The Role of Ideology

...As Stalinism grew older, its relationship to Marxist doctrine became more manipulative, though seldom to the point of being entirely free of self-deception...

...The older leaders of the Stalinist movement, who had once known what it meant to live in a non-totalitarian atmosphere, were trained in a school of exegetics that sharpened wits through prolonged polemics over the meaning of Marxist doctrine...

...On the contrary: the existence of such people was a precondition for such a movement...

...pushed everything to an extreme which helped make the reality all the clearer: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—this was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed...

...It was through works that the faith was to be manifested and tested...

...For if all change tends to be impelled by the Logic of History in a progressive direction, those who seemed to stand for the most change would also seem to be the greatest progressives...

...Given modern technology, total state control, the means of terror and a rationalized contempt for moral values, you can do anything with men, anything with the past...

...In the Communist parties ideologies were conceived as instruments of power, manipulable according to the needs of a given moment and very seldom serving as either check or standard for behavior.* Further qualifications are necessary, however, for in the relation between the Stalinist movement and the tradition of Marxism we face a highly complex and perhaps unprecedented problem...

...WAS ONLY FOOLIN' "I maintain that the only way before the free world is to adopt a positive policy...

...If, however, we mean by a genuine ideology a pattern of ideal norms that guide policy, something very different controlled the Stalinist movement...

...It defiled the intentions of Marx, his ethical passion and humanistic prophecy, but it clothed a rejection of his vision in the very language through which he had expressed it...

...In Ignazio Silone's novel The Seed Beneath the Snow a fascist orator, true in his comic fashion to the totalitarian ethos, asks the rhetorical question, Is the handkerchief for the nose or the nose for the handkerchief?, and answers that every good fascist understands that the nose is for the handkerchief...

...For the party, it facilitated the strategy of political access...

...and that the decisions of the party were the means for realizing the decrees of History...

...By contrast, Marx's philosophical and economic studies were likely to be neglected by most Stalinist leaders—even though the need to validate their claim to the Marxist heritage, as well as to give themselves satisfactions akin to those felt by patrons of scholarship, prompted the Communist parties to publish these works...

...The most terrifying assumption of the totalitarian mind is that, given the control of terror, anything is possible...

...They looked upon Marxism as a vocabulary useful in controlling followers abroad, a group of symbols that helped cement social loyalty at home, and a body of dogmatics to be guarded by professional scholiasts, who in turn were themselves to be guarded...

...STALINISM GREW OUT of, even as it destroyed, a movement that had been deeply attached to the letter of Marxism...

...The following article forms a section of a lengthy discussion on the nature of Stalinism is a forthcoming "History of the American Communist Party," to be published by Beacon Press.—THE EDITORS...

...All parties may violate their principles, yet the act of violation implies a certain recognition of norms...

...reality is something one manufactures, sometimes in anticipation, sometimes in tetrospect...

...Put so crudely, the "progressivist" ideology comes close to intellectual caricature...

...Not for the first time in history, the vocab ulary of a great thinker was turned against him, to corrupt his ideas and mock his values...

...The totalitarian party is "unprincipled" in the root sense of the term...

...They no longer needed to engage in debates with brilliant opposition leaders, as Stalin had once done...

...They felt that their version of "Marxism" provided them with omniscient knowledge of the course of History—knowledge so complete as to constitute a possession of History...

...Many individual Stalinists were obviously entangled with ideology as no one else in our time...

...that it made possible a finished program and a final answer...

...As Milosz wrote: "What is not expressed does not exist...

...The Stalinist claim to the Marxist tradition enabled it to compete for the allegiance of European workers who had been brought up in the socialist movements, particularly those who were taught to suspect the Social Democratic parties as reformist...

...And precisely to the extent that modern progressivism committed itself to what might be called technological optimism—the notion that the growth of a society's productive forces automatically renders it "progressive"—did it, in turn, become most vulnerable to Stalinist influence...

...Priding themselves on being practical men, they attached very little prestige to intellectual work and betrayed no desire to emulate Stalin's pretensions as a political theoretician...

...Appearing before the world as fellow progressives—fellow pro gressives in a hurry —the Stalinists were able to utilize many aspects of the liberal tradition and to claim, that far from being enemies of Western humanism—as, by contrast, many Nazi ideologues openly declared themselves—they were actually its true heirs...

...or Left Wing Communism might still be read by them with a certain interest, for while the topics of these pamphlets were not immediately relevant to the problems of Stalinism, they could be regarded as manuals of political warfare rich in suggestion to political strategists of almost any kind...

...Chiang kai-shek in Life magazine, July 1, 1957, page 104...

...The humanist elements in Marxism were discarded, the passion for man that animates Marx's writing eliminated, and instead those aspects of Marx's thought were emphasized which might be said to be most tainted by the Hegelian hubris of claiming to know what the future must be...

...It is sometimes said, in defense of this notion, that in those countries where Stalinist parties have taken power they have shown their ideological rigidity by risking the most severe opposition from the peasants rather than relax their insistence uponnationalization of the land...

...For many Stalinists it provided an indispensable means of reassurance: as long as the old words remained it was easier to evade the fact that new ideas had taken over...

...Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink...

...This description no longer holds fully for any political party, but least of all for Stalinism...

...It is here, in its reliance upon History, that Stalinism came closest to being an ideology...

...The Captive Mind, page 215...

...In the world of their youth, a ready capacity to cite Marxist classics, and to cite them with some relevance, could bring prestige and political preferment...

...IDEOLOGY IN THE STALINIST MOVEMENT was both exalted and degraded as in no other movement: exalted in that it was constantly put to work and accorded formal honor, degraded in that it was never allowed any status in its own right but came to be regarded as a weapon in the struggle for power...

...No Stalinoid intellectual in Paris would have been so unsophisticated as to accept the formula as we have reduced it here, but in the subtle writings of many a Stalinoid intellectual in Paris there was buried exactly this deification of "progress...

...Particularly in so far as they were uncritically or even enthusiastically honored by most of its * The notion that the Stalinist leaders were fanatical ideologists who could not takea political step without measuring it against their dogmas seems to us an error...

...Unlike other totalitarian and quasi-totalitarian movements, Stalinism was unable or unwilling to develop its own vocabulary, being an ideologically "dependent" system, an aftermath rather than a beginning...

...This mixture of knowingness and a pragmatic rejection of abstract thought—a remarkable reflection, by the way, of the profoundly ambiguous feeling of the modern world toward the intellectual vocation —provided the Stalinist leaders and intellectuals with a sense of certainty in a time of doubt...

...To have surrendered the signs and symbols it had appropriated from Marxism would have meant to face the enormously difficult task of trying to establish itself in the labor movement through a new vocabulary and what it would have had to acknowledge as a new set of ideas...

...I strongly feel that the only effective strategy against the Russian Communists' unlimited and protracted warfare is one of total war...

...Yet it is no contradiction to say that in a movement for which ideology has become a device there were many people whose submission to ideology was total, fanatical and ruthless...

...tive workings of the Stalinist movement, it is not sufficient for grasping the subjective processes of Stalinist thought...

...Therefore if one forbids men to explore the depths of human nature, one destroys in them the urge to make such explorations...

...Life magazine, ibid, same page...

...totalitarianism was the first, however, which systematically proceeded to remake the past...

...Theory, even while ritually celebrated, became an object of contempt...

...Nothing in thought or language need impose any limit...

...BELIEFS CONCERNING THE NATURE of History are here important in so far as they support the Stalinist myth, yet they cannot in themselves serve as guides to political or moral courses of action...

...Many political movements have claimed to control the present, and others the future...

...And Orwell, in describing the totalitarian attitude to thought and language...

...And not merely because the Communist parties have no genuine stake in the national interest, but more important, because they are not united upon "some particular principle...

...What is new is that by the third day he does not exist...

...The "essence" of History having been grasped, it then became possible to proclaim the primacy of praxis...

...Strategically, it proved far more advantageous to appear as the defender of orthodox Marxism even while ruthlessly emasculating it...

...For if the above is a usable description of the objec • Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent, page 96...

...and the depths in themselves slowly become unreal...

...But the new Stalinist functionaries, those who were themselves products of Stalinism and had never lived in any other milieu, showed very little interest in Marxist or any other form of speculative thought...

...To do this, it was necessary to regard words and ideas as instru mentalities that could be put to any use...

...Yet it would clearly have been impossible for the Stalinist movement to keep reiterating these claims without, in some way, coming to give them a certain credence itself...

...For the technological optimist, Dnieperstroy is an irrefutable argument...

...YET IT WOULD BE AN ERROR to Suppose that this dependence on the trappings of Marx's system was a mere useless survival...

...Precisely to the extent that the left tradition in the West did adhere indiscriminately to a simple optimistic theory of progress, it became most vulnerable to Stalinist infiltration...

...So understood, Marxism could provide a feeling of having reached a "total view" which permits one to identify with History and act in accordance with its inner rhythm...

...By contrast, the totalitarian party cannot, in any precise sense, be said to violate its principles: it can be described by its structure, its characteristics, its power goals, but not by any stable ideology or group of ideas...

...The elements in Marxism that have proved most attractive to the Stalinists were those most intimately tied to the 19th-century progressivism, a mode of thought still powerful in the life of the European "Left...

...Fascinated as they now were by the mechanics of power, the Stalin-_ ist leaders, if they read Marxist works at all, were likely to turn to those dealing with political strategy and tactics rather than those concerned with ultimate goals or values...

...opponents, these claims constituted a major source of Stalinist power and prestige...

...but so, often enough, does political life itself...

...From that point on, since there need be no further desire to question the underlying principle of social existence, strategy and tactics became all-important...

...One day Beria is a hero of the Soviet Union, the next day a villain—which is neither bad nor unusual...

...In the life of the totalitarian movement, the instrumental swallows up the ideological...

...hence, an acceptance of or identification with the supposed decrees of History, simply because they are supposed decrees of History, is an amoral act, leading more often than not to color-blindness in the choice of values...

...Though the ideological spokesmen of Stalinism advanced claims in regard to its ultimate ends that might seem similar to those of classical socialist thought, such pronouncements were manipulative, hortatory and self-deceptive—generally a mixture of the three...

...Recognizing how deeply the Marxist mode of thought has seeped into the modern mind, the Stalinist movement stressed its claim to being the true receptacle of Marxism with a vigor second only to its claim to being true to the tradition of the October revolution...

...A political party, wrote Edmund Burke at the dawn of the nation-state, "is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed...

...This relationship between Stalinism and its ideology followed from a fundamental attitude of totalitarian movements toward social and personal reality...

...and their general drive toward the abolition of private farms seems based far less on dogma than on thecorrect insight that as a ruling group which derives its power from total control ofa statified economy, they must regard any property-owning class as a potential threat...

...The uncritical acceptance of a metaphysical assumption proved in practice to be a shield against any further assaults by metaphysical doubt or contemplative temptations...

...Like one of the dark heretical cults of the Middle Ages which celebrated the devil through the ritual and imagery of Christ, Stalinism missed no occasion for proclaiming its Marxist orthodoxy...

...Or almost...

...The movement exists far less for the ideology than the ideology for the movement...

...In Orwell's 1984 and Milosz's The Captive Mind this idea is reiterated again and again, out of a despairing conviction that almost anyone can say the words but almost no one can apprehend their full significance...

...For these statements of ultimate ends had no controlling or restraining influence on the actual behavior of the Stalinist movement...

...In fact, however, the Stalinists have shown a capacityfor making temporary compromises with peasant ownership...

...History as such cannot provide values, though it may help and permit valuation...

...Lenin's What Is to Be Done...

...Reality is not something one recognizes or experiences...

...Despite the translator's use of such phrases as 'total war' here and elsewhere, the book (of Chiang kai-shek) as a whole constitutes an impassioned argument against nuclear warfare, total or otherwise.—ED...

...And for the intellectuals it offered the sanction of doing, or seeming to do, something "real...

...Stalinism, it is true, manipulated and exploited Marxist concepts and terms—but to say this is not yet fully to describe the relationship...

...Moral and political principles, however, are based on choices among opposing possibilities...

...the claim it made to the heritage of socialism could not in itself lead to a softening of the cruelties in the Siberian labor camps, though a shrewd political expediency might...

...His past has been destroyed, his name removed from the records...