TELOS, SUMMER 1998 MODERNITY AND TOTALITARIANISM, L.
Pellacani
> ... Contrary to the legend spread by the Marxist-Leninist Left after the
XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.(n62) Stalinism
was not a degeneration of Leninism or a system extraneous to the communist
tradition. Rather, it was the logical outcome of Lenin's program. In
Lenin's writings, the revolution in power has the task of "clean Russian
soil of any damaging insects -- fleas, scoundrels,bedbugs, the rich,
etc."(n63) Russia is a "moral morass"(n64) that must be disinfected by
resorting to "systematic violence against the bourgeoise and its
accomplices."(n65) This is a merciless operation, but one absolutely
necessary it the "greed, the sordid, hateful, frantic greed of the money
bags"(n66) is to be uprooted. At any rate, what rights have filthy
"parasites,"(n67) who live like "vampires"(n68) feeding on the workers'
blood? To eliminate them is a moral duty. Lenin's chilling "moral
legacy" is consistent with all this. In 1922, he wrote to Stalin: "we will
purify Russia for a long time."(n69) In the same year, he sent Kutsky the
following brutally frank instructions: "To highlight a thesis of
principle, correct on the political level (and not just in a strictly
juridical sense), motivating the essence and justification of terror, its
necessity and its limits. The tribunal must not eliminate terror; to
promise that would mean deluding oneself and others; it must be justified
and legitimated on the level of principles, clearly, without falsity and
without embellishments. The formulation must be as wide as possible, since
only revolutionary justice and revolutionary consciousness will decide the
conditions of its more or less long application."(n70)
According to Lenin, having achieved the "bloody extermination of the rich,"(n71) the Bolshevik Party had to institutionalize a permanent civil war. The declared objective was the "implacable annihilation(n72) of the petty bourgeoisie and the land-owning peasants. Here Lenin's prose is brutally frank once again. Immediately after adopting the NEP to avoid the total collapse of production, he wrote: "The enemy is no longer a horde of white guards at the command of the big landowners, supported by all the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries and the international bourgeoisie. The enemy today is the daily economic reality of a country of small peasants, a country in which big industry is in ruins. The enemy today is the petty bourgeois element that surrounds us like the air and penetrates deeply into the files of the proletariat."(n73) Thus the "final struggle" --
an expression that in the Bolshevik lingo had the same meaning as the "final solution" for the Nazis -- had to be unleashed against small entrepreneurs who grow into large entrepreneurs and thus become potential regenerators of capitalism. This was because Lenin was convinced that "small industry incessantly generated capitalism and the bourgeoisie, every day, every hour, spontaneously and on a mass scale."(n74) Hence, his declaration of war against the small entrepreneur: "The Kulak is a ferocious enemy of Soviet power. Either the Kulaks will exterminate an infinite number of workers, or the workers will implacably crush the Kulaks' revolts. There cannot be a middle road .... The struggle against the Kulaks is the decisive and final struggle .... The Kulaks are the most ferocious, brutal, savage exploiters .... These poisonous spiders have fattened up at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of starving workers. These bloodsuckers have drunk the blood of the peasants, getting richer as workers suffered from hunger in the cities and in the factories. These vampires have grabbed and continue to grab the land ... and enslave poor peasants once again. Implacable war against these Kulaks. To the death! Hate and loathing towards the parties that defend them: right-wing Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and the present left- wing social-revolutionaries. The workers must put down the revolts of the Kulaks with an iron hand."(n75) A terrorist state, the communist state is also permanently mobilized both on the internal as well as the external front: internally, in order to eradicate what Bucharin used to call the "spontaneity of the capillarily-diffused petty bourgeois," but also externally, since the final aim of the palingenic revolution cannot deviate from the "global dictatorship of the proletariat."(n76) Otherwise, the omnipresent and omnipervasive bourgeois spirit would return to infect those men tirelessly regenerated by the "party of the pures." In short, the peculiar nature of the communist project -- to "clean up the spectral old world"(n77) on the basis of the Satanic principle that "everything that exists must perish"(n78) -- requires that the "new society" be organized as a "fortress under siege" and that in it everything be organized along military lines.(n79) Furthermore, it requires the annihilation of all external powers that, by their mere presence, prevent the "reconstruction of the world"(n80) through the reshaping of "human material created by bloody and filthy capitalism."(n81) -- Michael Pugliese