Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, so
problematical for the earlier stages of fascism, fits here. For here we
enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the
behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances
in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate
stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds
implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience. (R. Paxton, The
Anatomy of Fascism, p.170.)
Our strident critique of historicism as a
method for the theorization of revolutionary movements that degenerate into
totalitarian dictatorships was meant to highlight its fatal flaws both from a
theoretical standpoint and from a practical political one – flaws that we
preliminarily and cursorily contrasted with the merits of the historical
materialist approaches to the theory of these historical phenomena. From a theoretical
standpoint, we can show that all the historicist elements of analysis of
revolutionary movements can be traced back aetiologically – with the due
caution to be exercised whenever we invoke “causation” in historical events
that are intrinsically aleatory – to historical materialist theoretical notions
starting with the mode of reproduction and production of given societies, or
what may be more generally described as “social relations of production”. This
is not a matter of replacing “politicism” with “economism” and reproducing thus
the Cartesian and Kantian antinomies of Matter or Nature, on one side, and
Thought or Spirit, on the other. Nor do we seek to lend support to the
Diltheyan distinction between Natur- and Geistes-wissenschaften. It
is rather an attempt to show that human needs are universal, and for
that reason alone all human cultural activities can be shown to adhere to
fundamental requirements for their satisfaction which thereby determine those
cultural or ideological manifestations. Furthermore, from a practical
political standpoint, were it otherwise, were we to accept as an
ineluctable fact that human beings do not share needs that can be assessed and
satisfied in an intersubjective manner, then we would have to acquiesce in the
conclusion that human conflict is ultimately irresolvable and must result in
the total annihilation of humanity! Philosophically expressed, our reasoning
maintains that transcendence is inimical to human interests and that
only an immanentist, materialist assessment of human needs can
lead to a future civilization capable to live in harmonious freedom and peace.
The problem with historicism is that its chief
analytical notions – “the masses”, nationalism, racism, leadership cult –
either have other causes traceable to human material interests, or else they
are reified as ineluctable aspects of human existence – which means that we
must resign ourselves to the imminent annihilation, in a nuclear age, of the
entire human race! As Aron put it in connection with Khruschev’s account of
Stalinism,
[f]or the time being Khrushchev gives only one answer, one
interpretation [for the terror unleashed by the Bolshevik Party-State from 1929
onwards] — the cult of personality. This explains nothing. As a very
distinguished Marxist, Togliatti, the late General Secretary of the Italian
communist party has said, to explain it by the personality cult is not a
Marxist explanation. To explain such important phenomena by one person is the
kind of explanation that Marxist doctrine by definition does not allow. (R. Aron,
Democracy and Totalitarianism, p.192)
Before we leave this topic, and as a further
illustration, if any more were needed, of the insidious traps of historicist
thought, let us examine briefly a long paragraph from Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition regarding “mass society”:
The laws of statistics are valid only
where large numbers or
long periods are involved, and acts or
events can statistically
appear only as deviations or
fluctuations. The justification of statistics
is that deeds and events are rare occurrences
in everyday
life and in history. Yet the
meaningfulness of everyday relationships
is disclosed not in everyday life but
in rare deeds, just as the
significance of a historical period
shows itself only in the few
events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large numbers
and long periods to politics or history
signifies nothing less
than the wilful obliteration of their
very subject matter, and it is
a hopeless enterprise to search for
meaning in politics or signifi-[43]-
cance in history when everything that
is not everyday behavior
or automatic trends has been ruled out
as immaterial.
However, since the laws of statistics
are perfectly valid where
we deal with large numbers, it is
obvious that every increase in
population means an increased validity
and a marked decrease of
"deviation." Politically,
this means that the larger the population
in any given body politic, the more
likely it will be the social
rather than the political that
constitutes the public realm.
The
Greeks, whose city-state was the most
individualistic and least
conformable body politic known to us,
were quite aware of the
fact that the polis, with its
emphasis on action and speech, could
survive only if the number of citizens
remained restricted. Large
numbers of people, crowded together,
develop an almost irresistible
inclination toward despotism, be this
the despotism of a
person or of majority rule; and
although statistics, that is, the
mathematical treatment of reality, was
unknown prior to the
modern age, the social phenomena which
make such treatment
possible—great numbers, accounting for
conformism, behaviorism,
and automatism in human affairs—were precisely those traits
which, in Greek self-understanding,
distinguished the Persian
civilization from their own.
The unfortunate truth about behaviorism
and the validity of its
"laws" is that the more
people there are, the more likely they are
to behave and the less likely to
tolerate non-behavior. Statistically,
this will be shown in the leveling out
of fluctuation. In reality,
deeds will have less and less chance to
stem the tide of behavior,
and events will more and more lose
their significance, that is,
their capacity to illuminate historical
time. Statistical uniformity
is by no means a harmless scientific
ideal; it is the no longer
secret political ideal of a society
which, entirely submerged in the
routine of everyday living, is at peace
with the scientific outlook
inherent in its very existence. (The Human Condition, pp.42-3)
There
are two obvious hypostatic errors that Arendt commits here: the first is
that she attributes the stultification of the behaviour of political
constituencies to their sheer number. Arendt’s statement that “[l]arge
numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination
toward despotism” is almost incomprehensible coming
from an intellect as refined as hers – it is a blatant and reprehensible
falsehood which supports the charges of “aristocratic thinking” often moved
against her. The second error Arendt incurs is to attribute “statistical uniformity”
– which, as she rightly reminds us, “is by no means a harmless scientific
ideal” – to “a society entirely submerged in the routine of everyday
living”. Again, this proposition is entirely false, and in conscience
entirely inexplicable coming from such a perspicacious mind as Arendt’s: the
crude reality is that throughout history it is not and never has been an
abstract “society” that has become “submerged in the routine of
everyday living”: quite to the contrary, it has always been at the behest
and under the coercive impulse of specific social agencies that humans
have engaged collectively in varying levels of brutal behaviour. Once
again, as with her critique of Marx on the importance of “the social question”
as the real material springboard to political freedom, Arendt has made the
colossal “aristocratic” mistake of separating “the social” from “the
political”:
Politically, this means that the
larger the population
in any given body politic, the more
likely it will be the social
rather than the political that
constitutes the public realm [my
emphases].
Arendt’s
obvious equation of “large population” and “the social” with the abandonment or
decadence of “the political” is as misguided as it is false. We linger on these
flaws in Arendt’s reasoning not to inveigh against a person and intellectual
toward whom have feelings of respect, if not reverence, but rather to draw
attention to the misguidedness of historicist analysis in this sphere of
historical inquiry.
But
let us return to the periodization of revolutionary movements. When it comes to
the theory of revolutionary movements, we saw earlier that a periodization of
their evolution is in order, starting with their origin and formation, through
to their seizure of political power as Party-States, until their ultimate apotheosis
and apocalypse as totalitarian dictatorships. It is at this last stage that, as
Paxton affirms with remarkable lucidity in the quotation above with reference
to Arendt’s great intuition, ”we enter a realm where the
calculations of interest that arguably governed the behaviour of both the Nazis
and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no
longer determined policy”. This is a conclusion of the utmost importance: the
way we should interpret it, in line with all of our foregoing analysis, is that
prior to the final apocalyptic stage of totalitarian
dictatorship, revolutionary movements – from Fascism to Nazism to Bolshevism –
had responded to, and acted in accordance with, “calculations of interest” that
“determined their policies”. But once these movements reach the final stage of
totalitarian dictatorship, these calculations of interest no longer determine
policy and – much worse, catastrophically worse – “[a]t this ultimate
stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds
implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience.”
Clearly, therefore, for Paxton, as for us, this “ultimate
stage” of totalitarian dictatorship may be distinguished from earlier stages by
the progressive relinquishment and indeed abandonment of any rational policies
or of any rationality in the policies that these totalitarian regimes had
adopted in the earlier phases of their development. Of course, the imminent
effect of this growing irrationality is to hasten the demise of these regimes,
as their respective histories have shown abundantly. (Maoist China may be thought
to be an exception, but there are obvious intervening factors – the opening-up
of the economy to Western capitalist investment until the renewed turn to totalitarian
irrationalism with Chairman Xi from 2012. We shall deal with these factors
later.) In the theorization of these regimes, then, it is well to remember the
gist of our thesis here – namely, that the origin and formation of
revolutionary movements is explained best with the adoption of a historical-materialist
framework of analysis rather than a historicist one – even because, as we have
shown, historicist analytical categories themselves can easily be explained by
historical-materialist ones -; whereas the “ultimate stage” of Party-State
regimes, the totalitarian stage, is noteworthy precisely for this progressive
or regressive jettisoning of rationality in all spheres of social and military
policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment