TRIALS OF THE MIND
7
Is
it
possible that all these years radicals the world over have been im–
posed upon, ensnared by an elementary plot of mistaken identity?
Formally this new exploitative society does not resemble the exploita–
tions that are historically known. Can it be that it is taken for social–
ism simply because it represents itself as such and because it seems
different?
If
this hypothesis is true, it matters not in the least with
what particular ki!1d of ideology the new exploiters are operating.
What they do is important, not what their ideology leads them to
think they are doing. Ideology, when at odds with the facts, is merely
false consciousness, though a deep contradiction between the ideology
and the facts gives birth to social and cultural neuroses, frustrations,
and crimes.
In the Soviet Union the
organization- which
concentrates within
itself the State and the Party-exhausts the totality of social and
property relations. Everything revolves around the organization, It
dominates every aspect of life, it is society's prose as well as its poetry.
"It is a huge machine," wrote Bukharin in 1934, "such as has never
been seen in the existence of humanity." In the tyrannies of the
ancient world and of the East, in medieval Europe, and in the modern
bourgeois countries (including the fascist states), the members of
certain classes, and sometimes even the members of all classes,
possessed, and still possess, some means, some mediating quantity,
that won them a measure of security from the demands of the organ–
ization.
If
private property did not bolster them up, they sought to
take advantage of the divisions in authority, such as between Church
and State. On this objective basis a morality of independence, of
resistance to the pressure of the social power, could form. But in the
Soviet Union, for the first time in history, the individual has been
deprived of every conceivable means of resistance. Authority is mono–
lithic: property and politics are one. Under such circumstances
it
becomes impossible to defy the organization, to set one's will against
it. One cannot escape it: not only does it absorb the whole of life
but it also seeks to model the shapes of death.
Regardless of the specific reasons that may be advanced to ex–
plain the confessions of the old Bolsheviks, to my mind it is this state
of affairs within the country which provides the most
generalized
explanation of their conduct. The trials are juridical metaphors of
counter-revolution; but it is necessary to analyse them in such a way
as to disclose their broad historical content. Quite a few books,
pamphlets, and newspaper articles have been published which refute
factually the evidence of the defendants. Nevertheless, there is no
having done with their larger meanings. The ordeals of Marxism in
its Russian captivity are subject-matter for the philosophy of history,
not for the philosophy of the criminal code.
