You Can't Have Marx Without Stalin

Why is Marxism so widespread and popular? Why does a system of thought in whose name an estimated 250 million people have been murdered in the Soviet Union alone keep many, many intellectuals and political activists spellbound?

Each year, university publishers and commercial presses produce hundreds of books devoted to making yet another version of Marxism palatable and understandable. Almost all proclaim to have found yet another important truth in Marxism—an improved version of what used to be thought the truth of the matter by some other loyal Marxist. Each year thousands of university-educated men and women go into the political arena defending some version of Marxist socialism or communism, all the while scorning the likes of Stalin and sometimes even Lenin.

How is this possible? Why can't these perfectly capable human beings see that the doctrine of Marxism is completely permeated with dictatorial, totalitarian prospects?

In fact, there is no mystery here. Marxism, contrary to widespread conviction, is not a grave departure from other prominent viewpoints in Western culture. For example, Marxism is altruistic through and through. From his first published writings to the last, Marx showed that he believed first and foremost in the moral imperative of individual self-sacrifice in support of humanity.

In what David McLellan calls Marx's "school-leaving examination of 1835," when he was only 17, Marx wrote:

When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egoistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.

The entire essay is filled with the spirit of this conclusion. Marx insisted that "man's nature makes it possible for him to reach his fulfillment only by working for the perfection and welfare of his society." And he believed that "if a person works only for himself he can perhaps be a famous scholar, a great wise man, a distinguished poet, but never a complete, genuine, great man."

In our modern age, the supernatural or theological justification of these ideas has fallen on hard times. But these ideas can be—and are—sustained within a secular framework. And when the altruistic ideals are shorn of their mystical underpinnings, they begin to look like real, attainable prospects. Heaven on earth appears possible if we but marshal all our efforts carefully and rationally enough. Reaching the perfection (or full maturity, or emancipation) of humanity then becomes simply an engineering problem.

So in essence Marxism perpetuates a secular version of the Christian idea, as Prof. Harry V. Jaffa pointed out in a recent centennial comment on Marx. "Communism draws upon the same capacity for a 'willing suspension of disbelief' that marks the faith of Christians," noted Jaffa. "The power of communism is its messianic promises.…The Church of Marx declares that these promises will be fulfilled because Science is Truth, and Marxism is Science."

One of the reasons, then, that Marxism is so widespread and popular is that it satisfies the visions of both mystics and materialists with its promise of heaven on earth. Its pretensions to being a science managed, initially, to hoodwink intellectuals who otherwise would have grouped Marx with William Godwin, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon—all denounced by Marx himself as utopian dreamers. Marx escaped this fate because of his ingenious, if confused, coupling of the collectivist vision of socialism with the aura of modern science. It is that false patina of science that made the real difference.

When Marx appeared on the scene, religion had already popularized the view that improvements in human and social life must ultimately come from outside, from something other than individuals. True, the objective of many religions is personal salvation. But the means to this end are said to be in God, in Jehovah, in Jesus. And although Marx brought this otherworldly force into the natural realm, he still clung to an impersonal redeeming force—the laws of history. By being brought into nature, the utopian ideal seemed far more realistic than it had within the religious context.

In short, by combining "science"—the impersonal but natural forces of history—and the promise of collective human emancipation, Marxism built on past visions while urging more modern methods. This explains much of the doctrine's appeal.

As a matter of plain fact, however, human beings cannot reform, improve, become emancipated, achieve self-perfection, or reach any other fine goals unless they individually take up the task of doing so. So the entire Marxian project is an impossible dream. And impossible dreams cannot be pursued except in fruitless and punishing ways. This is plain enough. Certainly no socialist or communist scheme has ever delivered what it promised—not one.

The impossibility of the Marxist scheme was obvious early enough. Lenin realized right away that the proletariat, which Marxists considered the only embodiment of true humanity, wouldn't do any of the fine things Marx had expected. Workers were plainly unwilling to disrupt their own comfort and material well-being to produce a massive democratic revolution.

So Lenin anointed the intellectuals as the conscience of the workers. Above the intellectuals, he erected the Communist Party elite (in the USSR, the Politburo). And to serve the guiding will of that elite, there was (and is) an army of secret police, butchers, informers, psychiatrists, and sham prosecutors and judges. Stalin developed these "scientific" techniques into the high art of massive, even global terrorism—all in the service of the impossible ideal.

But do true believers give up because of all this? The horrors of the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Holy Wars, and other bloody projects of Christianity did not put an end to this religion. Similarly, the barbarism perpetrated in the name of Marxism will not convince many people that Marxism is a dead end. Instead, thousands of Marxist intellectuals are running around patching up the true faith.

The latest effort is evident in America with the reemergence of the ideal of industrial democracy, in the guise of a system now called "economic democracy." Its contemporary advocates sometimes explicitly reject Marxism, even though many began as hard-line Marxist socialists. At other times they insist that Marx was misunderstood. In the words of Frederic L. Bender, "Nothing justifies the deeds of a perverse Marxism (e.g., that of Stalin); a proper understanding of Marxian humanism, and its betrayal, in contrast, enables us to raise afresh the question of means and to reevaluate the relevant historical, economic, and political facts."

What the economic democrats and Marxists do have in common, however, is the advocacy of what they call "democratic, worker-controlled production [which] would extend democratic choice to work, employment, income, and technology." In their book Economic Democracy, Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer go on to say that the economic democratic "reform must transfer capital from the corporations to the public, so that the people who work and consume can collectively and democratically decide what to do with it."