Sunday, March 13, 2005
(12:01 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
An Analysis of Stalinism
I have already linked to the Žižek article on "The Two Totalitarianisms." I'd like to venture a few comments. First, a quote:We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, ‘administered’ society; Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism. How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real trauma?This has been a persistent theme of Žižek's for the past couple years; at the lecture I attended in the fall of 2003, he was already castigating the Frankfurt School for this omission. Against John Holbo, I would argue that Žižek has never failed to condemn the Stalinist horror as a genuine horror; what he is trying to do in those passages in which he discusses Stalinism (this shows up in The Puppet and the Dwarf and Organs without Bodies in particular) is to develop the theory for which he so often calls -- which can often look disturbingly like apologetics. I think where he's going with the gestures toward Paul and toward Christian fundamentalism is an attempt to develop a historical materialist idea of heresy, a way of excluding Stalinism in the same way that early Christianity was able to exclude Gnosticism (even though, as with Leninism and Stalinism, there were aspects of the Christian proclamation that incited the Christian development of Gnosticism).
The problem is that, as someone says in a quote that John Holbo shared with me in private correspondance, Žižek doesn't seem to believe that books should be about something. We await in vain Žižek's Big Book of Stalinism -- instead, we need someone like Jodi Dean to piece together all the parts where he's talking about Stalinism and show how they hang together. Of course, it's possible that his discussion of the heresy of Stalinism will start to coalesce in the way his discussions of liberal democracy coalesced in the early works -- but since he's apparently decided that it's an absolute moral imperative to publish every few months, I wonder if he's actually going to have time to do the detailed research that would be necessary. A theory of Stalinism, of "what went wrong," would be a genuine contribution; maybe the Christian stuff will have turned out to be a necessary side road in getting to that point.
I agree with Žižek that the general liberal attempt to "symmetrize" Stalinism and Nazism is an oversimplification, and I think that liberal arguments that simply refer to Stalinist crimes as a way of countering any gesture toward the idea of a revolution being worth the risk (as Holbo does in his article) are not adequate or at least aren't hitting their mark -- especially since those arguments never seem to refer to the crimes committed "off the record" by liberal democracies such as the United States, always seem to assume in a totally off-the-cuff manner that such features as the Vietnam War or the farce of the Iraq War are "accidental" features of liberal-capitalist democracy in a way that Stalinist excess simply is not an "accidental" feature of communist revolution. Think how outraged a liberal would be if a critic of liberal democracy simply quoted in an off-hand manner the diary of a Vietnamese woman who lost her family and was herself crippled in a napalm run, as some kind of proof that liberal democracy is not worth the risk, or statistics on mass starvation in many parts of the world as showing that a global capitalist revolution is not automatically going to solve every problem -- or worse, taunting the liberal democrats as believing in "a few broken eggs," when the omelette is nowhere to be found, or at least is found only in very limited circumstances. Yet that seems just as true of global capitalism as it was of the Soviet experiment -- but we're trained to only see the bad parts of the Soviet experiment (which are considerable) and only see the good parts of the liberal-capitalist democracy experiment (which are considerable).
Any good aspects of communism are supposed to be accidental triumphs of the human spirit, while any bad aspects of liberal-capitalist democracy are unfortunate accidents. Well, why can't we say -- apparently, if you want to get to democracy, for instance, in Iraq, you have to kill 100,000 people, and turn children into quadruple amputees, and destroy entire villages, and ruin an already ruined infrastructure? Why is it that all of us left-wing critics of the Iraq War are supposed to put our tails between our legs and admit we were wrong when, after 100,000 deaths and countless other lives effectively ruined, a lot of people went to their polling places and some of their representatives are trying to form a constitution through reasoned debate? "I know that I've spread death and destruction throughout an already humiliated people -- but I believe that the horrors I've inflicted will be redeemed -- on the strength of the absurd." How many people are we supposed to sacrifice on the altar of parliamentary democracy -- when the electoral system in even the oldest democracy is a creaking, barely functional machine? Why isn't that a valid argument to make, whereas anyone who starts even broaching the topic of a revolution is shamed for advocating a return to the gulag?
So yeah, we need an analysis of what went wrong in Stalinism beyond calling it the absolute evil.
