Final reflections on Communism’s failure.
Mar 1, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 23 • By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Revel’s book is an inventory of political correctness as it stood in France a decade or two ago. There are a couple of problems with bringing out such a book now. First, no matter how important and revelatory these episodes may have seemed back then, it looks like nitpicking to care overmuch today about, say, the reaction of various leftists to remarks Octavio Paz made about the Sandinistas during a speech in Frankfurt in 1987. A second problem, naturally enough, is that some of Revel’s judgments have been falsified by time. When he wrote, it appeared obvious to everyone that China’s combination of partially open markets and political authoritarianism was on the verge of collapsing of its own contradictions. But China’s economic syncretism has, like capitalism before it, proved more flexible than its doomsayers suspected. Revel belittles the view of Lionel Jospin, France’s prime minister at the turn of the century, that the 1998 ruble crisis in Russia was caused by “the abuse of ultraliberal [i.e., ultra-capitalist] ‘gadgets.’ ” For Revel, the ruble collapse had everything to do with kleptocracy and nothing to do with international finance. With the wisdom of hindsight, we would probably say it had a bit to do with both. Financial gadgets have turned out to be more dangerous than we thought.
Revel shows that Communism introduces intellectual corruption in certain predictable ways. He seems keen to extend this point to political ideologies in general. There was always an asymmetry between Communists and anti-Communists; they were not simply opposite views of the same question. But ideologues act as if, because they believe x, their opponents believe the opposite of x. So, for instance, leftists scold their opponents that “the market is not a solution to every problem,” as if their opponents believed it were.
“Who has ever maintained such an absurdity?” Revel asks. “But since socialism was conceived in the delusion of being able to resolve every problem, its partisans project the same ambition onto their opponents.” And this is what makes it particularly dangerous when “ideals” and “convictions” become a legitimate criterion for judging political theories. Once they do, ideologues can impute all resistance to their behavior as resistance to their ideals.
“I always feel a little uneasy,” Revel writes, “when I hear someone eulogize a political figure with the vague phrase, ‘He (or she) is a person of conviction.’ What conviction, exactly?” An opponent of Stalin can be recast as an opponent of “a fair shake for the working man,” and if Communism itself fails to give the working man a fair shake—well, then, it is by definition not Communism. Thus, when the Communist regime of Pol Pot committed genocide in Cambodia, the historian and biographer Jean Lacouture opined that it wasn’t Communism that was responsible, but “tropical fascism” or “rice-paddy social nationalism.”
In the 1990s, when historians began to explore the links between the two midcentury totalitarian ideologies, anti-anti-Communists would make the implausible claim that to do so would hearten the right. Revel engages this argument with gusto. The one indisputably good thing Communism did, he admits, was to fight Nazism. But that tells us nothing.
Moreover, it is built on a misrepresentation. When the European socialist left made its big lurch towards Marxism it did so in the 1960s and ’70s, “in the absence of any serious fascist threat in Europe and when Francoist and Salazarist remnants were fading.”
If carping at the politics of the 1990s were all Revel had to offer, Last Exit to Utopia would be interesting only as a historical document. But Revel was a widely read and immensely witty man, with a glorious prose style, and he is capable of discussing trivial matters in ways that illuminate general principles. In this, Last Exit bears a resemblance to Albert O. Hirschman’s great short study, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991). In each case, the thinking transcends the narrow ideological aims of its author—social democratic in Hirschman’s case, anti-Communist in Revel’s—and winds up a study of how human beings argue, no matter what they happen to be arguing about.
Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.
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