Lenin and totalitarianism

Lenin did not merely murder large numbers of innocent people; he did it on principle. He did not inadvertently create a totalitarian state; he was a totalitarian on principle. Lenin's writings explicitly state his views on the subject. Like most Marxists in his day, Lenin advocated the "dictatorship of the proletariat," but unlike many of his comrades, Lenin carefully clarified his meaning: "The scientific concept, dictatorship, means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules. Nothing else but that." Moreover, Lenin explicitly stated that a Communist elite was needed to rule and educate the workers for an indefinite interim period, because "The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness."

Even before Lenin had seized power, his program was totalitarian to the core: "All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers... All that is required is that they should work equally, should regularly do their share of the work, and should receive equal pay." What of those who do not wish to be employees of the state? Or of the more able and skilled who refuse to work for equal pay? Once he was firmly in control, Lenin's program evolved to answer these difficult questions - and his replies were deadly. For example, when the peasants refused to sell food to the state for a pittance, Lenin threatened them with extermination: "These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing richer the more the workers starved in the cities and factories. The vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and time again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!" Lenin carried out his threat: suppression of peasant uprisings cost an estimated 250,000 peasant lives. This is but one example among many: anyone who failed to obey Lenin courted death. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose one's occupation, freedom of religion, freedom to own property - to Lenin, all were meaningless because they were "bourgeois."

Marx and totalitarianism

Lenin's commitment to totalitarianism, in both theory and practice, is essentially beyond dispute. The view of his precursor Karl Marx is more ambiguous, both because Marx wrote less clearly than Lenin, and because Marx never held power. In spite of this, the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced. He directs much of his critique against the classical liberal concern for personal freedom and private property - the Rights of Man, or what Marx called "bourgeois freedom." The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because:

None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice... Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property. He was not liberated from the egoism of business; he received the liberty to engage in business.

On the Jewish Question

For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are hollow freedoms, or at least grossly inadequate stepping stones to something better: "political emancipation itself is not human emancipation." "[B]ourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion." (Critique of the Gotha Program). Rather than advocating freedom for all people, liberals really value only the freedom of the ruling class of capitalist society, viz., the bourgeoisie.

Marx accuses the liberal tradition of slighting the social nature of man. "Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself." Marx elaborates: "The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." (On the Jewish Question)

Marx's solution, the route to human emancipation, was Communism, which would give people the freedom that bourgeois society denies them. Communism is, he explains, "the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man... the complete return of man to himself as a social being..." (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

Innumerable social thinkers disagree with much of Marx's thought, but praise his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his insight in contrast to the shallowness of laissez-faire liberalism. Yet it is difficult to understand how Marx's concept of freedom is anything more than a defense of tyranny and oppression. No dissident or non-conformist can see society as the "realization of his own liberty." And what can the attack on "the right to do everything which does not harm others" amount to in practice, except a justification for coercing people who are not harming others? The problem with "broad" notions of freedom is that they necessarily wind up condoning the violation of "narrow" notions of freedom. Under "bourgeois" notions of religious liberty, people may practice any religion they wish ("a private whim or caprice" as Marx calls it); how could this liberty be broadened, without sanctioning the persecution of some religious views?

While Marx occasionally says something in favor of democracy, Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was Marx's creation. In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx explains, "Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." It is not clear how long Marx thought this transitional dictatorship would last. As democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer notes:

Gradually, it became evident that the transition from capitalism to socialism would take not merely months or years but decades, and therefore the extreme left wing of the social revolutionists was compelled to take one further step. If it was permissible and even necessary to throw one's country for so long a period into the horrors of civil war and dictatorship, was it then not illogical to balk at the use of deceit, torture, provocation - in fact of any means that would speed up the revolution? Was it not clear that the actions of revolutionaries in the transition period should be governed only by the law of expediency, and that sincerity, mercy, justice toward the individual had as little place in the struggle of classes as in the jungle? (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

Marx's thought did not provide the blueprint for Communist totalitarianism, but it did provide a rough outline for more practical men like Lenin to elaborate upon.