Mephisto, Lord of This Earth

Part II of the Tragedy

Previously: The Soul of Faustian Marxism, Part I of the Tragedy

The highest strivings that we dedicate our conscious thoughts and efforts to are silently accompanied by our crudest impulses. The one who believes that there is only one true way that things should be done feels that no amount of suffering can be an objection to their aims, which will make things all right in the future. The logic of universal necessity, of immediate expediency begins to overtake the idealism of the aims. Whatever is immediately obvious, already in motion, already established as convention is true, while the thin possibilities of dreams should in the name of duty be ignored rather than explored. The Enlightened citizens of the true reality, in order to make their reality solidly and universally true, must eternally purge the vital multiplicity which stubbornly refuses to disappear into the dark night of infinite self-consciousness.

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: A Tragedy, the demon Mephistopheles plays the part of the devil making a wager with God to test the righteousness of the Renaissance alchemical scholar Faust. In the ancient Jewish story of Job, such a wager resulted in a man witnessing his life reduced to nothing except his spiritual faith in the Absolute God. It was a lesson in the limits of a finite life. In Goethe’s Faust, the mortal life of the scholar reaches holy infinity through a commitment to enhancing the power of humanity as a whole. It was a lesson in the righteousness of the struggle for earthly immortality.

In both stories, the devil is an adversary who challenges human beings by tempting them to sever their link with divine infinity, whether out of resentment for injustice or out of selfish avarice. The devil has his moments of reason. Mephisto, speaking to God in Heaven, questioned the righteousness of Creation. Peering into the quotidian intimacies of the human world in his role as tempter, Mephisto sighed: “I only see/How mortals find their lives pure misery./Earth’s little gods shaped out of the same old clay,/He’s the same queer fish he was on the first day./He’d be much better off, in my opinion, without/The bit of heavenly light you dealt him out./He calls it Reason, and the use he puts it to?/To act more beastly than beasts ever do.”¹ God questioned him, demanding: “Is that all you can do, accuse eternally?/Is nothing ever right for you down there, sir?”² Mephisto replied simply: “No, nothing, Lord—all’s just as bad as ever./I really pity humanity’s myriad miseries,/I swear I hate tormenting the poor ninnies.”³ The demon did not consider the world to be a rational, completed totality in which everything works out. He considered the divine power of rationality to be incomplete on earth, limited to nothing but an instrument of animal self-preservation and domination. This devil believed that “It’s right that everything that comes to be/Should cease to be. And so they do. Still better/Would be nothing ever was.”⁴

Goethe, however, did not allow Mephisto to be a power of radical nihilism in his play-world. Or rather, he subordinated negation to the whole by having it play its part in the way of the world. While introducing himself to Faust, Goethe’s Mephisto described his cosmic role as simply that of “A humble part of that great power/Which always means evil, always does good.”⁵ As the Adversary in the story of Job, Mephisto’s divine role is to teach mortals by challenging them to overcome himself. Rather than a destructive power outside of the cosmos, or an evil deity like the Satan of the Puritans, he appears as a questioner who must be answered with affirmation. When he manifests before mortal sinners, the challenge he places before their souls is an inner ordeal. To Faust, Mephisto says he will become his slave if only he agrees that he will be a slave of Hell in the afterlife. He promises Faust: “I’ll do your will as if my will.”⁶ Like the jinn of Islamic mythology, this promise already reveals the dialectical subversion which he will introduce into the ambiguous language of any command. Mephisto offers his powers to shape worldly existence to them to tempt mortal souls into forgetting the divine, spontaneously creative power of Heaven that he himself has no share in. If they forget, they forget by seeing only themselves and their self-interest. Mephisto is therefore the self-subversion of a person’s inner life, their own spiritual limitation conjured as an external supernatural power.

Faust, however, was no ordinary man. He found worldly wealth and celebrity unsatisfying, seeking instead an initiation into the divine knowledge and earthly power granted by alchemy. Driven by an infinite striving, Faust sought to “penetrate the power/That holds the universe together,/Behold the source whence all proceeds/And deal no more in words, words, words.”⁷ Encountering the sign of the cosmic macrocosm in a grimoire, he experienced a revelation: “How all is woven one, uniting/Each in the other, living, working!”⁸ This was the holism of Creation manifested in a symbol comprehensible on the plane of the mortal’s inner world, which is a microcosm of the divine totality. For Goethe, the mortal microcosm seeking its realization in the infinite macrocosm was the true vocation of earthly life.

Even the highest seeking can be transformed into its opposite. On appearing to the scholar, Mephisto had to adjust his strategy of subversion. To convince Faust to bargain the life of his immortal soul in exchange for free disposal over Mephisto’s powers, the demon had to draw on Faust’s longing for the macrocosm. He candidly revealed his cosmic role to the scholar, explaining his destructive motivations quite explicitly: “Man in his world of self’s a fool,/He likes to think he’s all in all./I’m part of the part which was all at first,/A part of the dark out of which light burst,/Arrogant light which now usurps the air/And seeks to thrust Night from her ancient chair,/To no avail. Since light is one with all/Things bodily, making them beautiful,/Streams from them, from them is reflected,/Since light by matter’s manifested/When by degrees all matter’s burnt up and no more./Why, then light shall not matter any more.”⁹ Mephisto is the personification of nothingness, indeterminacy, unconsciousness, and as a power in the orderly created world, he is chaos. As a son of the Night, the entropy which haunts creation, he can offer to mortals like Faust the power to forcibly shape the world into the image of their subjective desires as if it were nothing but a dead object, a raw material to be used up. He explained to Faust coyly: “I don’t know everything, but I know a thing or two.”¹⁰

Faust, tempted by the demon’s offer, had to convince himself of the emptiness of all that is divine in the microcosm. Turning away from his longing for a childhood sense of the harmony of the universe, Faust declared: “Curse comfort sucked out of the grape,/Curse love on its pinnacle of bliss,/Curse faith, so false, curse all vain hope,/And patience most of all I curse!”¹¹ By introducing himself and suggesting the pact to Faust, Mephisto had initiated a struggle of cosmic forces within the scholar’s soul. While Mephisto suggested a path of destruction and ruin as a means to the end of insight of the universe, the powers of divinity intervened to advocate on behalf of Faust’s higher aspirations. A chorus of spirits mourned the “lovely world,” “Smashed/By demigod’s fist,” calling to Faust to heed the call of Godlike creative power within him rather than Mephisto’s nihilism: “Omnificent Son of the earth,/Rebuild it,/Magnificent,/Inside your heart,/With a clear head and strong,/Singing a new song./Come,/Make a fresh start!”¹² Faust, however, had already been tempted into scorning the quotidian and embracing Mephisto’s fantasy of dominating the cosmos through infernal power. Agreeing to the demon’s unholy pact, Faust waved away the damnation of his own soul just as he consummated his fate: “My joys are part and parcel of this earth,/It’s under this sun that I suffer,/And once it’s goodbye, last leave taken,/Then let whatever happens happen,/And that is that.”¹³

The pact sealed, Mephisto set to work subverting the link between microcosm and macrocosm. Speaking to himself, he promises: “I will drag him deep into debauchery/Where all proves shallow, meaningless.”¹⁴ The power of creation and capacity of freedom would be transformed into the power of domination and capacity of control. The earth would be reduced to the territory of Faust’s subjective fantasies, severing him from the divine monism which had been revealed to him before his Satanic bargain. He did not doom himself out of ignorance, but out of a well-informed knowledge which sought only more knowledge. He would learn to scorn life as nothing but an exhausted toy, to sink into Mephisto’s nihilism. Faust’s evil is threaded into his character, from its lowest valleys up to its highest peaks. The tragedy of Faust is that he could not help but allow Mephisto to tempt him into damning his soul to hell.

Goethe’s interpretation of the Faust story served as a self-interpretation of the European Enlightenment. The educated middle class had set out from the 16th century to Goethe’s 19th century to become the masters of the world through the power of the all-consuming acquisitiveness of money, the microcosm of commercial society. Something higher grew from their struggles to establish the rule of law as a guardian for commerce, to seek knowledge of the laws of the cosmos in order to rationally re-organize the organic society of the Middle Ages, and to elevate private property into the centrally organizing institution of society. There was the possibility of an association of free people cooperating in their quotidian toil for the good of each and all. But this society struggled with the power of property, which limited the form of its aspirations to mere means for the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself.

Social revolutionary disciples of Goethe interpreted this dilemma as calling for a fundamental transformation of society. As a class of propertyless workers grew and began to challenge the reign of property in politics, the opportunity for a new beginning seemed to present itself. Seeking to radicalize the democratic revolutions of 1848, intellectuals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their famous Communist Manifesto. Within its pages, they painted the bourgeoisie as a class of Faustians led by the nose by the all-destructive and all-creative force of capital, their Mephisto: “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”¹⁵ Only the proletariat could assert the conscious power of decision-making over this spell of capital, and they could only do so in their struggle for political power. But to overcome capital, wealth which grants its owner command over society’s labor, they had to abolish their own character as a propertyless class which must seek employment from the owners of wealth. The communists had to radicalize the working class’s political struggle from the demands of majoritarian democracy into demands for the abolition of private property and the socialization of wealth in the hands of the association of producers.

Marx and Engels, like Goethe, still sought to reap the fruits of the bourgeoisie’s Faustian journey. Capital behaved as an all-destructive force, reducing all relationships and communities to appendages of a total labor-process: “Monetary greed, or mania for wealth, necessarily brings with it the decline and fall of the ancient communities [Gemeinwesen]. Hence it is the antithesis to them. It is itself the community [Gemeinwesen], and can tolerate none other standing above it. But this presupposes the full development of exchange values, hence a corresponding organization of society.”¹⁶ Yet as an all-absorbing force, the power commanded by money is one which may in the future be commanded consciously by a free association of producers. After all, the working world of capital awakens the creative powers of humanity: “Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.”¹⁷

For these revolutionaries, this was no automatic process of liberation in which the propertyless working class could simply step behind the wheel and direct its own toil to exploit nature. Capital, like Mephisto, imposes its own limits on those who simply follow its logic of command. The growth of wealth from toil serves as a means for greater control over the toilers, who become more superfluous and precarious as their own ability to produce things grows in scope. The concentration of capital in the hands of a few and the struggle of workers to limit capital’s ambitions reveals the nature of the mode of production itself and the tasks imposed on those who struggle to overcome it: “Expropriation is the starting-point of the capitalist mode of production, whose goal is to carry it through to completion, and even in the last instance to expropriate all individuals from the means of production—which, with the development of social production, cease to be means and products of private production, and can only remain means of production in the hands of the associated producers, as their social property, just as they are their social product.”¹⁸

The proletariat only clarifies a civilizational ethos beyond capital by struggling against it. Marx recognized the seeds of this in the trade unionist struggle to limit the working day: “For ‘protection’ against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital. In the place of the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’ there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.’”¹⁹ As they consolidate political control over society and limit the power of capital through the power of political association, they begin to set out on their own path. But even on socializing private property and reorienting work to the needs of the associated producers, the revolutionaries had to take care to remember their higher ethos rather than sink into the narrow drive to control and organize things characteristic of managerialism. Freedom in the sphere of toil alone signifies that “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”²⁰

Marx sought humanity’s freedom beyond the necessity of toil, in the “absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick[...]”²¹ But like Faust’s revelation of a holistic cosmos, Marx’s hope of a total humanity was soon turned to more narrow pursuits. As a movement of self-described “Marxists” developed in the late 19th century, they limited Marxism from a struggle for freedom to a struggle to understand and master the laws of necessity. This was initially an act of expediency, adapting Marxism to the efforts of the existing Social-Democratic movement to rationalize and democratize the unified German state which had been born through autocratic means in 1871. Through the hopes of the Marxists themselves, as they faced the limitations imposed by their struggles to elevate formal party organizations to state power, Marxism absorbed the Faustian ethos of the Renaissance and Enlightenment bourgeoisie. Socialism became equated with the intelligentsia’s technocratic management of resources.

The Marxists made their pact with Mephisto in the form of capital. They sang their praises of labor as the highest form of redemption and freedom, even as it appears under the auspices of capital. All must serve the totality, the greater good, even if the social whole is something which grows at the expense of their own multifariousness. This is the deeper significance of Marxist workerism. Their belief in the absolute power and goodness of the toilers beautifies a world in which the laborers are at the mercy of those who enclosed the conditions of production into impersonal private property. In this beautification, they sanctify those who impart a rational and ethical significance to a brute fact of life. Given that they assumed the ignorance of workers, this meant an endorsement of the intellectual’s role as one who must register the scientific knowledge of the class struggle and impart it to the struggling manual laborers through the connective tissue of a political party. In the classical party-form, the divide of intellectual and manual labor inherited from capitalist society is molded into a total political division of labor. The party becomes an organ which uses the heads and hands of its members as its own, at least insofar as they devote themselves as servants of this greater good.

The intellectual and ethical function of Marxism in politics served to strengthen its Faustian character. Rather than Faustian Marxism being the ideology of a single grouping, it was a discourse which united many partisans of the movement, whether they aligned factionally with each other or not. The Faustianism of the bourgeoisie served as a frame to interpret the ‘historical tasks’ of the proletariat that Marxists believed their movement would head the accomplishment of. To refer to Faustianism here is to refer to the ways that Marxists took up the worldmaking efforts of the modern bourgeoisie, which corresponded to the construction of a rationally organized civil service state.

This task of worldmaking through state-building was finally accomplished in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks had to struggle against other factions of socialism and the discontent of the laboring classes alike in order to maintain order and reorganize society. By enforcing one-party rule and banning internal factions, they reinforced the antithesis of mental and manual labor into a fundamental logic of the young Soviet Union. For the remainder of the 20th century, this antithesis worked to limit Marxism’s intellectual development and political goals into a Faustian form.

Vladimir Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party, served a role like that of Moses, who led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. The God of History promised: “Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you, and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span.”²² Salvation lay in the power to transform barren nature into social wealth. Both men sought to teach an unfree people how to be free. They used methods of unfreedom, in the form of an external measure of law and state organization, in an attempt to educate his people in the method of freedom.

Lenin and his party universalized factory discipline throughout Soviet society, treating one-man management as a law of history, in an attempt to achieve the efficiency and abundance necessary to open up free time for popular self-government and self-cultivation. But like Moses, he died before ever reaching the Promised Land. His followers turned to the idolatrous ideology of Leninism to replace his unifying charisma. They rationalized every step of the movement into a universal law of history, which all Marxists had to obey. The highest aspirations of communism descended to earth and coagulated into the cold hardness of justifications for actions taken. Faustian Marxism passed from a method to interpret liberating impulses along rational lines into a completed, dogmatic worldview. Marxism became Ideology, an identification of truth with whatever is immediately useful to the self-preservation and self-organization of the prevailing social order.

The role of ideals as a regulative ethic guiding revolutionary strategy was overtaken by the pragmatic ideality of the Plan. The rise of Bolshevik General Secretary Joseph Stalin to Premier of the Soviet Union consummated this. Stalin had long posited that “a party which has set out to lead the fighting proletariat must not be a chance conglomeration of individuals, but a united centralised organisation, so that its activities can be directed according to a single plan.”²³ During the 1922 Georgian affair, Lenin had criticized Stalin for his effort to centralize the country as only an extension of the party’s organization rather than follow Lenin’s position on national self-determination and crusade for the indigenization of the new republican governments. The death of Lenin left the Bolsheviks without their charismatic source of unity, creating an opportunity for those who best represented the organization’s self-preservation to empower themselves within it. Stalin quickly gravitated towards a centrist position in the party’s disputes, His mediating and centralizing role served to elevate him into the face of the party by the end of the 1920s. A personality cult rose around the name and face of Stalin, converting a normal Old Bolshevik into a symbol for the Communist Party and Soviet Union. This role of personifying socialism informed Stalin’s persecution of his personal and intellectual opponents, whom he considered to be enemies of the revolution by being enemies of himself. As the face of socialism, Stalin embodied party-mindedness (partiinost), enclosing the heights of the Idea into the self-preservation of the organization within the species-form that it had adopted.

The party-state of the Soviet Union was both the organizational form of the global socialist political faction and a national state pursuing its own geopolitical interests in competition with other national states. For the remainder of their existence, the Soviets played the part of an alternative model of industrial society. In their competition with the Western capitalist model and efforts to catch up to it, they overinvested their resources in building up a Red Army, consolidating political power in a unitary party administration, and constructing a gigantic technocratic apparatus to plan the actions of the entire country. The Faustian Marxism of the Bolsheviks, which sought to dominate nature and rationalize the world, was the soul and form of the new system.

As this new organism adapted to its situation and took its permanent shape, many Old Bolsheviks could no longer recognize their revolutionary ideals in it. Bolshevik author Evgeny Zamyatin penned the first of many dissident novels in We (1921). Zamyatin described a futuristic dystopia in which all people were reduced into the appendages of a totalizing state apparatus, which treated all of life and the cosmos as nothing but raw materials to be calculated, registered, and arranged according to its rational plans. The state struggled to eliminate all irrationality and externality to the toiling collective, including individual names, inner life, and artistic production. All buildings were constructed to be completely transparent, so that none may consider themselves independent from the greater whole. Through technical means, the One State built a civilization which enforced the ethical teaching of early Christianity that “‘We’ is from ‘God,’ ‘I,’ from the devil.”²⁴

The One State was the organizational form of Faustian absolute knowledge. But “Knowledge, self-confident knowledge, which is sure that it is faultless, is faith,” and so absolute knowledge implied a crusade to establish the dictatorship of insight over the world.²⁵ The State carried through an endless campaign for the destruction of difference and absolute conformity with the plan. The revolution of freedom, which once used these in its struggle, was forgotten in the work of organization. Instead, there was only infinite expansion of toiling humanity into the cosmos. The totally rational humanity collapsed into Mephisto, absolute negativity.

However, Zamyatin was careful to demonstrate that the One State could not enclose reality into a copy of its plans. The novel’s protagonist, engineer D-503, joined the resistance movement of the Mephi at the behest of a woman named I-330 who lives against the legal regime. Reflecting on the limits of the One State’s rationalist ideology, D-503 realized: “If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it means only that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life....”²⁶

I-330 drew on this insight, explaining the anti-Faustian revolutionary ethos of the Mephi. Rather than pursuing total knowledge, they pursued a full life, drawing on both the rational and irrational: “If we had taken pains to educate human foolishness through centuries, as we have done with our intelligence, it might perhaps have been transformed into something very precious.”²⁷ Though both D-503 and I-330 were captured and neutralized by the One State, the novel concluded with the movement of the Mephi spreading like wildfire. While Faustian striving for infinity went no further than reducing life into something that could be controlled, the Mephi’s infinity meant something beyond rationality alone. They rejected the One State’s doctrine that theirs was the “last revolution,” because revolution’s “number is infinite.... The ‘last one’ is a child’s story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night.”²⁸

Though Zamyatin’s imagined second revolution did not come to pass in the Soviet Union, his novel touched on an insight which continued to invigorate 20th century political struggles: all politics is irrational. Politics is about advocating along factional lines for one particular vision of the Good Life. Partisanship is a method of contradiction. By outright affirming the perspective of a part, rather than surrendering to the whole, politics draws strength from irrational impulses and hopeful passions. Politics thrive through opposition rather than consensus, confrontation rather than resignation.

Even while the Communist Party consolidated a political consensus by the late 1920s, the Great Politics of the 20th century exceeded and superseded this process. The intermittent global civil war of 1914-1945 provided breathing room for partisanship even amidst the construction of total states. It created a possibility for a socialist critique of socialism in the name of socialism from within the socialist movement itself. This struggle to revolutionize the revolution was the grandeur of 20th century Marxism.

Mephisto became the Faustian demon of officialdom, but other worlds always lay hidden in wait. The consolidation of an uneasy coexistence between the Soviet Union and the West in the wake of World War II shifted the central knots of this internal contradiction outside of the industrialized world. History, the life of contradiction in time, moved south and east. But the fragments of partisanship remained in the West. The soul and intellect of socialism was reactivated where junctures of political crisis created an opportunity and dissident youths leapt into the role of active refusal.

In our own age of consolidation, in which the leaders of the great powers of the post-WWII order have set to work dismantling their fathers’ work, the possibility of an ethical revolution seems to have been lost. But no loss is total, because no victory is absolute. We have to understand how this catastrophic present came together to see what we are looking at in its shattered pieces. Forgetting reifies the fragments of the old world, while memory picks them up and links them in the fertile fluidity of association. In any political renaissance, in any effort to begin anew the work of socialism, remembering will serve to bring us together to make a new beginning. It will reveal fertile contradictions where we before saw only a shattered mess that could not be helped. We must learn to overcome the way of a world that destroys things by controlling everything and knows a little in order to suppress and forget whatever is not itself.

From Lenin to Leninism

While being consistently centralist and disciplinarian, early Bolshevism found its greatest passion of inspiration in the hope of each and all living the fullest lives possible. The goal of even their most onerous policies, from the reintroduction of military discipline in the Red Army to the implementation of one-man management, was to realize a free society. The young Soviet Union could be a place of profound personal freedom for many. Alexandra Kollontai, leader of the Zhenotdel—the women’s department of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, accomplished the legalization of abortion and the commitment of the Soviet government to encourage women to work for themselves and earn their own incomes. Kollontai wrote that “Winged Eros” would be central to the emotional life of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which “the person experiencing love acquires the inner qualities necessary to the builders of a new culture—sensitivity, responsiveness and the desire to help others.”²⁹ Leaders like People’s Commissar of Public Health Nikolai Samashko secured the decriminalization and normalization of homosexual desire as part of a sexual revolution. Doctor Grigory Baktis, Soviet delegate to the 1925 proceedings of the World League for Sexual Reform, explained that “legislation does not intervene in any sexual relationship between two adult individuals that is not forced and which is free from pressure[...] Acts of homosexuality, sodomy and any other forms of sexual pleasure have the same legal status as the above mentioned. Whilst European legislation defines all this as a breach of public morality, Soviet legislation makes no difference between homosexuality and so-called ‘natural’ intercourse. All forms of intercourse are treated as a personal matter. Criminal prosecution is only implemented in cases of violence, abuse or a violation of the interests of others.”³⁰

This revolution in interpersonal life did not, however, take place in a setting of cultural individualism. As they struggled to construct the first socialist state, the Bolsheviks embarked on a path of ideological totalization. From the uncertainty and doubt which plagues a partisan faction, they sought to reach the certainty and confidence of a ruling class. While doubtfulness troubles decision making and even postpones it in one who seeks solid ground before moving, certainty serves to gather all forces into a united action. Unity of action was the aim of the Bolshevik party-form, and in post-Civil War conditions of reconstruction, it became a justification for enforcing political consensus through a ban on factions. This marked the suffocation of politics and the rise of an administrative state. But the new party-state was not only a repressive force. The rise of Ideology in the young Soviet Union drew on the religious passions of Futurism and Godbuilding. To find the certainty of an absolute truth, Bolsheviks looked to the power of mental and manual, united in the party-state, to penetrate the secrets of the cosmos and domesticate them into forces of social production.

Socialism was increasingly equated with nationalization and the planned economy. War Communism had reinforced this prejudice by accomplishing direct appropriation and distribution of products by the collective—in the form of the military state. Even as the power of the workers’ councils to organize their own activities waned in the face of state-enforced one-man management, the leading Bolsheviks did not believe that proletarian class rule was compromised. They assumed that their party was the embodiment of proletarian class consciousness and that, therefore, party leadership over the state constituted the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The party served this role insofar as it served to consolidate the party-state’s monopoly over production. The fate of this monopoly carried dire stakes for the fate of socialism in the eyes of some leaders. As his last direct intervention in Soviet politics, Vladimir Lenin recruited Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin to support the consolidation of the party-state’s foreign trade monopoly against Nikolai Bukharin, succeeding at the 12th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).³¹ They believed that this monopoly on foreign trade would ensure the power of politics over the economy and the sovereignty of the state over national commerce.

In 1800, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had drawn on revolutionary idealist hopes to advocate for the very same position as a measure that would establish the conditions for a cosmopolitan association of nations. Fichte believed that the state had to introduce a national currency, strictly control foreign exchange, and enforce fixed prices for goods in order to ensure that the rational plans of the state could become actual through its control over the distribution of paper money. As a bourgeois believer in private property, he thought that it would be sufficient that the state “cover public expenses with the fixed yearly taxes that are drawn from and returned into actual circulation,” maintaining the reciprocity of all with all through the universal centralizing power of the bureaucracy.³² The Bolsheviks, as socialists, believed that this closed commercial state had to also nationalize the means of production and transform banks into organs of the national economy’s planning system. Both committed their efforts to the construction of a work-state which would plan society’s production to meet the needs of all, insofar as those needs accorded with the insights of Reason. Faustian Marxism, like the Jacobinism of the German idealists, grew into an ideological endorsement for the dictatorship of insight.

The Golden Age of Faustian Marxism closed with the death of Lenin in early 1924. By the end of his life, Lenin had focused his efforts on consolidating the gains of a social revolution within the boundaries of a single country and reorganizing the state in order to make the power of governance accessible to workers and peasants. A lawyer through and through, he hoped to defend the people from their own state and defend the state from its own people with the belief that they could be reconciled in a mutually reinforcing relationship. He believed, above all, in the lawfulness of all politics—even in the realm of illegality. He believed that the Russian Revolution had made the questions of socialist revolution a daily reality. Turning to the Soviet people, he taught: “Socialism is no longer a matter of the distant future, or an abstract picture, or an icon. Our opinion of icons is the same—a very bad one. We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch.”³³

Lenin’s very face began to transform into the symbol of everyday socialism, his name becoming a synonym for Marxism. As people attempted to derive universal lessons from the October Revolution for the new era of socialist strategy, they deferred time and time again to the authority of Lenin as the personification of the revolution. He himself became an icon in the Lenin Cult. When he died in January of 1924, the icon outlived him. Against his wishes, his body was embalmed, displayed as the corporeal icon. The incorporeal icon began to take shape in the air between people as a discourse of “Leninism.”

Leninism began in the commemoration of Lenin, which gave an illusion of consensus by the fact that all of his followers expressed their mourning for him as one event. Communist Party General Secretary Stalin, speaking at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, declared that for a Bolshevik, there “is nothing higher than the title of member of the Party whose founder and leader was Comrade Lenin.”³⁴ For Stalin and others, Lenin was remembered as the founding father of their party-state. In the Comintern, Lenin became the symbol of international communism. German Communist Clara Zetkin described Lenin as having founded an International of the Deed in “the inquiring spirit of Faust, who passionately strives to learn all the mysteries, ‘on which heaven and earth depend,’ and who enjoys the moment of supreme bliss when contemplating the ultimate achievement of creative activity: ‘to stand upon free soil, amid free people.’”³⁵ Trotsky, thinking from both the perspective of the Bolsheviks and the perspective of the world communist movement, spoke a prophetic call to the Soviet citizens of Tbilisi, Georgia “Lenin is no more, but Leninism endures. The immortal in Lenin, his doctrine, his work, his method, his example, lives in us, lives in the party that he founded, lives in the first workmen’s State whose head he was and which he guided[...] How shall we continue? With the lamp of Leninism in our hands. Shall we find the way?—With the collective mind, with the collective will of the party we shall find it!”³⁶

In Germany, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács sought to unite the orphaned movement by elaborating a comprehensive vision of this “Leninism.” The result was his book Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1924). Setting out to define “Leninism,” Lukács identified the core of Lenin’s thought as the “actuality of the revolution.”³⁷ Rather than preparing for a future revolutionary event, communists had to work for the victory of revolutionary forces already struggling for power. This meant that Marxism had to guide those forces along the path most likely to assure their victory over their enemies. Lukács once again affirmed the role of totality as the guiding concept of Marxism: “It may be the sacred duty of every genuine Marxist to face the facts squarely and without illusions, but for every genuine Marxist there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than isolated facts and tendencies—namely, the reality of the total process, the totality of social development.”³⁸ Lenin had spoken constantly of a need for analyzing the positions of all classes and factions in society for a revolutionary party to successfully plan its actions. Lukács, seeking to establish a role for the intellectual in revolutionary struggle, believed that this insight of Lenin’s demonstrated that “the concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not the opposite of ‘pure’ theory; on the contrary, it is the culmination of all genuine theory, its consummation, the point where it therefore breaks into practice.”³⁹

This consummation in revolutionary practice was possible on the basis of the very contradictions of that total social development. Lukács identified the proletariat as the protagonist of the world revolution in its struggle to elevate the collective power of democratic politics over the narrow interests of imperialist capitalists. Even if class rule is ultimately based on force, the revolutionary struggle could not merely be one of force against force, because “no class rule can, ultimately, maintain itself for long by force alone.”⁴⁰ Class struggle is above all a struggle of organization against organization: “Every minority rule is therefore socially organized both to concentrate the ruling class, equipping it for united and cohesive action, and simultaneously to split and disorganize the oppressed classes.”⁴¹ Even democracy can serve this function where it is merely formal democracy, separating economics and politics and drawing the professional middle classes into the vocation of bureaucratic governance. From the most autocratic to the most democratic nations, the capitalist state serves to “further the aim of preventing the formation of an independent ideology among the oppressed classes of the population which would correspond to their own class interests; of binding the individual members of these classes as single individuals, as mere ‘citizens,’ to an abstract state reigning over and above all classes; of disorganizing these classes as classes and pulverizing them into atoms easily manipulated by the bourgeoisie.”⁴²

Proletarian class struggle must counteract this atomization with collectivization. Instead of separating politics and economics, workers must elevate politics over the economy. The organ of workers’ councils, as the seeds of a society in which the workers rule society, “means the attempt by the proletariat as the leading revolutionary class to counteract this process of disorganization.”⁴³ This factional organization reaches its highest form as “the organizational independence of the fully conscious elements of the proletariat” in a vanguard party, which “is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution.”⁴⁴ To compose itself as an independent class faction, the proletariat cannot rely on its own forces within trade unions, soviets, and other class organizations alone. Internalizing Lenin’s critique of his left-communism, Lukács believed that “the actuality of the revolution also means that the fermentation of society—the collapse of the old framework far from being limited to the proletariat, involves all classes.”⁴⁵ The vanguard party had to mediate both the task of class organization and the need for a broad democratic front: “Lenin’s idea of party organization therefore contains as fixed poles: the strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society. Thus he dialectically united exclusive singleness of purpose, and universality—the leadership of the revolution in strictly proletarian terms and its general national (and international) character.”⁴⁶

The party must serve as the strategist of the class struggle. It must relate every political issue “to the concrete actions of concrete (in other words class-conditioned) men in accordance with their real class interests.”⁴⁷ Any alliance between classes can only be based on an alignment of class interests. Whatever aligns with the proletariat’s class interests as determined by theory represents the growing future, while whatever aligns against it represents the old reactionary society. The class interests of the proletariat can only become clear if they find their conscious and discursive expression in the theory and practice of the vanguard party. The party, however, can only serve as the organizational embodiment of proletarian class consciousness “if it is always a step in front of the struggling masses, to show them the way. But only one step in front so that it always remains leader of their struggle.”⁴⁸ The party must neither tail the workers from behind, repeating their prejudices back to them, nor attempt to dictate actions to them from above. Ultimately, the party’s “adjustment to the life of the masses is impossible without the strictest party discipline.”⁴⁹ Party members must give themselves completely over to the centralizing power of the party, submerging into the consciousness of the proletarian revolution.

Lukács believed that the vanguard party was both philosopher and activist. To serve the proletarian revolution’s struggle to realize its age-old ambitions of freedom, revolutionary organization “must adapt itself to become an instrument both of this totality and of the actions which result from it,” meaning that “all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in organization are disastrous for the party.”⁵⁰ For Lukács, rather than a dead dogma, Leninism “represents a hitherto unprecedented degree of concrete, unschematic, unmechanistic, purely praxis-oriented thought.”⁵¹ The highest priority of Leninist practice is “[p]ermanent self-education, constant openness to the new lessons of experience[...]”⁵² Lukács even found a place for this dynamism in the party-state itself. Following Lenin’s late efforts to democratize the state apparatus, Lukács believed that the workers’ state had to work to “overcome by education the inertia and the fragmentation” of the non-proletarian exploited and oppressed classes “and to train them for active and independent participation in the life of the state.” ⁵³As the party-state trained all to participate in the new democratic republic, it would prove that “the party, on the basis of its knowledge of society in its totality, represents the interests of the whole proletariat (and in doing so mediates the interests of all the oppressed—the future of mankind)[...]”⁵⁴

This humanist philosophy of Leninism guided Lukács for the remainder of his life. He continuously struggled to unite Marxists through the convincing force of Leninist Reason. Lukács continued to be the Faust of Faustian Marxism, the man who granted it its fullest philosophical expression. But such comprehensive philosophical reflection could find little grasp on the ground in the Soviet Union. The irrational multiplicity of needs and impulses superseded the unity of philosophy. The post-Lenin Bolsheviks were splitting into antagonistic factions rather than uniting into a single class front. Within an organization that was far from a closed or complete totality, Leninism became a contended discourse.

Initially, the troika of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, and Joseph Stalin maintained a united front against factions. However, the decline of workers’ councils in the face of one-man management, the exponential growth of bureaucracy, and the disappointing commercial reality of the New Economic Policy (NEP) soon served as the backdrop for a dispute over the future of the proletarian revolution. While the right-wing of the Bolsheviks sought to set theory aside in favor of pragmatically aiding the NEP, the center and left entered a fierce theoretical debate. In spite of the ban on factions, the Communist Party began to divide into two main camps of Leninists: those who favored Trotsky’s call for a strategy of permanent revolution, and those who believed that the Soviet Union ought to turn inward and focus its efforts on consolidating the socialist state.

Though he had been an ideologist of War Communism, Trotsky did not oppose the NEP altogether. He reasoned that, as long as the working class continued to participate in governance and the party maintained the monopoly of the state over foreign trade, that the fruits of commercialization could eventually be made to serve socialization: “A state that controls nationalized industries, has a monopoly of foreign trade and a monopoly on attracting foreign capital to one or other area of the economy[...] has at its disposal a rich arsenal of means which it can combine to accelerate the pace of economic development. All these means, however, although they flow from the nature of the socialist state as such, do not yet, in essence, intrude into the realm of production processes.”⁵⁵ With the peasantry still owning much of the land in the countryside, the state remained a primarily urban power. Only industrialization could expand the power of the state in the sphere of production. This required wealth not only from the world market, but from agriculture. But the state would not have much wealth to nationalize in the countryside without large-scale development—thus the justification of the NEP, which allowed peasants to sell their products to the state as commodities. This would lead to the rise of a kulak commercial class and stratification in the countryside. While such a class would not pose any “immediate economic threats, i.e., the rapid growth of capitalist tendencies at the expense of socialist ones,” it “may nevertheless, under certain conditions, give rise to political tendencies hostile to socialist development.”⁵⁶

Without a constantly sustained effort of socialization, without a constant linking-up of the Communist Party with the poor peasantry and the inclusion of them in the nationalized economy, the revolution would falter politically. The commercial kulaks would become the mass base for a political challenge to the Communist Party’s rule. Meanwhile, the disillusionment of sections of the proletariat with the outcome of the revolution “the decline of the political energy and activity of the revolutionary class engender a revival of confidence among counterrevolutionary classes—both among those overthrown by the revolution but not shattered completely, as well as among those which aided the revolution at a certain phase, but were thrown back into the camp of reaction by the further development of the revolution.”⁵⁷ Only permanent revolution, linking up the Soviet proletariat with the renewing force of world proletarian struggles and with a revolutionary struggle against capitalist countries, would grant the Bolsheviks the enthusiasm necessary to resist the entrenchment of the counterrevolution.

Stalin, on the other hand, believed that the reduction of the revolution from a world transformation to state-building posed no fundamental threat to the revolution. Formerly sympathetic to the Vpered faction of left-communists and now leading theorist of the party’s center, he argued that soviet power served as a mass organization of “the power of the majority of the population over the minority, it is the state of the majority, the expression of its dictatorship,” and that the newly-born “republic of Soviets is thus the political form, so long sought and finally discovered, within the framework of which the economic emancipation of the proletariat, the complete victory of socialism, must be accomplished.”⁵⁸ Stalin looked on the Soviet state as the realization of the democratic general will of the majority within the country and committed himself and his allies to the project of inner centralization and consolidation of political power.

The two factions came to be known as the Bolshevik-Leninists, Trotsky’s faction, and the Marxist-Leninists. Initially, Marxism-Leninism was hardly the unitary theory of Stalin. Initially, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin had all laid claim to the Leninist mantle. Bukharin’s favorable position towards the commercialization of the countryside, declaring to the peasants: “enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your farms,” angered the semi-War Communist predilections of Zinoviev and Kamenev.⁵⁹ In developing the center as a political faction, Stalin forged an alliance with Bukharin.

While Bukharin was wrongfully framed as a rightist, his position was more complicated, allowing him to seek a centrist front. Bukharin believed that practice “is an active break-through into reality, egress beyond the limits of the subject, penetration into the object, the ‘humanising’ of nature, its alteration.”⁶⁰ Only through a sustained struggle with an unfavorable situation could practice humanize the possibilities of Soviet politics. After all, Bukharin thought, even theory is part of “the reproduction of social life; its material is furnished by experience, the breadth of which depends on the degree of power over the forces of nature, which is determined, in the long run, by the development of productive forces, the productivity of social-labour; the level of technical development.”⁶¹ In his alignment with the center, Bukharin sought to achieve a gradual and pervasive development of the productive forces. Rather than endorsing Socialism in One Country altogether, Bukharin believed that the self-defense of the Soviet republic had to be understood as only one episode in a broader process: “Whatever the differences in time and space, and whatever the variety in character of the processes of the international Socialist revolution, it is all the same a single process, for it expresses in itself the crisis of capitalist society, the decay of the latter, and the revolutionary re-fashioning of the world.”⁶² The struggle for industrial construction and political consolidation within the Soviet Union was part of the strategy of an international civil war between classes.

In the international communist movement, the dividing lines of such a civil war did not always seem so clear. By the mid-1920s, left-communists had begun to form their own circles independent of the Communist International. They had initially attempted a strategy of internationalizing the Comintern, shifting its organizational form away from the Muscovite centralism favored by Lenin. German revolutionary Jan Appel, addressing the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, explained that they faced a decision: “Should it adopt, decisively and with a determined step, the path of unity with the left elements, who today are also to be found in Moscow; and should it recognise that there is much of value in them also, then the revolution will receive from the Third Congress of the Communist International a new forward driving force; on the other path, however, it will collapse into the sand and fall to pieces.”⁶³

After the suppression of the Workers’ Opposition and the ban on factions, left-communists questioned whether the Comintern was truly appropriate as a political home for the world revolution. Some, like Karl Korsch, questioned whether the October Revolution had been proletarian at all, suggesting that the new Soviet regime was in fact a bourgeois revolution that had elevated itself through proletarian efforts before subjecting them to state capitalist labor-discipline during the Civil War. Italian left-communist Amadeo Bordiga, considering this a fatalist position, asserted instead that “it is a question of new forms of class struggle, which have no historical precedents; it is a question of showing how the entire conception of the relations with the middle classes supported by the Stalinists is a renunciation of the communist programme.”⁶⁴ At the time, Bordiga aligned more closely with the opposition emerging within the Soviet Communist Party, believing that they would return the revolution to its internationalist course.

Drawing from Lenin’s late efforts against the bureaucratization of Soviet society, Trotsky began to critique the rise of the bureaucracy as the social basis for this theory of Socialism in one Country. Against his critics, Trotsky reminded his fellow Bolsheviks that the power of the “world economy is not mere theoretical generalization, but a definite and powerful reality, whose laws encompass us; a fact of which every year of our development convinces us.”⁶⁵ The socialism which pretended that this was not a problem was a socialism of personal ambitions. Trotsky believed that “the theoretical dishonesty of a leadership is neither an accident nor a personal trait: it flows from the contradiction between the principles of Leninism and the actual policy of the Stalinist faction.”⁶⁶ Trotsky saw this as a result of gangsterist consolidation of politics, made possible by the isolation of true revolutionaries in a bureaucratized society: “The less its authority and cohesion, the greater its coercion. Discipline, as necessary as salt is to food, has in these last years been found to displace food itself. But no one has yet been able to live on salt. The selection of personnel takes place in conformity with the current line and the internal regime of the party. Communist fighters are more and more being replaced by bureaucratic department heads of communism.”⁶⁷

By 1926, Trotsky became the head of the United Opposition within the Soviet Communist Party, uniting with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin’s centrist faction. They called for radical reforms to the party-state as a means to save the revolution: “In contending for a definite tempo of industrialization as the premise of our socialist construction, in contending against the growth of the kulak and his aspiration toward supremacy in the countryside, in contending for a timely improvement of the living conditions of the workers, for democracy within the party, the trade unions, and the Soviets—the Opposition contends not for ideas which might bring about a separation of the working class from its party, but on the contrary for a reinforcement of the foundations of a real unity in the All-Union Communist party.”⁶⁸

The international Left Opposition echoed these calls, hoping that the Communist Party would serve as a center for the world revolutionary movement instead of only the administration of the state. Many looked to Trotsky to consolidate the oppositional factions into a united front. They believed that the reformers of the Soviet Union shared the same interests as the world revolutionaries. But Trotsky did not succeed at consolidating a strong factional front against Stalin. He could not unite the state or party in his personality, though he enjoyed prestige for his part in leading the Red Army through the Civil War. Stalin’s centrist faction continued to consolidate power over the party-state by attuning themselves to its needs. Furthermore, they held a monopoly over the party press, and to the Soviet public, appeared as the voice of the state administration. Stalin and his allies censored the Opposition and accused Trotsky of being an agent of foreign enemies. In 1929, Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union.

Even after being thrown out of the country that he had helped build, Trotsky did not turn against it. In fact, he had developed much of what became the Stalin faction’s concept of socialism in Terrorism and Communism (1921), a book that Stalin read closely.⁶⁹ When the Stalin faction carried out this program, Trotsky believed that they did so without the necessary confidence, owing to their pessimism on the prospects of world revolution, their accommodation to the peasantry, and their bureaucratic methods of politics. For the remainder of his life, he advocated for the defense of the Soviet Union, describing it as a bureaucratically degenerated worker’s state.

Trotsky thought that the problems the Communist Party faced were primarily personal in character, and that were the Bolshevik-Leninists in their place, they could fix things up. Describing Stalinism as “inverted Kerenskyism,” Trotsky believed “that ruling centrism is, on the road to Thermidor, the last form of the rule of the proletariat, weakened by domestic and foreign contradictions, by the mistakes of its leadership, by lack of its own activity. But it is nevertheless a form of proletarian rule. The centrists can be replaced either by the Bolsheviks or by the Thermidorians.”⁷⁰ His hopes rested on the assumption that the Stalin faction represented a downturn in the revolutionary process of October, and that the return of the true Bolshevik-Leninists could reinvigorate the leadership of the party. But there was another force at hand beyond the decay of the October Revolution. A new era of system-building had begun in the Soviet Union.

Rationalizing DiaMat

System-building was a well-established technique for assisting the birth of a new civilization. The Renaissance bourgeoisie had sought a systematic worldview in the works of Classical Antiquity as a weapon against the “darkness” of the Middle Ages. They looked to the notion of a designed universe in order to invoke the rational laws of divine nature against the irrational arbitrariness of medieval social organization. Florentine artist and philosopher of the notion of the “Renaissance” Giorgio Vasari taught that design granted insight into the cosmos, being “cognizant of the proportion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to the whole.”⁷¹ The intellectual and inventor Leonardo da Vinci believed that the unity of artistic and scientific work in the power of design could unlock the keys to a total human personality. This hope of the Renaissance bourgeoisie would later become that of the communists.

As the bourgeoisie rose to political power through the ascent of the rule of law and the power of commerce over production, this total humanity gradually disappeared into the Archimedean point of objective truth. Capital’s demand for accumulation and control over production pressured its owners to focus on the mastery of nature as an end in itself. Enlightenment scientism pretended to present the laws of nature from the impersonal and universal perspective of an absolute, nowhere and everywhere at once. René Descartes identified this absolute as the thinking substance of the mind as distinct from the extended substance of the world, answering the problem of uncertainty: “Archimedes sought but one firm and immovable point in order to move the entire earth from one place to another. Just so, great things are also to be hoped for if I succeed in finding just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshaken.”⁷²

But as Mephisto, posing as Faust, taught a university student in an effort to corrupt him, to study something living one must “Drive out the spirit, deny it being,/So there’re just parts with which to deal,/Gone is what binds it all, the soul./With lifeless pieces as the only things real,/The wonder’s where’s the life of the whole.”⁷³ As the bourgeoisie constructed state organizations on the basis of impersonal meritocracy rather than blood descent, they carved the world into a rational order of interest groups, interlocked by their own dependency on each other to fulfill their needs, and with politics as an Archimedean point above the fray. The liberal state was to be a contract between equals, a rational whole which would mediate conflicting interests and reconcile them on behalf of the greater good. In the 19th century, socialists began to challenge this claim to neutrality by accusing the new states of being class states which ruled on behalf of the private interests of the bourgeoisie while veiling this class rule under the formal equality of law. They believed that only the abolition of private property as an institution of selfishness and the ascendancy of a new cooperative association could truly reconcile the interests of all in a greater good.

The Bolsheviks, advocating for the rule of the working majority over the exploiting minority, found themselves attempting to realize the dreams of the socialist movement. To construct the new socialist state, they too set out on a project of both ideological and state system-building. Soviet Marxism attempted to forge a link between the omniscient Archimedean point of the modern scientific intellect with earthly existence through the omnipotence of labor. A leading faction of Russian Marxists had long held that the human intellect can access the objective truth of things-in-themselves by converting them into things-for-us through the force of labor. This would grant knowledge acquired through experience and systematized through reason the status of absolute certainty. This belief became the cornerstone of the new Soviet ideology known as Dialectical Materialism.

The term itself had been developed by the Social-Democrats of the 1890s, particularly by intellectuals like Josef Dietzgen and Georgi Plekhanov. Many of its central premises were universal to early Marxist movements. Unlike the old mechanical materialism of the Enlightenment, historical materialism claimed to grant a central role to the contradiction of class struggles and the intervention of revolutionary subjectivity in the historical process. What the Soviets granted to this new materialism was the faith of a systematic worldview of the cosmos and a universal science of politics. Trotsky had made his own contributions to it, stating in a 1926 speech that “science is an accumulation of knowledge, based on experience relating to matter, to its properties; an accumulation of generalized understanding of how to subject this matter to the interests and needs of man.”⁷⁴ Stalin later attempted to catalogue Marxism into a science with a singular worldview: “Dialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic. Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history.”⁷⁵ DiaMat was supposed to be the scientific and universal doctrine of the proletarian movement, the Catholic essence of Marxism.

DiaMat spoke of a battle between class-conditioned Ideology for the selfish bourgeoisie and the universal practical knowledge of the proletariat. While the bourgeoisie obscured reality in order to obscure its own exploitation of the proletariat, the propertyless workers had no particular interests except for that of the greater good of toiling humanity. This was a repetition of the passions of Godbuilding in the enframing, impersonal language of the new Bolshevik bureaucracy. DiaMat drained the living, flowery, literary exposition of philosophical knowledge out of socialism, dismissing it as a subjective and selfish form of expression. Yet DiaMat’s demand for a universal language which would reflect a universal reality papered over real differences and continuities in a ceaseless drive for the standardization of thought.

DiaMat dragged along the weight of the history of revolutionary movements, cooking an eclectic stew out of their teachings according to the expediency of any given situation. Ideas from the French Encyclopedists, European socialist reformers, German Social-Democrats, and Russian Godbuilders were all thrown together and blended into the final and absolute science of DiaMat. The notion that science was the understanding of matter in motion stemmed back to the earliest teachings of pre-Socratic philosophy about the nature of the elemental universe. The adherents of DiaMat sometimes recognized this long history of dialectic, but only to subsume the history of thought into a preface to its own absolute science. The average Marxist did not have to know anything about the history of thought to memorize the doctrines of dialectical materialism by rote. It was a truly Catholic ideological system of knowledge, with Moscow as a new Rome.

Mephisto who explained that “It’s exactly when ideas are wanting,/Words come in so handy as a substitute,” and seeking to plant a seed of corruption, taught that words “guide you safely past doubt and dubiety/Into the Temple of Absolute Certainty.”⁷⁶ The Ideological immediacy of DiaMat, which taught that the absolute truth of the cosmos could be grasped in the simple laws of moving matter and the knowledge of toiling experience, enforced a forgetfulness of the other possibilities of history.

The socialist movement’s rich history was collapsed into Marx and Lenin as ideological founding fathers, and the others as only their immature and unripe predecessors. They were elevated into mere personifications for two different ‘stages’ of the proletarian revolution, with Marx as the forefather and Lenin as the father of the world proletarian revolution. This framework of history covered up contingency, incompleteness and oppositions. It treated the disputes of Marx with Ferdinand Lassalle, the French Marxists Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue with the Social-Democrats, and Lenin with the other Bolsheviks as only episodes along the path of inevitability. All of history and knowledge was subordinated to the brute pragmatism of expediency. This absolute certainty in a “proletarian science,” ironically, laid down the ideological conditions for the later incoherent and self-contradictory turns of the Comintern’s positions, ranging from a Third Period of total crisis and uncompromising class struggle to a Popular Front with the liberal bourgeoisie against fascism.

While the certainty of an ideological system offers a force of consensus, it does not grant the consistency and freedom of reason. At most, it incorporates reasoning as an instrument of the system, obscuring its irrational function of preserving the machine from thought. Consciousness, pretending to be the direct reflection of an objective reality, obscures the part played by its own needfulness in conditioning its knowledge. The dialectician Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that, instead, consciousness can only know the world that it is only a part of if it comes to know that the “antithesis of its appearance and its truth has, however, for its essence only the truth, viz. the unity of self-consciousness with itself; this unity must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general.”⁷⁷ Desire is the passion of knowledge, an agonizing passion for wholeness.

Self-conscious thought must know itself as only a part of a whole to strive for its own fulfillment in a world made consciously by human beings. Thought must endure doubt to truly achieve reason. The path of doubt, the feeling of mortality within consciousness, grants “insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion[...]”⁷⁸ The aspiration to the world as Absolute Idea, uniting subjective freedom and objective necessity, is on the path of skepticism “the resolve, in Science, not to give oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to examine everything for oneself and follow only one’s own conviction, or better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s own deed as what is true.”⁷⁹

One may work with the doubt within oneself in order to remain open to reasoning through things, or one can constantly strive to close the void of doubt and fill oneself with the certainty of pure life through submersion in the dogmas of a movement. The mass adherents to DiaMat encountered it as something taught by those in the know, seeing it as an insight granted by people who knew better than them. The greatest Bolshevik intellectuals resonated more closely with the Enlightened Hegel, enduring doubt in order to reason through the course of the common body and common mind that they had given themselves to and find its reasonable core.

It was skepticism and self-questioning which brought life into Marxist theory rather than the certainty and dogmatism of DiaMat. The call to treat historical materialism as a living theory of revolution extended into a project of bringing its own history to life. David Riazanov set to work collecting materials from the history of communism, re-publishing the works of influential revolutionary philosophers like Denis Diderot and Ludwig Feuerbach, and researching the lives and intellectual development of Marx and Engels. The practice of Marxology grew as a method of subjecting Marx’s own life to historical materialism’s line of questioning, rather than treating his works as completed revelations of an absolute truth: “Everyone is a product of a definite social milieu. Every genius creating something new, does it on the basis of what has been accomplished before him. He does not sprout forth from a vacuum. Furthermore, to really determine the magnitude of a genius, one must first ascertain the antedating achievements, the degree of the intellectual development of society, the social forms into which this genius was born and from which he drew his psychological and physical sustenance. And so, to understand Marx—and this is a practical application of Marx’s own method—we shall first proceed to study the historical background of his period and its influence upon him.”⁸⁰

Rather than Marx being the singular expression of a stage in history, Riazanov and other Marxists treated him as a partisan in a social movement which had grown amidst the ruins of the Napoleonic Wars, the dispossession of the European peasantry, and the proletarian ferment of capitalist industrialization. As head of the Marx-Engels Institute, Riazanov initiated the first systematic compilation and publication of Marx and Engels’s work in an international collaboration of scholars. The product was the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), which arranged Marx and Engels’ works in dated volumes which were meant to demonstrate their development in a chronology which was periodized according to the different eras of their lives and political careers.

Other Marxists drew from Riazanov’s work to improve the Soviet and world socialist public’s knowledge of Marx’s work. Isaak Illich Rubin published his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1923) in order to explain the essence of Marx’s Capital (1867). His publication initiated a series of debates in Soviet political economy over his argument that the concept of commodity fetishism was the most important in Marx’s book. Though not all agreed with Rubin’s interpretation, particularly his emphasis on the ideological reification of commodity fetishism over the actual reified fetish character of commodities in society, his explanation revitalized the study of Capital and the interpretation of the capitalist system as a means for guiding political strategy. Later opposition leaders like Isaak Dashkovskij, member of the Soviet underground Democratic Centralist group, and Roman Rosdolsky, Trotskyist theorist and inspiration for the New Left, drew on Rubin for their critiques of both the Soviet system the world capitalism that it made its peace with.

Lukács, an early expositor of a comprehensive Marxist philosophy, cooperated in the work of the Marx-Engels Institute by offering his own interpretation of the development of Marxism. Lukács drew his attention to Marx’s youthful experience of critiquing and polemicizing with the early 19th century Young Hegelians, who adhered to a mixture of Fichte’s philosophy of infinite self-consciousness and ethical humanist universalism. Lukács believed that this critique and Marx’s departure from the philosophical framework of Young Hegelianism through his 1844 initiation of a critique of political economy marked the birth of Marxism as a science of the proletariat’s struggle towards a total human personality.

Lukács’ return to the problems of Young Hegelianism put Marx into context and compared his own thought to the opposing tendencies that were supposed to have been rendered irrelevant by the sublation of Hegelianism into DiaMat. Lukács found a fertile source of critique in these confrontations between Marx and his fellow radicals. Just as Lenin had sought to defend the essence of Marxism from revisionism, Lukács sought to redeem the essence of Marx’s thought from the obscurity of history and inject life into his work by seeing it as a process.

Initially, Lukács focused on distinguishing Communism from Social-Democracy. Before the split of the Third from the Second International, Marxists had long invoked Lassalle and Marx in the same breath as the founding fathers of their movement. Lenin, while initiating the rupture of Communism, had criticized Lassalle as a worshipper of the state, offering only “petty bourgeois, confused phrases about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ in general.”⁸¹ The independence of Communism from Social-Democracy meant the separation of Marx from Lassalle. Identifying Lassalle as both a latter-day Young Hegelian and the father of Social-Democracy, Lukács wrote in a 1925 essay that “Lassalle in our view never ceased to be a Hegelian,” whereas the “dominant feature of Marx’s early development is his struggle with, and his inner conquest of, Hegel.”⁸²

Marx inverted Hegel’s history of self-consciousness into a history of the production and reproduction of needful bodily life. Lassalle, on the other hand, did “not see Hegelianism as the philosophical expression of bourgeois society, containing for that very reason within itself the elements of the dissolution, overcoming and supersession of that society; nor as entailing for that very reason the necessary liberation of those elements striving beyond the given system turning them against their author.”⁸³ Lassalle adopted Hegel’s thought naively, incorporating it as a ready-made system for the method of science. In order to adapt Hegel’s philosophy to their own revolutionary ambitions, the Young Hegelians had set to work “loosening the methodological connection between category and history, instead of rooting the categories in history and making them grow out of historical reality.”⁸⁴ While Critical Critic Bruno Bauer and egoist Max Stirner generated their philosophical categories out of “a kind of philosophical subjectivism, Lassalle “adhered to the objectivism of the mature Hegel,” but failed to “prevent a loosening of the relationship between category and history finding expression in his own work. For even he is not able to do more than merely apply a—logical, timeless, ready-made—system of categories to history.”⁸⁵

Lukács believed that the social basis for this dogmatic backwardness lay in the fact that Lassalle and the other Young Hegelians were still philosophers of the bourgeois revolution. Looking backwards at the French Revolution and seeking to draw out its universal lessons for the scattered and conservative situation of the German states, their horizons were limited to either the subjectivity of critical self-consciousness or the objectivity of national state-building. Lassalle, as a leader in the German socialist movement, was closer to the fertile and living truth in the eyes of Lukács. Though he sought a Jacobin bourgeois revolution, it would be one that “is so comprehensive, so thorough and so profound, that bourgeois society as it stands cannot possibly carry it out and will have to cede it as a heritage to the proletarian revolution. In this respect Lassalle stood intuitively on the brink of a discovery the meaning of which has only now become clear to us—primarily as the result of Lenin’s work.”⁸⁶

But while Lenin could recognize the proletariat as the protagonist of the democratic revolution, which radicalizes democracy to the point of socialist transformation, Lassalle looked on the workers as only citizens of the state. He sought to derive a perfect system of rights as a weapon for the workers to wield on behalf of the greater good of the national state against the narrowly selfish propertied class. While the power of money marked a situation in which “I see the reality of my being-for-itself, that most inward, most personal property, in the power of the other (money). Being-for-itself has thereby come outside itself (out of itself), it sees itself dependent and in the power of the other,” the system of rights would stage the suppression of commercial rootlessness by the self-conscious force of the national general will in politics.⁸⁷ Even after declaring his adherence to communism, Lassalle treated it as only another change in history like the French Revolution rather than a fundamentally novel revolution. Lukács believed that “as a result of the supra-historical nature of his system of categories, as a result of his basing the dialectical method in the realm of pure logic and not in real history, what he achieves is an historical equalization of the events of the different historical epochs.”⁸⁸

The political accomplishment of this equalization was to limit the horizons of communism to the bourgeois revolution. This held a profoundly contemporary significance for a Marxism that had split between adherents of Bolshevism, who believed that the time was ripe for a world revolution, and the adherents of Social-Democracy, who had begun constructing parliamentary democracies in Germany and other European countries. Lukács believed that the 20th century sanctification of Lassalle in Social-Democracy “signifies the theoretical attempt to arrest development at the bourgeois revolution.”⁸⁹ Communists had to draw on the strength of the proletariat and take its side in the world civil war of classes in order to truly realize communism.

For Lukács, other Young Hegelians offered a lesson in the consequences of attempting to realize communism as an ethical ideal rather than an outgrowth of the daily tactical necessities of the class struggle. In 1926, he penned an essay on Moses Hess, one of Marx’s earliest communist philosophical influences. Hess, following Feuerbach’s humanism, believed that communism would reunite each human being with its own species-essence. In the commercial power of money, Hess saw “human value expressed in figures; it is the mark of our slavery, the indelible brand of our servitude. Money is the congealed blood sweat of the miserable wretches who bring to market their inalienable property, their most personal capacity, their life-activity itself, to barter it for a caput mortuum, a so-called capital and to consume cannibalistically their own fat.”⁹⁰ He called for the formation of a revolutionary political association, which would “put an end once and for all to all these absurdities and hypocritical nonsense of our philosophers, scholars, priests and statesmen, who harmonise so well with the inhumanity and baseness of our bourgeois society; we will do this by uniting together in a community and expelling all these extraneous bodies and all these external means of communication, these thorns in our flesh.”⁹¹ In his refusal to endure alienation and attempt to affirm pure humanity, Lukács saw Hess as the predecessor of his day’s left-communists. The political impotence of Hess in the face of the 1848 revolutions proved that “in practice that there was no real choice: those who were not prepared to fight on the left wing of bourgeois democracy—which of course meant constantly coming into conflict with the bourgeoisie as it veered increasingly rightwards—were bound of necessity to make common cause with the forces of reaction.”⁹²

Hess attempted to eliminate the mediation of knowledge and politics and replace it with the immediacy of the homogenous human community. Hess even extended this position to the linguistic body of thought, opposing speech as an organic unity to writing as inauthentic because it mediates the inner and personal with the impersonal and external: “Language is a living, spirit-rich means of intercourse but letters are not. Spiritual money is only valid in so far as it is organically attached to man. Language can be organically attached to man because it is an organic, articulated whole. But money cannot be organically attached to man, as already shown above. Money therefore resembles writing not as a living language but as a dead letter[...] as soon as men unite, as soon as a direct intercourse between them can take place the inhuman, external, dead means of intercourse must necessarily be abolished.”⁹³

Lukács believed that Hess, in all of his moral intransigence, had missed “the methodological possibility of acknowledging and recognizing the social reality of the present in its reality and yet still reacting to it critically—not moralistically-critically, but in the sense of practical-critical activity.”⁹⁴ Hess’s universal love appeared only as an external, moral standpoint from which he could denounce the way of the world. Lukács drew a universal lesson from this failure, characterizing the phantom intransigence of Hess and other ultraleftists as a revolutionary posturing “which either leaves the structure of objective reality fundamentally untouched, hence confirming the contemplative attitude towards it and not transcending it ([Immanuel] Kant’s Ought), or is incapable of posing the transition from given reality to ‘transformed’ reality as a concrete problem (utopianism).⁹⁵” He believed that Hess’s moral standpoint had been superseded by the materialist dialectic of Marx, which identified the day-to-day struggles of the proletariat for democratic power to limit the arbitrary despotism of capital as the site for the emergence of communism. In the present day, this meant affirming Lenin’s positions against those of the communist left.

Lukács’ work on the Young Hegelians was the beginning of his lifelong theoretical stress on historicity. However, even in this early work, he interpreted history as a linear process of ascending world-makers and decadent world-preservers. People in this framework serve as mere character masks of their historical roles. The human being known as Hegel becomes the philosopher of the bourgeois revolution, while Marx becomes the mind of the proletarian revolution as it emerges from the democratic revolution. Both were part of modern humanism’s Faustianism imperative to seek a total human being. Even later left-communists like Raya Dunayevskaya, secretary of Trotsky and mother of the North American New Left, internalized this notion of history. Dunayevskaya identified Marx’s communist humanism as the concretization of Hegel’s Absolute Idea in the subject of the oppressed struggling for freedom. She looked to “free creative power” as the force of all revolutions, “the unity of the theoretical and practical idea, to that form of life which is the activity of the Notion.”⁹⁶ Theoreticians play the part of expressing the theoretical movement of practice in philosophical discourse, registering the historical significance of each movement. Dunayevskaya therefore spoke of the same Marxist Humanism as Lukács, but laid her stress on a different part of it: political leaders are the mouthpieces of freedom struggles in history.

The work of Riazanov, Rubin, Lukács, and others in elaborating the historical and theoretical significance of Marx appear in retrospect as the most dynamic part of the systematization of Marxism-Leninism. One of the greatest tests for theory to distinguish itself from Ideology is for it to think through its own history without erecting blind spots of forgetfulness for the sake of its own dogmatic viability. The Marxologists refuted those adherents of DiaMat who believed that a ready-made doctrine of objective truth was revealed through Marx and that focusing on the theoretical conditions of Marxist theory’s production is irrelevant. Their work was the critical and dialogic side of Soviet Marxism which was ultimately suffocated by the imperatives of system-building. The philosophical debate between mechanists and dialecticians, which had served as the background for Marxology, was ended by the late 1920s with the consensus of DiaMat. Soviet Marxism had found its categorical science, and intellectual production within the Soviet Union would face the limitation of a demand to endorse and reinforce the party-state’s system of thought.

This Soviet systematization of Marxism-Leninism took place in a global context in which many factions still competed to claim or contest the inheritance of Lenin. In the Hungarian Communist Party (HCP), Lukács continued to pursue his own positions independently of the Comintern. Forging an alliance with party leader Jenö Landler, Lukács’ faction opposed that of Béla Kun, who believed that the HCP ought to be run from exile and provoke yet another open class war in Hungary. Kun garnered the support of Zinoviev, then leader of the Comintern, and represented the Hungarian delegation of Communists at the Congresses of the Comintern in Moscow. Lukács and Landler believed that Kun’s ultraleft course was inappropriate to the highly repressive realities on the ground in Hungary, and advocated for the HCP to be run by the underground network of communists within the country rather than by exiles who could not accurately weigh the viability or stakes of any given strategy.

Landler died in early 1928, before he and Lukács could stage an open confrontation and struggle for party leadership with the Kun faction. Nevertheless, Lukács went forward and made his case on his own to the HCP’s Congress. He drafted the “Blum Theses,” laying out the present situation of the HCP and its path to political power. Lukács believed that the party’s successes up until 1928 had been in developing an intellectual leadership, accomplishing the task of immediate self-preservation amidst counterrevolutionary repression, and adapting its organizational network to underground existence. More than this would not be possible without opening up breathing room for oppositional politics. Lukács therefore turned to the problems of democracy. The strategy he outlined for the future was a united, revolutionary democratic front between workers, peasants, and intellectuals.

Lukács explained that the underground party’s struggle for the right to open, aboveground political opposition would link it up with broader social struggles. He believed that “the HCP is the only party in Hungary today which is fighting seriously for bourgeois democracy. This struggle of the party must be widened into a mass struggle, it must be taken beyond the confines of the proletariat. The central slogan of this struggle, which is directed towards bringing down the entire [István] Bethlen regime, is: a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”⁹⁷ Lukács believed that the struggle for bourgeois democracy was itself directly linked to the tasks of socialism, as “bourgeois democracy is the best battleground for the proletariat[...]”⁹⁸ The Hungarian bourgeoisie had thrown its weight behind the far-right regime of Prime Minister Bethlen, who sought to unite urban industrialists with the landed gentry in the law-and-order Party of National Unity. The struggle for true bourgeois democracy, though it would not subvert bourgeois society itself, would challenge the class power of this bourgeoisie as it was manifesting in the Bethlen regime: “A democratic dictatorship provides the possibility of creating those organizational forms which can help the broad masses of the workers to assert their interests in the face of the bourgeoisie.”⁹⁹

Though Lukács acknowledged the limits of the democratic dictatorship for its failure to fundamentally usurp private property and socialize productive wealth, he believed that it would still serve socialist aims in the Hungarian scene. It would lay out the problems of European revolution in miniature, posing the alternative to the Hungarian revolution of the decadent, Western, Weimar path of compromise or the ascendant, proletarian, Soviet path of social revolution. He described democratic dictatorship as “a dialectical form of transition towards the revolution of the proletariat—or towards the counter-revolution. To stop at democratic dictatorship, conceived as a fixed, ‘constitutionally determined’ period of development, would necessarily signify the victory of the counter-revolution. Democratic dictatorship can therefore be understood only as the concrete transition by means of which the bourgeois revolution turns into the revolution of the proletariat.”¹⁰⁰

Democracy was not in itself a limit that had been superseded. It could also be considered a weapon of struggle, so direly needed in the conditions of repression faced by the HCP. Lukács placed the problems of democracy in the setting of the world civil war of classes that he had described in 1924 as characteristic of the actuality of the proletarian revolution: “To ascertain the value or valuelessness of a democracy, therefore, the communists must pose this question: which class’s power is disorganized by that democracy?”¹⁰¹ Capitalist-imperialist democracy disorganized the ability of the proletariat to act as an independent faction. In the United States, for example, “the bourgeoisie as the dominant class (which did not have to destroy feudal power with the help of proletarian and semi-proletarian masses) has succeeded in creating the very forms of democracy in which every possibility for the free development, accumulation and expansion of capital is given, while at the same time the external forms of democracy are preserved—but in such a way that the working masses cannot exert any influence whatever on the actual political leadership.”¹⁰²

In this absorption of class struggle into national unity, capitalist democracy truly blurs together with fascist class collaboration. While the class content of the two is the same—capitalists are organized as the ruling class—the methods differ. Capitalist democracy means the rule of formally equal citizens within the legal and political limits set by plutocracy. In each fascist state, “it is different strata which exercise power—that is, they share power in different degrees.”¹⁰³ Fascism gives the appearance of a revolutionary movement by mixing the class content of the state administration in a general national movement of total conformity. The democratic states, on the other hand, appear to oppose fascism by offering a formal means for trade union leaders to represent their group interests in decision making. Yet, in both fascist and democratic states, mass media and the state bureaucracy intervene in society to integrate the proletariat into the nation and prevent its rupture into an independent class. Rather than counterposing democracy and fascism, which implied a concession to these capitalist techniques of conformity, Lukács called for the opposition of class against class.

Lukács believed that the demand for a democratic republic had to be given a class content to be made effective. Freedom of association, the right to combination, and the freedom of the press had to be understood as weapons of class organization; “the struggle for bourgeois liberties must be connected with the everyday needs of the workers.”¹⁰⁴ The slogan of a democratic republic had to be “used in the sense of a struggle for total democracy, for the republic headed by a government of workers and peasants, a struggle against the democratic liquidation of democracy, a fulfilment of the slogan, ‘Class against class,’ a mobilization for the struggle which has to be conducted to secure democratic dictatorship.”¹⁰⁵ The confrontation of the democratic revolution with the conservative gentry had to be given a class content as well, corresponding to the “expropriation of the large landed-property owners without compensation, revolutionary occupation of the land, free land for the peasants!”¹⁰⁶ Defending the relevance of land reform to an urban, proletarian revolution, Lukács explained that “the power of large-scale landed property and large-scale capital cannot be destroyed except by this kind of revolution, and that the remnants of feudalism cannot be wiped out except through the elimination of capitalism.”¹⁰⁷

The theses concluded with a demand for the transformation of the HCP from an underground network and a scattered collection of exiles into an organization grounded in the day-to-day class struggles of Hungarian workers. Lukács believed that the policies advocated in the theses “move the party’s basic organizations, the factory cells, more than ever into the centre of its political work; they turn the politicization of the cells into a fundamental task.”¹⁰⁸ The slogans of the leaders and the unity of the party could only find solid ground in “the worker’s life and his everyday problems.”¹⁰⁹ Only with this grounding could the party link up the quotidian problems of the workers to the general, universal problems of the emancipation of the proletariat. The success of the HCP had to be founded on a democratic mass movement, the class’s struggle for liberty, and successes in the party’s efforts “cannot be assured until they are based fully and firmly in the life of the workers and in the class struggle—that is, in the life of the workers in the factory.”¹¹⁰

Lukács’ call for a broad democratic struggle came at an inopportune time in the context of the Comintern. The Moscow leadership of the Comintern had expanded its role from enforcing the 21 Conditions for membership to direct intervention in the politics of member parties. After 1928, this meant enforcing Moscow’s position that capitalism had entered a “Third Period” of terminal decline in which democracy and fascism could no longer be distinguished, and that any strategy of class struggle that shrunk away from open warfare with all non-Bolshevik factions of society had to be considered treason. The stock market crash in 1929 and beginning of the global Great Depression seemed to confirm the correctness of this position. Kun, the target of Lukács’ critique, had struck up a friendship with the Stalin faction of the Soviet Communist Party and was considered their representative in the HCP. After Lukács presented his theses, a dispute broke out which culminated in the 1930 victory of the Kun faction. Lukács’ theses were rejected as opportunistic for their failure to adhere to the theory of the “Third Period.” Lukács was marginalized by the hardline Stalinists and retreated from direct participation in politics. He had attempted to make a reasonable case for strategy in a movement that had subordinated reason to the consensus of dogma. The total mobilization of the Soviet Union and its allies became the Alpha and Omega of official Marxism.

The Collective Worker

The novelty of Stalinism was not that it demanded the conformity of all within the party. Lenin’s ban on factions in 1921 had already enforced such a closing of ranks. What was new in the Stalin era of the late 1920s and 1930s was the massification of the party-state throughout society in pursuit of a centralized general will. Politics had been decisively collapsed into administration. But administration was itself defined along partisan lines as the struggle of a proletarian general will in a world civil war. The general will, in Stalin’s reasoning, found its institutional expression in the party-state.

Lenin had set the sights of the Bolsheviks on the need for reforms that would democratize the state by massifying it. While Lenin believed that the council democracy of the soviets had to be recovered in a more mature form as the national self-governance of workers and peasants and the constant inspection of all levels of the bureaucracy by these organs of self-governance, Stalin sought to implement a mass worker’s control of government by promoting workers into the bureaucratic positions themselves. Lenin advocated the subordination of the institutions of both the economy and professional politics to the workers, while Stalin sought the professionalization of workers as an apparent abolition of the problems posed by the bureaucracy. In ultraleftist terms, Stalin led “a wide campaign for the struggle against bureaucracy and issued the slogan of purging the Party, trade-union cooperative and Soviet organisations of alien and bureaucratised elements.”¹¹¹

Stalin’s centralism extended to a vision of transforming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a truly singular Union. By 1930, he began to implement this dream, which he had also advocated during the 1922 Georgian affair. Shifting away from Lenin’s free association of self-determining nations, Stalin argued that the “flowering of cultures that are national in form and socialist in content under the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country for the purpose of merging them into one common socialist (both in form and content) culture, with one common language, when the proletariat is victorious all over the world and when socialism becomes the way of life—it is just this that constitutes the dialectics of the Leninist presentation of the question of national culture.”¹¹² As in 1922, Stalin believed that the Russian language and central leadership of the Moscow Communist Party would serve as the binding glue for the new Union. His uncompromising centralism informed his interpretation of the revolution’s new course as well: “We stand for the withering away of the state. At the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed. The highest development of state power with the object of preparing the conditions for the withering away of state-power—such is the Marxist formula. Is this ‘contradictory’? Yes, it is ‘contradictory.’ But this contradiction is bound up with life, and it fully reflects Marx’s dialectics.”¹¹³

The Soviet leadership set to work expanding the state apparatus into all realms of life. The national state’s wealth and power had to be built up into a gigantic mass. Private commerce, which had been allowed breathing room under the NEP, was officially abolished in 1931 and replaced by the nationalization of all industries. In order to pursue a massive industrial buildup, the state initiated a “revolution from above” in the countryside after 1928, collectivizing agriculture under the control of the state in order to subsidize urban demand for agricultural products. In 1936, the state made abortion illegal once again in order to ensure a maximum buildup of the Soviet population, making more hands available for labor and warfare.

The working class political subjects of the early Soviet Union passed into civic nationalism. The unitary general will of the state ascended over the political diversity of the soviets. The Soviet economy converted each worker into a unit of the total collective worker. This “collective worker, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up solely of such one-sidedly specialized workers.”¹¹⁴ These worker-units, rendered precarious and impotent by specialization, can only find power and wholeness by surrendering themselves to become an instrument of the general toil of their class; the “one-sidedness and even the deficiencies of the specialized individual worker become perfections when he is part of the collective worker.”¹¹⁵

All of society was to become a single working factory according to the plans of the state. The species of the collective worker would perpetuate itself by reducing individual workers into mere means for fulfilling the plan’s requirements. The plan constituted a pre-established harmony to which the living workers had to conform. In the factory-society of this collective worker, the “community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital—by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality—labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.”¹¹⁶

The cooperation of many workers together as a single working organism reaches a degree of complexity in which “the interconnection and unity of the process is necessarily represented in a governing will, and in functions that concern not the detailed work but rather the workplace and its activity as a whole, as with the conductor of an orchestra.”¹¹⁷ The nature of this conducting role is determined by the nature of the work itself. In a system dominated by a plan drafted according to the pre-conceived needs of accumulating capital, “workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force.”¹¹⁸ The conducting managers in such a system function as the mediators between the workers and the alien will of that central moving force.

Yet the flow of surplus wealth from the combined powers of the workers and the shared living conditions of the manual workers and the intellectual manager creates the conditions for a different way of life. Instead of each member being a fragment, an instrument of the total working organism, “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”¹¹⁹ The free flow of wealth from efficient cooperative labor, the reconciliation of mental and manual labor, and the development of self-governing habits would create the possibility of orienting production towards free time rather than the reproduction and accumulation of the communal capital. This free time would mean dedicating society’s wealth “for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind, even the rest time of Sunday.”¹²⁰ Such an association, however, would have to struggle to overcome its own subordination to the global capitalist competition of all against all. While free time rests on the well-being of the worker, capital drives towards infinite productivity for infinite accumulation, which enlists the power which might liberate free time into a power of intensifying a despotic rationality over the workers of every firm.

In the Soviet system of management, compensation of and obligations for labor were equalized. Even the superior pay of the managers functioned as only a complex, combined form of the simple average labor of each worker-unit. The state’s plans aimed to abolish unemployment through a strategy of intense investment of capital into heavy industries, leading to a rapid circulation of resources and labor throughout the Soviet Union. The reality fell short of the dream of full employment, instead being characterized by the unemployment and dislocation of peasants in the countryside, overemployment of workers crowded into the industrial cities, low average wages for workers as a whole, and as a result, high turnover within each firm. In a society with many capitalists, the “planned and regulated a priori system on which the division of labour is implemented within the workshop becomes, in the division of labour within society, an a posteriori necessity imposed by nature, controlling the unregulated caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the fluctuations of the barometer of market prices.”¹²¹ In the society of the Soviet Union, where the collective worker and the communal capitalist were one in the party-state, individual ownership of capital and the fluctuations of market prices were replaced by the single plan and the fluctuations of production and distribution through middle managers, who secured necessary resources and met their quotas through the blat system of personal favors.

With the Soviet state exercising a monopoly on foreign trade, it functioned as both the collective worker and the owner of the nation’s capital. It was both a state of professionalized workers cooperating in a single labor-process and an organ of managing the production and distribution of wealth through command over social labor. This meant the enforcement of the collective state’s single plan, drafted with the future industrialization of the nation in mind, as the iron law of a quota for individual workers and firms. The state increasingly restricted workers’ movements and punished absenteeism with harsher measures. It did not exercise repression alone. It was not merely a new capitalist class but the institutional form of “the social productive power of the collective worker, hence of capital.”¹²² As in any other process for the production of capital, Soviet industry was characterized by the despotic power of the general plan over each firm, within which “command over labour power and the function of direction intersect and link up into an objective mechanism that stands in opposition to the workers.”¹²³ But the factory system also birthed the passions of the mass worker as a political subject. The passions of the collective worker birthed the movement of the Stakhanovites, who exerted themselves into the maximum intensity of work in order to do their duty to the greater good by expanding the national capital.

In order to strengthen the worker-nation against the expansion of the Japanese Empire in the East and for commercial competition with the industrial West, the Soviet state enforced a policy of rapid collectivization on the peasantry as a means of building large-scale industry. Collectivization lacked enthusiasm in the countryside, facing resistance from peasants who looked on the urban state as a foreign exploiter. While the cooperative communes showed little success in the rapid expansion of large-scale production, they had preserved the political and cultural autonomy of the peasantry. Since the Civil War and the Scissors Crisis, much of the peasantry had focused their productive activities on subsistence rather than producing for urban commerce. This mass divestment appeared to the Soviet leadership as a conspiracy of petty property owners, kulaks, who sought to keep the poor peasantry from merging into the collective economy and to instead maintain them as a source of exploitable labor. The “revolution from above” sought to make agricultural labor and produce directly available to the state by force. The rise of the collective economy, with large-scale cooperative kolkhozy and state-owned collective sovkhozy, was intended to industrialize agriculture so that heavy industry could blossom.

From 1930-1933, the failures of collectivization snowballed into a Great Famine. After a good harvest in 1930, the central planning agencies overestimated the capacity of Soviet agriculture, setting excessively high quotas for produce to be transferred to the cities and exporting masses of grain to acquire reserves of foreign currencies in 1931-1932. When the harvests of 1931-1933 fell short of the plan’s expectations owing to poor weather conditions, over-exploitation of the soil, lack of grain to sustain a rapid pace of labor by peasants and draft animals, demoralization of the workforce, and peasant inexperience with heavy machinery. Countless peasants were left without sufficient food and without a motivation to toil. Many resisted collectivization by refusing to work or outright rebelling against the state. The authorities repressed the rebellion as a kulak-Western conspiracy. They attempted to reduce the severity of the famine by altering the plan, transferring produce from export to domestic consumption, focusing agricultural production on food products rather than cash crops, and implementing an internal passport system to stem the tide of famine-stricken peasants into the towns. The most severely affected regions were the agricultural centers of the Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine, and the Central Asian republics in which the state had enforced the agricultural sedentarization of traditional nomads, such as Kazakhstan. In all, about 5 million people died as a result of the famine in 1933, the majority in the countryside.¹²⁴

The famine reinforced the managerial divide between intellectual and manual laborers in Soviet society. Individual peasants and small villages were hit the hardest of all, while collective farms fared somewhat better. The egalitarian division of labor and distribution of product of the villages, which the Bolsheviks had long criticized as an impediment to large-scale production, eroded in the face of large-scale agriculture. In the large-scale cooperative kolkhozy and the state-owned sovkhozy, professional managers grew into a class of bureaucratic administrators who commanded the labor of workers.¹²⁵ The ability of peasant households to vote over the use of local resources was supplanted by the central state’s arbitrary transfers of land and technology, often rendering the peasants into landless laborers employed by the state.¹²⁶ The First Five-Year Plan had led to a rapid expansion of the bureaucracy’s scale and powers in the cities and countryside alike.¹²⁷ Through the implementation of a passport system and other techniques of discipline, petty bureaucrats exercised arbitrary control over everyday life. The passions of the new revolution sought an outlet from the frustrations of an administered world.

Just as Faust sought to acquire a plot of land to manage through service to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Soviet intelligentsia sought to experiment with agriculture under the authority of Stalin. The passions of the collective worker and the hopes of Godbuilding found a new expression in the emergence of a “proletarian science.” By 1940, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko rose to national prominence with his biological theories. He criticized Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, arguing that it naturalized the competition of all against all in bourgeois society and implied that races could be ‘coded’ through eugenics. He instead advocated a theory that “it is possible for plants and animals to inherit individual variations of characters acquired under the influence of conditions of life.”¹²⁸ On this basis, he advocated a campaign against the study of genetics and the use of its theories in large-scale agriculture. Instead of the artificial selection of plants and animals according to their viability in a specific environment, he advocated for the practically infinite instrumentalization of all life as means of implementing the state’s plans. Because any life-form could inherit the changes made to its parents’ bodies, life could be molded into anything that labor set it into.

The collective worker of the Soviet state lit up with the passion of this teaching. Lysenko’s theories became official doctrine and began to guide agricultural policy at all levels. The herd mentality of the centralizing party created the conditions for Lysenko to achieve universal acclaim by winning the respect of Stalin. His theories, the Bolshevik leadership thought, could serve the ideological workerization of the peasantry. Their results were disastrous, and in practice, Soviet agriculturalists rarely conformed to Lysenko’s theories.¹²⁹ But the episode of the Lysenko movement demonstrated that the warm streams of Russian socialism, the agricultural teachings of which stemmed back to Kropotkin’s doctrine of mutual aid, could still find expression in the Soviet system—even if they took on the forms of that cold monster, the state.

Unmasking the Enemy

By the 1930s, Stalin had grown into the face of the revolution. Joseph Stalin, the Man of Steel, was a symbol, externally autonomous from the Georgian Old Bolshevik Iosef Dzhugashvili. In the personality cult of Stalin, the mass party-state found its face. Pictures of Stalin took the place of Christian icons and portraits of the Tsar, serving as a signifier of Soviet civilization at home and abroad. Russian Marxists had long criticized their Narodnik opponents for their heroic interpretation of history, but they themselves had made room for Great Men to personify historical movements. Stalin was now the personification of the Soviet republic. After his son Vasilii attempted to get out of trouble by flaunting the fact that he was the son of Stalin, Dzhugashvili reportedly replied: “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and portraits, not you, no not even me!”¹³⁰

The Stalin character became the very persona of the revolution. The hope of Stalin was this: “Everything human encompass in my single person,/And so enlarge my one self to embrace theirs, all,/And shipwreck with them when at last we shipwreck, all.”¹³¹ While all were expected to give their personalities over to the great effort of the collective state, they could find a shining personality in the face of Stalin. Even amidst the rapid growth of the bureaucracy, this symbol mediated the highest echelons of the Politburo with the everyday lives and hopes of regular Soviet citizens. Stalin was the power of the collective personality ascendant over the impersonal system, an authoritative, ethical symbol which could be invoked against the excesses of the managerial bureaucracy. Mediation was the enemy of Soviet society.

The problems of mediation appeared most obviously in the language of Soviet society. Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov observed that “the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction.”¹³² In the factory committees and councils of the early revolution, the primary character of language was public dialogue in debates over the courses of action that assemblies of workers and soldiers ought to take. The dialogue of each participant was “directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinary discourse, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech.”¹³³ The problems of the day appeared in a fluid form through the dialogue of each participant in the assemblies with the others, contesting their interpretation of events that they themselves were taking part in.

By the time of the 1930s, Soviet language had become dominated not by dialogue but by the monologue of the plan. The plans were a form of language that had become autonomous from dialogue, instead enlisting writing as a function of representing the total situation of Soviet society, weighing the most effective means for managing labor and resources, and commanding the movements and actions of people accordingly. In short, the rich language of freedom had been overtaken by a language of necessity. Language, as a universal body which points to a sense of what is right in its dialogic nature, collapsed into the immediacy of a planned economy, which enumerated the resources available to the state and set quotas for the future. These functions of ethical symbolism and planning language are the real significance of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union. Rather than propaganda imposed from outside, Marxism-Leninism was an authentic expression of the ideological function of communist theory within the party-state system.

The function of Marxism-Leninism for Soviet socialism echoed the function of Orthodox Christian theology for East Rome and Byzantium. Orthodox Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in 1931 that the passion of the Russian Revolution was a sublimation of the Christian effort for the Kingdom of Heaven: “The Russian people did not achieve their ancient dream of Moscow, the Third Rome. Imperial Russia was very far from resembling a Third Rome. But, instead of the Third Rome, they have established the Third International.”¹³⁴ The ethical ideal of sobornost, all-togetherness, in the Byzantine religious community had hoped to forge them into one body and one mind—a Church. In the Soviet Union, where the Communist Party had declared its opposition to religion, the Church would have to fill God’s throne with another deity. They settled on laboring humanity. In labor, this Third International perceived the qualities of immortality and omnipotence possessed by humanity when taken together as a whole.

This laboring organism was a jealous God. After 1929, the anti-religious campaigns of the League of Militant Atheists became state policy, replacing the Communist Party’s previous position of treating religion as a private matter while opposing it ideologically and within its body of members. The militant atheism of the state served as an evangelism for an alternative conception of belief as the perception of history as it really is: the struggle of classes, culminating in the unification of humanity into a single organism. In essence, the extermination of religion meant elevating DiaMat into a state religion. Religious ceremony and iconography were transferred to the personality cult of Marxism-Leninism. Any who failed to conform marked themselves as anti-social parasites on the toiling organism.

It was in this political and cultural setting that Georg Lukács moved to the Soviet Union, fleeing Nazi anti-communist and antisemitic persecution. The Soviet Union became his new home, to which he acculturated as he had previously acculturated to the German Communist movement. After moving between the Soviet Union and Europe throughout the years to continue to participate in German Communism, the rise of Adolf Hitler to Chancellor of Germany forced Lukács to settle under the watchful eye of the Party in Moscow in 1933. This was a time when people had to toe the party apparatus’s line. Soviet civic nationalism had taken the place of the mass enthusiasm for the councils, and this sense of patriotic duty was itself defined according to the positions of the Central Committee. The professionalization of workers and peasants into bureaucrats had not done away with the institution of the party-state by any means, but rather reinforced their loyalty to the upper administrative leadership whose policies had helped them secure their positions.

Lukács, always a centralist at heart, grew closer to the thinking and concerns of the Moscow party. Of his exile, he later recalled that “Bukharin gave me a very friendly reception.”¹³⁵ Like Bukharin, Lukács believed that socialism would take a long period of struggle, political and cultural, for the global proletarian faction to win out against the global capitalist faction. Severed from a Nazifying Germany, and unable to join the Soviet Communist Party, Lukács turned his attention to cultural work. In this era, cultural work meant serving socialist public education and ideological struggle. By the 1930s, socialist realism, which depicted heroic scenes of everyday working class life, had taken the place of the early avant-garde. Socialist realism more effectively served as public art, appealing to conventional aesthetic sensibilities while depicting the quotidian reality of the masses in an idealized form. Lukács, though at times a critic of socialist realism, offered his own position on the importance of realist aesthetics for the cause of socialism.

In his Soviet essays on art, Lukács returned to the problem of reification. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), he had expressed his hope that workers’ councils—the class’s organs of class consciousness, combining with the party as the autonomous organizational form of this consciousness—would dispel the appearance that the prevailing order of capitalism is reality itself. After the decline of the council-form and rise of the party-state, Lukács turned to art to perform a public educative role against reification. While reflecting in a 1932 essay on the importance of reportage as a journalistic style, he wrote that literary portrayal deals “only with individuals and individual destinies, whose living interactions illuminate, complement and make each other comprehensible, the connection between such individuals being what makes the whole typical,” whereas in reportage “the individual case only keeps its really typical character, in an all-round way, in the conceptual summary and explanation of the conditions that it serves to illustrate, even if this summary is either necessarily or deliberately kept to a minimum.”¹³⁶ Both had their roles to play, but only insofar as they served to illuminate the part played by individuals as only a fraction of the social totality.

For Lukács, this totality-illuminating function of literature discounted anything which fell short of the social didacticism of realism. In 1934, he began to attack German expressionism, which experimented with new and often puzzling techniques of language and aesthetics in treating art as an expression of spirit, as a reactionary petit-bourgeois product of a backwards, imperialist society. Echoing his earlier critique of Moses Hess’s ultraleftism, Lukács argued that the expressionists’ Romantic anti-capitalism was hampered by the movement’s purported middle class social basis dependent on parasitic monopoly capital. Ignoring the political collaboration of militant workers and intellectuals in the expressionist movement that characterized council communist journals like Die Aktion, Lukács claimed that the expressionists “could only raise even their ‘social’ questions to the level of a subjective idealism, or a mystical objective idealism, and could find no understanding of the social forces acting in the real world.”¹³⁷ What Lukács sought from art was not the free play of the spirit, but the freedom of the intellectual serving as a means to comprehend and explain social and political necessities for their readers. Just as the Soviet Communist Party accused absentee workers and disgruntled peasants of petit-bourgeois wreckerism, Lukács accused any artist who failed to serve this totalizing education of being petit-bourgeois decadents.

Aesthetics and politics were linked closely in the 1930s. As a class of people, artists understood the significance of art to an era of mass culture and mass politics, and sought to address the problems of their day through aesthetic production. Many joined Communist Parties and offered their moral and aesthetic advocacy. Lukács, for his part, began to rationalize the direction of the Stalin-led Communist Party for his fellow intellectuals. He participated enthusiastically in the campaign against Trotskyism, which justified the purges and executions of many Soviet intellectuals. In a 1932 essay, he criticized the aesthetic approach of Trotsky and similar intellectuals as falsely demanding disinterested and impersonal standards of quality in which “the work of art is isolated from social practice, from material production and the class struggle, and the task of art is thought to be that of realizing an ‘aesthetic ideal.’”¹³⁸ Later in his life, he continued to justify this anti-Trotskyist campaign according to the political-aesthetic principles he had first outlined in the 1920s. Recalling something that writer Maxim Gorky had once claimed Lenin had said, Lukács described Trotsky as having “a bad streak reminiscent of Lassalle,” and declared that Trotskyism “could only be seen as a trend which would help to bias public opinion in England and America against the Soviet Union in the struggle against Hitler.”¹³⁹

Lukács’ narrowly sectarian framing contained a grain of truth—after all, Trotsky had penned a defense of compulsory labor and the militarization of society in Terrorism and Communism. While pointing a finger of accusation at Trotsky’s part, however, Lukács pointed four fingers back at his own party. Stalin was guilty of Lassallean populism to the same extent that Lukács’ accusation of Lassalleanism hit on Trotsky’s idealist disciplinarian character. In his 1862 Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany, Lassalle had written: “It is to you, the suffering, the patient and enduring class, that the State belongs; not to us of the higher classes; for the State is the consolidated people.”¹⁴⁰ Once he began to seek an alliance with the Prussian state against the liberal bourgeoisie, Lassalle had continued his thought by declaring: “Sovereignty, whether it inhere in the princes or in the people, is indivisible, by its very nature, as indivisible as the soul of man.”¹⁴¹ Stalin shared this conflation of socialism with the unitary popular sovereignty of the state. And like Lassalle, he would not stop at any means necessary to empower the Fourth Estate—even if it meant altogether abandoning principles. If Trotsky stuck by the Ideal, Stalin threw himself blindly into the consolidation of state power.

The demand of Soviet politics in the 1930s was to fall in line in the world civil war of classes, to be either with the movement or against it. This principle was even extended to the interpretation of the past. Lukács characterized the poet Heinrich Heine, cousin of Marx, as the very last in the line of great bourgeois literary revolutionaries in Germany before the proletariat inherited this intellectual tradition. While reporting Marx and Engels’ criticism of Heine for being an artist-for-hire for despots, Lukács softly explained the poet by explaining that “his true historical greatness is reflected, among other things, in the fact that these ‘dirty things’ of his, despite the large scale of his activity, served him only as a means of securing the necessary freedom of expression of his thoughts. The only way out of this dilemma for him could lie in a real break with his class, in a real affiliation with the proletariat.”¹⁴² Lukács, born to a family of bankers and court Jews, had himself turned to the proletariat to realize the Faustian dreams of his youth. From the court of Stalin, he offered his teaching to his fellow intellectuals of the world that only adherence to the revolution, the center of which was Moscow, could grant them true freedom.

In reality, this “freedom” meant bread and politics, with anything beyond these bare needs of human life put into question as potentially degenerate. The Soviets had long since reversed their commitment to a full life, with every citizen participating in the regulation of the personal behavior of each other to ensure that they conformed as part of the whole. In 1933, the Soviet state re-criminalized homosexuality as interchangeable with pederasty. Reacting to the prominent part played by an openly gay man, Ernst Röhm, in the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), Marxists across the world began to insist that there was an intimate link between gay desire and fascism. The novelist Gorky reported in 1934 of Soviet public opinion: “There has already arisen a sarcastic saying: ‘Destroy the homosexuals and fascism will disappear.’”¹⁴³

Even the critique of class elitism coalesced with Soviet homophobia. While the decadent bourgeoisie groomed the youth of the West with violent racism and nationalism, Gorky believed that proletarian humanity would ultimately win over “ a certain insignificant minority,” a class of diseased degenerates, who had “grown creatively decrepit and is decomposing from fear of life and from a morbid, incurable thirst for profit.”¹⁴⁴ The Soviets conflated homosexuality with the aristocratic culture of Greek-revivalist pederasts which had flourished in 19th century Europe, finding its expression in movements like the Uranians. They despised the weakness of the intellect, praising the masculinity of manual labor as a virtue.¹⁴⁵ Against gay men, they vented their hatred of “decadent” intellectuals, who they associated with effeminacy and fascist barbarism. The critique of decadence, which had begun as an inheritance of theoretical attempts to analyze the crises of capitalism, now fixed its efforts on the realm of culture to alternatively distinguish or conflate fascist and democratic imperialist states according to their alignment with Soviet geopolitical interests.

In 1934, the Soviet Union hosted its First Congress of Soviet Writers to make its appeal to the literary intelligentsia. Rather than rejecting high culture, they sought to inherit its mantle and enlist artists in the defense and propagation of the revolution. Andrei Zhdanov, a close associate of Stalin in the Central Committee, declared that “the proletariat, just as in other provinces of material and spiritual culture, is the sole heir of all that is best in the treasury of world literature. The bourgeoisie has squandered its literary heritage; it is our duty to gather it up carefully, to study it and, having critically assimilated it, to advance further.”¹⁴⁶ For Zhdanov, this meant a strict adherence to the realism characteristic of novelists like Honoré de Balzac.

Some participants of the Congress sought to somewhat modify this call to assimilate bourgeois literature. Bukharin, speaking of Goethe’s Faust, hit on notes reminiscent of the late People’s Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky: “The type of poetic work which presents a period in its more general and universal attributes, embodying them in peculiar images concretely abstract—images of extreme generality and at the same time of colossal inner richness—ran counter to the old conception of realism.”¹⁴⁷ Even while Faust was not a concrete depiction of a situation in history, it illuminated much about the rise of Europe’s bourgeois civilization in the era of the Renaissance. Bukharin believed “poetry of the type of Faust, with a different content and consequently of a different form, but still maintaining the extreme generality of Faust, must unquestionably find a place as a component part of socialist realism, and that it will create the most monumental form of socialism’s poetry.”¹⁴⁸ While Bukharin’s call for poetic experimentation was heeded abroad, Zhdanov’s position prevailed in the Soviet Union. Socialist realism more effectively served as a tool to forge an effective consensus around the political tasks of the time, in particular the rapid industrialization of the country and expansion of the state apparatus.

These same tasks served as the background for a reorganization of the Soviet legal system. Since the beginning of the New Economic Policy in 1921, the Russian Revolution had been redirected towards the construction of a democratic party-state rather than the council republic of 1917. The 1936 Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aimed to formalize the party-state’s existence as a federal democratic republic. The constitution’s legal provisions recognized the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies as the basic unit of mass political participation, declared the Union an accomplished socialist society with both generalized public state property and particular cooperative property, recognized the personal property of individuals, made work a right and duty for all, expanded suffrage to a universal—and now non-class restrictive—scale for elections to Soviets and People’s Court, established a Union-wide Supreme Soviet as a legislature, and made Moscow the capital of the new U.S.S.R. Much of this legal order was distant from practical reality, owing to the power of the Moscow-centered party-state to select and vet electoral candidates, create new policies and interpret old laws, enforce economic plans on all lower units of the state, and control the resources and political orders of member Republics. Article 126 of the Constitution explicitly enshrined the principle that the Communist Party was to be “the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system and is the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.”¹⁴⁹

The new constitution, in short, established the sovereignty of the people as the basis of the state while declaring the members of the Communist Party and its Central Committee to be the undisputed leaders of this people. Former critic of the legal-form Evgeny Pashukanis, who had begun to face accusations of Trotskyism, attempted to interpret the 1936 Constitution in a manner which would reveal the character of the Soviet state. In Aesopian language, he recognized that the “maximum development of the workers’ participation signifies the strengthening of the state apparatus which is persuasive, ideologically influential and can use power, compulsion and force as well,” meaning that the “administration of things and processes of production are inseparable from the administration of people, and from the functions of power, state coercion and state legislation.”¹⁵⁰ The enforcement of the socialist principle of equal compensation for equal labor demanded that “we must have a national supervisory and accounting organization to oversee labour and consumption patterns. For this legal norms—and an apparatus of coercion, without which law is nothing—are necessary.”¹⁵¹

Pashukanis attempted to draw out the most democratic aspects of this new legal order, which might be strengthened by mass organizations and intellectuals, in order to find some means for those persecuted by the Communist Party to find respite. While recognizing the significance of “public socialist property” and “distribution according to labour,” he argued that the “problem of personal and property rights—and of their protection—is an immense theoretical and practical task.”¹⁵² As the constitution had identified private dwellings and correspondences as part of these personal and property rights, Pashukanis perhaps believed that reinforcing them would curb the power of the party and its secret police to harass individuals. He further suggested that the People’s Courts could be oriented away from persecution alone: “The task of socialization and re-education is now being pushed to the forefront more and more. In practice the court is an agency which uses coercion and repression; simultaneously, it acts by persuasion and re-education.”¹⁵³ Even petty delinquents and accused Trotskyists, who had been the targets of executions and had been filling up the Gulags, ought to have a chance to repent and return into the fold unharmed. Pashukanis’s immediate suggestions, in short, were to limit the arbitrary fierceness of the party-state through the rule of law, which would grant the collective body of the people and its members rights to life and wellbeing.

Other intellectuals sought to intensify the passions of the new Soviet populism along class lines rather than to limit it through law. Gorky, formerly a novelist of Godbuilding and the Bolshevik left, set to work in the 1930s writing for his four-volume novel The Life of Klim Samgin, which explored the psychology of the Russian Revolutionary struggle across the ages. While emphasizing the importance of personal life as much as Pashukanis, and gazing within the inner lives of his characters, Gorky was still searching for the old fire of Godbuilding and Proletarian Culture. Rather than falling in line with the strict aesthetic requirements of Zhdanov, Gorky defended Soviet artists who explored less well-trod avenues. When he died in 1936, the nation mourned for the fallen Old Bolshevik. In a eulogy read in the Red Square of Moscow, Lukács commemorated Gorky as a prophet of the “free and all-sided development of the human personality,” a writer who had demonstrated that the intransigent fight for “self-preservation” against capitalism and had taught an attitude towards life which brought him to the “thoughtful mastery of life, to the unity of the proletarian Revolution, humanism and realistic style.”¹⁵⁴

Gorky’s death marked the end of a passing era and the consummation of a nascent order. The Old Bolsheviks were waning in the face of the state that they had built. Bukharin, once leader of the Bolshevik center alongside Stalin, attempted to preserve the old hopes of the October Revolution. Like Lukács, he searched for something revitalizing in the self-defense of the Soviet Union. Echoing Lenin’s State and Revolution, Bukharin wrote in 1933 that the “process of overcoming class oppositions, of ‘servile hierarchy’ (Marx) and of the dying away of the state will create a self-discipline which little by little will not only push out the relics of class compulsion but also of authoritarianism in general.”¹⁵⁵ Class oppositions could only be overcome by passing through them, by intensifying the war of faction against faction until it reached its conclusion in Soviet victory over capitalism. In the interim, however, the proletarian faction would face increasingly dangerous conditions amidst “the unusually intensive process of the polarisation of the classes—the great differentiation in all social forces and ideologies—the sharpening of the struggle between Fascism and Communism, as two class camps—two doctrines—two cultures.”¹⁵⁶ In the struggle against fascism, the ideology of capitalism as it defends itself against communism, “great class forces are forming in military array for coming battles—for the battles which will be really final (in the world-historic sense) and really decisive.”¹⁵⁷

While he witnessed the militarization of Soviet society, Bukharin would not live to see this military confrontation of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. In 1937, he was arrested and accused of associating with a conspiracy of Trotskyists to assassinate Stalin. By the time he was dragged to court, the charges had expanded to being himself a leader of sabotage and even having planned to assassinate Lenin. After being tortured by his captors and put on the stage of a public show trial, Bukharin offered a confession before the court. While profusely rejecting the charges of having collaborated with foreign intelligence agencies, intended to kill Lenin, and worked destroy the Soviet Union from its beginning, he admitted in Aesopian language that he may have unintentionally played the part of a wrecker by failing to conform: “The might of the proletarian state found its expression not only in the fact that it smashed the counter-revolutionary bands, but also in the fact that it disintegrated its enemies from within, that it disorganized the will of its enemies. Nowhere else is this the case, nor can it be in any capitalist country[...] It is in the consciousness of this that I await the verdict. What matters is not the personal feelings of a repentant enemy, but the flourishing progress of the U.S.S.R. and its international importance.”¹⁵⁸ The court was unconvinced by his praise of the Soviet cause and the force of its general will. Stalin had long since declared the development of a gigantic state apparatus as part of the war of classes. After Bukharin was executed by firing squad, his corpse was cast into oblivion as nothing but another unmasked enemy of the revolution.

Bukharin’s trial and execution was only one episode of the Great Purges. His trial was itself held simultaneously to countless others during the crescendo of a purge targeting the inner party apparatus. The purges began after the December 1, 1934 assassination of Politburo member and Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov by ex-party apparatchik Leonid Nikolaev, who was possibly motivated by personal resentment for his poor living conditions. Nikolaev was put on trial, accused of being part of a vast conspiracy against the Soviet state. Much was made of Nikolaev being a part of the “Zinoviev group” during a time when Zinoviev was aligned with the Left Opposition, and that he had targeted Kirov, an ally of Stalin. In self-defense, Trotsky wrote from exile that the affiliation “implies hardly more than the fact that Nikolaev in 1926 was a member of the Leningrad organization of the party,” where Zinoviev was in charge.¹⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the accusations stuck, and the Purges at the elite level expanded into a general campaign against accused Trotskyists. Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police, expanded his organization into a gigantic apparatus for kidnapping, interrogating, torturing, and killing accused subverts and people of ‘suspicious’ backgrounds. In spite of the 1936 Constitution’s declaration of equal rights for people of all races, Yezhov’s apparatus even targeted people on an ethnic basis, singling out those of Central European and East Asian descent.¹⁶⁰ Historian Robert Thurston has estimated that from 1937 to 1938, the height of the Purges, approximately 680,000 people were executed, the majority being everyday intellectuals and apparatchiks both within and outside the party.¹⁶¹

On the mass level, among workers and peasants, the Purges initially appeared as an opportunity to settle accounts. Individual grievances and denunciations served as the means for entire classes to pour out their frustration against the class of bureaucratic managers which had acquired such power over Soviet workers since the Civil War. The Soviet people publicly attacked local authorities for micro-managing everyday life with a barrage of dictates and police. During show trials, workers accused their factory managers of a range of bureaucratic abuses to get them arrested or even executed.¹⁶² Peasants who had been dispossessed and abused by officials enforcing collectivization in 1935-1936 sent masses of letters to the newspapers recounting the crimes of the bureaucrats and demanding that they be punished.¹⁶³ The destruction of party leaders and bureaucrats created a path for many workers and peasants, through affirmative action policies, to eventually become the first leadership generation of the Soviet Union who had grown up with the experiment.¹⁶⁴

Though regular Soviet citizens often testified at trials, the purge of the higher, intellectual and political echelons of Soviet society was not a popular effort but a game of elite factional struggle. By the height of the Purges in 1937, the popular enthusiasm of the early period had slowed down into a gigantic regime of secret police and courts which was later remembered as the Yezhovshchina, referring to its architect. This regime managed the revolt against bureaucracy within the state-immanent forms of denunciations to the police and trials by kangaroo courts. While the Soviet people had vented their fury against bureaucrats who had personally wronged them, the personal vendettas which played out in the elite purges were more of a matter of preserving the absolute, centralized unity of the party-state. Historians J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov described the height of the Great Purges as the moment where, in “the name of party unity and with a desperate feeling of corporate self-preservation, the nomenklatura committed suicide. They also contributed to their own destruction by pushing things in the direction of mass terror.”¹⁶⁵ The terror targeted prominent Bolshevik leaders who were perceived as competitors to the prevailing order, including Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, and Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev. Not even intellectual theorists were spared of the accusation of Trotskyite terrorism. David Riazanov, Alexander Chayanov, Isaak Rubin, Evgeny Pashukanis, and even Nikolai Bukharin, then the leading theorist of Soviet society, were all executed during this time period. In 1940 Yezhov, architect of the Purges, himself fell victim to his own apparatus on the party leadership pinning the blame on him as the man responsible. Georg Lukács, who was arrested by the secret police and detained for a few months in 1941, considered himself “lucky” that by then “the executions had stopped.”¹⁶⁶ Stalin’s destruction of Yezhov ended the concentrated period of the Great Purges but not the practice of purging, and it certainly did not dismantle the useful machinery of terror that he had built.

The drive to unmask the enemy drew on the dominant ideological assumptions of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. To unmask loyal Bolsheviks as enemies of the revolution was also to force them to confess what they ‘really’ were. As Bukharin observed during his trial, what they subjectively thought of themselves and their commitment to the revolution did not matter. Their revolutionary work was only a mask which had to be torn away, revealing a Trotskyite wrecker and agent of fascist imperialism underneath. The old Russian Marxist epistemological debate on humanity’s ability to know the thing-in-itself by converting it into a thing-for-us through the domination of nature was resolved by the practice of the purges, which made the accused into enemies wherever they seemed to resist absorption into the human mass of the revolution. The Great Purges, in short, amounted to the ritual destruction of all who dared to be anything other than the freely self-determining totalized party-state.

The Great Purges were not the sole inevitable outcome of the tensions in Soviet society during the 1930s. Some, however, had seen them coming. Writing in 1930, the German Conservative Revolutionary Ernst Jünger described the modern age as that of “total mobilization,” meaning “an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy.”¹⁶⁷ An advocate for a German-Soviet alliance, he expressed his admiration for the First Five-Year Plan as having, for the very first time, “presented the world with an attempt to channel the collective energies of a great empire into a single current,” revealing ultimately that the “’planned economy,’ as one of the final results of democracy, grows beyond itself into a general unfolding of power. We can observe this shift in many events of our age. The great surging forth of the masses thereby reaches a point of crystallization.”¹⁶⁸ In war and peace, all were being rendered workers in one gigantic labor-process. Jünger believed that the demand for constant readiness for war, for mobilization in self-defense, allowed the power of total mobilization to find expression even in class wars against national wars. Reflecting on the exile of Trotsky, he wrote that “a great war is already recruiting its folkish [völkisch] and social armies. It is clear in any case that one day, armed people will trespass the borders drawn by treaties and arrangements not only on the edges of countries, but in the streets of the big cities too.”¹⁶⁹

Party-Mindedness

The world of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was a world of chaos. Blind partisanship ruled the day. Stalin, as the central personality of the party and the Union, made arbitrary political and theoretical turns according to the tactical demands made by the world situation on the Soviets. The result was to make an eclectic theoretical incoherence out of the monotonous tones of Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

To demonstrate the absurdity of the Marxist-Leninist pretense to unbroken theoretical coherence, it only takes recollecting the episodes of the time. The theory of the intensification of class struggle under socialism served to justify the executions of Old Bolsheviks. While seeking to marshal French and British assistance for Soviet intervention against fascism in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, the Comintern promoted a theory of the Popular Front and the necessity for the proletariat to fight for bourgeois democracy. After the fall of the Spanish Republic to the Nationalists, the Soviets signed the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, agreeing to a mutually beneficial arrangement of trade and territorial claims. Moscow rapidly altered the Comintern’s rhetoric, denouncing all imperialistic warmongers and calling for peace and development. Even Trotsky replied to the Pact with a continued call for defenceism, saying that “Soviet patriotism is inseparable from irreconcilable struggle against the Stalinist clique.”¹⁷⁰ In 1940, Soviet agent Ramón Mercader murdered him in his Mexico City home with an icepick. Marxist-Leninists celebrated the death of a man they had accused of collaborating with the Nazis—at the same time that the Soviet Union was sending industrial equipment to the very same Nazis, indirectly providing them with resources that could be used to organize the Holocaust. When the Nazis finally invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Comintern once again called for anti-fascist Popular Frontism with the “democratic imperialist” countries.

The only consistent theoretical throughline, which the Central Committee opportunistically departed from repeatedly, was the world civil war of classes and the dual opposition of communism and fascism. Lukács, who always sought to elevate the politics of the Communist Party to a comprehensive philosophical expression, stuck by this thread throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1934, he initiated his career-long polemic against the purported representatives of bourgeois irrationalism by accusing them of being “ideologists of the imperialist era” who “deny the objective linkage between objects and processes in the external world,” with this position leading into a “series [which] stretches from Nietzsche and [Ernst] Mach through to [Oswald] Spengler, [Othmarr] Spann and [Alfred] Rosenberg.”¹⁷¹ Lukács continued this reductio ad nazium throughout the remainder of his life.

While he made legitimate critiques of the racial and eugenic ideology embedded in fine de siècle European vitalism, he ignored the inconvenient fact of the highly rationalist and scientistic advocacy of eugenics made by socialists and Marxists. The early Soviet Union itself practiced a kind of Lamarckist eugenics, criticizing racial hygiene in favor of encouraging the maximum breeding of able-bodied toiling proletarians.¹⁷² Though the Soviets of the late 1930s denounced eugenics for their association with Nazi racial genocide, the very same ideological practice continued to inform Soviet agriculture through Lysenko’s theories. Lukács’ framework could not comprehend these limitations of his own faction as anything other than contingent, personal flaws. Nothing could be a problem of their own partisan aim. History was nothing but the linear ascent of world-builders with their own corresponding rationalizing worldviews and the descent of the old ruling classes who selfishly held onto power and whose ideological expression was the praise of unreason. He thought of everything in terms of a confrontation of one party with the other, the true universal confronting the decadent mass of the old society.

As Lukács’ studies returned to the cultural production of what he considered the revolutionary and progressive era of the bourgeoisie, he picked up justifications for his own ‘ascendant’ faction. Even his highest quality works of history from this time period are marked with this blind party-mindedness. The Young Hegel (1938), for example, frames Hegel as the bourgeois philosopher of the development of the productive forces, the ascent of the modern state, and the rise of the mass politics of the ‘rabble.’ Throughout, he praises the realism of Hegel—read, his reconciliation with the prevailing tendencies of his time—as opposed to the intransigent ultraleftism and reactionary Romanticism of his former associates. For instance Lukács contrasts Hegel to social republican poet Friedrich Hölderlin—a favorite of some of Lukács’ own associates in Germany, including Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht—as a man who could find his way in the world, unlike the Romantic poet, who descended into despair and madness after the Napoleonic Wars. Though both were tragic, owing to the transformation of their class into nothing but functionaries of capital in the 19th century, they were tragic in starkly contrasted ways:

“Hölderlin remained true to the ideals of the French Revolution right up to his own tragic end, and not only that, he firmly placed tragedy in the very centre of his poetic enterprise. Hegel in Frankfurt, on the other hand, wished precisely to reconcile the contradictions of bourgeois society with the aid of his view of religion and only arrived at tragedy against his conscious intentions thanks to the contradictions between his objective and the method he employed to achieve it, and thanks also to his uncompromising insistence on the method despite its unpalatable conclusions.”¹⁷³

It is not difficult to perceive a veiled commentary on the fate of the October Revolution in these lines. Men like Hölderlin, who in the 1930s continued to advocate for the by then ultraleft position of a council republic, would fail to ascend from their own personal tragedy. Men like Hegel, who made their peace with the developmentalist party-state of the Kremlin by thinking through its historical necessity, would play the part of reformers within the movement and help defend the importance of the ultimate goal—the free development of a total human personality. In the meantime, Stalin, like the 1804 coronation of Napoleon and his Francification of Europe through war, was a force of historical necessity who would secure the political expansion of socialism.

Lukács’ framing fit well into the terms of dominant politics at the time. Leaders of Communist Parties and staunch anti-communists alike agreed that Stalin was necessarily the personification of Communism. Other revolutionaries, of course, objected to such linear, monovocal interpretations of historical necessity. Ex-Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist Victor Serge, for example, wrote: “It is often said that ‘the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse—and which he may have carried in him since his birth—Is that very sensible?”¹⁷⁴ The global Left Opposition was the inheritor of these many other germs of Bolshevism. Non-Bolshevik communists defended their independence from Moscow on principle. Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker, writing in his monumental Nationalism and Culture (1937), objected to the belief that there was no choice but that of fascism or official Communism. Invoking the very same anti-fascism that Marxist-Leninists like Lukács had dedicated themselves to, Rocker wrote:

“The arbitrary and brutal suppression of every other faction and of all freedom of opinion, the reduction of every sphere of public life to the iron control of the state, the omnipotence of an unrestrained and unscrupulous police system which interferes in the most intimate affairs of human beings and supervises every breath of the individual, the unexampled disregard for human life which shrinks from no means of clearing disagreeable elements out of the way—this and much more has taken on in Bolshevist Russia the same scope as in the countries of Hitler and Mussolini.”¹⁷⁵

These critics of Stalin’s reign considered the Soviet Union to have consummated the despotic tendencies of the modern national state rather than realized any of the libertarian hopes of communism. Lukács, of course, had a justification for his position built into his explanation of it. The young Hegel, like Hölderlin, had drawn inspiration from the participatory democracy of Athens, in which any citizens who joined the public assemblies could decide the course of the polity. Even in his later career, Hegel searched after “the harmony between individual morality and the ethics of society that had obtained in Greece.”¹⁷⁶ The primordial and heroic unity of the Greek demos, however, could not but be limited by the fact that citizens were slaveholders and workers were slaves, mere instruments of the people. The citizens did not labor, and so they did not seek to master nature—thus the doctrine of Stoicism, which taught conformity with nature. Only labor could remake the world, actualizing Spirit in its own world—society, where the Concept is itself a reality in practice. The world of labor, after a long historical development, would become the space for the striving of a total personality:

“As state power is the simple substance, so too is it the universal ‘work’—the absolute ‘heart of the matter’ itself in which individuals find their essential nature expressed, and where their separate individuality is merely a consciousness of their universality. It is also the ‘work’ and the simple result from which the sense that it results from their doing has vanished; it remains the absolute foundation and subsistence of all that they do. This simple, ethereal substance of their life is, in virtue of this determination of their unchangeable self-identity, [mere] being and, in addition, merely a being-for-another. It is thus directly the opposite of itself, wealth. Although this is indeed something passive, something devoid of inner worth, it is equally the perpetually produced result of the labour and activity of all, just as it is dissipated again in the enjoyment of all. It is true that in the enjoyment, the individuality develops an awareness of himself as a particular individual, but this enjoyment itself is the result of the general activity, just as reciprocally, wealth produces universal labour and enjoyment for all. The actual has simply the spiritual significance of being immediately universal.”¹⁷⁷

Like Hegel, Lukács had also set out in search of Greek fullness and had come to its power of realization on labor—the difference was that he had done so in a time when the working class was erupting into a world revolution. Lukács believed that Hegel’s idealization of the Napoleonic Imperial state, which he veiled in order to avoid accusations of treason, was the only option available to him as a progressive bourgeois limited by his own class standpoint. In the construction of a vast legal state and civil service, there worked the striving of Spirit as absolute freedom in the state, which Hegel considered to be a “real general will, the will of all individuals as such. For will is in itself the consciousness of personality, or of each, and it is as this genuine actual will that it ought to be, as the self-conscious essence of each and every personality, so that each, undivided from the whole, always does everything, and what appears as done by the whole is the direct and conscious deed of each.”¹⁷⁸ Lukács, thinking from the standpoint of his idealized proletariat, thought that the “realization of a state in which spirit exists for itself, its elevation above the division of society into estates each with its own sharply distinct point of view, can only be annulled in the Hegelian sense, i.e. preserved at the same time as it is annulled, if a concept of complete equality can be discovered, with the aid of which spirit really can recognize itself.”¹⁷⁹ True equality, rather than merely formal equality, would actualize the general will of society as a practical force. Lukács, of course, believed that this equality could be perceived in the collective worker of socialism. He weighed this as the subject which had inherited the tasks of the progressive bourgeoisie. With justification, of course—the Soviets had conducted campaigns of Westernization in Asia, built up a national industrial force, waged a campaign of political and military defense against ‘decaying’ imperialism, and set out to conquer all of reality through work.

Even while Hegel rejected democracy and identified ethical life with a total state, even while he critiqued the self-destructiveness of ascendant capitalism while attempting to resolve its problems through the state, Lukács believed that his conciliatory tendencies stemmed from “the understanding and the recognition of the actual existence and ultimately the progressive nature of capitalism.”¹⁸⁰ The passage from Hegel’s bourgeois self-consciousness and the dialectical materialism of “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” would be the insight that the social totality “always constitutes an objective unity, albeit a dynamic, contradictory one” through the struggle of classes.¹⁸¹ Though Lukács had reconsidered his youthful identification of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history, he still perceived this future human totality as theoretically expressed in the universal world-making mission of the proletarian faction. He still believed that the meek shall inherit the earth, but not through moral force alone. Drawing a comparison between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Goethe’s Faust, he perceived the true throughline of the progressive bourgeoisie and proletarian DiaMat as the recognition of “the principle of human labour as the key to the self-creation of man.”¹⁸²

His engagement with Hegel was the first part of Lukács’ philosophical case for the positive historical mission of the Popular Front and anti-fascism. In 1940, Lukács set to work on a study of Goethe’s Faust to continue his argument. In both works, Lukács treated the accomplishment of a truly united German people as a revolutionary task. He later said that “the failure of the [1524-1525] Peasants’ war produced not, as in Poland, for example, a feudal democracy of nobles, but again a variation of absolute monarchy; nevertheless a specific variation, purely reactionary and anti-national: the German petty principalities.”¹⁸³ The petty egoism and personal despotism of this system of principalities in the Holy Roman Empire “in every way obstructed the formation of a progressive national culture.”¹⁸⁴ With the rise of capitalist imperialism in Germany, the long and irrational legacy of the Junkers’ selfish egoism in place of revolutionary bourgeois patriotism found new expression in the racist Aryanism of the Nazis. Goethe, in the light of the modern struggle of Nazism and Communism, appeared as a great Weimar bourgeois progressive and critic of Prussian irrationalism who had seen through to the way past this dilemma—the development of the productive forces. This, Lukács argued, was the very subject matter of Faust itself.

To get to the point that he could compose Faust, however, Goethe had to undergo his own personal development. Goethe, like Hegel, had begun as a Romantic, first achieving literary fame through the celebrated epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The novel depicts a personal tragedy, in which a young man’s unrequited love for a married woman culminated in his refusal to compromise his Romantic ideals for middle class respectability and commits suicide. Werther, Lukács observed, “is destroyed in a conflict common to the whole of bourgeois society.”¹⁸⁵ Though Goethe never abandoned the passion which inspired Werther, Lukács noted that he “experienced the disintegration of the heroic illusions of the pre-revolutionary period and yet he held fast to his humanistic ideals in a unique way, representing them in a more comprehensive and richer form in their conflict with bourgeois society.”¹⁸⁶

In the wake of the 1789 French Revolution, Goethe penned the philosophical novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795). Striving beyond the personal tragedy of Werther, Goethe depicted Wilhelm Meister’s abandonment of the world of business and initiation of a journey in pursuit of the fullest education in the use of his abilities and the most beautiful possible experience of life. Lukács argued that the “the humanist social criticism” of the novel “aimed not only at the capitalistic division of labour, but also at the constriction and deformation of human nature due to all constraints resulting from the existence and consciousness of social rank.”¹⁸⁷ Goethe, however, also used the novel to criticize the character type of bohemian Romantics, whom Meister comes to estimate as an impotent and superstitious lot. Romanticism is “false” because “it has no home in bourgeois life. This homelessness necessarily possesses a seductively poetic power, for it corresponds exactly to the direct and spontaneous rebellion against the prose of capitalism. This directness, however, is seductive, but not fruitful; it does not overcome the prose, but rather bypasses it, ignores its essential problem, thus allowing it to flourish undisturbed.”¹⁸⁸ Goethe’s hope for a “new poetry of life,” the “poetry of the harmonious human being who daily masters life through action” could only establish itself through an attentive critique of the very capitalism that threatens it.¹⁸⁹

Legends of educated men making a deal with the devil for worldly power had circulated in Europe since the late Middle Ages. The Faust legend emerged as a variation of it during the Renaissance, initially as a popular tale and later as a series of popular plays and pamphlets. Lukács believed that such legends “are great real and historical tendencies of life restored to their essence and concentrated on this level into concrete characters by the poetic effort of the people.”¹⁹⁰ Only a great artist and educator, however, could introduce cohesive and comprehensive thought into this poetic effort. Goethe altered the Faust legend from a religious protest against the morals of the urban bourgeoisie into an allegory for the rise of the bourgeoisie. In this, he did not act alone, but carried out “the continuation of a folk creation, the creation of a great figure who could represent a folk destiny.”¹⁹¹ Reflecting on the thoughts of the original folk story, Goethe the intellectual brought forth the “problem of understanding nature, the problem of knowledge in general, and that of the relationship between thought and action (all three questions in the last analysis form only one).”¹⁹² The one problem that they all constituted, in the “universal poem” of Goethe’s Faust, was that of “an individual whose experiences, destiny, and development are supposed to represent at the same time the progress and destiny of the whole species.”¹⁹³

Lukács drew out universal lessons of history from this problem. In all of history, “the unceasing progress of the human species results from a chain of individual tragedies. The tragedies occurring in the microcosm of the individual are the disclosure of the ceaseless progress in the macrocosm of the species”¹⁹⁴ Goethe’s poem explores the question of whether this progress can perhaps end not in individual tragedy, but in the individual’s realization of their own personality in the species itself. Even with all of his education, as an elderly and dusty scholar disconnected from the great working organism of humanity, Faust has no power to do anything but participate in the boring and self-aggrandizing life of academia. In tomes of occult alchemical lore, he searches ceaselessly for the secrets of the cosmos that might empower him to live a satisfying life. On the appearance of Mephisto, the opportunity to empower his striving presents itself. In their pact, Mephisto offers Faust “the pleasures of life,” while Faust seeks “not the enjoyment of life (this is only a means and medium) but the realization, the development of all his individual possibilities, so that, by being put to the test in the world, he might penetrate, come to know, and dominate reality.”¹⁹⁵ This, ultimately, is what grants a universal human significance to Faust’s personality. Mephisto, on the other hand, seeks to drag him down into nothing more than the empty decadence of luxury and hedonism.

Lukács interpreted the relationship between the first part of the tragedy, published in 1808, and the tragedy’s second part, published in 1832, as that of the microcosm to the macrocosm. The tragedy of the microcosm ends with Faust’s corruption of Gretchen, and her rejection of his Satanic powers in favor of her own moral fortitude. If one only read the first part, it would remain uncertain whether Faust would be damned or not. Only Gretchen adheres to something universal in her Christian ethical beliefs, being drawn up into Heaven after her death, while Faust’s tragedy can only continue in the macrocosm of the working world. The second part therefore commences with Mephisto playing the part of a fool in the court of the Holy Roman Empire, suggesting the introduction of paper money in place of gold in order to save the Emperor’s finances by stimulating the economic activity of the Empire with public debt. In this episode, Lukács recognized Goethe associating Mephisto with capital: “If we consider the magical effects produced by Mephistopheles, especially in the first part, we see in essence this magical enlargement of the radius of human action by means of money such as Marx analysed it[...] in the waning feudal world Mephisto becomes the inventor of paper money, the symbol of the dominion of money over conditions in general. And, without a revolution of the relations of production, without a development of the productive forces, the petrifaction and decomposition of these conditions is accelerated by the infiltration of money.”¹⁹⁶

Mephisto’s future, as the power of capital, was to reinforce the worst aspects of German feudalism while bringing about the economic ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. In essence, Mephisto drew out the elements of capitalism which, after the failed revolution of the German Peasants’ War, would provide a social basis for the hierarchical personalism and selfishness of capitalist society. While capital functions as a devilish power, it began as a useful power in the hands of a bourgeoisie with a humanist worldview. Faust, using Mephisto’s powers, “finds his field of activity in the subjection of nature to human action” and brings about the commercialization and urbanization of society.¹⁹⁷ Mephisto, on the other hand, seeks to bring about “the bestialization of man” and the reduction of capitalist society from a world of self-cultivation to a “spiritual animal kingdom.”¹⁹⁸ Faust can only overcome this corrupting power of Mephisto through an ethic aiming at the “mastery of passion, its ennoblement, its orientation toward the really great goals of the human species.”¹⁹⁹

On falling unconscious, Faust enters the deepest depths of his psyche. Sinking into “The eternal mind in eternal self-conversation./Surrounded by the forms of all things possible,” Faust encounters the Mothers.²⁰⁰ This is identical to unconscious nature and the entire history of humanity which each of us inherit. Faust, a soul who wishes above all else to penetrate reality, is rejected by the Spirit of Earth. She, humanity’s primordial Mother, does not embrace a loving son in Faust; he, in turn, blames Mephisto, who “In my own eyes and with a whisper turns/All the gifts you gave me into nothing.”²⁰¹ Mephisto, the spirit of negativity, dissolves the original unity of humanity and nature. Faust, like Goethe, continued to seek after his Mother in every woman, seeking to find an inspiration for “a philosophy which transcends the solely contemplative, dead objectivity, and the disunity between the knowledge of nature and human activity.”²⁰² The entire history of human society, in this interpretation, begins with the prohibition of incest, which first organized the human animal into a social system of kinship, and is driven throughout its various episodes by a longing to return to and possess its mother for itself. Lukács and Goethe both thought of historical progress from the depths of the Oedipus complex. Their hope of a total human personality, accomplished through the total rational mastery of nature and society, is a hope of infinite self-incest.

The Oedipal dilemma of both tales, that of Faust and that of dialectical materialism, drives the subject matter to seek the Mother-ideal in society instead of nature. Initially, Mephisto attempts to tempt Faust with a vision of a scantily clad, exotic woman—Helen of Troy. Faust falls in love with Helen, destroying the illusion with rage when her lover Paris abducts her. On Mephisto’s drawing Faust back into unconsciousness, Faust seeks out the real Helen, begins a passionate relationship with her, marries her, and comes to realize that she resembles Gretchen. Lukács wrote that the passage of this fantasy from beastly sensuousness to spiritual love represented “the evolution of Greek beauty from its primitive, still natural, partially oriental beginnings.”²⁰³ Helen, and therefore Greek beauty, could only take on a spiritual and rational existence by abandoning these “oriental beginnings” and entering history. Helen’s transformation “signifies as a reality the renascence of antiquity, by which the spectral world of the Middle Ages is exposed for what it is; that renascence whose gradually ascending and brightening light forever dispels the realm of darkness.”²⁰⁴ The Euro-bourgeois Enlightenment Westernized the democratic life of Greece, and thus elevated it to a universalizable form which could be realized across the world. Democracy, founded on Western rationalism, becomes the political and ethical form for the redemption of Faust’s strivings.

After suddenly being magically relocated to a mountaintop in Germany, Faust sees a cloud rise and begin to divide into two. One cloud shows the face of Gretchen, who represents Christian universalism, and ascends upwards into heaven. The other cloud bears the face of Helen, and sets off to the East. After the French Revolution passed away by initiating a long era of partisan struggle and rationalizing development in the West, the democratic hopes of the Enlightenment would find their new realization in the East. Lukács would add—in the Russian Revolution. After this vision, Faust begins to break from the grip of Mephisto. Though Goethe and Faust oppose all social revolutions, their attempts at inwardly rejecting the diabolic temptation of capital and Mephisto are futile—”The development of the productive forces in bourgeois society is possible only under capitalism.”²⁰⁵ The content of Faust’s final fantasy, however, is what elevates him into a species-man and saves his soul from Mephisto. He imagines an association of people working to master the forces of nature for the good of each and all, finally ceasing his striving in a hope “To stand with free men on ground that is free!”²⁰⁶ Faust’s final victory over Mephisto and ascent into Heaven, with the assent of Mother Mary, stems from the fact that his hope expresses “for the first time, in his striving for the highest goals of the human species, which he has realized until now only in himself, only in the development of his own personality (for the human species, of course), this conscious desire: to struggle for these goals in common with his fellow-men on the basis of freedom.”²⁰⁷

This free commonwealth of humanity could only appear as a progressive orientation towards the future in bourgeois men like Faust or Goethe. They could only serve this future humanity by assisting in the development of humanity’s productive forces, which would be under the command of Mephisto and capital until men who could master their own labor mastered society. Lukács’ idealized proletariat, then, were the inheritors of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian faction of the world struggle between renewal and decadence represented “the possibility of a perfection of man on earth, a perfection of man as a physical and spiritual personality, a perfection founded on his mastery of the external world and the elevation of his own nature to spirituality, to culture and harmony, without a denial of its natural character.”²⁰⁸

In reality, of course, this was only Lukács’ high-philosophical idealization of his party’s aims. In the late 1930s, the ethical orientation to humanity, in a partisan framing, meant becoming only the footsoldiers of humanity, subjected to the mastery of those who commanded and represented the whole. The people of Lukács’ time wanted to be instruments of something much bigger than them, which dictated that their subjective duty was to do what was necessary to fulfill a destiny. Thus the constant campaigns against selfishness. In the Soviet Union, the Gulags attempted to redeem the non-conformists by imposing hard labor on petty delinquents and political dissidents. The exile practices of Tsardom, which often left the option of forgiveness through renunciation open to dissidents, took on new life in an attempt to bring people back into the fold of the collective worker through redemptive labor.

Conformity and populism went hand in hand. The society of the Soviet Union was hostile to any who appeared to be upstarts, challenging the personality of the whole. Old Bolsheviks were purged as men who had fallen out of step with the people. Yet the centralization of the party-state was carried out through factionalism itself. And the campaign against upstarts could harm the whole of Soviet society as much as it reinforced its solidity. In 1940, Lavrentiy Beria, new head of the secret police after the execution of Yezhov, initiated a purge of the Army to prevent any officers from getting too big for their britches and potentially being poached by foreign powers. The attempt at asserting the authority of the party over the military, and by extension over the state, could not have come at a worse time for the Soviet people. Just after the Soviet Union had decapitated its own military, the Nazis initiated Operation Barbarossa and commenced a genocidal invasion on June 22, 1941.

The ensuing course of the Second World War is among the most significant events of the 20th century. The Nazis conducted war as a total campaign of extermination, seeking to eliminate Soviet Jewry, destroy the party-state, and enslave the Soviet workers. They looked on the Soviet people as a cringing mass of beasts of burden; the Soviet people unleashed the fury of the collective worker on them in return. While the Nazis imposed the terror of the Einzatsgruppen and the death machinery of the concentration camps on the peoples of the East, the Soviet resistance became a veritable people’s war of total mobilization. The Soviets remembered it for generations as the Great Patriotic War.

The Soviet people showed a great and universal heroism against the Nazi regime, contributing the most crucial forces of the Allied war effort against the Axis. It was the Red Army which ultimately liberated Auschwitz, the site of the Nazis’ total instrumentalization of life into a sadistic, yet impersonal machinery of mass extermination. At the same time, the Soviet war effort drew increasingly on the terms and practices of nationalism as their framing for liberation rather than of world socialist revolution. Even their appeals to the German underground resistance were framed as a patriotic struggle of national liberation from a caste of rapacious imperialists, the so-called National Socialists. In a 1941 speech to the Soviet public, Stalin asked: “Can the Hitlerites be regarded as nationalists? No, they cannot. Actually, the Hitlerites are now not nationalists but imperialists[...] Can the Hitlerites be regarded as socialists? No, they cannot. Actually, the Hitlerites are the sworn enemies of socialism, arrant reactionaries and Black-Hundreds who have robbed the working class and the peoples of Europe of the most elementary democratic liberties.”²⁰⁹

Within the Soviet Union, the very same invocation of a ‘true’ nationalist socialism grew into the public ideology of the state. After having become almost unheard-of since 1917, public expressions of ethnic Russian patriotism grew into a universal genre of the Union. The place of the Internationale, song of the world revolution, was taken by patriotic hymns. While anti-semitic nationalists in occupied Ukraine joined the Nazis to break from the Union, the Union invoked Russia as the universal motherland of all its members.²¹⁰ One popular patriotic song, originating from Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), which depicted the invasion of Novgorod by Teutonic knights in 1240, called out to the people: “Rise to arms, arise, native Mother Russia./In our Russia great, in our native Russia/No foe shall live.”²¹¹ This patriotism was not only directed against invaders, but those populations whose loyalty to the Union was considered suspect. In 1943-1944, Stalin oversaw the mass deportation and forced relocation of Central Asian peoples and Soviet Koreans in the east, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands on the way to their exile.²¹²

In Asia, the Soviet Union behaved quite a bit like the old Russian Empire. During the 1941 Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran, whose monarchy had allied with the Nazis, the Soviets collaborated with the British imperialists to impose oil concessions. The Soviet Union, by then a prominent petrostate, was seeking to expand its resource base even by seizing control over the resources of other countries. The logic which prevailed within its territory, total mobilization expanded into the state’s behavior outwards. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt later weighed such behavior as begging the question: “Who is the great appropriator, the great divider and distributor of our planet, the manager and planner of unified world production?”²¹³ Though Schmitt may have answered such a question with the use of racial epithets, it touched on the basic logic of wars of total mobilization as also global territorial wars. This character even manifested in the attempts of non-Western national movements at achieving independence and the multipolarization of the world order. The Axis found willing collaborators in India’s Subhas Chandra Bose, Algeria’s Malek Bennabi, and Mexico’s José Vasconcelos against the British, French, and North American empires, respectively. At the same time, pro-Allied resistance movements fought to victory and, in a handful of cases, independence against Vichy France in North Africa and Southeast Asia, the Japanese Empire in East and Southeast Asia, Fascist Italy in the Balkans and Africa, and the Nazi Empire in Eastern Europe. These were the democratic and nationalist expressions of territoriality.

The logic of territoriality reached its absolute, global point in the threat of total annihilation—the invention of the atom bomb and its use against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This infernal power of absolute negativity became the characteristic threat of the Cold War after the conclusion of World War II with the dividing up of the world between a U.S.-led bloc and a U.S.S.R.-led bloc. The actual use of the bomb in strategy was limited by the absoluteness of the threat, the mutual assurance that if one power used it, the other would to, and that all would be destroyed. In practice, the nuke served as an instrument to globalize territorial Realpolitik. Where geopolitical competition reached a breaking point, as during the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, all life on earth dwelled under the Damocle’s Sword of total annihilation.

The Soviet acquisition of the power of the nuclear bomb in 1949 only reinforced its leadership’s conservatism. Stalin approached politics with the political conservatism of territorial self-preservation and expansion. When Kim Il-sung, head of the Worker’s Party of Korea, approached him in 1950 for support in a plan to invade the U.S.-backed south and reunify the country under a socialist system, Stalin was hesitant.²¹⁴ Only by convincing Mao Zedong, head of the new People’s Republic of China, was Kim able to secure Stalin’s support. Nevertheless, the war effort against the south and the U.S. was primarily fought by Korean and Chinese soldiers, with little involvement by any Soviet citizens except for Soviet Koreans. Faustian Marxism, which had once threatened the entire world with revolutionary war, had become aged and conservative. The policy of Soviet leadership was now “the policy of peace and security, the policy of the equality and friendship of the peoples.”²¹⁵

Postbellum Soviet society settled into a lingering routine of conformity. The bloody violence of its inner political struggles, episodes in a world civil war, passed into the outer geopolitical competition of the Cold War. Stalin had dissolved the Comintern in 1943 in order to reorient the efforts of the Communist Parties in the World War to national liberation. The Marxist-Leninists of the world simply kept up their habit of conformity to the party, which had developed into a Moscow-centric behavior under the Comintern, as a force of cohesion within their own Communist Parties. The German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote that “One single man may have two eyes/But the Party has a thousand/One single man may see a town/But the Party sees six countries./One single man can spare a moment/But the Party has many moments/One single man can be annihilated/But the Party can’t be annihilated/For its techniques are those of its philosophers/Which are derived from awareness of reality/And are destined soon to transform it/As soon as the masses make them their own.”²¹⁶ The hope of Communist conformists was that the whole would be a rational consciousness elevated above the caprices of selfishness—but an organization is a self-preserving organism driven by needfulness just as much as any person. Democratic centralism, which was supposed to make everything transparent to everyone, became a technique of eliciting its members’ frantic rationalization of any means necessary to preserve the unity of their faction. The party was more like a gang than the organizational embodiment of social self-consciousness.

Of course, not all members of the Communist Parties were blind appendages of the center. They had all begun as voluntary associations of partisans, with each drawn into the association for their own reasons. Even as the party was a “new power that arises from the fusion of many forces into a single force,” it was also a site for “a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits.’”²¹⁷ This freedom of spirit led some to reflect on the actual significance of the Soviet experiment for communism. While it had wandered quite far from Marx’s hope of an association of free producers, it had drawn continental masses of people into the enthusiasm of a movement which had as its final aim a universal community. French Communist Henri Lefebvre recognized a Faustian accomplishment in Soviet socialism:

“In his megalomania Stalin plotted gigantic operations which were intended to alter the face of the planet; under the organization of socialist power, men would change the course of rivers, move mountains, modify climates. The great exploits of modern technology came just at the right time to appropriate Stalin’s dreams, inflating them and giving them a reality and a new meaning. Interplanetary rockets, artificial satellites, the exploration of the universe are no longer dreams, and yet they excite the imagination in a way which allows for certain seemingly pressing problems to be avoided or temporarily shelved: the transformation of everyday life, man’s appropriation of his own specifically human powers (desire, for example), the metamorphosis of the social environment (by means of a new art or concrete poetry, or by something other than art or poetry): every thing which had been essential to the Marxist project!”²¹⁸

The life of Soviet socialism in this era was one which strove infinitely to subordinate its world to its own desires and plans, to remake the world in the image of work with no remainder. In this, a gigantic human power was unleashed, and communism became a distant ideal which inspired the accumulation of a national capital. Stalin was the apotheosis of Faustian Marxism. What Napoleon was to German idealism, Stalin was to worldview Marxism. He gave theory its practical basis in the actuality of the Faustian revolution.

Stalin was only a destiny for those who chose him, while he was a brute fact for those who only fell under him. Lukács later recalled that he had been drawn to Stalin for his critique of Georgi Plekhanov’s orthodox Marxism, in which Stalin argued that Marxism was rather “a view which rejected the idea that Marxism was just one socio-economic theory among others. Instead Stalin saw it as a totalizing world-view. This implied that it must also contain a Marxist aesthetics which did not have to be borrowed from Kant or anyone else.”²¹⁹ Lukács attempted to salvage Bolshevism’s Faustian impulse in the realm of aesthetics through a sophisticated democratic realism. This realist art was meant to inspire the passion necessary for the victory of the proletariat in the great battle of democracy. The personal tragedy of the Faustian old guard was consummated in their alliance with the demonic pragmatism of the party-state. In their intellectual production during the 1930s and 1940s, they scampered to derive general principles from the tactical expediencies of the Soviet Union.

Encircled by enemies and struggling to build up its collective labor-power, the force of necessity, of self-preservation, converted Bolshevism’s democratic demand of self-mastery into a call to perfect the planning apparatus and its system of one-man management. In the future, Lukács and other pro-Soviet reformers set to work trying to make this system live up to its goals, to make it capable of consciously mastering itself by understanding its own historical mission of communism. They became like the Encyclopedists in the court of Catherine the Great, seeking the victory of Enlightenment through the reform of an apparatus of autocratic control. To realize their ideals, they entered the court of power, appealing to the rulers of the state as the only people who could set their plans into motion. They spoke sweetly of their visions to these commanders of the army of labor, reminding them that “as for the earth, you possess it already.”²²⁰

Next: The People and the Earth, Part III of the Tragedy

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2. Goethe, Faust, p. 12.

3. Goethe, Faust, p. 12.

4. Goethe, Faust, p. 48.

5. Goethe, Faust, p. 48.

6. Goethe, Faust, p. 58.

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8. Goethe, Faust, p. 18.

9. Goethe, Faust, p. 49.

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26. Zamyatin, We, p. 96.

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28. Zamyatin, We, p. 162.

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126. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, pp. 302-305.

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130. Quoted in Sarah Davies and James Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order (Yale University Press, 2014), p. 136.

131. Goethe, Faust, p. 62.

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137. Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline,” Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (MIT Press, 1981), p. 85.

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146. Andrei Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature—The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, ed. H.G. Scott (Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 22.

147. Nikolai Bukharin, “Poetry, Poetics, and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.,” in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, ed. H.G. Scott (Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), p. 256.

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158. Nikolai Bukharin, “Last Plea—Evening Session March 12,” March 12, 1938, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/3.htm.

159. Leon Trotsky, “On the Kirov Assassination,” December 1934, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/12/kirov.htm.

160. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, trans. Benjamin Sher (Yale University Press, 2010), p. 219.

161. Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941 (Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 138-140.

162. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 199-200.

163. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, pp. 327-330.

164. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, pp. 85-87.

165. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, pp. 218-219.

166. Lukács, Record of a Life, p. 97.

167. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (MIT Press, 1993)., pp. 126-127.

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170. Leon Trotsky, “Trotsky Indicts the Kremlin’s Role in Europe’s Catastrophe,” Socialist Appeal, June 22, 1940, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/06/indicts.html.

171. Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline,” Essays on Realism, p. 108.

172. M.B. Adams, “The Politics of Human Heredity in the USSR, 1920-1940,” Genome 31, no. 2 (1989): 879–84, https://doi.org/10.1139/g89-155.

173. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press, 1975), p. 202.

174. Victor Serge, “A Letter and Some Notes,” New International, February 1939, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/otherdox/whatnext/serglets.html.

175. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Black Rose Books, 1998), p. 533.

176. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 504.

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178. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 357.

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180. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 204.

181. Lukács, The Young Hegel, pp. 373-374.

182. Lukács, The Young Hegel, p. 567.

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184. Lukács, Goethe and His Age, p. 8.

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207. Lukács, Goethe and His Age, p. 215.

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210. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 346-347.

211. “Arise, Russian People,” The Most Popular Songs from the Soviet Union (Stinson Trading Company, 1942), p. 44, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/culture/music/songs-from-soviet-union.pdf.

212. Suny, The Soviet Experiment p. 389.

213. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press, 2006), p. 335.

214. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 405.

215. Joseph Stalin, “The People Do Not Want War,” May 1, 1946, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1946/05/01.htm.

216. Bertolt Brecht, “The Decision,” in Collected Plays, ed. John Willett, vols. 3, Part 2 (Methuen, 1997), p. 83.

217. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 443.

218. Henri Lefebvre, “On Irony, Maieutic, and History,” Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959-May 1961, trans. John Moore (Verso Books, 1995), pp. 30-31.

219. Lukács, Record of a Life, p. 86.

220. Goethe, Faust, p. 219.