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IV

Chronological frontiers are seldom landmarks in the history of ideas, and the current of the old century, to all appearances irresistible, seemed to flow peacefully into the new. Presently the picture began to alter. Humanitarian liberalism encountered more and more obstacles to its reforming zeal from the conscious or unconscious opposition both of governments and other centres of social power, as well as the passive resistance of established institutions and habits. The militants among them found themselves compelled to use increasingly radical means in organizing the classes of the population on whose behalf it fought into something sufficiently powerful to work effectively against the old establishment.

The history of the transformation of gradualist and Fabian tactics into the militant formations of Communism and Syndicalism, as well as the milder formations of Social Democracy and trade unionism, is a history not so much of principles as of their interplay with new material facts. In a sense Communism is doctrinaire humanitarianism driven to an extreme in the pursuit of effective offensive and defensive methods. No movement at first sight seems to differ more sharply from liberal reformism than does Marxism, yet the central doctrines--human perfectibility, the possibility of creating a harmonious society by a natural means, the belief in the compatibility (indeed the inseparability) of liberty and equality--are common to both. The historical transformation may occur continuously, or in sudden revolutionary leaps, but it must proceed in accordance with an intelligible, logically connected pattern, abandonment of which is always foolish, always utopian. No one doubted that Liberalism and Socialism were bitterly opposed both on ends and in methods: yet at their edges they shaded off into one another.1.4 Marxism is a doctrine which, however strongly it may stress the class-conditioned nature of action and thought, nevertheless in theory sets out to appeal to reason, at least among the class destined by history to triumph--the proletariat. In the Communist view the proletariat alone can face the future without flinching, because it need not be driven into falsification of the facts by fear of what the future may bring. And, as a corollary, this applies also to those intellectuals who have liberated themselves from the prejudices and rationalizations--the `ideological distortions' of their economic class--and have aligned themselves with the winning side in the social struggle. To them, since they are fully rational, the privileges of democracy and of free use of all their intellectual faculties may be accorded. They are to Marxists what the enlightened philosophes were to the Encyclopedists: their task is to free men from `false consciousness' and help to realize the means that will transform all those who are historically capable of it into their own liberated and rational likeness.

But in 1903 there occurred an event which marked the culmination of a process which has altered the history of our world. At the conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party held in that year, which began in Brussels and ended in London, during the discussion of what seemed at first a purely technical question--how far, centralization and hierarchical discipline should govern the behaviour of the Party--a delegate named Posadovsky inquired whether the emphasis laid by the `hard' Socialists--Lenin and his friends--upon the need for the exercise of absolute authority by the revolutionary nucleus of the Party might not prove incompatible with those fundamental liberties to. whose realization Socialism, no less than liberalism, was officially dedicated. He asked whether the basic, minimum civil liberties-- `the inviolability of the person'--should not be infringed and even violated if the party leaders so decided. He was answered by Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian Marxism, and its most venerated figure, a cultivated, fastidious, and morally sensitive scholar of wide outlook, who had for twenty years lived in Western European was much-respected by the leaders of Western Socialism, the very symbol of civilized `scientific' thinking among Russian revolutionaries. Plekhanov, speaking solemnly, and with a splendid disregard for grammar, pronounced the words, Salus revolutiae suprema lexi 1.5 Certainly, if the revolution demanded it, everything--democracy, liberty; the rights of the individual-- must be sacrificed to it. If the democratic assembly elected by the Russian people after the revolution proved amenable to Marxist tactics, it would be kept in being as a Long Parliament; if not, it would be disbanded as quickly as possible. A Marxist revolution could not be carried through by men obsessed by scrupulous regard for the principles of bourgeois liberals. Doubtless whatever was valuable in these principles, like everything else good and desirable, would ultimately be realized by the victorious working class; but during the revolutionary period preoccupation with such ideals was evidence of a lack of seriousness.

Plekhanov, who was brought up in a humane and liberal tradition, did, of course, later retreat from this position himself. The mixture of utopian faith and brutal disregard for civilized morality proved in the end too repulsive to a man who had spent the greater part of his civilized and productive life among Western workers and their leaders. Like the vast majority of Social Democrats, like Marx and Engels themselves, he was too European to try to realize a policy which, in the words of Shigalev in Dostoevsky's The Possessed, `starting from unlimited liberty ends in unlimited depotism'. But Lenin1.6 accepted the premisses, and being logically driven to conclusions repulsive to most of his colleagues, accepted them easily and without apparent qualms. His assumptions were, perhaps, in some sense, still those of the optimistic rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the coercion, violence, executions, the total suppression of individual differences, the rule of a small, virtually self-appointed minority, were necessary only in the interim period, only so long as there was a powerful enemy to be destroyed. It was necessary only in order that the majority of mankind, once it was liberated from the exploitation of fools by knaves and of weak knaves by more powerful ones, could develop--trammelled no longer by ignorance or idleness or vice, free at last to realize to their fullest extent the infinitely rich potentialities of human nature. This dream may indeed have affinities with the dreams of Diderot or Saint-Simon or Kropotkin, but what marked it as something relatively novel was the assumption about the means required to translate it into reality. And the assumption, although apparently concerned solely with methods, and derived from Babeuf or Blanqui or Tkachov or the French Communards,1.7 was very different from the practical programme set forth by the most `activist and least `evolutionary' Western Socialists towards the end of the nineteenth century. The difference was crucial and marked the birth of the new age.

What Lenin demanded was unlimited power for a small body of professional revolutionaries, trained exclusively for one purpose, and ceaselessly engaged in its pursuit by every means in their power. This was necessary. because democratic methods, and the attempts to persuade and preach used by earlier reformers and. rebels, were ineffective ; and this in its turn was due to the fact that they rested on a false psychology, sociology, and theory of history--namely the assumption that men acted as they did because of conscious beliefs which could be changed by argument. For if Marx had done anything, he had surely shown that such beliefs and ideals were mere `reflections' of the condition of the socially and economically determined classes of men, to some one of which every individual must belong. A man's beliefs, if Marx and Engels were right, flowed from the situation of his class, and could not alter--So far, at least, as the mass of men was concerned--without a change in that situation. The proper task of a revolutionary therefore was to change the `objective' situation, i. e. to prepare the class for its historical task in the overthrow of the hitherto dominant classes.

Lenin went further than this. He acted as if he believed not merely that it was useless to talk and reason with persons precluded by class interest from understanding and acting upon the truths of Marxism, but that the mass of the proletarians themselves were too benighted to grasp the role which history had called on them to play. He saw the choice as being one between education, the stimulation among the army of the dispossessed of a `critical spirit' (which would awaken them intellectually, but might lead to a vast deal of discussion and controversy similar to that which divided and enfeebled the intellectuals), and the turning of them into an obedient force held together by a military discipline and a set. of perpetually ingeminated formulae (at least as powerful as the patriotic patter used by the Tsarist regime) to shut out independent thought. If the choice had to be made, then it was mere irresponsibility to stress the former in the name of some abstract principle such as democracy or enlightenment. The important thing was the creation of a state of affairs in which human resources were developed in accordance with a rational pattern. Men were moved more often by irrational than reasonable solutions. The masses were too stupid and too blind to be allowed, to proceed in the direction of their own choosing. Tolstoy and the populists were profoundly mistaken: the simple agricultural labourer had no deep truths, no valuable way of life, to impart; he and the city worker and the simple soldier were, fellow serfs in, a condition of abject poverty and squalor, caught in a system which bred fratricidal strife among themselves; they could be saved only by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organize the liberated slaves into a rational planned system.

Lenin himself was in certain respects oddly utopian. He started with the egalitarian belief that with education, and a rational economic organization, almost anyone could be brought in the end to perform almost any task efficiently. But his practice was strangely like that of those irrationalist reactionaries who believed that man was everywhere wild, bad, stupid, and unruly, and must be held in check and provided with objects of uncritical worship. This must be done by a clear sighted band of organizers, whose tactics--if not ideals--rested on the truths perceived by elitists--men like Nietzsche, Pareto, or the French absolutist thinkers from De Maistre to Maurras, and indeed Marx himself--men who had grasped the true nature of social development, and in the light of their discovery saw the liberal theory of human progress as something unreal, thin, pathetic, and absurd. Whatever his crudities and errors, on the central issue Hobbes, not Locke, turned out to be right: men sought neither happiness nor liberty nor justice, but, above and before all, security. Aristotle, too, was right: a great number of men were slaves by nature, and when liberated from their chains did not possess the moral and intellectual resources with which to face the prospect of responsibility, of too wide a choice between alternatives; and therefore, having lost one set of chains, inevitably searched for another or forged new chains themselves. it follows that the wise revolutionary legislator, so far from seeking to emancipate human beings from the framework without which they feel lost and desperate, will seek rather to erect a framework of his own, corresponding to the new needs of the new age brought about by natural or technological change. The value of the framework will depend upon the unquestioning faith with which its main features are accepted; otherwise it no longer possesses sufficient strength to support and contain the wayward, potentially anarchical and self-destructive creatures who seek salvation in it. The framework is that system of political, social, economic, and religious institutions, those `myths', dogmas, ideals, categories of thought and language, modes of feeling, scales of values, `socially approved' attitudes, and habits (called by Marx `superstructure') that represent `rationalizations', `sublimations', and symbolic representations, which cause men to function in an organized way, prevent chaos, fulfil the function of the Hobbesian state. This view which inspires Jacobin tactics, though not, of course, either Jacobin or Communist doctrines, is not so very remote from De Maistre's central and deliberately unprobed mystery--the supernatural authority whereby and in whose name rulers, can rule and inhibit their subjects' unruly tendencies, above all the tendency to ask too many questions, to question too many established rules. Nothing can be permitted which might even a little weaken that sense of reliability and security which it is the business of the framework to provide. Only thus (in this view) can the founder of the new free society control whatever threatens to dissipate human energy or to slow down the relentless treadmill which alone prevents men from stopping to commit acts of suicidal folly, which alone protects them from too much freedom, from too little restraint, from the vacuum which mankind, no less than nature, abhors.

Henri Bergson had (following the German romantics) been speaking of something not too unlike this when he had contrasted the flow of life with the forces of critical reason which cannot create or unite, but only divide, arrest, make dead, disintegrate. Freud, too, contributed to this; not in his work of genius as the greatest healer and psychological theorist of our time, but as the originator, however innocent, of the misapplication of rational psychological and social methods by muddle-headed men of good will and quacks and false prophets of every hue. By giving currency to exaggerated versions of the view that the true reasons for men's beliefs were most often very different from what they themselves thought them to be, being frequently caused by events and processes of which they were neither aware nor in the least anxious to be aware, these eminent thinkers helped, however unwittingly, to discredit the rational foundations from which their own doctrines derived their logical force:For it was but a short step from this to the view that what made men most permanently contented was not--as they themselves supposed-- the discovery of solutions to the questions which perplexed them, but rather some process, natural or artificial, whereby the problems were made it vanish altogether. They vanished because their psychological `sources' had been diverted or dried up, leaving behind only those less exacting questions whose solutions did not demand resources beyond the patient's strength.

That this short way with the troubled and the perplexed which underlay much traditionalist, anti-rationalist, right-wing thought should have influenced the Left was new indeed. It is this change of attitude to the function and value of the intellect that is perhaps the best indication of the great gap which divided the twentieth century from the nineteenth.


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