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PARTISAN REVIEW
had a nationwide colloquium on her" -and in a country isolated
and still under dogmatic control, a national colloquium on
Luxemburg is a major event. At a later meeting, some of my
audience seemed
to
know and perhaps approve her defiant anti–
Leninist definition: "Freedom is always freedom for the person
who disagrees with you." How rich are the traditions of Marxism
for subverting mindless and repressive regimes!
I emphasized that on ly the tragedy of the Great War could
explain the rise of fascism and the decline of democratic socialism,
that the First World War was also the Europeans' first experience of
total mobilization and total impotence, this terrifying amalgam
where individuals are at once caught up in the drama of public
events (such as Europeans had not ever been before) and impotent
to affect or escape these events, which at any moment could bring
them deepest grief. Exaltation at the abyss. And all this in the
shadow of imminent death, of untold misery and apprehension. But
was that amalgam of exaltation, total mobilization, and total impo–
tence not also the essence of Maoism in madness? Did not some in
my audience feel this affinity of disaster?
There was never any need to pause to underscore parallelisms
between the European past and the Chinese present. An undercur–
rent of relevance seemed always to run between that past and the re–
cent upheaval. A group indoctrinated in the belief that the Bolshevik
revolution was the inevitable triumph of the class struggle was sur–
prised by my argument that there would never have been a Bolshevik
revolution without the horror of the Great War-and this not
because of the minor (but
to
them largely unknown) detail that the
German High Command transported Lenin to the Finland Station
and continued to help the Bolsheviks thereafter, but because com–
munism wou ld not have triumphed where Marx had least antici–
pated it-in the most backward of major European countries-with–
out the war-induced collapse of the tsarist regime. The triumph of
Bolshevism imposed a new civil war on Europe and, more immedi–
ately, a civil war between Bolsheviks and democratic socialists, and
that division was a precondition for the rise of fascism . Finally, I
spoke of Stalin's ruthless Russification of the Comintern and his
attendant suicidal policy, begun in 1928, which defined the chief
class enemy to be the social democrats, vilified as social fascists.
How cou ld Stalin-and the Bolshevik leadership-have been so
blind
to
the uniqueness of real fascism at a time when Gramsci was
