Stalinism was the fulfillment of Lenin’s famous prescription: with barbarism we will drive barbarism out of Russia:

The Road to Nowhere

By David Horowitz

“Actually existing Marxism” is dead, long live Marxism. 

This is the political formula of the Left — of your Left — today. 

A letter David Horowitz wrote to his former mentor Ralph Miliband in the late 1980s. He included it as a chapter in The Politics of Bad Faith. Ron Radosh discusses this letter in his recent article in PJMedia, “How David Horowitz Revealed the Truth about Ralph Miliband’s Legacy: What it Should Teach the British Left.

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Grandiose as this project was, it was not something we had invented, but the inspiration for a movement that was coterminous with modernity itself. As you had taught me, the Left was launched at the time of the French Revolution by Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals. In Marx’s own words: “The revolutionary movement, which began in 1789,…and which temporarily succumbed in the Conspiracy of Babeuf, gave rise to the communist idea,…This idea,…constitutes the principle of the modern world.”

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The ideas embodied in this theology of liberation became the inspiration for the new political Left, and have remained so ever since. It was half a century later that Marx first articulated the idea of a historical redemption, in the way that became resonant for us:

Communism is the positiveabolition of private property, ofhuman self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of humannature through and for man. It is therefore the return of man himself as a social, i.e., really human, being…

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Stalinism is not a possible interpretation of Marx. 

What could you have been thinking to have written this, to have blotted out so much of the world we know? Forget the Soviet planners and managers who architected the Stalinist empire and found a rationale in Marx’s texts for all their actions and social constructions, including the Party dictatorship and the political police, the collectivization and the terror, the show trials and the gulag. These, after all, were practical men, accustomed to bending doctrine in the service of real world agendas. Consider, instead, the movement intellectuals — the complex nouns who managed to be Marxists and Stalinists through all the practical nightmares of the socialist epoch: Althusser and Brecht, Lukacs and Gramsci, Bloch and Benjamin, Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson too. Subtle Hegelians and social progressives, they were all promoters of the Stalinist cancer, devoting their formidable intellects and supple talents to its metastasizing terror. Were they illiterate to consider themselves Marxists and Stalinists? Or do you think they were merely corrupt? And what of the tens of thousands of Party intellectuals all over the world who were not so complex, among them Nobel-prize-winning scientists and renowned cultural artists who saw no particular difficulty in assimilating Stalin’s gulag to Marx’s utopia, socialist humanism to the totalitarian state? In obliterating the reality of these intellectual servants of socialist tyranny, you manifest a contempt for them as thinking human beings far greater than that exhibited in the scorn of their most dedicated anti-Communist critics.

What persuaded us to believe that socialism, having begun everywhere so badly, should possess the power to reform itself into something better? To be something other than it has been? To pass through the inferno of its Stalinist tragedies to become the paradiso of our imaginations?

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Stalinism is not just a possible interpretation of Marxism. 

In the annals of revolutionary movements it is without question the prevailing one. Of all the interpretations of Marx’s doctrine since the Communist Manifesto, it is overwhelmingly the one adhered to by the most progressives for the longest time. Maoism, Castroism, Vietnamese Communism, the ideologies of the actually existing Marxist states — these Stalinisms are the Marxisms that shaped the history of the epoch just past. This is the truth that leftist intellectuals like you are determined to avoid: the record of the real lives of real human beings, whose task is not just to interpret texts but to move masses and govern them. 

When Marxism has been put into practice by real historical actors, it has invariably taken a Stalinist form, producing the worst tyrannies and oppressions that mankind has ever known. Is there a reason for this? Given the weight of this history, you should ask rather: How could there not be?

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