The Living Flame: The Revolutionary Passion of Rosa Luxemburg by Paul Le Blanc

Author:Paul Le Blanc [Blanc, Paul Le]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, pdf
Tags: Radicalism, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Philosophy, Women, Essays, Political Ideologies, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Collections, Political Science, Individual Philosophers, Social Activists
ISBN: 9781642590906
Google: _TuZDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-02-04T10:43:55+00:00

BLACK BOOKS AND HOLOCAUSTS

An interesting twist executed by a certain current within German historiography has further extended Weber’s impulse, blaming the Reds for their own victimization and for the triumphant rise of Adolf Hitler. As one historian has critically summarized it: “Nazi atrocities were no worse than the earlier Bolshevik and Stalinist crimes on which they were allegedly modeled and … the Holocaust represented an understandable preemptive response by the Nazis to the perceived communist threat.”43

Related to this is The Black Book of Communism, composed by a cluster of disillusioned ex-leftists in France, arguing that what Luxemburg and her comrades were trying to do ultimately killed 100 million people in the course of eight decades (generating tyrannical regimes opposed to human freedom and dignity). The book tells us that the communists, inhumane destroyers of life, were no better—perhaps even worse—than the Nazis. Without question, there are genuine crimes against humanity, done in the name of Communism, which these authors document. Many of those who shared Luxemburg’s uncompromising critique of capitalism and commitment to a socialist/communist future of the free and the equal perished (as she did) in the battle for that future, but others presumably “won” the battle in the vast Russian Empire and elsewhere and began to build “the future”—with horrific results. George Orwell’s fable Animal Farm satirizes some of what happened, where the dream of a better world is corrupted and betrayed by presumed “revolutionary” leaders whose new tyranny turns out no better than the old. Inhumanity and murder on a massive scale have been amply described and analyzed by some sharing (or at least sympathetic with) Luxemburg’s revolutionary perceptions.44

But The Black Book of Communism is badly flawed in more ways than one. Attributing to Communism one million deaths in Vietnam, without factoring in the one million Vietnamese deaths resulting from the US war in Vietnam (it is not clear whether we are talking about the same million here) raises serious questions. There is also a more general historiographical issue related to the book’s argument—approvingly highlighted by historian Martin Malia in his foreword to the English edition of this volume—that “there never was a benign, initial phase of communism before some mythical ‘wrong turn’ threw it off track” and that the problem can really be traced to “the ‘scientific’ Marxist belief in class struggle as the ‘violent midwife of history,’ in Marx’s famous metaphor.” But independently of Karl Marx, and long before the rise of the modern communist movement, there actually were classes and violent class struggles, particularly as laboring majorities were brutally subjugated and ruthlessly exploited, as they so often were, for the purpose of enriching powerful minorities. Such “violence of the status quo” continues to our own time, well after the collapse of communism.45

Mass violence and inhumanity were the staple of the human condition well before 1917 or 1933 and were attributable neither to communism nor to Nazism, but to good old-fashioned imperialism—which slaughtered many millions more, and caused intensive suffering and inhumanity over a much greater expanse of time, than what is offered up to us in the Black Book of Communism.

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