As a political gnosis, Bolshevik philosophy proposed the opposite of the young Marx's emphasis on the relatively spontaneous revolutionary development of class consciousness. For Marx, as the young Lukács showed, the revolutionary class symbolized the viewpoint of totality, thereby creating the epistemic premises for acceding to historical truth. For Lenin, the party was the totality—and dialectical logic served to render this oxymoron palatable to committed militants.50 This was the origin of the major conflicts between Lenin and Luxemburg and one of the main distinctions between Soviet and Western Marxism. Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the path taken by the Bolsheviks toward the totalization of power when she wrote that the development of their revolution “moves naturally in an ascending line: from moderate beginnings to ever-greater radicalization of aims and, parallel with that, from a coalition of classes and parties to the sole rule of the radical party [my emphasis].”51 In the same criticism of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg issued a strong warning concerning the methods of preserving power adopted by Lenin and his party. She cautioned that the elimination of democracy, with its institutions that though cumbersome did prevent abuses of power, would lead to the mortification of the first workers' state: “To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”52 Luxemburg's words were echoed later by one of Lenin's closest collaborators, Nikolai Bukharin, who, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, concluded that the notion that “all tasks … can be solved by Communist decree” was “Communist conceit.”53 A few years later he added that “we do not carry out experiments, we are not vivisectionists, who … operate on a living organism with a knife; we are conscious of our historic responsibility.”54 This thinking, however, did not prevent Bukharin from purging individuals perceived as deviationists within the party. Despite moderation, his behavior essentially reflected the organizational ethos of Leninism: dictatorship over and uncompromising struggle against the the party's enemies and heretics. No wonder that in 1927 Bukharin was denounced by an old comrade as the “jailer of the best Communists.”55
The Communist Manifesto foreshadowed this fundamental schism by advancing in two directions that would be further elaborated in mature Marxian theory: on one hand, it emphasized the self-development of class consciousness; on the other, it glorified violence. The bastardization of Marxism in Lenin's experiment cannot be dissociated from the attacks on bourgeois rights and the criminalization of private property in the founding fathers' writings. This was of course legitimized by high historical necessity, the ultimate end that would somehow justify the cruelty of the means: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”56 Moreover, one need go no further than the famous opening lines of part 1 of theManifesto for evidence of this monism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”57
From the outset, the Manifesto announced what the influential Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov called a “monist view of history,” according to which all historical conflict is reducible to class conflict and all political debate is reducible to the question of which class you represent or support.58 In History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukács reads the thought of Marx as an “expression” of ‘the standpoint of the proletariat.’ Lukács offers an ingenious interpretation of Marxism as the unfolding ‘truth’ of the class struggle. And in reducing questions of truth or falsity and right or wrong to questions of “class standpoint,” he is simply following the lead of the Manifesto. For it was Marx himself who declared, “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer…. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”59 The intellectual distance separating this formulation from the Bolshevik idea that the Communists are in possession of “politically correct” insight into the movement and the meaning of history is not far. Moreover, Marx himself consistently showed an obvious unwillingness to tolerate those socialists who did not agree with him or questioned his authority. The energy he spent denouncing such “heretics” indicates the presence of an authoritarian personality.
In the passionately incandescent lines of the Communist Manifesto, one can decipher the whole tragedy that was to follow: Lenin's forcing of the pace of history, the genesis of Bolshevism as a matrix for generalized terror, the Stalinist horrors, and the universe of the concentration camp. Nations were murdered to carry out Lenin's utopian desiderata. Social classes were victimized in the name of his abstract speculations and moral revolt. The question, therefore, is what connection exists between the Leninist exterminist project and the original Marxian salvationist fantasy. In retrospect, one can argue that Marx's oracular monism, defined by his hyperdeterministic approach, scientism, and positivism, took revenge on the ethical-libertarian dimension and laid the foundation for intolerance and repression. To elaborate on a dichotomy proposed by Karl Popper, it can be said that the moral radicalism of Marxism survived in contemporary varieties of democratic socialism. Political radicalism, with its mixture of historicism and positivism, culminated in Leninist conspiracy and dictatorship.60 Essentially, the Bolsheviks' revolutionary subjectivism was defined by the conception of parties as “oligarchies of scholars and organizers, assemblies of people who change the world through their wills, while constantly obeying the laws of history.”61