[PEN-L:7548] totalitarianism by Jim Devine 02 June 1999 16:19 UTC http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/jun99/msg00050.html I'm not going to get into a debate in which I disagree with both sides (Brad vs. Charles & Jim C.)
However, I have a little note on the word "totalitarianism."
The word was used a lot, with most of its usage being loose meaning "an authoritarian government I don't like." This looseness became Official Policy with Jeanne Kirkpatrick's view that "We" (the US government under Reagan) oppose totalitarianism (authoritarian governments We don't like) but support authoritarianism (authoritarian governments We like) because they are necessary evils in the battle against ... you guessed it, totalitarianism. It was an updated version of FDR's reference to Somoza as "our SOB" because he fought communism, radical nationalism, workers, peasants, and democracy, all obstacles to US foreign policy goals, i.e., making the world safe for US business. It was also simply a rhetorical expression of what had been standard Cold War policy all along, long before Reagan.
The "totalitarianism theory" is different, even though Kirkpatrick probably linked her usage and that theory in her mind. It refers to a specific theory of the nature and dynamics of USSR-type societies, as developed by people like Hannah Arendt and other leftish intellectuals who were often ex-Communists or ex-Trotskyists. (James Burnham, who went from being a comrade of Trotsky to the editorial pages of NATIONAL REVIEW contributed a lot.)
I think the best expression of the theory is Orwell's novel _1984_ (though most people forget or never knew that the book is not just a response to Stalin's Russian, Hitler's Germany, but is also responding to the war hysteria in England during WW2 and also to the beginnings of McCarthyism in the devastation of postwar England).
The thing about totalitarianism in _1984_ is that the authoritarianism is total with a capital "T." Big Brother rules Oceania _completely_, so that people don't even know exactly what year it is and people assume that the new enemy of Oceania (Eastasia) is identical to the old enemy (Eurasia). (The switch is reminiscent of attitudes in the USSR (and maybe Germany) after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed; a similar switch occured when the USSR suddenly became the "West's" Enemy at the end of WW2, after being an ally against Nazi Germany, while Nazis were brought into help run the new West Germany.) There is no civil society, with the working class ("proles") marginalized and the middle class totally co-opted. All institutions serve Big Brother and the Party of Ingsoc. (The members of Ingsoc's version of the Boy Scouts spy on their parents, turning them into the Thought Police, just like the DEA wants kids to do concerning their parents' drug use.)
Independent thought is impossible for any length of time, so that Winston Smith eventually learned to love Big Brother (just as Orwell himself, sick, broken, and in love, learned to love Big Brother and finked at the end of his life). The only opposition comes from Immanuel Goldstein (based on Trotsky) who seems to be a fiction thought up by the Thought Police to lure potential dissidents to stick their necks out so they can enjoy thought reform. Individual acts of opposition -- like Julia's wrapping of her "anti-sex league" sash tightly around her waist to emphasize her figure -- seem to do nothing but reinforce the system.
The key part of _1984_ and the totalitarianism theory is that there are _no internal contradictions_ in the system. There's No Way Out, so that the system will last forever. Even the competition (fighting over the division and redivision of what later called the Third World) from the other totalitarian states (Eastasia & Eurasia) simply reinforces the system's stability, since the Permanent War Economy not only deals with the economic contradictions of overproduction (described in the "Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism," the interesting book within the book, written by "Goldstein," which is reminiscent of Burnham's book, which highly influenced Orwell) but also provides the ideology that legitimates the system and the permanent generalized poverty, while justifying the suppression of dissidents and dissident ideologies. (This seems preminiscent of the role that the Cold war economy played in the US, though it encouraged prosperity until 1970 or so.)
The theory says that totalitarianism will last forever. The Cold Warriors modified the theory to indicate that the only Way Out was for the "West" to oppose totalitarianism in every possible way, through containment, spying, subversion, military competition, alliance with the worst thugs, etc. (But Orwell might have been right: the Cold War and its "imperialist encirclement" of the USSR and its allies and puppets probably helped to keep the USSR going for a few years.)
In the totalitarianism theory, the end of the USSR was not supposed to arise due to internal causes, like worker rebellion in Poland, by struggles for national independence as in Afghanistan, or the effort by sections of the Soviet Communist Party to benefit from "privatization." But it sure seems to have worked that way.
So the totalitarianism theory, along with Stalinism, belongs in the waste-basket of history, not only because it was a crude ideology justifying the Cold War but also because it is incoherent as a theory and doesn't fit the empirical facts. All societies with a ruling class (including bureaucratic socialism and capitalism) have contradictions, so that there are internal reasons to reject their immortality.
Jim Devine jdevine at lmumail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out of Serbia!