Leftist Organicism
There was a leftist version, though the inter-war emergence of organicism was slower and less thorough on the Left. The new USSR quickly embraced the statism that pre-war socialist and especially communist movements had denounced.20 By September 1918, the independence of the soviets, the unions and the law was almost gone, the Cheka secret police was into its first murders, ‘merciless extermination’ was declared to be the fate of the kulak class enemy, concentration camps were built and the ‘Red Terror’ had been formally inaugurated. Statism was seen more as political necessity than moral principle—unlike extreme rightism.
Nonetheless, some Bolshevik language had begun to resemble fascist language. Trotsky made a famous speech with a decidedly fascist title: ‘Work, Discipline and Order Will Save the Soviet Socialist Republic’. He also sometimes praised paramilitary virtues: economic problems, he declared, had to be ‘stormed’ with ‘disciplined armies’ of workers. Like the fascists, the Bolsheviks gave status and privileges to ‘old fighters’, leaders wore military tunics and used metaphors drawn from infantry formations to describe revolutionaries—fortress-storming, shock-troops, campaigns, labour brigades and so on. Violence would help generate ‘socialist morality’ and ‘Soviet Man’, the equivalents of the Nazi ‘German morality’ and ‘New Man’. The notion of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, dormant since the Revolution, was revived among Marxists.
Yet Bolshevik ‘enemies’ differed from fascist ones. Bolsheviks had no initial conception of national enemies, despite fighting in the Civil War against Ukrainian and other nationalists. They claimed their state would embody not the (Russian) nation but the transnational proletariat. Acknowledging that their realm contained many nationalities, they endorsed multi-culturalism, not of an ethnically-blind type but linked to federalism. The Soviet Union was a federation of ‘sovereign national republics’, each with its republican autonomy, while smaller nationalities enjoyed lesser autonomies.
Thus, the enemies of the proletariat were not ethnic but political rivals, classes and foreign powers. The political rivals were Whites, Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Mensheviks, then Trotskyists and ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ oppositions. But these were usually the vanguard of the second enemy, opposed classes. The forward march of the proletariat was being subverted by the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, feudal classes and the ‘kulaks’. But, third, since the Soviet Union was ‘encircled’ by hostile foreign powers sending aid to these enemies, opposed classes were routinely denounced as ‘aliens’, ‘traitors’, ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’ sponsored from abroad. Thus ‘the proletariat’ came to mean ‘the people’, beset by linked domestic and foreign enemies. This had more than a passing resemblance to the fascist notions of the enemy. From 1920, Lenin was describing ‘class enemies’ in terms that disconcertingly anticipated the SS: they were ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘spiders’, ‘leeches’, ‘parasites’, ‘insects’, ‘bedbugs’, ‘fleas’. As with the SS, the language suggested both ‘threatening’ and ‘dehumanized’ enemies, ‘infecting’ the people, requiring ‘cleansing’.
Stalin took the action much further. Forced industrialization and collectivization, he argued, was being subverted by almost-irredeemable class enemies—especially the ‘kulak’ class. Since no-one knew quite who a kulak was (Lenin had largely invented the term), and régime policy was being opposed by almost all peasants, local officials and roving paramilitaries had to do their own class analysis, filling in forms headed ‘Purging of Class-Alien and Anti-Kolkhoz Elements from the Collective Farms’. They labelled class according to very varied indicators. Lynn Viola claims that the key one was any link to the ‘old régime’ (byvshie liudi).21 This meant large or noble landowners, clergy, church elders, members of church sects (especially Baptists and Evangelicals), wealthy peasants, peasants who had joined the Stolypin reforms of the late Tsarist period and ‘separated’ their land from the commune, entrepreneurs, merchants, traders, Tsarist officers and policemen, Cossack headmen, estate stewards and village elders—plus anyone else who had supported the Whites, SRs or Ukrainian nationalists during the civil-war period. We see here the entwining of political and class labelling in a somewhat frantic search for enemies.
Sometimes, local communists went far beyond what higher party officials wished, defining class in terms of heredity, taking out local resentments on the second and even the third generations. The Bolshevik élite condemned such invoking of bloodlines. Viola argues that Stalinism involved ‘a compound of political warfare unleashed from on high and traditional antagonisms’ unleashed from below. Yet both were essentially aiming at class enemies.
Blood and Class
Thus, Stalinist mass murder was not just socialism blown entirely off course. Socialism had acquired a strong sense of an alien ‘other’. Especially under Stalin—though beginning earlier—socialism’s opponents were cleansed in their millions because, as ‘bourgeois’, or ‘petty bourgeois’, or kulaks, or old régime, they were ‘class enemies’ opposed to the ‘proletariat’. Since the latter had been transformed
into ‘the people’, other classes were ‘enemies of the people’. In Asia, the Chinese and Cambodian communists went further, accepting bloodlines as a way of identifying class enemies. The Chinese population was classified in 1948 into persons of ‘good’ ‘neutral’ and ‘bad’ class backgrounds. Thus their parents—and, more recently, their grandparents—were defining which side they were on. The Khmer Rouge took this to far more murderous lengths, into a kind of ‘classicide’ analogous to genocide, killing about half the Cambodians with bourgeois backgrounds. But when they linked this to more conventional organic nationalism, they fell. When they began murderous cleansing of Vietnamese, the army of communist Vietnam invaded and deposed them.
Few other socialist parties went much distance along the organic road. They did claim they were ‘the vanguard of the proletariat’. Thus other parties, even potential allies, supposedly represented other classes and were therefore enemies. The Spanish leftist use of the term pueblo, meaning village as well as people, implicitly excluded many from membership in the people: Spanish priests, landlords and others they called ‘fascists’—again, a ‘foreign’ term—were killed as being outsiders to the pueblo. Yet, during the inter-war period, most leftists realized that to take and retain power they needed a broader base of support than just the working class. Thus they sought to mobilize a broader populist constituency, variously called ‘the people’, ‘working people’, ‘the toiling masses’ or ‘workers and peasants’. Even Stalin began to invoke the people, using a much older, less proletarian term, the narodny, which included peasants as well as workers. Socialism remained committed to socialist internationalism and quite tolerant of most ethnic communities. The USSR often positively encouraged the ‘sub-nationalisms’ contained within its borders—except with supposedly ‘treasonous’ nations during the Second World War. Social democrats embraced the people more in inclusionary than exclusionary terms. Nordic social democrats claimed to embody the Volk—as in welfarist slogans like the ‘people’s home’, ‘people’s health’ and ‘people’s security’. But this excluded no one.
Nonetheless, both fascism and communism derived from the central political theme of modernity: they claimed to represent alternative organic conceptions of ‘we, the people’, the people as a singular working class and the people as an integral nation. They viewed dictatorial states as bearers of a moral project to cleanse this people of its enemies. Fascism and communism were from the same family of political ideals as liberal democracy. Essentially modern, they were the dark side of democracy, generated by organicist rather than liberal-democratic ideals.”
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing, NLR, May/June 1999
It is so revealing to know that “California’s 1850 Constitution enshrined universal white male suffrage, ‘the most advanced form of democracy of the age’; and that in little over a decade, the Californian Indian population had been reduced by 80 per cent—exceeding the rate at which the Third Reich exterminated Europe’s Jews.” (Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p. 70)
Notes
20. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, New York 1991, chaps. 15–18. [Mann refers to the American historian Richard Pipes – a historian known for his selectivity, perpetuating ‘the evil empire’ narrative, a historian who “approached Soviet History as a prosecutor”. Pipes was a historian in the cold war propaganda machine and part of the American regime.]
21. L. Viola, ‘The Second Coming: Class Enemies in the Soviet Countryside, 1927–1935’, in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, edited by J.A. Getty & R. Manning, Cambridge 1993.
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