One of the biggest philosophical questions is the problem of evil. Needless to say, it is a problem that Marxists wave aside. The whole notion of ‘good versus evil’ smacks of ‘bourgeois idealism’. Such moralism is to be avoided as much as humanly possible. One can only speak of ‘class struggle’, the forces of progress versus the forces of reaction. Besides, the whole notion of good versus evil is used cynically by class society to control the morality of the working-class. To obey the authorities, to accept the status quo and to adhere to tradition constitutes ‘good’, and to seek the violent overthrow of your society makes you ‘evil’. Morality is just a tool of class struggle, and obscures a ‘scientific’ analysis of why things are the way they are.
One does not have to take this Marxist view of morality too seriously, especially since Marxism conceals within its doctrine a moral position – it just isn’t elaborated. Despite purporting to give a ‘scientific’ analysis of capitalism, Marx could not help slipping into moralistic language now and then. Marx was pitiless in the vitriolic language he used to describe the bloodsucking bourgeoisie, those exploiters of the workers and degraders of the human spirit. Marxism is sublimated religion, rationalised with scientific-sounding language. (Alan Woods, at a gathering of comrades, exhorted us to join the ‘holy war’ against capitalism, and is fond of quoting the Bible in his speeches.) Like traditional religion, it has had, as the ex-Marxist Christopher Hitchens famously admitted, its show-trials, heresy hunts, excommunications and rival Popes. The fierce language with which Lenin and Trotsky attacked the forces of counter-revolution cannot be easily distinguished from the hateful rhetoric of the religious fanatics of early modern Europe. Trotsky killing Admiral Schastny was the equivalent of Calvin burning Servetus at the stake. Lenin fuming against the ‘renegade Karl Kautsky’ was akin to Pope Leo X’s denunciation of Martin Luther. The drowning of the Kronstadt rebellion in blood was much like the Christian princes of Germany savagely repressing the Anabaptists.
This apparently Manichaean attitude, which has so often served to legitimise mass murder, does not stop Marxists from reacting indignantly to the ‘reactionary’ claim that human nature is inherently evil. Human nature, argue Marxists, is malleable, a reflection of the society in which we live. If human beings under capitalism appear greedy, selfish, atomistic and asocial, it is because the system has made them that way. To rectify this, we must overthrow capitalism in favour of a more pro-social socio-economic system, in which cooperation is emphasised over conflict. It is not explained how this is to happen if capitalism is so successful in corrupting human beings into being selfish. There is little sign of any countervailing pressures mitigating the social forces promoting extreme individualism. Unless Marxists are conceding that there IS an inherent human nature after all, except that human beings are naturally good as opposed to evil. Here we have a paradox. On the one hand, there is no inherent human nature – human behaviour is largely the product of socio-economic forces. On the other hand, there is an inherent human nature, and that nature is inherently good, sociable and progressive.
The truth is, Marxists do not have nearly as much faith in the inherent goodness of humanity as they might otherwise pretend. The Leninist attitude to the working-class is actually very cynical. Aileen Kraditor, in her book on the mental world of American Communism, illustrates this paradox very well:
‘The masses had no antidote of their own, for, as Lenin said, socialist consciousness must be brought to the workers and did not arise spontaneously from their own experience and struggles. The two warring belief systems—the capitalists and the Party’s—both originated outside the working class: the capitalists’ from their class interests, and the Party’s from the scientific generalization, by intellectuals, of the workers’ experience and the data of history. As Lenin said, there was no third ideology, which meant that none could evolve within the people’s own communities. The image of the helpless proletariat was thus intrinsic to the Party’s general belief system.’ (p.203)
Left to their own devices, argue Leninists, the masses will end up adopting bourgeois ideology. Therefore, the workers must have the ‘correct ideas’ brought to them from a third force, the socialist intelligentsia. Lenin borrowed this idea from Karl Kautsky, leader of the Second International and the so-called ‘Pope’ of Marxism. (When I said earlier that Marxism has its own Popes, I wasn’t joking. Lenin, as every good historian knows, went on to disavow Kautsky and set himself up as an Anti-Pope.) Of course, this simply illustrates that Leninists do not have nearly as much faith in the innate goodness of the working-class as they pretend. No sooner had the Bolsheviks seized power than they set about dismantling all of the organs of workers’ control and imposing totalitarianism.
Within our own organisation, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), which was a microcosm of the kind of control that we sought to exert over society as a whole in the event of our seizing power, a similar dynamic existed. Everything was in the hands of the Central Committee, and we, the members, were its unthinking foot-soldiers. There were mechanisms of control in place to prevent us from challenging party doctrine, and our indoctrination of new members was done in such a way as to guide them away from ‘alien class ideas’ and have them only reading material produced by our sect. If our wise leaders had truly had faith in the working-class, they would have trusted their members to think for themselves, to read heretical material and to discuss ideas freely with each other – even to raise criticisms of Trotsky and elements of our doctrine. Of course, this was not the case, as I found to my cost. Our treatment of contacts was utterly cynical. We would consider how amenable they were to being indoctrinated, how we could integrate them more into the cult, how we could extract more and more of their time and energy. Raising ‘incorrect ideas’ in branch was taboo – after all, you would ‘miseducate’ the members, who were obviously so impressionable that they could be led astray. Instead, differences could only be communicated to the higher-ups. This was not an organisation in which the leadership had any belief in the inherent goodness of its members. Rigid ‘proletarian discipline’ was imposed upon everyone who was a member. This internal regime was of course borrowed from the Comintern, and then bequeathed by Trotsky and James P. Cannon to their followers throughout the world, with few if any modifications.
Of course, if you are going to decide to police the citizens in your totalitarian proto-state for thought-crime, then you must invest a chosen few individuals with the unchecked authority to decide what thought-crime consists of and how it is to be dealt with. And this is how cult leaders crop up. It is no wonder that Trotskyist sects have created tyrannical monsters like Gerry Healy, Juan Posadas, James P. Cannon, David North, Alex Callinicos and Pierre Lambert time and time again. You could not find a finer vindication of the conservative position on human nature if you tried. Not only has every single Marxist revolution degenerated, irrespective of the ‘objective conditions’ that existed in those countries, but every single Leninist organisation, whether in power or not, has degenerated into a cult around a guru figure – Alan Woods in the IMT, Peter Taaffe in the CWI, Tony Cliff in the SWP, etc. Maybe the problem is not objective conditions. Maybe the problem is the ideology, and moreover, human nature. Marxism says that human nature is either an illusion or is inherently good. Neither of these positions are tenable. Experience tells us that if you give someone or a group of people unchecked power, it will corrupt them. Alex Callinicos’ great-grandfather Lord Acton coined a wonderful phrase to this effect, which was sadly unheeded by his great-grandson. It turns out there is a human nature after all, and that it can be pretty ugly. It is not an accident that Marxist dictatorships have produced monsters like Stalin and Mao, and it is not an accident that Marxism produces dictatorships, for despotism is in the DNA of Marxism, and Marxist states and parties must inevitably give rise to despots.
We have, therefore, two extremes. On the one hand, we have a strong distrust of human nature serving as a justification for intellectual despotism by Leninists over their citizens and party rank-and-filers. On the other, a complete ignorance of the problem of unchecked power in the hands of an individual or a few individuals, which shows an utter naivety bordering on the criminal. Yet go up to any Trotskyist and remonstrate with them about the role played by human evil in the corruption we saw in the Leninist states. They will roll their eyes, condescendingly swat away your ‘bourgeois moralism’ and accuse you of ‘idealism’ and a failure to understand the problem using the science of dialectical materialism. (The full-timer for my region mocked me for suggesting that the Bolsheviks became corrupted by power, in the tone of voice which suggested that only a child could take such a proposition seriously.) To blame the degeneration of the Marxist states on the Communists becoming corrupted was moralistic clap-trap, and to blame ideology was insufficiently materialist. The problem was the ‘objective conditions’ of isolation, economic and cultural backwardness and imperialist encirclement which made degeneration inevitable. No doubt such individuals are convinced that Marxists are super-humans, immune from the same temptations and tendency to sadism and bullying as others.
Of course, one could concede that ‘objective conditions’ played a role, whilst also noting the ‘dialectical’ (yes, I will use that word) relationship between these objective conditions, ideology and, last but not least, human nature. Marxists can deny human nature all they want, but it exists, and it has an impact upon human affairs. To borrow a point made by Kraditor, if Marxists can accept that capitalism is basically the same as it was in the eighteenth century despite its many modifications since then, then they should be able to accept that human nature is roughly what it was thousands of years ago, even with all of the changes that human beings have endured since then. (At least one Marxist writer, Norm Geras, has suggested that Marx did believe in an inherent human nature after all, but that it existed in dialectical tension with any given socio-economic system – which is common sense, really.) Thus, it is neither an illusion nor simply the product of a given socio-economic system. This being the case, any revolution will face the problem of the leadership becoming corrupted by power, and Marxists must find ways of anticipating this and dealing with it, instead of throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, it all depends on the objective conditions.’ If the difference between the psychopathic madness of a Pol Pot and the humane benevolence of a Gorbachev rests upon how many peasants a country has and how many factories it has succeeded in building, not to mention the slim possibility that any revolution will take place entirely peacefully and avoid the perils of diplomatic isolation, then revolution is clearly a stupid risk that should never be embarked upon.
No cult can exist without followers, and no totalitarian state can operate without the uncritical obedience of at least a subset of the population, usually the army and the party, which is made up of indoctrinated robots that will obey any edict from the Dear Leader. It is human nature to conform and to obey authority. The Nazi enforcers of the Holocaust would always claim that they were just following orders. Likewise, Stalin’s henchmen, paralysed by a mixture of fear for their own lives and the belief that Stalin was indeed a preternatural genius and indispensable leader, carried out their orders without question. There were also young and ambitious bureaucrats within the Communist Party who supported the Great Purge because it made room within the state apparatus for people like them to gain prominence. Evil happens not just because of evil individuals, but people willing to assist them in the doing of evil. When you are part of a group, responsibility for wrongdoing is distributed in such a way that no one feels accountable for their vile acts. This is true in totalitarian states, and it is true in Trotskyist sects. I often shudder to think of the horrors I and others would have been forced to commit if the IMT ever seized power. Examples of utter evil on the part of the members of such organisations include being forced to cover up incidents of rape and sexual assault. All this is justified as being for the greater good. After all, we wouldn’t want the bourgeois media to use these dirty secrets against us, would we? Then there are the innumerable examples of people being forced out as a result of power struggles within the leadership, the use of slander, gossip and outright lies to discredit political opponents, and much more besides.
Something which infuriates me every time I think about it is how, when I was in the IMT, we created a myth that ‘the Marxists’ (our sect) existed on a higher ethical and moral plane than our opponents (even as we were wont to dismiss morality as a bourgeois concept). We boasted that Lenin and Trotsky never used bureaucratic methods against their opponents (a blatant lie refuted by the historical record), but always sought to persuade them with ‘facts, figures and arguments’. We claimed that whereas other sects used ‘Zinovievite’ methods, we encouraged democratic discussion and debate (something the members that were purged back in the 2010 split would dispute). In his hagiographical biography of Ted Grant, Alan Woods, discussing Grant’s run-in with some vindictive rival Trotskyists in Britain, self-righteously denounces slander and gossip as the ‘methods of the petty-bourgeoisie’ (as if he and his colleagues have not happily engaged in slander and gossip against their opponents). The truth is, we had all the flaws of our opponents, even if some groups were even worse. This lack of self-awareness illustrates how unserious Trotskyists are about the problem of evil, and the problem of human nature. If Trotskyists cannot even rectify this issue in their own organisations, how much worse will things be if they seize power?