U Not Gonna Like This

From an archived copy of the Consent Journal (link) published by the Freedom Party of Canada:


by Kenneth H. W. Hilborn



(Professor Kenneth Hilborn teaches 20th Century international history at the University of Western Ontario, in London. A Freedom Party member, he is also a member of the President's Council of the National Citizens' Coalition.)



Last year the Pennsylvania State University Press published a book that should inflict great damage on its status as a reputable academic publisher. Entitled The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolution, it illustrates the continuing danger of leftist intellectuals' illusions about Marxism.



The author, Alex Callinicos, sets out to convince readers that the ideas of both Marx and Lenin were essentially sound, and that Lenin's revolution in 1917 led to evil consequences only because it fell victim to "Stalinism."



According to Callinicos (who teaches politics at a university in England), Lenin and his Bolsheviks were true Marxist socialists, whereas Stalin was a counter-revolutionary whose system represented a "variant of capitalism." Thus, the fall of European "Stalinist" regimes brought a transition not from socialism to capitalism, but merely from one form of capitalism to another. Genuine Marxist socialism, based on rule by workers' councils (soviets), Callinicos portrays as still a viable alternative.



The author's belief that "a qualitative break separates Stalinism from Marx and Lenin" is impossible to defend without massive suppression or distortion of relevant information. In his book Intellectuals, the British historian Paul Johnson maintains that everything in "Stalinism" was already foreshadowed in the conduct of Marx --- a man violent in his language, barefaced in his lies, fiercely intolerant towards all who disagreed with him, and determined to dominate everybody with whom he associated.



Callinicos makes no attempt to refute the evidence that Johnson summarizes; he simply ignores it. For him Marx is the supreme authority. He repeatedly deals with issues not by examining facts, but by telling us what Marx said on the subject, though Marx has been dead for more than a century and often misrepresented the realities even of his own time.



In his efforts to conceal the conspicuous continuity between Lenin's regime and Stalin's, Callinicos displays a dismaying indifference to the historical record. For example, though he mentions the decision of the Communist Party's Tenth Congress in 1921 to prohibit "factions" (pluralism) within the organization, he puts this development in the context of Stalin's ability as General Secretary to "control party congresses." In fact, Stalin did not become General Secretary until the following year, and it was on Lenin's initiative that the Tenth Congress acted against "factions."



The author also creates an impression that the Soviet secret police (originally called the Cheka) was founded in response to the pressures of civil war, whereas in fact Lenin's regime created the Cheka in December 1917 --- months before the civil war broke out. Callinicos says nothing whatever about Lenin's enthusiastic advocacy of ruthlessness and mass terror, nor about his role in inaugurating the system of camps that developed into Stalin's notorious Gulag.



On the other hand, the author makes no attempt to deny Lenin's responsibility for the decision in 1918 to suppress the Constituent Assembly. Conceding that the Bolsheviks had won only a quarter of the popular vote in the Assembly elections, Callinicos questions whether the outcome at the polls "accurately reflected the balance of social and political forces."



Perhaps recognizing that this point provides no adequate justification for a losing party's use of force to nullify an election result, Callinicos places more emphasis on the distinction between what he calls "two kinds of democracy" --- the "bourgeois" parliamentary form based on territorial constituencies and the "proletarian" or "soviet" form based on the workplace. Even with universal suffrage, he argues, parliamentary institutions --- such as the Constituent Assembly --- tend to result in the defeat of workers' revolution. As a Marxist, he assumes that revolutionary "workers" have a democratic right to rule even if they cannot win a majority of the national electorate as a whole.



Callinicos prudently avoids discussing the question of what percentage of the population would be excluded
from the soviet "democracy" that he advocates. Participation in the soviets is apparently to be restricted to "wage-labourers," though on one occasion Callinicos refers in passing to a "new middle class of professionals, managers and administrators occupying an intermediary position between wage-labour and capital." He says nothing about a political role for these people, for the self-employed, for retired persons, or indeed for anybody who either receives no wages or lacks a "workplace" as a "focus of collectivity."



The most ominous passage in the book is one in which Callinicos cites the precedent of wartime Britain to justify use of such measures as "detention without trial and extensive censorship" in defence of "socialist democracy." Marxist doctrine blinds the author to the difference between emergency measures by a constitutional parliamentary government acting in the interests of a nation under foreign attack and superficially similar measures by a revolutionary government acting in the (supposed) interests of one social class against the rest of the population.



The threat to freedom is especially great when the revolutionaries seek an objective, equality for all, that is inherently unattainable. Since inequality is a fact of normal life, any effort to achieve equality requires continuing enforcement, and to perform their function the enforcers must be entrusted with great power --- a power that allows them to establish themselves as a new privileged caste.



If academic propagandists like Callinicos can succeed in convincing gullible readers that a future Marxist experiment would have better results than those in the past, the twenty-first century may suffer as much as the twentieth from the disasters to which utopian dreams have so often led.



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