'Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy'. Do you agree?

With its roots in both French revolutionary tradition and Hegels theory that history is the rise and fall of conflicting cultures, a logical progression, communism was effectively created by Marx and Engels with their Communist Manifesto. In this text, Marx ties Hegels idea of conflicting cultures with social classes, and he saw the growing industrial class as the key to the revolutionary transformation of society. Marx modernised Hegels propositions; he said that historical change took place within the real world of economics and economic relationships, instead of the intangible world of human consciousness. Marx claimed there would be a period of socialism, or dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat would become the new ruling class, or the vanguard. He and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, The first step in the revolution is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class (Marx & Engels, 1848). Marx claimed this period would be over when the last remnants of capitalism and bourgeois consciousness had disappeared altogether. This was, Marx claimed, the final stage for history to reach, the final post-capitalist world. Humankinds freedom and personal creativity would be restored. This theory is called Dialectic Materialism, and stems from Hegels theory of idealistic dialectics. Time changes peoples opinions on history; changing circumstances can shed light on previously obscured situations. The extreme evils of communism at its worst, usually considered to be Stalins regime in the Soviet Union, are often overlooked when balancing these and Hitlers crimes in Nazi Germany when assessing the evilness of both. This is in part due to the intense secrecy the Iron Curtain provided, as well as the fact that Stalins membership of the Allies at the end of the war afforded him the power to unveil the Nazis crimes in a dramatic manner which distracted the worlds attention away from the crimes occurring in his own country against his own people. He did this by appointing judges and lawyers to the Nuremberg Trials. The rise of fascism in Germany has been attributed to many varied factors. Perhaps the most important and symbolic moment was the point at which the November Criminals signed the Treaty of Versailles, an action that struck a crippling blow to Germanys military might. Another factor was the weak and ineffective Wiemar executive, due in part to the hostility of the elites to parliamentary democracy, and the final factor was the public perception that capitalism had failed the working poor, a feeling that was justified by the fact that by 1932 almost one worker in three was unemployed. The German people were appalled at the permissive attitude of the new Republic towards such dramatic changes as the rise of modern art and literature, and the increasing freedom that women seemed to be gaining. They longed for a strong government that would take control, disregard the Versailles Treaty, make Germany strong again, and return to traditional values. Perhaps the extreme of this would be Nazism; placing all power in the hands of one man would be the perfect antidote to weak

government and increasing liberalisation of society, especially when the man himself was virtually hero-worshipped by many people. Hitler may well have been hailed as an excellent leader for that specific society, had he not taken Germany into an unwinnable war in 1939. Is this not enlightened leadership; using reason, at least in the beginning, to assess what the people wanted? No, because his intention was to condition the German people to assist in his anti-Semitic crusade. He wanted to create a total war economy; and he wanted to take Lebensraum, or living space, in the East. When assessing the numbers killed, naturally one can only assume that Stalins regime was the worst. According to the documentary Monster: Portrait of Stalin in Blood (Ivankine, 1993), Stalin may have been responsible for up to sixty million deaths, although Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (Volkogonov, 1996) disputes this. The generally accepted figure is approximately twenty million. This would make Stalin the greatest mass murderer that ever lived, when comparing any of these figures with Hitlers nine to eleven million. The outcomes of both were exactly the same: failed states with oppressed and terrified populations, and so the benefits cannot possibly outweigh the deaths in the simple Utilitarian measure. During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18
th

Century, reason was advocated by many

philosophers as the primary source and legitimacy for authority. In L'Ancien Rgime et la Rvolution (de Tocqueville, 1850) the author states his belief that the French Revolution was the result of the radical opposition created in the eighteenth century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment, who constituted a substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power. This illusory power came from the rise of public opinion, born when absolutist centralisation removed the nobility and the bourgeoisie from the political sphere. Was Hitler not an opponent of monarchist influence in the body politic, yet an autocratic leader, an opponent of the status quo, and yet the substitutive aristocracy personified? He effectively assumed the role of monarch, as Cromwell did, and he allowed the elites in Germany to continue having a nominal role in his administration. He was not a socialist, as he crippled Germanys trade unions and replaced them with one Nazi version. The philosophers prevalent in the Enlightenment Era rejected romantic ideals and conjectured that by using rational thought, one would be able to explain virtually everything with scientific, empirical evidence. It could be said that the fascists worshipped romantic ideals, especially with the blood mysticism and militarist fetishism evident in the National Reich Church. The Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) aspect of Nazi eco-fascism referred to in Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (Darr, 1929) would make them, by the definition of many Enlightenment Era philosophers, unenlightened. Furthermore, the late 19th Century Social Darwinists particularly impressed Hitler, however Social Darwinism is incompatible with the socialism that Hitler claimed to believe in. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, (Hitler, 1925-6) The stronger must dominate and not blend with

Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy. Do you agree? Thomas Williams

the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. This states explicitly his belief that society must effectively remove the influence of the weak, and can explain his hatred for the fundamentally weak Wiemar government. This inconsistency in Hitlers personal values indicates a lack of enlightenment in the ideology that Hitler followed throughout the duration of his regime. It could be said, though, that in fact fascism is a form of Syndicalism, a theory created by the French philosopher George Sorel. This advocates the use of collectivised trade unions to replace the capitalist economic system. The word fascism itself is derived from the Latin fasci meaning bundle of sticks, and the emblem of Mussolinis Partito Nazionale Fascista was exactly that. It symbolises the theory that a nation working together as one will always work better than a fractionalised nation with competing interests. The basic tenet of fascism is that the only way to remove these opposing interests and to unite the nation in attempting to achieve one goal is by force. This collective action in Germany is quite similar to Syndicalism, in the sense that the Nazi Party itself was a form of trade union, being the National Socialist German Workers Party. This was supposedly working to create a socialist state with all citizens working together as one, at least in the beginning, until the Strasser brothers and the leadership of the SA were removed in the Night of the Long Knives. In fact, Sorel praised both Mussolini and Lenin for attacking bourgeois interests, and Mussolini was a follower of Sorel (Jennings, 1985. George Sorel: the Development and Character of his Thought). He may well have praised Hitler had he not died in 1922. I believe that this pertains to a strong link between communism and National Socialism as a means to an end, but not the end itself. The end in early Nazi theory was a socialist state, whilst the end in communist theory was a communist state. Both, however, were supposed to go through a period of socialism before they reached their respective endpoints. This period would have to entail a revolution; a National Socialist Revolution and a Bolshevik Revolution, with each involving mass murders. Therefore, the crimes against humanity that were committed in the name of each of the causes are justified in different ways. This means that whilst the crimes may in essence have been the same, the causes themselves can still be more or less enlightened than one another, due to the differing intended endpoints. Nazism was not what it seemed to the foot soldiers of the Nazi revolution, and the October revolution resulted in something wildly different to that which the Bolsheviks envisioned, and so either the respective ideologies that motivated them were flawed, or the leadership of their respective movements had ulterior motives. Whilst academic and popular opinion is generally united in agreement that fascism was not enlightened, opinion is certainly split regarding whether or not communist philosophy was enlightened. It could be argued that the public was calling for strong government and national

Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy. Do you agree? Thomas Williams

unity, and fascism provided those at the time. In the Soviet Union, it did not achieve its desired aims, although that was not all due to the philosophy itself. Lenin was convinced by October 1917 that Russia was ready for the Bolshevik revolution. I would disagree; Marx expounded his idea that the proletariat could and would overthrow the bourgeois ruling class in The Communist Manifesto. He and Engels wrote, The petty bourgeoisie, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. This implies that he believed that the bourgeois could only exist after a feudal society. Considering Russia was still, at that time, a feudal society, this meant that there was no bourgeois to overthrow, in the Marxist meaning of the term. Furthermore, there was no proletariat to overthrow the bourgeois ruling class, as in the feudal society that existed, the vast majority of the lowest tier of society were peasants. This means that Russia was not suitably conditioned for the transition from socialism to communism, or even for a dictatorship of the proletariat, as there was only a very small proletariat. Just to add to the many deviations from Marxs theory, those that carried out the revolution were not even working class, or proletarians, themselves. Marx intended for a dictatorship of the proletariat to occur, not of the petty bourgeoisie. Does this mean Lenin was wrong to think that Russia was ready for the October Revolution? Only a basic reading of Marxs work can tell you that the answer is, indeed, yes. Does this mean that Lenin was unenlightened? An understanding of the meaning of the term enlightenment will tell you that again, the answer is yes. He did not use rational thought correctly and allowed dreams of what was not possible at that time to motivate him. The very action of instigating the October Revolution was unenlightened, because it was without proper application of reason. In the case of Soviet Russia, an initial utopian ideal gave way to intolerable, harsh rule, and conformism. During the civil war and their subsequent exile, Lenins Communist revolutionaries acquired distinctly dictatorial habits; they had become an army instead of a party. The civil war only worsened this process. Did they consider themselves to be visionaries, building an undemocratic bridge into a democratic future? Did they intend to allow democracy to intervene in their accumulation of personal, concentrated power? Was the final communist stage democratic in Marxs eyes? The historian Isaac Deutcher wrote, They [the Soviet revolutionaries] could not dispense with power if they were to strive for the fulfilment of their ideals; but now their power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals (Deustcher, 1959. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929). This suggests that the final stage of communism could not occur from the very start, as the very ideals that all of the subsequent crimes were committed in the name of were doomed to be overshadowed by the crimes themselves. Stalins regime, which I identified earlier as communism at its worst, can be summarised in one phrase. In a quote from Anatoly Rybakovs 1987 book, Children of the Arbat, a fictional

Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy. Do you agree? Thomas Williams

Stalin said, Death solves all problems no man, no problem. His attitude towards the peasantry was to repress them, in an even more vicious way than the previous feudal system had. A quintessential example of such behaviour is The Great Terror - characterised by widespread police surveillance, imprisonment, and executions of the members of the intelligentsia, peasants, and kulaks that were suspected of anti-revolutionary activity in a move designed only to consolidate Stalins power. Over Stalins period in power, millions of peasants died from starvation. What for? The pursuit of an ideal that was already unattainable due to the unsuitability of Russia for revolution nineteen years before the beginning of the Great Terror? Flaws in Marxist philosophy, perhaps, that meant that any transition from a dictatorship of the proletariat to a communist state fundamentally impossible due to the human factors that Marx, ever the great theorist, did not take into account? Throughout my research on this topic, I have come to some interesting conclusions. Whilst the German people were calling for a strong figurehead at the top of government, which Hitler gladly provided, and a stop to the liberalisation of German social values, which again, Hitler provided, the Nazi obsession with such romanticised ideals as an Aryan master race, Blut und Boden, and the irrational Nazi hatred and subsequent persecution of Jews and other subhuman groups makes any kind of suggestion that Nazi ideology was enlightened in the 18 Century sense of the term ridiculous. Although the original socialist elements of National Socialism as set down by the Strasser brothers, including a National Socialist revolution, which entailed removing the elites and eliminating poverty, are very similar to the Bolshevik revolution and removing the bourgeois elements in society, the Nazi Party itself was capricious in its commitment to many policies. Once the Strasser brothers were murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, the regime took a different turn. This lack of consistency was definitely not enlightened, as there was no reason in such inconsistency. The Communist regime, as I have explained, was a flawed enterprise from the outset. The country was not ready for revolution, following the conditions set down by Marx. For all their scientific socialism, the Soviets used idealised images and icons of workers and land, as well as using mass psychology and propaganda to secure the support of the people. These romanticised ideals and propaganda techniques are prevalent in both Nazism and Soviet Communism; they are indicative of a lack of reason and empirical evidence in persuading the people in their respective countries to support their brand of socialism, whether extreme, total, warped, or virtually non-existent. Even taking into account their respective merits, whether it be the Soviet Union ushering in a new wave of rights for women, or the Nazi regime providing employment for millions following the economic collapse, neither of them were enlightened in the 18
th th

Century

definition of the term. Both killed millions, both were fascist regimes, both discriminated against different sections of society; the Soviet Union on economic position, the Nazi Regime

Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy. Do you agree? Thomas Williams

on race. The Communist regime in the Soviet Union was so far removed from the arguably enlightened philosophy that Marx advocated that any merits that Marxs arguments had cannot be applied to the Stalinist regime. Therefore, the argument that communism at its worst was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy is not true due to the Soviet regime following an unenlightened philosophy that Marx did not advocate, or rather it did not progress far enough to be able to claim that it was enlightened.

Bibliography Darr, R. (1929). Neuadel aus Blut und Boden. de Tocqueville, A. (1850). L'Ancien Rgime et la Rvolution. Deustcher, I. (1959). The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929. Hitler, A. (1925-6). Mein Kampf. Ivankine, A. (Director). (1993). Monster: Portrait of Stalin in Blood [Motion Picture]. Jennings, J. (1985). George Sorel: the Development and Character of his Thought. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). The Communist Manifesto. Volkogonov, D. (1996). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy.

Communism, even at its worst, was better than Nazism because it was an enlightened philosophy. Do you agree? Thomas Williams