Pretense of Humanism: The New Face of Marxism

Ever since the brave street-fighters of Hungary placed the world in their debt by forcing the Russian bear to expose its fangs and claws for all to see, Communist stock has been declining on the international market. Today Secretary Rusk offers persuasive evidence for his contention that, among uncommitted peoples, Communism in the Sino-Russian style does not sell.

It must be obvious even to the unsophisticated Marxist that significant phases of the Russian “experiment” are a real liability, not relieved in the least by its Chinese copy, and by no means redeemed by Titov nor even by Sputnik. He—the Marxist—sees that if Marxism is to regain ideological initiative among the colonial nations rapidly assuming self-conscious statehood, it will have to shunt aside certain aspects of Sino-Russian Communism as at best aberrations, or at worst necessary historical stages now passed on the road to Utopia, neither normative nor essential elsewhere. This may be at least part of the meaning of Khrushchev’s desperate gamble in denouncing so explicitly in 1956 the crimes of Stalin—precisely to explain them away as a deviationist “cult of the individual,” and not essential Marxism at all. What he forgot, apparently, was that he who cries “stinking fish” may not find all fingers pointing accusingly in the same direction. Perhaps the strategy worked well enough at home to prevent, as Khrushchev told the Twenty-Second Party Congress last October, “the forces which clung to the old and resisted all that was new and creative” from gaining “the upper hand in the Party” (Report to CPSU, I, p. 142), but the world at large smelled a rat, not necessarily the same deceased one Mr. Khrushchev was exhuming. Nonetheless the Chairman told the Party in 1961 that “had the cult of the individual not been condemned … in the sphere of international relations, the result would have been a weakening of Soviet relations on the world scene and a worsening of relations with other countries, which would have had dire consequences” (ibid., p. 143). Did he mean by this language that Marxism can still hope to appeal to the world with fanciful sketches of a classless paradise dazzling by its dark light the horizons of tomorrow only by a repudiation of Stalinism?

Shadows Of The New Marxism

The dubious success of the Khrushchev maneuver cannot but stimulate other Marxists to attempt other approaches to the problem of stepping up the sale of Marxist ideology. It is not only an interesting theoretical question, therefore, but one of some moment to the Western world to speculate: What form will the “new Marxism” assume?

One thinks first of Trotskyism. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1928, Leon Trotsky became one of the first Marxists who sought with all his might, in book, pamphlet, and before the Dewey Commission, to distinguish genuine Marxism from Russian autocracy. “The bureaucracy,” he wrote in Stalinism and Bolshevism in 1937, “won the upper hand. It cowed the revolutionary vanguard, trampled upon Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik party. Stalinism conquered” (p. 15). And Trotsky quite literally gave his life to proclaiming Stalin’s usurpation of “the old label of Bolshevism, the better to fool the masses” (ibid.).

But though Trotskyism found and retains adherents around the globe, it remains an abortive attempt to free Marxism from the incubus of Russian Communism. One reason is that Trotsky was too closely identified with the Russian Revolution really to disengage successfully his own views from its workings; nor, for another reason, did he wish to distance himself too decisively from it. Thus, even while bitterly attacking Stalin’s usurpation, Trotsky frankly admits to having himself predicted that bureaucracy would triumph in Russia if the revolution did not soon spread around the world. In short, Marxism is not likely to achieve revival as Trotskyism in our time.

Nor is it likely to win many friends by diatribes against Stalinists and Trotskyites alike such as is mounted, for example, in H. M. Wicks’s Eclipse of October, published in the United States in 1957. It is his intention, Mr. Wicks says, to document “the wide breach between the founders of the Marxist system and most of those who, today, profess to be its spokesmen” (p. vii). Before he has done, Mr. Wicks stands virtually alone: “The Trotskyists talk much of Marx and, like the reconstructed Stalinists (whom he has named ‘Mikoyan, Bulganin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov’) claim to be the sole competent interpreters of Marxism. But none with even the slightest understanding of Marx would take seriously, to put it mildly, the pretensions of either” (p. 454). Nor, one suspects, will many take very seriously the pretensions of Mr. Wicks to rehabilitate Marxism after his own image.

In what form, then, might Marxism hope to appeal to a world grown dubious of pronouncements out of Moscow or Peiping?

Perhaps in the form, I suggest, illustrated by Mr. John Lewis’ volume, also published in 1957, Marxism and the Open Mind. “Certainly the time has come,” Mr. Lewis says, “to develop and enrich our Marxism,” particularly, he continues, on the questions of “democratic rights … and (the) moral ideals which are independent of class interests …” (pp. xvi–xvii).

That Marxism can offer the world true democracy and socially sensitive ethical theory rests upon the fact, Mr. Lewis argues, that “Marxism is humanism in its contemporary form.… And the Marxist has thus to convince the disinherited, whether in the great industrial cities of the West or the fields and mines of colonial countries, that their very oppression could be the instrument of their emancipation, their entrance into an earthly paradise of material plenty and human justice” (p. 161). The carrot is the same, but it hangs from another string: “contemporary humanism.”

That this is the form in which Marxism-Leninism is also being offered to the world by Mr. Khrushchev and cohorts may be evidenced from the Program adopted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at its Twenty-Second Congress. “What is Communism?” the Program asks, and answers: “Communism is a classless social system with one form of public ownership of the means of production and full social equality of all members of society; under it, the all-around development of people will be accompanied by the growth of the productive forces through continuous progress in science and technology; all the springs of cooperative wealth will flow more abundantly, and the great principle ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ will be implemented. Communism is a highly organized society of free, socially conscious working people in which public self-government will be established, a society in which labor for the good of society will become the prime vital requirement of everyone, a necessity recognized by one and all, and the ability of each person will be employed to the greatest benefit of the people” (p. 67).

Except that Mr. Lewis says Marxism “is” what the Program says it “will be,” they are saying the same thing. And so the voice of the siren is heard once more in the land, not in the grim monotony of Stalin’s heavy accents but in the dulcet tones of the “humanist” Marx.

Marx’S Appeal To Humanism

Some such “return to Marx” may well be, apart from the course of world power politics, the next major ideological threat confronting the improving relations between what Professor Toynbee calls “the world and the West.” To expect to defeat this new challenge by a wave of the hand in the direction of Moscow murder trials or Peiping prison camps is not only naïve, it is dangerous. Look carefully and behold Khrushchev waving with us—and preaching Marxism as he does so. Sino-Russian brand Communism may—God grant—one day collapse, but even so the Marxist will still profess the most sophisticated form of secularism yet devised.

We will meet the new challenge only by soberly evaluating the claim of Marxism to be a vehicle for true humanism.

And first, what is meant here by humanism? Mr. Lewis says: “Behind the whole philosophy of Marxism there is passionate opposition to all relations, all conditions in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, despised creature. That is why Marxism is a humanism” (p. 146). While observing that so broad a description qualifies much more than Marxism to the claim of being true humanism, we may largely agree with Mr. Lewis’ assertion. Engels’ first major work, for example, The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in German in 1845, was written to document the contention that the condition of English workers under industrialism was “the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of social misery existing in our day” (Moscow, Eng. ed., p. 3). But Engels finally includes all mankind in Communist concern: “Communism is a question of humanity, and not of workers alone” (p. 332).

So, too, the so-called youthful works of Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, first published in Moscow in 1932, have occasioned a number of volumes, in a number of countries, proclaiming Marx’s early humanism. German pastor Erich Thier, for instance, in his Das Menschenbild des Jungen Marx, published in 1957, equates the “young Marx” with Kierkegaard in his “existentialist” critique of the philosophy of Hegel, and his concern for the individual.

It is true, moreover, that in their joint critique of the left-wing Hegelianism of “Bruno Bauer & Company” published in 1845 under the title of The Holy Family, Marx and Engels together mount their vicious attack in the name of “real humanism” (p. 3). In her Reminiscences of Marx, his daughter Eleanor recalls that the phrase “Work for humanity” was ever on her father’s lips; and no doubt the great sacrifice of place, pleasure, pride, and prestige which Marx inflexibly imposed upon himself and his beloved family was laid, as Marx saw it, upon the altar of human progress. Mr. Lewis says, then, accurately enough and with pardonable exuberance: “It is not sufficiently understood that Marx’s own thinking was basically humanist. He recognized the worth of the individual personality, he blazed with indignation at social injustice, there was prophetic fire in his passion for righteousness” (p. 144).

Futhermore, it may be argued with some degree of plausibility that Marxist humanism remained substantially true to its origins in its twentieth-century exponents, Lenin and Trotsky.

And no doubt Mr. Lewis is quite correct when he says that there are Marxists today who are so “because they are dreamers as well as economists, and idealists as well as politicians, because they are stirred by pity and indignation, because they believe in justice and equality, because they are humanists” (p. 144).

What Is True Humanism?

The question is: Can Marxism be palmed off on mankind as idealistic humanism now that the appeal of Sino-Russian Communism has worn thin? For this—I am suggesting—is the face which Marxists will wish increasingly to display to a world grown suspicious of Khrushchev’s and Mao’s faces. This “return to Marx” will be proffered not only to cleanse the bitter taste left by the fruits of Sino-Russian tyranny, but more significantly to wrest from the democracies worldwide ideological initiative with its political consequences.

But is Marxism the vehicle of true humanism, and are then the Russian and Chinese autocracies but aberrations or way-stations to be bypassed and ignored? The uncommitted world is asking this question in making up its mind between Marxism and democracy. To answering it for ourselves the West may well devote more of its energies than it now does.

For the answer to this significant question is not recondite, though its demonstration and its propagation are not simple: Marxism is not and never has been a true humanism. Why not? Not only because it is irreligious, but essentially because it mutes the significance of the individual. Hegel, it is true, set out to “actualize the universal,” and, like Marx and Engels after him, presumably wished to preserve the infinite worth of the particular. But Hegel was to lose in theory, as Marxism has lost both in theory and in practice, all ability to preserve effectually the worth of the individual against the claims of the abstract collective.

When Marx surrendered to Hegelianism—if he ever escaped it—he cut off at the root the capability of his system to cope with real particularity, to protect real individuality, to promote real personality, to be a genuine humanism. And the course of Marxism-in-practice, writ large in the history of Russian Communism, amply demonstrates that anti-humanitarianism is not an aberration but an inherent consequence of Marxist rationalism. Communist brutality affords instructive commentary upon the awesome consequences implicit in a false ideology, seen as it were by laboratory experiment—from its seemingly innocent birth in the passionate humanity of the youthful Marx to its corrupted maturity in the cold, calculated inhumanities of Joseph Stalin. The rationalist abstractions enter history as the lethal enemies of the concrete particulars they were presumed to save. By all means the Marxist may wish to brush aside as a passing and incidental “cult of the individual” the era of Stalinism, and substitute in its stead a sentimental “return to Marxist humanism.” But history teaches us nothing if we ignore the laboratory test of this humanism provided by the Sino-Russian experience. Only the blind can fail to grasp the lesson of the “experiments,” and only the willful can thrust it aside.

It is more than ironic that Mr. Lewis delivered his lecture on “Marxist Humanism,” which is published in his book from which quotation has been made, in 1956, the very year in which Khrushchev was revealing the Stalinist consequences of Marxist humanism in the “secret speech” which told, and left half untold, the crimes of the most powerful exponent of Marxism the world has yet beheld. And while some Marxist “idealists” came at last to an agonized break with a Marxism which turned into Stalinism, Mr. Lewis set himself to achieving the redemption of a system patently at enmity, in its practical consequences, with the noble aspirations it counterfeits.

Loss Of The Real Individual

But Mr. Lewis and those whom he represents must be stayed long enough from their romp with “development” to be obligated—as Trotsky grimly obliged himself—to answer seriously the question: Why is Marxist humanism not humanitarian?

This is, as has been said, a crucial question, not of “enrichment” but of simple intellectual integrity, the more so when Marxism is posed as “the highest development of humanism.”

Let us for the moment willingly accept Marx’s passionate sentiments for justice as genuine; he suffered and surrendered much for them. Let us acquiese in the “early” Marx’s recognition of the “worth of individual personality”; and let us not deny that Engels, Trotsky, and Lenin subscribed more or less consistently to the same estimation of humanity. And then we may ask in all sincerity: Why does Marxism, professionally loyal to the master’s voice in every nuance, run amuck in unhuman, inhuman, subhuman brutalities of all kinds, practiced advisedly, deliberately, systematically against human beings by those very Marxists most “in the know” of what Marxism is all about?

This man, say, who so loved children and never was severe with them—while he coolly murdered their parents, if need be: Why?

This dictator who wrote on the “essence” of Marxism, and, as he did so, slew his ten thousands: Why?

The answer—or at least one significant phase of the answer—to such questions is, as I have already suggested, implicit in Marx’s Hegelian rationalism, implicit therefore in the very fabric of Marxism. This answer may, in fact, be found spelled out in the same book—The Holy Family—from which quotation has already been made. It is to be found in the same paragraph in which Marx and Engels proclaim their “real humanism.” They say: “Real humanism has no more dangerous enemy in Germany than Spiritualism or speculative idealism which substitutes ‘self-consciousness’ or the ‘spirit’ for the real individual man.…”

Quite so. Hegelianism, like all other rationalisms, has no role for the “real individual”—be it man or any other entity. And precisely so, the substitution of an abstract category like universal “self-consciousness” for the “real individual man” is indeed the most “dangerous enemy” which “real humanism” can confront. It could not be put more accurately.

But when Marx and Engels, for the purposes of advertising their “socialism” as “scientific,” chose to pour into the mold of Hegelian categories the notions of “matter” and “relations of production” in substitution for the notions of “spirit” and of “self-consciousness,” did they think thus to escape the thrall of the rationalism they had derided in the Bauers? Did they propose thus to safeguard the “real individual man” from his most dangerous enemy, not the content but the form of the abstraction? Did they think that by an abstract humanism they could protect the real human being from any number of crimes that may be perpetrated on man quite compatibly with the most passionate concern for humanity?

Whatever they thought, or hoped, they in fact tumbled headlong into the same trap into which they had so elaborately sought to push “Bruno Bauer & Company” in The Holy Family. That “real individual man” whom the Bauers had lost to view in the categories of spirit and self-consciousness, Marx and Engels equally lost sight of in what became the dominant category of their system, the Class. And the more they adhered to the schematic of Hegel’s Logic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—to support their claims to “scientific” validation, and the more they thought, wrote, talked, and acted in terms of the class relations prescribed by these categories, the more Marxism came to leave that “real individual man” naked and defenseless, prey to the tactics, strategies, or whims of the dictatorial powers exercised nominally on his behalf—and prescribed by Marx as guardians of his salvation.

The Harvest Of Casualties

Not since the Inquisition has the sowing of abstractions brought forth greater increase in the harvest of concrete casualties. In the name of the Class, for the deliverance of the Class, to the continuance (or destruction) of the Class, the individual is sacrificed, submerged, victimized, destroyed. For, while the Class is rationally manageable in the recesses of the British Museum, where Marx developed his notions, it can achieve its “self-consciousness” in historical reality only by allowing this or that member, or clique of members (in theory the Communist Party, the “vanguard” of the proletariat; and in practice the schemer, like Stalin), to become its director and guide, with absolute authority and uncontrolled power. Moreover, because the abstract concept has no hold on the concrete event, even the system itself does not control the will of the dictator. Thus the “cult of the individual,” which Khrushchev and his clique exemplify even as they denounce it, is inherent in Marxist rationalization whenever a revolution is brought about, that is, whenever its abstractions must cope with concrete historical events.

By the iron fist of the dictator the massive power of the Class is given direction. By the dictator are “real individual” decisions made; and history cruelly revenges rationalism’s abstract and pretentious neglect of the singular by confronting the Marxist who comes out last in the melee with one ineluctable moment of reality: he dies alone, and in the act discovers his particularity even as it is taken from him. The hoax of the superiority of the universal is revealed in the flash of the particular assassin’s rifle or the snap of the particular gallows trap.

Professional Sentimentality

So in fact the most sincere and genuine Marxist concern for the plight of the proletariat protects no particular proletarian from prison or the gallows, or the threat of both—in the name of the proletariat! Such concern, however well meant, is therefore only sentimentality, confined to the emotions, neither effectual nor normative in history, as evanescent as the rest of Marxist “realism.” It is easy, therefore, for an abstract humanism to make common cause with the most brutal and finished practice of inhumanity. What Professor Bultmann called in his Gifford Lectures, “the historicity of man, the true historical life of the human being, the history which everyone experiences for himself and by which he gains his real essence” (History and Eschatology, p. 43) gains no validation from Marxist humanism because Marxist humanism, when genuine, is only sentimental by virtue of abstraction from the real man—and sentimentality is by definition and in fact incompetent to coerce the course of real events.

In Marx himself, I think, one may discern the same process exhibited by Marxism in history—the movement from “humanism” to “Stalinism.” Assuming, as we have, the initial genuineness of his passion for human rights, it is evident that this passion becomes ever more professional and doctrinaire as Marx’s theories develop, until at last there is no conflict in his mind between a dictatorship bent on destroying a whole class of men and his passionate concern for the rights of man. Progressively Marx estranges himself from real contact with the British proletariat, and more and more he retires to his study and the British Museum for abstract thought about the proletariat. His concern reckons with the individual the less as his theories comprehend the Class the more. And most of the last two decades of his life were spent in isolation, from which he scorned all practical efforts to meliorate in any way the real hardships of the real poor as inimical to the Class Struggle.

Marx demonstrates by his own conduct what Marxism repeatedly illustrates in practice, that the Marxist concern for the sufferings of the proletariat is dictated (and made futile) by the dialectic of history to which Marxism is committed. According to the Hegelian framework of the Marxist “theology,” the proletariat becomes the “suffering saviour” of mankind—not through or by virtue of its suffering, but by its revolutionary negation of the capitalist order through the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat became of supreme concern to Marx, not because it suffered, nor because he was touched by its suffering, but because it first of all embodied the motive force of history—for Marx accepted Hegel’s dictum that the womb of the future was the negation. Marx was concerned with, rather than for, the proletariat, therefore, not because proletarians as such died, were exploited, or came to beg at his door, but because in the dialectic of history all hopes of the future destruction of the bourgeois order hung on the proletariat. In this abstract sense Marx came to dote upon “the workers,” as did Lenin after him for the same reason. And all the while the plight of this or that worker elicited no response from Marx, nor from Lenin or Trotsky, at all. They gauged, in fact, the worth of the proletarian by the extent of his Class-consciousness, that is, his capacity for the subordination of his own entity to the abstract entity of the Class. Thus the finest expressions of Marxist humanism comport easily with the most brutal treatment of any particular human being; and to a man like Mr. Lewis, who is enamored of the dialectic, this fact provokes no sense of contradiction at all; or if it does, Mr. Lewis may comfort himself with the reflection that contradiction is, after all, the motive force in progress—let’s see where this one leads.

Mr. Lewis says that Marxism is “a scientific, a philosophical humanism” (p. 147). Again, he could not be more accurate. For if Aristotle was right in denying the possibility of a “philosophy of the particular”; and if Professor Maritain is equally right in arguing that the “contingency of the singular escapes the grasp of science” (Degrees of Knowledge, p. 35), then the very fact that Marxism is indeed a “scientific, a philosophical humanism” reveals precisely why it is a sentimental, a professional, an abstract humanism, capable of singular inhumanity in its historical and concrete manifestations.

Is Marxism, then, the vehicle for a true humanism?

Not at all. Nor can it become so until it surrenders its abstract categories and reckons effectually with particularity. But for Marxism to do this would be to surrender not only all claim to “scientific” validation, but its idealogical framework as well, leaving it merely “utopian” in Engels’ and Lenin’s most derisive sense.

This, then, can be at least one phase of the West’s answer to the “new Marxism.” An even more significant phase is a positive humanism of our own. For such a humanism, the category of the particular—if I may put it so—is neither scientific nor speculative, but religious. It is in Christianity that the “historicity of man” is secured and validated. The relations which encompass without destroying real individuality (and form it, as Professor Maritain argues in his True Humanism, into personality) are not those of the dialectic, but those subsumed under the concept of love—incorrigibly, ineluctably personal and particular. And the person remains ever, in love, the singular. Lenin may argue that “the genius of Hegel recognized (that) the individual is the universal” (Works, Vol. 38, p. 361), but for Hegel this “both … and” is equally “neither … nor” for, as Lenin adds, “the individual is opposed to the universal” (ibid.). And the resolution of this apparent contradiction is frustrated, not achieved, by the dialectic.

The never-present “moment” in Hegel saps the life of the particular of all significance, which the ever-present “moment” in Christianity alone can restore; for Hegel’s “moment” is ever a passage, ever the transition from Being to Nothing, while Christ’s “moment” is ever the presence, the inescapable “now” held in the hand of God, the IS as opposed to the BECOMING.

When, for example, the Marxist learns what it means to love the enemy instead of destroying him, he will no longer be Marxist. It is the duty of the Christian to show, also toward Marxists, that this goal can be achieved, in the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.

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