The essence of totalitarianism is the desire to remake all of society into a gray homogeneity. Islamism, communism, fascism – all seek to impose on society a stultifying sameness and uniformity of opinion, dress, manners, culture and language. The Islamists seek to impose on everyone strict adherence to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, and force everyone into a brotherhood of the righteous. Communists seek to create homogeneity by the abolition of class, nation and all other essential differences between human beings. Fascists seek to abolish all meaningful differentiation within the nation in favour of what the Nazis called a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (People’s Community). All demand blind obedience to the state, to the leader, to the doctrine. None permit individualism or critical thinking of any kind. Their doctrines are wildly different, but their attitudes strikingly similar. Indeed, Trotsky openly admitted that the methods of the communists were very similar to those of their fascist rivals. However, whereas liberal intellectuals used this to equate communism with fascism, Trotsky brushed this aside as ‘bourgeois’ prejudice – communists and fascists sought different goals and fought for different class interests. How could they be morally equal? One fought for progress and for the oppressed workers of the world. The other fought for black reaction and the interests of the ruling class.
Of course, what Trotsky was missing the point. No one denies the real differences between communism, fascism, Islamism, or any other totalitarian doctrine. But for supporters of liberal democracy like myself, the superficial differences in doctrine are not the essential point. Nor is it the ‘class interests’ that are served by these ideologies. The fact is that all of these ideologies have been responsible for the creation of monstrous tyrannies where the individual is crushed beneath the yoke of mindless collectivism and brutalising conformism. Tankies and Trotskyists on Twitter mock ‘liberal centrists’ and create ridiculous strawmen like the following: ‘Fascists want to kill and oppress ethnic minorities. Marxists want to create a just world for all. Centrists want to kill and oppress some ethnic minorities but not too many.’ This is an idiotic claim for all sorts of reasons. Everyone can agree that in the 1930s, Nazism was a greater threat than Communism, and that allying with Stalinist Russia to beat Hitler was a necessary evil. This does not change the fact that both Nazism and Communism are totalitarian ideologies that are equally undesirable from the perspective of liberal individualism.
Trotsky’s argument was as follows: ‘Yes, we use the same methods as the fascists. So what? Two different entities can use similar means to achieve different ends.’ Trotsky was responding to Victor Serge (and other critics) who argued that the ‘ends justify the means’ attitude of Marxists had led to Stalinism, because Stalin was the ultimate example of a Marxist revolutionary who totally rejected morality, something which led to the anti-human monstrosity of the USSR. Trotsky did concede that there was a dialectical relationship between means and ends, and that the means used must be appropriate to the ends sought. If only Trotsky had taken this to its logical conclusion, and reflected on whether the means used by the communists of the twentieth century was appropriate to the end they were seeking – a world that would be freer, more human, more equal. How one gets to this end through creating a cult of violence, mindless conformity, blind obedience to an elite of revolutionary cadres and suppression of individual thought, is unclear to me.
Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth, in their book, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, describe a cult as a totalitarian society in miniature. I think this is one of the most succinct and accurate descriptions I have ever read. Looking back on my time in the International Marxist Tendency, I can see how so much of my experience in the organisation approximates the experiences of people who were members of the European Communist Parties of the twentieth century, or that of people living in North Korea and Communist China today. As I have said before, totalitarian ideologies all seek to create homogeneity in society, and this is at the heart of Marxism and its Trotskyist derivation especially. Marx and Engels imagined that a socialist society would be one in which not just class, but all other divisions among humans – that of race, gender and political affiliation – would be eliminated. This often led them to draw racist conclusions, like saying that Slavs and Magyars were ‘unhistorical peoples’ who were incapable of attaining the blessings of modernity through their own efforts, and would have to be subjected to a ‘revolutionary holocaust’. (This is often interpreted not in the sense of physical annihilation, but forcible subjection to and assimilation within a German-dominated socialist Europe.) The Soviet Union’s drive to creation a homogeneous proletarian brotherhood involved suppressing ethnic minorities, including Jews, and destroying synagogues, banning Hebrew and clamping down on Zionism and other efforts at national self-expression. Marx himself was a self-hating Jew who preached that Jews were bloodsuckers and leeches on other peoples, and that antisemitism was a reaction to their being capitalist moneylenders and usurers. Antisemitism, said Marx, would only be abolished once the revolution had abolished class society, and with it, the position of exploiter that makes the Jews so hated. This would involve forcibly assimilating the Jews with the rest of society and destroying Jewishness as a concept.
I often think about how the homogeneous political culture of the IMT mirrors the society we sought to bring about. I remember Rob Sewell saying that the only bad thing about socialism is that we would all agree with each other! I remember thinking, even then, that I did not want to live in a world in which everyone is in complete agreement on everything. I still cringe when I remember the articles reporting on our national conference and World Congress, at which everything would be voted through ‘unanimously’. Imagine if this kind of attitude was transferred to all of society. How boring such a world would be. A world in which everyone has the exact same political opinions, the exact same taste in music, reads the exact same books and eats the exact same food, wears the exact same clothes, lives in the exact same houses and agrees ‘unanimously’ to each and every suggestion put forward by the Central Committee – just like in our cult. It occurred to me after leaving the IMT that this was essential to Marxist doctrine – a conclusion I was helped to draw by reading Leszek Kolakowski’s criticisms of Marxism – and I felt relief that Marxism was in fact false, and that such an anti-human society would never be brought into being. Nowhere has this ideal been achieved, not even in the USSR, which only created the illusion of homogeneity, but was fraught with social conflict beneath the surface.
Insofar as I still had any socialist convictions, I knew that my idea of socialism was very different from that of Trotskyism, so different that some might say it wasn’t socialist at all. I became interested in socialism through reading libertarian socialists like Oscar Wilde and Max Stirner. By sheer accident, I got involved in the IMT and was brainwashed into adopting Trotskyism. After leaving the IMT, the process of my political indoctrination reversed, as I tried to rekindle my former interest in libertarian socialism – reading people like E.P. Thompson, for example. I am now convinced that socialism is a lost cause, and relieved that this is so – the less energy we waste on utopian fantasies the better. But that does not mean that I think that everything about Marxism or socialism is false. I still find the idea of a society in which we have increased leisure time to spend on cultural pursuits and self-actualisation as opposed to the drudgery and pettiness of bourgeois society attractive. I just no longer believe that socialism of any kind can get us there. I don’t see a revival of social democracy any time soon, and the left at present is so contaminated by identity politics, antisemitism and pro-Islamist sentiment that I do not consider it to be a serious alternative to the flawed neoliberal system we have now. I have therefore drawn the conclusion that the status quo is preferable.
I do not believe that socialism, by itself, is a totalitarian doctrine. Marxist socialism, however, which is socialism taken to its logical conclusion, is an inherently totalitarian doctrine. Every Marxist regime has been a totalitarian one, and every Marxist regime has sought to regiment, control and homogenise the population in line with certain political goals. This is not an ‘aberration’, or the result of some ‘degeneration’. It is inherent to the doctrine. How else are you supposed to keep control of a demoralised population that decides it doesn’t want socialism anymore, especially in the face of counter-revolution? That is the dilemma that the Bolsheviks had to face when the working-class turned against them after their seizure of power in 1917. Did they throw up their hands, say, ‘Well, I guess we have to respect the democratic will of the workers and hand over to the Mensheviks.’ No. And to an extent, I can understand why, despite not having any sympathy with Marxist dogma. After all, what if their old rivals sought to take revenge by putting leading Bolsheviks on trial and executing them? What if a Menshevik regime proved too weak to stand up to White counter-revolution, ending with the massacre of the workers and all of the Bolshevik cadres? Maybe Lenin had a point – the workers did not know their best interests. The Bolsheviks had to hold onto power at all costs, and the workers, in Rousseau’s words, had to be ‘forced to be free’, forcibly conscripted into the Red Army and subjected to strict discipline in the factories to stop the economy falling apart.
Of course, I am being charitable. But even if it hadn’t been for the ‘difficult objective conditions’ faced by the Bolsheviks – even if there had been no civil war, no imminent threat of counter-revolution, no imperialist intervention – the regime would still have needed to be a totalitarian one, because Marxist doctrine would permit nothing less. Marxist doctrine holds that a workers’ state must have complete control over the economy – hence the Bolsheviks’ implementation of War Communism, and later on forced collectivisation. Marxist doctrine also says that ‘formal democracy’ and ‘bourgeois’ rules do not have to be respected by a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is entitled to use any means at its disposal to crush opposition, including the banning of ‘bourgeois’ parties and ‘bourgeois’ media. (Mind you, anyone in any way critical of the regime could be labelled ‘objectively bourgeois’, even if they were socialist critics from within the ruling party.) Marxist doctrine preaches that divisions in society are primarily (if not entirely) because of ‘class struggle’, and thus, once we abolish class by overthrowing the bourgeois state, and put the means of production into the hands of the ‘workers’ state’, we will be on our way to overcoming alienation and creating complete harmony between the individual and society. Therefore, all potential sources of social conflict can be labelled as ‘remnants of bourgeois society’ and suppressed, whether this be related to national identity, religious belief, political opinion etc. Of course, this doesn’t get rid of meaningful differences within society. All it does it conceal them. In the IMT, we would create the illusion of unanimity and homogeneity through stage-managed mass meetings and the bullying out of dissidents, all in line with ‘democratic centralism’. In the same way, dissidents and other disruptives in totalitarian regimes like the USSR are silenced, locked up or forced into exile so as to maintain the illusion of a united society. I still recall my branch secretary telling me just before I left over political disagreements that everyone in the organisation was ‘in complete agreement’ and I was the only one who had any criticisms of the group’s doctrine. This of course is a lie – no doubt there were others in the organisation who shared my views, but the leadership had succeeded in suppressing open discussion of doubts or criticisms, preserving the illusion of unanimity around a set doctrine.
Recently, I watched a very good video by the ex-Scientologist and anti-cult activist Chris Shelton, in which he discusses some of the tension between ex-Scientologists, and the falling out that often happens between them. Shelton raises the good point that the experience of being in the cult is to see everyone as a friend, a brother, a fellow struggler in the war to ‘clear the planet’. This is deeply unhealthy and actually serves to suppress people’s individuality. In the real world, we don’t all have to be friends, we don’t all have to agree with each other, and we are allowed to go our separate ways. No one is forcing us to think or act a certain way, and this is as it should be. The relationships we have in a cult are entirely artificial, and Janja Lalich makes the good point in her book Take Back Your Life that people in cults often feel lonely, despite being surrounded by people. This was certainly my experience in the IMT. I still recall how I would attend our stage-managed mass gatherings and feel a wave of exhilaration and adoration rushing towards me from all the other ‘comrades’, and would return home on a high, only to go back to being my usual, lonely, depressed self. The cognitive dissonance between wanting to be myself, and needing to conform to this group, was incredible.
Enforced brotherhood is at the centre of every totalitarian ideology, and it is the exact opposite of genuine friendship and brotherhood. The workers of the world will never unite. Class will never truly become more important than nation. Nation will never truly become more important than family. The more organic and natural the bonds between human beings, the harder it is for a totalitarian entity to destroy them. No matter how hard Communist regimes tried, they could not completely destroy these things. Class re-emerged, as a bureaucratic elite sought to differentiate itself from the workers who it officially governed on behalf of. (The Ancient Greeks could have told us this was human nature.) Nation re-emerged, and the state had to fall back on nationalism to rally the workers against the foreign enemy during WWII. Early attempts to abolish the ‘bourgeois’ family failed and were repealed by Stalin when society began to breakdown under the weight of the Communist Party’s utopian schemes. Marxism has failed not because of ‘difficult objective conditions’ or ‘bourgeois sabotage’, but because it is incompatible with basic human nature. The sooner this is accepted, the better.
Totalitarian ideologies have an in-built destructive tendency. They always collide with reality. Not only are they incompatible with basic human nature, they cause more problems for themselves by choosing to declare war on the entire civilised world, deliberately isolating themselves from the rest of humanity and condemning themselves to poverty and decline. They then have the gall to blame ‘imperialist sabotage’ for their self-inflicted woes. North Korea is a hellhole because its own rulers have decided they would rather be cut off from the rest of the planet than accept foreign influence. Cuba is the same way – better to shut out all ‘bourgeois’ influences from abroad than let in anything that could threaten the socialist project. Besides, they can always blame the American blockade and ‘Yankee imperialism’ for their failures. Stalin destabilised his regime with his mad purges to further shore up the Communist ideal of social homogeneity, even killing his best generals, and nearly being defeated by Hitler as a result. The same is true for Islamist regimes like Iran. Nazism is the most spectacular example – the Nazis literally burned all of Europe to the ground as part of their conquering rampages, before being brutally crushed by an international coalition, leaving Germany weaker and poorer than before its unification in 1870. The country sacrificed its best and brightest men to the delusions of a crazed dictator and his sick, demented henchmen.
My reflections on totalitarianism did not begin recently. I think it is something I have pondered for some time. I am reminded of an essay I wrote in my second year of university about the ideas of Rousseau. I found the parallels between Rousseau’s ideas and those of Marxism fascinating. In the end, I drew very ‘liberal’ and un-Marxist conclusions from my study of Rousseau, but my cognitive dissonance prevented me from taking things any further and questioning Marxism. Rousseau argued that a truly free and democratic society would be one in which everyone obeyed the ‘general will’. The general will is not necessarily the opinion of the majority, but what is objectively in the best interests of everyone in society. Rousseau assumes that in his ideal society, there will be unanimous agreement on what the general will is. This is predicated upon the population being educated and enlightened enough to abandon their selfish, ‘particular interests’ (the interests of certain groups and individual people within society) in favour of the interests of society as a whole. In the event that a minority dissents from the general will, Rousseau argues that it is for the majority to ‘force them to be free’.
There has been much controversy over what Rousseau meant. If he meant physical force, then clearly this cannot be in line with his belief that adherence to the general will safeguards the freedom of all in society, since some individuals will have to be subjected to repression in order to force them to have the ‘correct’ opinions. Furthermore, if a majority of individuals become corrupted by their own selfish interests, and reject the general will, then one is forced to conclude that coercion of any kind is almost impossible. Some scholars have argued that what Rousseau actually meant was the use of intellectual persuasion, plus ostracism of those who behaved in an uncivil manner. My conclusion in the essay was that Rousseau’s ideal society would be unworkable except in a society which was completely homogeneous, as any normal human society would have meaningful differences between citizens that would preclude their having the exact same interests. Workers will not have the same interests as bosses. Men will not have the same interests as women. The old will not have the same interests as the young. These ‘particular interests’ will always take precedence over the ‘general interest’, or ‘general will’, for most people. The only way to prevent these ‘particular interests’ from dominating and corrupting the state would be to impose a totalitarian regime that banned freedom of association among like-minded people or those with interests in common (so no political parties, trade unions, employers’ associations, feminist groups etc) and to forcibly atomise them so that they exercised their citizenship in the solitary way Rousseau seemed to prefer. (Rousseau believed that this would make everyone more likely to come to the correct conclusion and vote in line with the ‘general will’, and not be corrupted by ‘relations of dependence’ they had with other members of society.) It would also mean creating a society that was racially homogeneous (meaning banning immigration and deporting or killing ethnic minorities), one that was homogeneous in age (so euthanasia of all people above a certain age), and repressed women in favour of men. Since Rousseau was a racist and a sexist who also idealised children as being innocent ‘noble savages’ who were uncorrupted by modernity, none of this is as far-fetched as you might imagine.
Of course, Rousseau would likely have balked at the logical conclusion of his thought. He genuinely believed that his ideal society would be a perfect democracy in which everyone would ‘unanimously’ choose the correct position on any given issue, and which would have no civil strife or conflict whatsoever. I argued in my essay that this was impossible to achieve. If only I had reflected on what this meant for the Marxist vision of the ideal society (and seen the parallels with the IMT). I must have convinced myself that a socialist society would still have friendly disagreements or conflict of interests, but that they wouldn’t consume society in the way they did under class society, and would be resolved peacefully. Only after leaving the IMT did I abandon this idea completely, convinced that no society run by Marxists could ever permit open conflict and disagreement of any kind – the ideal of complete homogeneity and social harmony is too inherent to the ideology.
I am just grateful that the IMT will never come to power. Imagine if any of these Trot sects enjoyed state power. Just think of what they would do. Luckily, in their present position, they are only able to bully and abuse the poor people in their ranks. Let us hope that such totalitarian scoundrels remain in their terminal state of impotence.