based☭communist

[M]an’s actions, and so too the results of his actions, the things created by them, not only could, but must, be considered manifestations of his thought, as acts of the objectifying of his ideas, thoughts, plans, and conscious intentions. Hegel demanded from the very start that thought should be investigated in all the forms in which it was realised, and above all in human affairs, in the creation of things and events. Thought revealed its force and real power not solely in talking but also in the whole grandiose process of creating culture and the whole objective body of civilisation, the whole ‘inorganic body of man’ (Marx), including in that tools and statues, workshops and temples, factories and chancelleries, political organisations and systems of legislation. It was on that basis that Hegel also acquired the right to consider in logic the objective determinations of things outside consciousness, outside the psyche of the human individual, in all their independence, moreover, from that psyche. There was nothing mystical nor idealist in that; it meant the forms (‘determinations’) of things created by the activity of the thinking individual. In other words, the forms of his thought embodied in natural materials, ‘invested’ in it by human activity. Thus a house appeared as the architect’s conception embodied in stone, a machine as the embodiment of the engineer’s ideas in metal, and so on; and the whole immense objective body of civilisation as thought in its ‘otherness’ (das Idee in der Form des Anderssein), in its sensual objective embodiment. The whole history of humanity was correspondingly also to be considered a process of the ‘outward revelation’ of the power of thought, as a process of the realisation of man’s ideas, concepts, notions, plans, intentions, and purposes, as a process of the embodying of logic, i.e. of the schemas to which men’s purposive activity was subordinated.

There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; . . . our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

In fact, it was said: ‘After Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc., the word dictatorship has become intolerable.’ It was said: ‘The proletariat, the hard core of the working class, is too narrow a notion for the broad popular union we want.’ Now, the notion that the working class (or the proletariat) is at the head of a broad popular alliance, indispensable, vital for its class struggle, descends directly from Marx and Lenin. The 22nd Congress was only repeating a classical thesis in speaking of the ‘leading role’ of the working class in a broad popular alliance. Thus there is no serious problem on this point. On the other hand, it is difficult to take seriously the argument about the word dictatorship, for it is incomplete. It lacks something very important, in the very perspective of the 22nd Congress. The list of examples provided to show that the word ‘dictatorship’ is intolerable includes Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet etc. It forgets to mention Stalin: not just the individual Stalin as such, but the structure and the confusion of the Soviet Party and state; the line, ‘theory’ and practices imposed by Stalin for forty years, not just in the USSR but on Communist Parties the world over. I am not pretending that this is a simple matter, and not for a moment can one reduce the social reality of the USSR to Stalinist practices. But fascism is fascism: the workers rapidly realized what they could expect from it. On the contrary, they expected from Soviet socialism, in which they had placed all their hopes for emancipation and liberation, something quite different from the regime of mass terror and extermination which held sway beneath Stalin after the 1930s, and the practices that persist in the USSR sixty years after the Revolution and twenty-two years after Stalin’s death. Yes, there were the Red Army, the Partisans and Stalingrad, unforgettable. But there were also the trials, the confessions, the massacres and the camps. And there is what still survives."