Terror was no accident

“The road to paradise leads to hell.” That is the premise of this Svenska Dagbladet editorial on Mauricio Rojas’s book, “Lenin and Totalitarianism.” Its argument is blunt: communist terror and purges were not accidents, but the logical completion of totalitarianism rooted in Marxist and Leninist ideas.

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truly free

The book may seem an unusual publication as an election campaign approaches, the editorial says. The Soviet Union’s communist ideology and its architect of mass murder have not been openly celebrated in Sweden’s Young Left circles for decades. The belief that revolution could purify society had faded in practice long before communism collapsed around 1989.

Yet the editorial sees attempts to revive those ambitions, pointing to renewed enthusiasm for socialism in the United States. Many people, it says, miss having a higher cause to devote themselves to and seek one in politics. Rojas returns to the messianic element in Marx’s thinking partly to examine his own youthful commitment to a radically new kind of communal society, populated by a new kind of human being.

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the unconditional absorption of every member, with their whole personality, into the movement’s practice

In that communist society, individuals would have no rights, property or interests separate from the collective. The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács described a person as “truly free” in 1922 by completely merging with the collective and submitting to the cause: “the unconditional absorption of every member, with their whole personality, into the movement’s practice.” The editorial presents this self-erasure as the source of the ideology’s totalitarian implications.

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no personal interests, relationships, feelings, ties or property, not even a name. Everything in him is directed toward one goal, one thought, one passion: the revolution.

It then turns to Lenin’s development of those ideas. Lenin admired Russian revolutionaries and terrorists who sacrificed everything for the cause. The Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev described such a person as having “no personal interests, relationships, feelings, ties or property, not even a name. Everything in him is directed toward one goal, one thought, one passion: the revolution.” Lenin wanted to gather such revolutionaries around him. Through Marx, he gave them a mission: the proletariat needed intellectual assistance to transform society, because revolutionary consciousness would not arise spontaneously among workers. “Only a party guided by the most advanced theory can fulfill the mission of a fighting vanguard.” The editorial says that leading the masses and realizing Marxism therefore required an avant-garde of armed intellectuals.

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Only a party guided by the most advanced theory can fulfill the mission of a fighting vanguard.