Red = mass death?

 Translation of: https://www.gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/rot-massentod/

On the debate about the Black Book of Communism

Even before it was published, it caused a sensation. In France, of course, such a book is a different story: there, the communists are in the government and have always been a recognized part of the nation. There was a communist-socialist counter-culture, which was eliminated in Germany when the Nazis came to power. And of course it is also about the Resistance, the French resistance to which the French Republic refers and which also included communists.

In Germany, therefore, it is also about something else: on the one hand, the GDR is to be portrayed once again as evil, evil, evil, Honecker = Stalin = Pol-Pot. On the other hand, it is about the permissibility of Marxist social criticism in general. 

However, pointing out the interest of the editor and the discussants is not a refutation of the book's arguments. Because even a political opponent with the worst intentions can still say something right. To give away the conclusion: this is not the case here. There is nothing new in the book. As is usually the case when history is used to make politics, historians do not really know what the fuss is about: it is all well-known already. The gesture of the book -- that a long-held taboo is being broken -- is such an obvious and stupid lie that the counter-question is: what is the point? 

When you speak of our weaknesses, remember also the dark times from which you have escaped (Brecht: To Those Born Later)

 Now it is a little cheap to accuse the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries of using violence from the safety of a professor's chair in Paris around 70 years later. They did, they had to, and anyone who looks at the history of the bourgeois revolutions in England in 1648, France in 1789 and the USA in 1777 can see that they were pretty much massacres, just as the history of the establishment of capitalism in general is written in blood. The conditions in Tsarist Russia and pre-revolutionary China were terrible: unbelievable misery, famine (with several million deaths), brutal terror - just like that part of the free world that is so beautifully called the "Third World" and produces over 100,000 deaths from starvation every day. Violent action against such conditions and their representatives and perpetrators cannot be blamed.

A dead person is a dead person. If someone dies of hunger, it doesn't matter why: whether the Yangtze has overflowed its banks as it has for the last thousand years and the harvest is rotting as a result, whether the warlord or the Japanese occupiers confiscate the entire harvest, whether US wheat is so cheap on the world market that the rice grown is simply unsellable, or whether the farmer had to melt down his kitchen utensils to meet the village's steel quota and so many fields remained uncultivated, which is why the people's commune is now dying under the leadership of the party - dead is dead.

With the Communists taking power, the previous reasons for mass, premature deaths have disappeared, at least in the Soviet Union and China. Capitalism itself overcomes the natural barriers to production: when people die of hunger after a drought or flood, it is no longer because there is nothing to eat, but because people cannot buy it. The task of a socialist society can be nothing else: to put an end to the situation where the survival of producers is dependent on stock market prices, for example, or fails because they have no money. The fact that this has not happened, but that people who called themselves communists not only let millions die as a matter of calculation - that is the majority of the 'victims of communism' - but also had hundreds of thousands of people worked to death in camps or even shot, raises questions. And the fact that disgusting torture methods were used on a massive scale in countries that called themselves socialist - and not just in the military dictatorships of South America, in Nazi Germany or by Japanese military fascism from 1932 to 1945 - is quite serious. And this cannot be justified either by the terrible conditions before or by the mass atrocities in the capitalist world: anyone who wants to create a society in which the free development of each is a prerequisite and condition for the free development of all must be measured against this goal. But that is something completely different than trying to justify capitalism or even Nazi rule by using the mountains of corpses of state socialism.

However, the critics' argument that the authors of the Black Book only talk about the corpses of state socialism is wrong. Firstly, it is always stupid to accuse someone who talks about something specific of not talking about other things. That is always true, but it is limitless - which is why the answer is so normal that people don't want to talk about the victims of state socialism. At the same time, it is not possible to talk about everything that is terrible - because there is simply so much of it that it also sheds a significant light on the beautiful modern world. Moreover, if you want to find out something about the victims of Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge, etc., you have to talk about that and not about anything else.

But the point is: The Black Book does not just talk about the mountains of corpses on one side. It even makes a comparison with fascism and the rule of law. And then the question of the Black Book of capitalism, democracy, fascism, nation-states or anti-communist torture regimes is actually quite legitimate. The Black Book wants to use the number of victims to prove that communism is condemnable and that bourgeois democracy is superior, while at the same time rejecting references to fascist forms of capitalism. It wants to deprive the left of its sense of moral superiority.

Comparison, equation - or analysis?

And this concern gets in the way of any serious historical debate. If the authors had been serious about finding out why so many people had to die in the name of socialism, they would have had to ask themselves the following questions: What were the perpetrators' programs? What were the circumstances of the crime? What were their reasons? But that would be the opposite of a comparison. It would be an investigation.

 A comparison of two things is only possible if one knows the things being compared. In principle, anything and everything can be compared: a comparison of an atom bomb and pea soup, for example, would reveal a lot of differences and very few similarities. All the properties of an atom bomb and pea soup cannot be found out by comparison, but by examining the atom bomb and pea soup respectively. A comparison is useful in order to clarify what is special or general about something by showing that other things are the same or completely different. The fact is that the terms "communism" and "fascism" come from the same sphere, so perhaps they have more in common than pea soup and the atom bomb.

A comparison is usually not an equation, because it is made between two different things. Otherwise it makes little sense. The supporters of the Black Book act as if they had discovered by comparing communism and fascism that they were pretty much the same: totalitarianism. This claim is not new; from 1947 to 1968 it was even the general view in the Western world.

Now, if you compare two things after a thorough examination, you can suggest a common umbrella term. Whether a common umbrella term makes sense must then be discussed in terms of content.

And there are all kinds of doubts about the term "totalitarianism": we know nothing about the programs of the NSDAP, the Italian fascists, the Spanish Falange, the CPSU or the Party of Labour of Albania when we describe them as totalitarian. On the contrary: all differences are crossed out, an identity is claimed, of which the differences are only variants. But what is this identity supposed to be?

Totalitarianism can only be defined negatively: it is not Western democracy with its elections, its rule of law and all the freedoms granted by the state. And that is almost as if one were to define the atom bomb and pea soup by the absence of broccoli florets, asparagus tips and red dye. Attempts to define totalitarianism positively end up in poor abstraction: rule by a party (what kind?) that makes its program binding (what did it consist of?) and in the process murders masses of people (why? who? how?).

Bad abstraction: victims of — communism?

But it is not just the term totalitarianism that is open to criticism. It is not just the attempt to encompass National Socialist, Fascist, Stalinist and Maoist rule under one term that is subject to criticism: is there actually a common reason for the murder of Soviet party cadres, the starvation of Chinese farmers and the mass murder of all kinds of people that the Khmer Rouge identified as an obstacle to their better society? That alone would justify classifying them - and, say, the dead of the Ethiopian civil war and the many others mentioned in the Black Book - as 'victims of communism'.

Seriously, it can hardly be about grief, given the many thousands of people who the readers do not even know personally. And the horror of the dead remains a somewhat strange thing if it does not give rise to the intention to do something to prevent a possible recurrence - and that requires knowledge of the thing that should not be repeated. The dead people are completely indifferent. They are dead and cannot buy anything with the grief and dismay of people who live in other times and under different circumstances in other parts of the world.

So let us examine three points in which a particularly large number of people died: Soviet industrialization in the 1930s, the "Great Leap Forward" in China in 1958-61 and the mass murder in Cambodia in 1975-1979.

After the revolution in 1917 and the civil war in 1919-1924, in which Western states intervened on the side of the enemies of the Soviet power, the Soviet Union was a devastated country. Industrial production was in decline, agriculture was in the hands of large and medium-sized farmers who showed little inclination to hand over their harvests for worthless paper money. The Russian Revolution was only planned as the prelude to the world revolution, which, as we know, never took place. When Stalin put forward his doctrine of "socialism in one country", he did not mean to establish a planned economy in the sense that social needs should be determined and then the firms should be informed of what was needed and then how best to do it with the available resources. The companies were obliged to make a profit from the allocated amount of rubles and, under the given circumstances, this was only possible at the expense of the workers.

 This was what Soviet labor legislation looked like and the most radical form was to accept the death of the workers in the Soviet labor camps, so that despite the conscious application of the law of value, an "original socialist accumulation" could be put into practice. The development of heavy industry—with everything that was required for it: transport routes, power stations, the development of coal and iron deposits—was necessary in order to make the Soviet Union ready for war. As is well known, a movement with a program that was not very pro-Soviet came to power in Germany in 1933.

The party purges of the CPSU not only served to eliminate the opposition—the grandiose failures of planning with money could, according to party logic, be nothing other than an indication of treason and sabotage. Because everything that the CPSU undertook, it simultaneously sold as the execution of historical necessities, so that failures could only be attributed to bad will.

In China, the Communist Party took power after many years of civil war against the Guomindang and the joint war against the Japanese fascists. From the beginning, it was more nationalistic than Marxist, and wanted to turn the backward peasant country into a modern socialist industrial state, ideally with its own atom bomb. The Communist Party has been questioning the CPSU's claim to leadership since the mid-1950s, and in 1958 it wanted to build communism directly with the Great Leap Forward: "Three years of suffering for 1,000 years of happiness." An attempt at sabotage could hardly have been more effective. There was no sensible planning because nothing is impossible for the masses. This madness is explained by the fact that the Communist Party has been constantly accused of its impossibility ever since it was founded. In 1919, when the party was founded, no one would have believed that 30 years later they would proclaim the People's Republic of China. The Communist Party had survived the massacre of its base in 1928, the Long March through China and Stalin's policy of alliances - what could be impossible for it? Hundreds of thousands died of starvation, the economy and public life collapsed, and China was then allied only with Albania. The whole madness ended with the removal of Mao Zedong from power, only to celebrate its second performance in 1968 as the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution".

When the Khmer Rouge overthrew the government in Cambodia in 1975, they wanted to start from scratch: they considered the city of Phnom Penh to be corrupt and decadent, and before they could think about building up industrial production, society had to be cleansed and a new agricultural base created. The murder of all "unreliable elements", which included city dwellers, intellectuals and members of the Vietnamese minority, was just as much a part of this stupid program as the mass expulsion to the countryside, where many people died of starvation. The nightmare only ended when Moscow-oriented Vietnam invaded. This, incidentally, led to both the free West and the current rulers of Cambodia allying themselves with the Khmer Rouge.

What do these three cases have in common? Nothing. Stalinists, Maoists and Khmer Rouge all called themselves "communists" - but they understood this to mean completely different things. The fact that a large number of people died in each case has completely different reasons. Terror - and this includes the conscious acceptance of famine by the Soviet regime in the early 1930s - is never an end, but a means. The use of this means must be explained by the end it is pursuing. But anyone who believes that terror is always necessary when attempts are made to change society - and this is the authors' research hypothesis - is blind to the ends and therefore cannot explain anything.

The post-totalitarian ticket - the liberal form of anti-antifa

Why, people often ask after the book's publication, has the left always stared at Auschwitz instead of seeing the crimes of the left? If the question were serious, the answer would be easy: the nice white-haired gentleman sitting opposite you on the tram is about 1000 times more likely to have been an SS task force leader than a party commissar in Cambodia. These people built this country and we live in it, so we just have to deal with it.

But of course it's about something else: the number of victims - the editor is quite generous in calculating this, much to the annoyance of his co-authors - is intended to show that Auschwitz can no longer be an argument for criticizing capitalism in the future. Horkheimer once said that if you don't want to talk about capitalism, you should also keep quiet about fascism. Ex-leftists and the new right have long since stopped talking about "capitalism" - it is now called "civil society." That is why we should keep quiet about fascism in the future. Or at least we should no longer be allowed to talk about it without pointing out that the only alternative to capitalism that existed until now was just as bad or even worse.

This is a blow to the left that knows nothing about fascism except that many people were murdered. But the unique thing about Auschwitz is not that six million people were murdered, but that a group of people was hallucinated as an overpowering, inherently evil enemy whose complete annihilation would have been the only chance of survival for the Aryan race. That is why the Nazis actually intended to kill all the Jews in the world - and that also explains the difference between state socialist labor camps and National Socialist extermination camps. And forced labor in fascism also had different reasons than in real socialism, just as the forms and reasons for economic activity were quite different.

Since 1989, many leftists have been more concerned with social reality. Since the black, red and gold flag frenzy, they have also known that they are not speaking in the name of the masses and that history is not automatically on their side. This has also led to a reassessment of fascism as the ultimate and most brutal consequence of everyday nationalism, which is why consistent anti-fascism must begin with the social basis of fascism: namely, with nation-state capitalism. This is precisely the kind of consequence of official anti-fascism that is not desired. In the future, anyone who criticizes bourgeois democracy and the capitalist nation state will be silenced by reference to the "victims of communism". Now we know where that leads...

That is why all those who used to be leftists and now celebrate bourgeois democracy get pretty angry when someone questions their rejection of left-wing social criticism. Then tolerance suddenly ends - "no freedom for the enemies of freedom" - and the "open society" takes a fairly unified approach against its opponents. Against its left-wing opponents - but that's really nothing new.