracy of workers which was supposed to eradicate the cause of
bureaucracy classes seems to be more firmly entrenched than ever, its
power seems to be growing, and its enemy is no longer the arch-demon
capitalism but the dissident offshoots of the Marxist ideology from
which they, the bureaucrats, stem. Here's a how-de-do! Whoever thought
that the establishment of a communist society would have to be built
upon the bones of communists? (Again it is necessary to point out that
among the blindly orthodox, these bones did not inhabit real
communists, but only traitors, spies, fascists, Trotskyites; but among
"intellectuals" this rabble-rousing rationalization doesn't
go far.)
The Moscow trials reveal the error in the Marxian interpretation of
human nature and of the state. The opposition to the bureaucrats in
Russia is inconceivable in Marxian theory. "The dictatorship,"
writes one of the disillusioned, "exists in theory to suppress
capitalist foes, not to suppress communists who have other goals and
principles than the ruling faction." Thus, the state which was
established for the purpose of abolishing the state, and vested with
absolute power therefor, finds itself using that power to suppress all
shades of thought, even those that are opposed to capitalism. In other
words, for any excuse, the all-state that was to become the no-state
is digging itself in.
Which is the way of all power. Only a mind befuddled by Marxist
dialect could naively accept the idea that a state invested with
unlimited power would destroy itself. Such a thought is contrary to
all historic fact, violative of all logical reasoning. And so, Marx's
dream of a "free association of workers" that would arise
from the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has been wrecked
upon the fact that force, coercion, power feed upon more of the same,
that freedom is not born from the womb of slavery.
The way to freedom is more freedom. And freedom is essentially
individual, not social, in character. It cannot be achieved for
society as a whole until it is secured for and assured to the
individual units of that society. The political mechanism which we
establish for the purpose of enabling us to satisfy our desires with
the least effort is merely a "necessary evil," an instrument
which must be watched, curbed, restricted to its most elemental
function that of protecting us from one another.
It is not through any political instrument that we can attain
freedom. In fact, freedom and state are anti-theses; the one belies
the other. On what one simple fact does freedom rest? Is it not the
ability to earn one's living and to enjoy undisturbed the fruits of
one's labor? If so, then the way to freedom is not through any scheme
of politics, but through the science of economics. Somewhere in the
study of this science will be found the solution of our riddle. And
only there. It is because Marxism is essentially a political scheme
(its "economics" a manufactured thing to bolster up this
scheme) that it has failed to achieve freedom in Russia its great
laboratory.
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