On the occasion of the hundred years of the Communist Party, it is reissued The communist manifesto and another hundred years of hope open. Let’s see if someone finally reads it. The fact that this time, in a good and careful edition, it is prefaced by the deputy minister Yolanda Diaz has given us a certain illusion that someone from the Party will learn something from the tainted Marx. But the same thing happens to good Carlos as to the third medical consultation: everyone uses it to diagnose themselves, and nobody pays attention to him.
Reading the prologue, however, leaves little room for hope. Once again acronyms outweigh ideas. Behind some corny and sentimental phrases, glued together with images of preschool poetry, lies that idea that is much more communist than Marxist: the party is the true interpreter of the sign of the times, and society is a group of reactionary sheep.
Marx long ago became a bronze bust or stone statue in some secondary square in communist Russia. The Soviet leaders knew well that it was best to archive the lay priest in a library and that the figures who could provide shade and shelter for the party leaders were those of Lenin O Stalin. Marx was a mad old man full of contradictions. Better not to air it too much. The only salvageable thing about Marx was Engels, period.
What is prolonged here, therefore, is not the ideas of Marx, but the logic of power and the survival of the Party. This is how it is in post-communist Russia, where the struggle is still alive between the two great figures of the party, Lenin and Stalin, and where Marx does not paint anything.
The question for Putin’s Russia is, today as yesterday, the greatness of the one party and the cult of personality
In the 1950s, Jruschov started the process of de-stalinization and wrote a secret report that was titled About the cult of personality. The document, once again, reflected the concern for the survival of the party. Stalin had been too charismatic and could lead to the disappearance of the group with his death. It was a rotten element in a living organism, or so the heir to the apparatus saw it. The Moscow metro, that underground Gnostic cathedral that grows as an opposite image to medieval religious buildings, has its own imaginary, and it is surprising to find almost no image of Stalin. The Russian sixties were built on the budget of de-Stalinization and the exaggerated cult of Lenin.
However, something is changing in the red motherland, and tells us a lot about what communism is and very little about the real success of Marxist doctrine. Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, not long ago a holy site in the heart of Moscow, is today a neglected, marginal place with scruffy guards and perpetual fires that languish. Upon entering, it seems that someone has raised the air conditioner a couple of degrees so that the waxy mummy melts and the Leninist myth flows through the sewers.
It is also surprising to visit the recently created Museum of Contemporary History and see nothing but glasses, clothes and an old Lenin text in a marginal and dimly lit corner. Everything else in the museum is a cult of the greatness of the country. Today Stalin is back in fashion. Why? Because Lenin divided the Russians into white and red and promoted civil war, while Stalin united them all around the great homeland victory against the West. The question for the Russia of Putin it is, today as yesterday, the greatness of the single party and the cult of personality. That has been the Communist Party, and so are its children and grandchildren.
Poor Marx! Have they read our prologues The 18th of Brumaire? Have they paid attention to the luminous pages of the Manifest in which it trusts in the emancipation of the proletariat and not in the strength and organization of the party? The problem is that Marx was a great sociologist and a lousy politician. Today, among his followers, the latter prevail and the former are rare.
In Marx there is an affirmation of the dignity of the people that is very far from the contempt that the communist leaders have shown.
Yes, as it says Hannah Arendt, He was a bad politician is precisely because he radically distrusted the power of those of always and believed that the sign of the times and culture would lead to the disappearance of political antagonisms. He was profoundly ignorant of the oligarchic reality of politics. He really thought, or so we are led to believe, that the domination of man by man could disappear once and for all. It is a very respectable wish, we can share it, but history has shown us many times that its implementation leads to the worst tyranny.
Communist leaders have in all cases been elitists who have treated the peasant, worker or worker with deep contempt, as uneducated or unaware of the true sign of the revolution. Society, for the party communist, is reactionary, and that is why a strong party is needed that is capable of overcoming temporary resistance and that leads us, triumphantly, to the final victory.
If Marx was an excellent sociologist, and this is why we would love for our communist leaders to read him, it is because was among the first to discover the political meaning of social reality, different and, in many cases, independent of the political form and the oligarchies. In Marx there is an affirmation of the dignity of the people and of society that is very far from the systematic contempt that the various communist leaders have shown them.
If there is one thing we can expect from the puppies of politics, it is that they read more of Marx and less of the Party pamphlets. I, like Engels in the 1890 edition, would then say: “I wish Marx were by my side to see it with his own eyes!”
*** Armando Zerolo is professor of Political Philosophy and Law at USP-CEU.
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